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January 31, 2006

Pulling out the rug: GOOG Q4 shows continued shift away from partner sites

By Tom Foremski for SiliconValleyWatcher

GOOG missing its Wall Street estimates is the main focus of the media coverage of its Q4 numbers. The more interesting story is that Google continues to shift revenues to its own sites, and away from third-party sites in its AdSense advertising network, such as those operated by media companies.

Take a look at the release and what used to be about a 50/50 split in revenues coming from Google sites and network sites:

Google Sites Revenues -- Google-owned sites generated revenues of $1.098 billion, or 57% of total revenues. This represents a 24% increase over the third quarter revenues of $885 million.
Google Network Revenues -- Google's partner sites generated revenues, through AdSense programs, of $799 million, or 42% of total revenues. This is an 18% increase over network revenues of $675 million generated in the third quarter.

In Q3 revenues from Google sites grew 20 per cent as revenues from Google's network sites grew 7 per cent.

This shows that GOOG is accelerating its revenue shift from network sites. And why not? It doesn't have to share the revenues with network sites.

This is bad news for media companies such as the New York Times--a key AdSense partner.

It is also bad news for the many VC funded startups whose business models rely on becoming honey pots for Google AdSense clicks. The trend towards developing advertising supported web service applications could be a short one.

However, Microsoft might be able to exploit this shift if it can offer a better "AdSense" revenue model to Google's network sites.

Here is my ZDNet column on GOOG.

Wonkette, Dave Barry, and Silicon Valley Watcher--in Bacon's secret list of 250 of the most influential blogs

By Tom Foremski for SiliconValleyWatcher

SF Chronicle columnist C.W. Nevius chats with blogger Dave Barry--the foremost humorist in the US and the former columnist at the Miami Herald.

C.W. says that Mr Barry believes that newspapers are dead. "And Barry may even be right," he writes in "Podcasts, blogs and Dave Barry."

But at the end of the column he writes that it is easy for Mr Barry to survive in the "new world of journalism" because he has written 25 best-sellers, has won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary (1988), etc.

Well, let me tell everyone that reads this post: you don't need a stellar list of achievements to do well in the "new world of journalism."

Take a look at this quote from a senior vice president at Bacon's, in a Media Post story that appeared December 27, 2004, just a couple of months after SVW started publishing:

Ruth McFarland, senior vice president and publisher for Bacon's, said she vacillated about the significance of blogs, but was sufficiently convinced this year to assign three of her 56 editors to monitor the Blogosphere. "We're adjusting our network because no one is accurately monitoring these guys as their influence continues to grow."
Bacon's is keeping tight raps on its blog list, which covers technology, politics, business, travel, and religion. The racy Wonkette, the Miami Herald's Dave Barry, and the Silicon Valley Watcher are three well-known blogs run by "reputable, credible professionals" that McFarland said will be on the list.

You can't buy publicity like that :-) And SVW has never spent a single dollar on promotions of any kind.

In this new world, if you build a better mousetrap the world does indeed beat a path to your door. It's a meritocracy of a kind we've never seen before.

Drawing Flak from the Flacks: Transitions are always painful and emotional

By Tom Foremski for SiliconValleyWatcher

I've been drawing a lot of flak lately from the flacks in the PR industry, as I've been asking where is the disruption in their sector?

Why hasn't the PR industry joined the media industry's hand basket to hell? Media and PR industries have always moved pretty much in tandem--with maybe a six to nine month lag.

My posts have generated quite a lot of debate, and responses from leaders in the PR industry--which is wonderful. [That's one of the forgotten roles of a journalist--to be a muckraker, to challenge the accepted notions of our times.] Richard Edelman, for example, has written a lengthy post. And Steve Rubel, the top PR blogger, has also spent time discussing my posts on his blog Micro Persuasion.

I have a lot of respect for PR professionals (I use flack as an affectionate term, in the same way as I refer to myself and fellow journalists as hacks). I've worked with PR people for nearly 25 years both here and in London. We work on different sides of the same coin: we try to find and publish great, compelling stories. And the best PR folk think like journalists.

Lately, I have been challenging the PR industry to move away from business as usual because of the changing nature of communications and media.

Paradoxically...

The great paradox of the PR community is that it spotted the changes a long time ago. It spotted the emergence and importance of blogging a long time ago--several years sooner than the mainstream media. And it shows: there are more PR bloggers than journalist bloggers, and they have been around a lot longer.

Yet nothing much has changed in the way the PR industry does its job. Yes, there is a nod or two, here and there to new approaches, but 99 per cent of the industry's revenues come from traditional services.

BTW, let me say this again: blogging and related technologies such as podcasting are not disrupting mainstream media they are disrupting the PR sector; online advertising is disrupting media.

When you have huge disruption happening in the media sector--and none at all in the PR sector--you have to wonder if a reckoning of sorts is on the way.

Shift happens

Among all the feedback I've received, I've also had some of the most senior executives in the PR industry privately tell me, "Tom, you are right." Yet it is difficult for them to say it in public, and I can understand their position. It is much easier (and effective) for me to act as an agent of change since I am outside of the industry.)

I see myself as helping the transition to the new communications industry, and such transitions are always painful and emotional.

- - -

BTW, if you want to know what the new communications will look like--call me :-)

Related: Richard Edelman's essay "The Me2 Revolution."

January 30, 2006

Fear and Loathing in VC land--animosity towards VCs is rampant

By Tom Foremski for SiliconValleyWatcher

SVW reader Penguin points to VC Rick Segal's recent post about the quandary venture capital is in.

To summarize: Web 2.0 companies don't need much capital and GOOG, YHOO and MSFT can step in and buy them just for the heck of it for a few million and the VCs don't get a look in. Plus there is not much distinction between the Web 2.0 startups.

Welcome to the world of the new rules startups; no VCs required, although an Angel or two helps... It's a knowledge capital world these days and GOOG and pals offer the largest platform for rolling out Web 2.0 services/products. How can VCs compete against that?

But also, there is widespread animosity towards VCs today. I've been covering Silicon Valley since 1984 and I haven't come across as much hostility towards VCs from startups, as I have over the past 18 months.

Why? Because of the many outrageous VC practices during the dotcom boom and afterwards. VCs always get their pound of flesh and then some.

But what goes around comes around. We live in a serial entrepreneur community here in Silicon Valley, and memories are still very fresh.

The strategy for startups these days is to bootstrap--go for Angels if you need money. And if you do need to pitch the Sandhill row, first raise your valuation as much as possible through your own efforts and financing.

I have a lot of respect for many VCs. Those are usually the ones I come into contact with, because they are out and about and pitching their investments.

There are hundreds of VCs that I never come across and seem to be baffled about what to invest in; they follow each other with a herd mentality and thus mess up the markets for all; and with almost no IPO market exit strategies rely on selling out to one of a small number of large companies--which keeps valuations in check.

When I recently met with VC M.R. Rangaswami of Sandhill.com, he said there were still too many VCs, and that the industry must come to terms with the fact that future returns on investments will be far lower than at traditional levels.

That means VCs have to tell investors in their funds to expect smaller gains. That's a tough sell, especially since the risk has not decreased. I could argue that the risk of failure for VC-backed startups has increased. . .(more on that in future posts).

While some VCs are twiddling their thumbs thinking about what to fund, they would do well to hire a PR agency to spruce up their image. Something along the lines of a benevolent "uncle" looking out for the best interests of their young charges might be an appropriate image to shoot for :-)

- - -
Please also see SVW: That giant sucking sound...will massive tech companies vacuum up all the cool/hot tech companies?

January 29, 2006

You can't get there from here -- a phrase that helps define disruption

By Tom Foremski for SiliconValleyWatcher

I love this American saying, "You can't get there from here," I'm told it comes from Maine. It seems to make no sense but when you need to use it--it makes perfect sense.

I find myself thinking of the phrase more and more these days. It's because I see companies and people defending dying business models because they are still profitable. And because the new business models are not yet formed.

That means an organization can't jump to the new business models because it doesn't recognize that there is a big change happening in its industry; or it can see it happening but cannot jump to the new business models because the new cannot support the old cost structures.

For example, that's what I see happening in the PR industry, which sees itself carrying on business as usual and defending its traditional methods of PR, with no threat to its business from new communications methods such as blogging.

While in the media sector, media companies can see the writing on the wall but they cannot jump over to become new media companies. Because the new media business models are too flimsy to support the old cost structures.

In both cases, "You can't get there from here." You have to be a new company you have to be a new rules company.

Is internet a disruptive technology?

"You can't get there from here," also helps to define a "disruptive technology." I define a disruptive technology as something which companies do not see coming, when they see it they pooh pooh it, then they grudgingly accept it, then they can't do anything about it.

A disruptive technology is like seeing the car crash in slow motion, it is seeing the train wreck happening right in front of you--and you can't get out of the way.

PC was disruptive

That's what the PC did to the minicomputer and mainframe companies of the East Coast. They laughed at the PC, then when the train wreck started they couldn't get out of the way, yet they could see it coming.

It took down all those minicomputer companies etc, and it nearly took down IBM forcing it to reinvent itself as a services company.

Now that's a disruptive technology! Don't you think that the internet is a disruptive technology? It's a very powerful technology, more powerful than the PC. But where is the disruption?

All the tech companies that made it through the PC revolution are pretty much still there. The disruption is in the media sector--the internet is a publishing technology.

Now, with blogging, we've connected up the other end of the internet. Now, you can publish to any device with a web browser. Now, any device with a web browser can publish back.

This is why this really is a new internet and this is why there will be lots of disruption of media companies.

Oh, and by the way: every company today is a media company to some degree. Because every company publishes and tells stories, to itself, to its customers, to its community, to its new hires. An organization is not much more than its stories--that's the content. (And you can think of business processes as stories too.)

And those stories had better be good, truthful stories, and they had better be compelling stories. That's the new media--that's the new communications.

If you've understood this post, and I've helped you see the internet in a new way, then you are now six to nine months months ahead of the game--and you owe me at least a dinner :-)

What if Chinese internet users were banned from US access?

By Tom Foremski for SiliconValleyWatcher

The Chinese government's attempts to censor internet access makes it vulnerable to a reverse censorship--web sites could cut themselves off from Chinese internet users as a form of protest.

This could be a new form of protest and could be applied to any country. Individuals, organizations, educational institutes, and government agencies could easily ban the users of any country from accessing their web sites.

Such actions could emerge as a form of grass-roots protest against governments that practice censorship or carry on with what are deemed to be inhumane actions.

And such actions could also become part of a government's foreign policy in the same way the US government sought a global boycott of Iraqi oil.

I've explored this theme in my recent ZDNet blog:

What would be the economic cost to a country that is unable to access all of the internet all of the time?
Would the economic cost be large enough to create pressure on governments to moderate inhumane or undemocratic behaviors?

I think it could–that's if we are right about the importance of the internet and the free access to information.

But would it be ethical? Would reverse censorship be just as bad as censorship in any form?

Here is the rest of it...

January 27, 2006

Concerts by the Sea in Pacifica this Sunday

Silicon Valley works too hard and works all the time, it is Always On. We must remember to take some time out and enjoy our existence as social and cultural beings.

So please mark your calendar for the following event on January 29, Sunday at 5pm at Pacifica Performances Sanchez Concert Hall in Pacifica.

Allison Lovejoy and colleagues will be performing classical works as part of a competition organized by the San Francisco Concerto Orchestra. Doors open at 4.30pm and tickets are just $10. Bring the kids, everyone under 18 is free.

PR's hand basket to hell

My recent post about "where is PR's hand basket to hell?" sparked some spirited debate within the online PR communities. I remain unconvinced that PR can justify a larger spend when the media sector continues to decline.

PR agencies are hiring, they are making money, while the media sector is rapidly falling apart. Online advertising is disrupting mainstream media and blogging will disrupt the PR industry.

Yet the PR industry is saying everything is okay. That is like the man falling past the 33rd floor of building heard saying, "No problem so far..." Jam tomorrow :-)

The PR industry needs to change into a new communications industry. But it can't get there from here. It has business models and products that are profitable (just as newspapers remain profitable).

The business models in the new communications and new media sectors are still in formation, and cannot support the cost structures of the old. That's why the old cannot cross the chasm to the new and that's why there will be considerable disruption ahead.

The winners in the new communications/new media sectors will be new companies, or what I call new rules enterprises. New rules companies are new, and they are formed around the emerging new business models.

Here are some of the rules of new rules enterprises

You start with the lowest cost business model and you grow as the new business models grow. I am a new rules enterprise, I am a journalist blogger with a laptop. To get below my costs you would need to be living rent-free at your parents' home and using your sister's computer :-)

January 26, 2006

VNU in acquisition mode: Dutch global media company buys UK tech news site The Inquirer

Rafat Ali at
PaidContent.org - the economics of content, reports:

VNU has bought the Inquirer for an undisclosed sum. Inquirer founder Mike Magee will retain the editor's chair but will hand over advertising and administrative duties for the site.
Magee helped pioneer a tabloid approach to tech publishing when he co-founded IT news service the Register in 1994. But a split with fellow founder John Lettice led to his departure from that website in 2001.

The deal comes after VNU came to an agreement last year with U.S. gadget website Gizmodo.com to publish localised editions across seven countries in Europe.

More here...

Statisticians are needed to keep massive grid systems running, says Sun Services CTO

By Tom Foremski, for Silicon Valley Watcher
The killer skills for this next decade are going to be statistical analysis combined with business studies. I was just recently discussing this with my 18 year old son Matt, who is switching his second year college courses towards those subjects.

That's because in an online world where you have tens of thousands of business transactions and interactions happening in a day, or even in a minute, you need the tools to manage and interpret the behavior of large numbers of events.

Then three days later BusinessWeek comes out with its cover story: Why Math Will Rock Your World. I should remember to wear my tin foil lined hat more often--BusinessWeek is known for monitoring my brain waves :-)

At least Matt and I are thinking along the right lines. And while "Quants" as the top math stats geeks are known, are usually found in the financial sector where they are paid rock-star salaries, there is growing demand for Quants in helping to manage ever larger IT data centers.

I recently met with Daniel Berg Distinguished Engineer VP & CTO of Sun Services group, and he was telling me how Sun Services is using Quants to proactively prepare against IT failure.

As IT data centers grow ever larger, with tens of thousands and eventually hundreds of thousands of servers, plus storage systems, plus network gear, plus a myriad of applications interacting with middleware and operating systems, things get complex very quickly.

And it's important to be able to analyze and monitor the huge masses of telemetry data generated by such interactions, so that patterns can be found that will signal future problems. Mr Berg says such patterns can signal IT downtime several days in advance, by which time proactive measures could be taken--but some customers don't...

Here is more of my interview with Mr Berg on ZDNet:Sun Services CTO says utility computing acceptance is slow going.

January 25, 2006

A 1400 mile long corridor of innovation . . .the emerging Silicon Coast

The Disney acquisition of Pixar Animation Studios is interesting from a regional point of view. It strengthens growing ties between Santa Clara and Santa Monica tech/media cultures.

Terry Semel came up from So. Cal where he was co-chief of Warner Bros. to run Yahoo. Now Steve Jobs will help run Disney. The two cultures might seem different but they work well together.

The Disney-Pixar deal also highlights the emerging West Coast corridor of tech/media innovation that is forming. From Vancouver, to Seattle, to Portland to San Francisco Bay Area, to Santa Monica, and San Diego--we have a string of formidable tech/media centers that continue to grow, maybe one day forming a near continuous ribbon of innovation along 1400 miles of coast.

This is a formidable regional corridor of companies and individuals that will help determine the look and the feel of the next ten years and beyond, imho.

---

More on my ZDNet blog about Disney and Pixar.

January 24, 2006

Silicon Valley Watcher eclipses WSJ's top columnist Walt Mossberg in PR turnout

By A. Tom

The decline of old media was made startlingly evident Tuesday as Silicon Valley Watcher drew a much larger crowd of PR professionals than the Wall Street Journal's top media brand: Walt Mossberg.

Tom Foremski, the publisher of Silicon Valley Watcher, was the featured guest on Sam Whitmore's Media Survey weekly teleconference. The popular Media Survey teleconference allows PR professionals in locations around the US, to listen and ask questions of top journalists, such as Walt Mossberg.

But huge interest in blogging and the new media pushed the number of listeners to the Silicon Valley Watcher interview to a record 42 PR offices. That compared with 34 PR offices joining the Walt Mossberg teleconference.

"Silicon Valley Watcher has hit a new record," said Sam Whitmore.

Andrew Orlowski the pugnacious US editor of The Register--the popular tabloid-style UK based tech news site--is the featured guest on the Media Survey teleconference next week.

Here is a link to the podcast of the Silicon Valley Watcher interview with Sam Whitmore and Tom Foremski, broadcast from the offices of Outcast Communications in San Francisco.

SWMS Tech Media This Week Podcast: Jan. 18, 2006

:-)

Big Brother brings business opportunities

With all the chatter about Big Brother, and government subpoenas for internet usage data, there are business opportunities to be had...

Take a look at my idea for the Big Bro Co-investors VC fund--focusing on telemetry applications. Monitoring advertising, or network performance, or people--it's all the same: essential to both commerce and government.

It's a huge business opportunity. Take a look at my ZDNet blog/column IMHO and let me know what you think.

A new VC fund to help develop the next-stage internet technologies

The publishing industry is the new technology industry

[The following is a reply to a post by Dave Winer, the father of blogging, on his blog scripting.news, which doesn't accept comments, which is fine because we have hyperlinks :-) That's the beauty of the new media.)

Dave, your question is spot-on: "is the publishing industry the new technology industry?" Yes, the publishing industry is indeed, the new technology industry.

The publishing industry that has been forming the last few years is a technology-enabled publishing industry made up of technology-enabled media companies. It is not the publishing industry of the New York Times, or Dow Jones.

The first wave of technology-enabled media companies are corporations such as Yahoo, Google, AOL, Amazon, EBay, and Craigslist. They publish pages of content and advertising. Except that most of their content is obtained for as low cost as possible; it is harvested by servers and algorithms or their content is contributed by their communities of users, such as at EBay or Craigslist.

Content can also be spidered from other sites, collected, and spun into an index. Publishing the index provides Google and others with cheap content, much cheaper than the New York Times using its journalists to produce a page of content.

[BTW, my web site is spidered by 17 bots every day (a number that is increasing.) The bots suck up one third of my bandwidth and deliver about 5 per cent of my traffic. More than 90 percent of my readers come direct, they know where I live, which is a great position to be in and not have to rely on search engines for traffic. The bots slow down my server, so that means they must be slowing down the internet experience for millions of people as they visit sites like mine. I wonder how long that situation will last.]

Yahoo has tried to produce its own content in the past, such as its financial news channel, which was scrapped. And more recently, Yahoo has tried again and hired editors such as Patrick Houston from Cnet, to create some content in-house.

By and large, this first wave will give way to a second wave of technology-enabled media companies because of the effect of what I call "you can't get there from here." (This is a characteristic of all important transitions in industry.)

Obviously, the second wave of successful companies will not be any of the web 2.0 companies we read about--they all seem so very 1.5 . . . don't you think?

January 23, 2006

The ring that binds them all? IBM instant messaging agreements with AOL, Yahoo and Google

Parents stuck in the office will be able to chat with their kids and their friends thanks to IBM's Lotus group agreeing to combine its Lotus Sametime corporate instant messaging with that of AOL, Yahoo, and Google.

The additional capabilities of Lotus Sametime will help IBM extend the usefulness of its collaborative enterprise platform into the consumer IM space.

IBM says:

Sametime has about 20m corporate users among 60 percent of the Fortune Global 100, making it the largest in the enterprise space. There are 100 million IM users between the three public IM players.
In 2005, Lotus experienced 10% double-digit growth -- the first full year of double-digit growth for Lotus in more than a decade -- making it a key driver of revenue for IBM's $15.8 billion software business, second only in size to Microsoft. And, attendance at this year's Lotusphere customer/developer show is up 20% from last year, to 6,000 attendees, including 10% first-timers.

IBM's new interoperability with the top public instant messaging communities will be available with a new version of IBM's instant messaging product, Lotus Sametime 7.5, being announced today at Lotusphere, the annual show for corporate IT folks and developers in Orlando, Fla.

Available mid-2006, the new version of Sametime will also bring consumer instant messaging features like integrated voice and video into widespread corporate use, through agreements with telecommunications and A/V companies such as Avaya, Nortel and Siemens.

By converging corporate instant messaging with telephony and video capabilities, IBM's Sametime corporate users will have “click-to-call” capabilities, enabling them to instantly place a telephone call or initiate a business-quality video feed to an instant messaging contact (to a colleague, business partner, vendor, spouse or child) directly through their instant messaging client software.

These multimedia capabilities are examples of consumer technologies that are crossing over into mainstream corporate use.

The Future Transparency of the Past or why you should get used to living in a glass house...

By Tom Foremski for SiliconValleyWatcher

I've been wanting to write this piece for a while and with all the chatter over government subpoena of internet useage data, it seems like this is the right time.

Here is an excerpt of my piece on ZDNet, and my apologies for asking you to click over to ZDNet, but they pay on pageviews and do a better job of monetizing my work than I do! So in the interests of keeping SVW as "advertising-lite" as possible, an occasional click or two over on my ZDNet blog IMHO would be much appreciated by my landlord :-)

An excerpt from "The future transparency of the past."

Did you know that Google keeps a copy of every piece of data it ever comes across? That includes every web page (without images), search terms, and useage data such as time of day, IP address, etc. Google's head of engineering told me more than two years ago that all the data gets saved onto onto tapes and is shipped to a storage facility.
What will you do with that data I asked? We don't know was the answer.

I'm sure that Google's data is not personal to a user, but, if you could combine it with other data, such as from third-party cookies, or other databases, it can get personal very easily. You'll be able to triangulate an identifiable user.
Now combine that ever growing store of data at Google, with the masses of location data from cell phone companies, and credit card companies, and health data, etc. And also all the data that corporations are required to save because of Sarbanes-Oxely.

It would be a big mashup of data, but if you had access to it all–it would reveal a person's life in tremendous detail. You would almost be able to follow the daily track of a person through every minute of their day, as they gassed their car, called their spouse, associated with a person that later was put into prison, called a person later revealed to be their lover, what they wrote that day in corporate emails, what they wrote on blogs and with who they linked.

Okay, it would be a massive data mining project–but. . . we will have such capabilities.

- - -
Here is one of the related articles on this topic: Online privacy a fragile shield SUBPOENAS MAKE USERS UNEASY ABOUT WHOM TO TRUST By Michael Bazeley Mercury News

Some of my Top-Ten people in PR/marketing/communications for 2005

I think I can get away with at least one more top ten people list. And again, these are just some of the many top-ten people who came onto my radar screen in 2005. And they are not presented in any order of importance.

-All the junior staff at the big PR agencies who jumped into blogging while their bosses were preoccupied with trying to understand blogging. It is people such as Blake Barbera and Sarah Bresee, and many other young bloggers that I met in 2005. Jump in--figure it out later, is the motto for bloggers :-)

-Mike Manuel at Voce Communications, continues to be one of the leading brands with his Media Guerrilla blog. And yes, he has a photo of himself that is the envy of ALL bloggers--don't ever change it Mike. (And if you do, can I have it?) Also, the rest of the Voce team isn't too dang bad either, with Richard Cline, Dave Black, and Matthew Podboy (a name from the future :-).

-Giovanni Rodriguez and his team at Eastwick Communications. They like and use wikis in a big way, and it helps that Socialtext, the corporate wiki company is a client. Some innovative thinking is coming out of Eastwick and the G-man is behind some of it.

-Michael Arrington of TechCrunch, writes one of the top blog sites covering Web 2.0 companies.

This is an excellent example of the mashed up future of tech marketing/communications/journalism. Michael is a lawyer, a former dotcom executive, and VC, living in Atherton, Silicon Valley's #1 address. He does a fantastic job profiling new companies, and also hosting parties for them at his home which are showcases for the companies he writes about. [I'd get crucified if I did that...]

-Ross Mayfield CEO of SocialText. Ross is one of those natural journalist bloggers and he is an excellent example of a new role for CEOs. I call it Chief Excitement Officer--not that Ross is a pompon waving cheerleader--but it is to tell your company's story in a compelling way and be constantly involved in your customer communities. We used to call them evangelists . . . or maybe that's what the "E" in CEO should stand for?

-Renee Blodgett of Blodgett Communications is most probably the best known woman blogger in tech today with her blog Down the Avenue. And she was one of the first of the A-list bloggers. And yet Renee is so very old-school in the way she runs her PR business. I'm always wondering why...

-Ron Piovesan--Cisco Systems. Ron has worked in the large PR agencies. He helped build the very innovative news@cisco news and features editorial service. This employs regular journalists and publishes an online magazine about Cisco. It gets more hits than some prominent trade and financial newspapers. Ron works with Dan Scheinman, head of corporate PR and Mergers and Acquisitions. Now that's a unique corporate position.

-Rok Hrastnik , is just 24 but already on a trajectory that will shoot him out of this solar system. He is humble, serious, and a serious student of marketing. He works as a consultant for Studio Moderna in Slovenia and is one of the top experts in RSS marketing.

-Andy Plesser of Plesser Holland Associates; the New York PR firm that specializes in representing major media companies. You can imagine how the devastation in the media sector affected Andy, and his business partner Kent Holland and colleagues. But Andy is one of those consummate professionals and he has managed to reinvent his firm through conferences, and take-on the new media challenge through time-honored ways: steady and persistent relationship building. He recently added Salon to his list of clients.

-Jen McClure and colleague Elizabeth Albrycht are among the leaders of the new communications movement--the PR equivalent to the new media movement. I met them in early January at their New Communications Conference--and it was a blast. I'm proud to be a founding fellow of the Society of New Communications Research think tank that Jen has organized, although I feel guilty because I have done very little so far. The think tank has benefited both their PR businesses, which is the way things should be done today--demonstrate thought leadership and the business will follow.

January 20, 2006

This and that: Email or posts?. . .Larry skips Fusion event . . .Forrester Mag is no more . . .Fast search . . . I'll be moderating a panel with Scott McNealy on sharing

My apologies, but I am horribly backed-up on my emails. My first focus is always on reporting/blogging/writing which means I have to hold email blackout periods of several hours at a time, otherwise I'd spend several hours on my emails.

I try and get out and about Silicon Valley everyday, which eats up a lot of time. I try to get those top exec interviews, scoops, news, tidbits of gossip for the locals, and always, always, focus on original and exclusive content--two key newspaper principles that will continue to be important in the new media world.

And that means that in during some busy weeks my email gets terribly jammed up--but please be assured it is not personal--everyone gets mashed up into my Gmail inbox. Also, we had a bounce-back email problem but that should be solved. (We just have a problem with our archive permalinks to sort out...)

. . .

There was no Larry Ellison at the big Oracle customer event about its Fusion IT enterprise push. Mr Ellison had the flu and couldn't attend the San Francisco City Hall red carpet event.

I popped in on my way home from an earlier meeting, thinking I would grab a bite or two at the Oracle event, treat it as a blogger soup kitchen of sorts, and also catch up with some of my media colleagues.

I was very late but the event still had 45 minutes to go--and the drinks and eats were all under wraps. I almost quit but Dan Fost from the SF Chronicle wandered by and we entertained ourselves and made the time pass more quickly until the eat and schmooze-time.

Customer events such as these are dire for any journalists trapped inside the halls of presentations. It seems IT customers are hardened to four hours of jargon and buzz-word filled presentations, and can maintain a steady alert level.

Most journalists at such events feel as if they have landed in pergatory and must endure the suffering, obviously a karmic punishment for something--until the media Q&A at the end with the top execs.

That's why I prefer to go to the evening events where the journalists with day jobs have gone home for the night. And I prefer my purgatory to be in its proper place--in the after-life.

. . .

If you haven't heard yet, Forrester Magazine is no more. It was an interesting attempt at representing Forrester's thought-leadership. Although it didn't quite jell, I think Forrester were onto something. And it might have worked if the format were changed a bit.

. . .

Take a look at Rock-n-Go for some interesting perspectives on the media. Also, you might want to take a look at this post on Rock-n-go about Antonio Gramsci, whose work influences a lot of my thinking. http://www.antoniogramsci.com/

. . .

The new batch of Internet scandals begins? Fast, the Norwegian search company and Europe's answer to Google is in a bit of trouble due to allegations of accounting scandals and other nefarious activities. . . Here is a Computer Business Review article.

. . .

This will be a fun event: February 21 at Stanford University at 10am, I'll be moderating a panel on "The Economics of Sharing" with Scott McNealy, ceo of Sun Microsystems, along with a few other top bods of interest. More details to follow...

January 19, 2006

More SVW top ten people lists, this one in media (the PR list is coming next...)

I'm still in the mood for top ten people lists and since it is still January, I think I can get away with a couple more.

By the way, please note that nearly everyone I meet is a "top ten" person these lists are just a fraction of the top ten people that stood out for me in 2005. And they are not presented in any order of importance:-)

Here is SVW's Top Ten people in Media in 2005.

Dan Farber is vice-president of editorial at CNET and editor in chief of ZDNet. Dan is one of the consummate media professionals in our industry. He is always everywhere, and I am constantly surprised that he doesn't yet sport an Al Franken-style satellite upload dish on his head, but give him time and I'm sure he will because Dan is relentless in his reporting and blogging.

Om Malik, senior writer at Business 2.0 and founder of GigaOm.com, the universal sound of broadband. Of course, his Om-ness could not be left out, he is one of the original gang of A-list bloggers and continues to be year-after-year. He's a good buddy and is always very generous in his advice, of which there never seems to be a shortage.

Kevin Maney, senior tech reporter at USA Today and now also a blogger. Kevin started the year off with a bit of blast at bloggers. But ended the year as a blogger himself and is doing very well at it.

Tom Abate from the San Francisco Chronicle. Tom started his blog mini media guy last year and so now when we get together we get to speak the same language. Tom covered tech for a long time then switched to bio-tech at just the right time. And now I'm hearing he is heading back to do some tech coverage, around Silicon Valley innovation.

Jeremy Zawodny, Yahoo's chief blogger and a search engineer, is one of those natural journalists that you find in the blogosphere. Jeremy is what I like to call a "big link" because of his large audience, and he always keeps things interesting.

Robert Scoble, Microsoft's chief blogger and very probably the second most famous Microsoft employee. It took a long time for Microsoft to understand his value to the company. Robert spent a lot of last year using his own vacation time to speak at panels and conference events. Microsoft wouldn't give him a travel budget which often meant having to share a room with someone.

Doc Searls, Senior Editor at Linux Magazine, is one of the godfathers of the blogosphere. I have learned a tremendous amount each time I hear him speak, or get to speak with him. He is a marketer though, not a geek, and he has an intuitive understanding of marketing as shown by his co-authorship of the "The Clue train Manifesto."

Gabe Rivera is the creator of tech.memeorandum. Using servers and software, Gabe collects the top news items of the day. Gabe is a software engineer but more towards a media engineer--able to create what I call smart-machine media, in a similar way that Google News is created--but smarter :-)

Sam Whitmore from Media Survey makes a living reporting on the media industry. And he has given me some great advice in further expanding themes such as what happens if the old media dies sooner. And Sam was the first to get me on a podcast (next one is coming up January 24.)

Charlene Li, a senior analyst at Forrester, is one of the superstar analysts of Internet 2.0. Charlene is a media professional and knows how to use her blogging to great effect. Also, she doesn't seem to rest for one minute and she seems to be on nearly every conference panel at every related conference.

January 18, 2006

Scoop! Google is considering outsourcing some of its IT infrastructure

By Tom Foremski for SiliconValleyWatcher

I had an interesting chat last Friday with John Loiacono, Sun's software chief. Sun's software is the way it sells hardware and it is the hardware that is very interesting because Sun is very focused on lowering electric power consumption in the huge data centers of tomorrow, which will have hundreds of thousands of servers.

During the chat I asked him if someone were to try to build another Google, with its focus on inexpensive grids of PCs, could it be done more efficiently today using Sun's systems?

"Definitely, and we have systems running over there (Google) right now," he said. He also said that Google is thinking about whether it wants to be running its own data centers and developing its own software.

He added that Google created its own operating system to run its grids. And now there are some within Google that question whether they should continue doing that, especially since there is so much open source software, and middleware available (from Sun, of course :-) and increasingly, specialist grid builders.

He suggested that Google might outsource some of its infrastructure in the future, which would make sense if grid computing and utility computing take-off. After all, a machine cycle is just a machine cycle in the world of web services--it is what you do with it that counts--not the fact that you own and manage the infrastructure.

Here is my interview with Mr Loiacono on ZDNet:

I'm in a small, daylight filled conference room in Building 10 in Sun Microsystems Menlo Park campus with John Loiacono, head of Sun's software group. We've just met and sat down but he springs back up and walks over to the whiteboard, "let me just show you something . .."
This is normally not a good sign...

http://blogs.zdnet.com/Foremski/?p=28

January 17, 2006

Business Wire: Is this Warren Buffett's "senior moment?"

By Tom Foremski for SiliconValleyWatcher

OMAHA, Neb. & SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jan. 17, 2006--Berkshire Hathaway (NYSE: BRK.A and BRK.B) announced today a definitive agreement to acquire Business Wire, a privately held company that is a leading global distributor of corporate news, multimedia and regulatory filings. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

I guess you have to hit a dud occasionally, otherwise you wouldn't be mortal. I think Business Wire had about 30 seconds to live.

Maybe Mr Buffett's advisors hadn't heard of RSS and the fact that Business Wire has a customer (pissed-off) list--and that is all. A pissed-off customer list is not a defensible business model, (maybe he needed a fast depreciating asset for tax reasons?)

Anybody could disrupt Business Wire. I'll do it today, I'll call up Fergus Burns at Nooked, and some other contacts in the RSS sector.

We'll get every Silicon Valley corporate news room RSS enabled, and feed those feeds directly to the media news desks, investors, and any shareholder or anybody with an RSS news reader, in fact, we'll give you a news reader for free, already set up with the feeds you need.

And yes, this does satisfy Full Disclosure regs--much more so than Business Wire I would argue. Because FD calls for the broadest dissemination of news that is material to a company's business activities. RSS gets you into more places much faster and for far less money.

So give me a call if you want to skip Business Wire, I'll send out your releases for $50 a piece rather than $600 plus. . .

Hey Fergus, (and others...) let's create a media business on-the-fly and in real-time. Call my cell 4one5 threethree6 seven54seven. Now.

Judge a (PR) company by its bloggers. . . pointers for choosing wisely

By Tom Foremski for SiliconValleyWatcher

I am often asked to recommend PR agencies to companies. And often I am asked how to choose PR agencies, especially ones that understand a bit about the new media: blogging and the blogosphere.

I'm always happy to point people in the right directions, and to offer some pointers. Here is a key pointer: if you are looking for a PR company that understands something about blogging find out who in that organization blogs, and how long have they been blogging, and what is their blog pagerank and traffic.

You will find that in many large PR companies, it is their most junior staff that are the in-house bloggers, and there lies the rub. PR companies that "get it" have senior staff as bloggers, and they blog regularly, and they have decent traffic, and they also use other types of new media such as wikis.

Understanding blogging can only be done by being actively involved in blogging and the blogosphere. It cannot be understood by reading about blogging.

If you are not involved in blogging you will never be able to "get it" no matter how many articles and books you read on the subject.

I would like to invite many of the good people in the Silicon Valley PR industry to re-read that sentence again and again, if I thought it would do any good :-)

But I can help you in getting started, there are many ways to become involved in the blogosphere, give me a call sometime--my cell is 4one5 threethree6 seven54seven.

A Martin Luther King day weekend: The connection between Rap music culture and blogging.

By Tom Foremski for SiliconValleyWatcher

I didn't do much work this Martin Luther King three-day weekend. My 18-year old son Matthew was staying with me for a few days so it was good just to hang out together while being able to do things seperately too.

Hang out is one of the great American cultural gifts to the world, especially for someone who grew up in London. It means being there and not being there, it means being in the vicinity of another person; a comfortable space (except, of course sometimes when it's not :-).

Matt and I did a few things together. We went to see King Kong (v.good), and visited our favorite Punjabi restaurant twice [and loaded up on to-gos.] I'd tell you where the restaurant is located but I'd rather not--I'd hate to have to line up for a table because it got crowded...

Therese Poletti from the SJ Merc plus Paul Hrisko, and Tom Abate from the SF Chron joined us one of the evenings at the Punjab restaurant--but we had to confuse them along the way, with many false turns and double-backs, so please don't pester them about the location of the restaurant :-)

Matt and I also managed to find room for some culture. We caught an astonishing performance by local SF pianist Allison Lovejoy in Pacifica.

The classical part of her performance was marvelous, but it was her Debussy, the last piece of her classical set that continues to stay with me.

After an intermission we were treated to Ms Lovejoy's cabaret persona--aptly demonstrating her witty lyrics and her witty use of the ivory keys. The way she played and toyed with with signature lyrical phrases of our musical cultural icons was fun and extremely skilful. It's what we geeks might call a mashup--in this case, a combination of art forms rendered musically and vocally in an original form by a life-time master practitioner.

. . .

Sunday I took a long walk through Golden Gate Park, Matt dropped me off at the Ocean Beach end, and I walked home. It was a wonderful, sunny day and my pace was languid and unhurried and I enjoyed it all tremendously.

. . .

Monday morning Matt and I had breakfast at our favorite breakfast place, yet another secret location :-) Wide booths, diner style, a place to stretch out with your newspaper, (and yes, my son is barely 18 and he reads the newspaper.)

Matt left for home (Russian River) about midday and I went home and spent the day doing chores, laundry, bills, and avoiding my landlord, bank manager, and email.

Then, later in the evening I realized that this was the perfect time to write a piece I had wanted to write for a long time, about blogging and African-American culture. And about the recognition that the blogging movement owes to the African-American culture.

[Continues on ZDNet: A Martin Luther King Day essay--blogging needs to pay its dues to the African-American culture.

January 14, 2006

This is how the iPod reign could come to an end . . .

I'm new to Yahoo Music, I only recently got a subcription. And I've had an Apple iPod for several years. But now the iPod is on Craigslist and I'm searching for a new MP3 player.

Here is why I think that the Yahoo Music web service could become Apple iPod's Achilles's heel. And it is very disruptive to FM radio too, to boot.

January 12, 2006

Early to bed or early to rise says a lot about your focus on the future

If you rise late in the morning you look to the future, if you rise early in the morning you look to the past.

This is not a saying from Confucius, but it does refer to the region of Confucius. It is my way of saying: are you looking east or west?

Is your day 5 to 11 or is it 11 to 5?

By which I mean do you rise at 5am and sleep at 11pm? Or do you rise at 11am and sleep at 5am?

Are you on East Coast time or are you on Asian time?

This point came up in a fascinating conversation with the remarkable Selina Lo, President and CEO of Ruckus Wireless, a leading IPTV startup. More on that conversation later...

I keep Asian times, although for different reasons than Ms. Lo. [I like to joke that crypt space is cheaper than crib space :-)]

BTW take a look at the Ruckus Wireless logo. . . that is certainly a good omen for 2006, the Chinese New Year of the Dog.

Disruption in mainstream media but where is the disruption in the mainstream PR industry?

. . .it's coming

By Tom Foremski, for Silicon Valley Watcher

With all the disruption that is going on in the mainstream media industry, where is the disruption in the mainstream public relations industry? PR companies and corporate communications teams are still going about their business in the same way, and seem to be thriving.

You would think that there would be a corresponding shakeup in both industries. After all, one is dependent on the other. The PR teams work with the journalists to find stories, and help them research whatever information is needed for their articles.

There has always been a close correspondence between the fortunes of both sectors in the past. This could be seen in the dotcom dotbomb fallout.

PR companies suffered large losses when thousands of internet related companies went bust. Job losses in both media and PR were directly related to the fact that there were now far fewer customers.

Fewer dotcom-related firms meant less demand for advertising services and thus less demand for PR services. But now there is a growing disconnect; the mainstream PR sector is booming while the mainstream media sector is fading fast.

The PR boom paradox

Over the past two years the PR sector has been growing quite nicely. The PR firms serving Silicon Valley companies have been been hiring people steadily as the local startup companies seek to raise their visibility.

Every PR firm I know has many vacancies, and there is a very short supply of experienced PR practitioners in the 5 to 8 year experience range. And the demand for PR services continues to grow as new startups come onto the scene and want to raise themselves above the noise level of their competitors.

Yet the number of media outlets continues to shrink. There are fewer mainstream media outlets, there are fewer journalists to pitch stories to; and there are fewer pages to carry stories because there are fewer ads.

This is an interesting situation: Companies want media visibility so that they can make more money from increased sales. That is why they spend money on public relations--to make more money.

But the companies are increasingly advertising their products with the search engines, rather than in the mainstream media.

The companies are able to reach many of their customers through search engine marketing--and that drives revenues. Yet those same companies want to be visible in the media, in news stories, features, radio and TV shows--because they believe this will drive revenues.

If the companies know that mainstream media is inefficient at advertising and therefore of less value in helping to drive revenues. . . why do they believe there is great value in being mentioned in the mainstream media?

Mashup metaphors: The Cows are coming home to roost

What this means is that the realities of this situation have not yet hit home. The realities are these:

-Companies can sell their products and services with a far lower cost of sales these days, because it is easier than ever to reach their customers directly through search engine marketing and blogs.

-This means there that there is far less value offered by mainstream media and mainstream public relations in the product and services sales process.

-Companies know search engine marketing works better than advertising in mainstream media.

-Yet companies still think that being mentioned in the mainstream media is going to help them sell more products and services.

There is a serious disconnect here.

(My apologies for spelling it all out again, but I do want to belabor my points :-)

On the one hand, companies recognize that the mainstream media is not an efficient advertising vehicle to help increase revenues; yet on the other hand they believe that being mentioned in the mainstream media, via PR spending, is an efficient vehicle to help them increase their revenues.

At some point companies will realize that the ROI on being mentioned in a story in the Wall Street Journal or New York Times, or in trade publications, makes little difference to their bottom line. Press coverage might boost the egos of company senior executives but it doesn't do much for overall sales.

Fiduciary duties

Company executives have a fiduciary duty to operate in a manner that will maximize profits for their shareholders, public or private. Spending large sums of money on mainstream public relations is the equivalent to spending large sums of money on advertising in mainstream media: it is inefficient in driving revenues.

Therefore why do it? Why waste all that money? That is why there will be widespread disruption in the mainstream PR industry.

And that is why the mainstream PR industry will give way to a new communications industry in the same way that the mainstream media industry will give way to a new media communications industry.

I think I know what both types of industry will look like, and the successive, progressive, evolutionary forms they will take along the road to the future. Call me and I'll tell you.

Or you can wait until I write about it, sometime later this year, or next :-)

January 11, 2006

Skinny applications have a bright future

By Tom Foremski, for Silicon Valley Watcher

There is a new class of software emerging from companies such as Jotspot and Socialtext. The software enables custom applications to be created for small numbers of users, through a simple interface.

This class of software is sometimes referred to as roll-your-own or do-it-yourself software. Although they convey a meaning--they aren't that good because of the other connotations they invoke.

When I met with Joe Kraus, co-founder of Jotspot, before the holidays, he said it would be good to have a different term. And so here is my suggestion: skinny apps. Just skin it!

The reason is that there is an application layer or "skin" on top of a database. I've floated the idea over on ZDNet if you want to take a look at whether it floats or sinks in IT circles.

Or let me know if you have other suggestions.

Software 2006 is coming; MBA tours; and the Ruckus Room

It's been a hectic week and it's not even half-over (and I'm backed up on my emails...)

I caught up with M.R. Rangaswami Monday, and M.R. is definitely in my top ten list of VCs. He also publishes one of the best darn enterprise software publications out there: Sandhill.com.

And he also puts together one of the best enterprise software conferences in Silicon Valley. This year's two-day conference: Software 2006 begins April 4 and promises to build on the momentum of the prior two conferences.

This year, Ray Lane (one of SVW's top people of 2005) is one of the keynote speakers. BTW, check out Ray Lane's freshly published column on Sandhill.com, called "The Innovate-Dominate Imperative."

I'll be writing more about M.R. and the software conference later this week.

. . .

It was also good to catch up with my friend Annie Kim, who used to work at RightNow Technologies, the CRM on-demand company. She is in the middle of her MBA studies at MIT.

This is one of the toughest business programs in the world and that's why its MBA graduates are among the most sought after by leading corporations. Annie and her classmates last week toured and met with many of the top Silicon Valley companies such as Google, Nvidia, and SAP's large, local organization.

Here is Therese Poletti's news story from the San Jose Mercury: Scouting out Silicon Valley.

. . .

Take a look at The Ruckus Room from Ruckus Wireless as a good example of a corporate blog with lots of the right bits. It is graphically simple, sophisticated, and clever. Plus it has some attitude; take a look at this post about Selena the ceo. (I've been promised an interview...if I suddenly disappear without trace you'll know where to ask questions first :-)

I give The Ruckus Room seven out of ten clicks in the corporate blog category.

Ingres preps assault on enterprise software strongholds as IBM's Jim Finn joins

In the shadows of Tuesday's Oracle-Sun enterprise system bundling partnership, and news from MacWorld, was some news about Ingres--an open source database company.

The news about Ingres was that Jim Finn joined the company as senior vp and head of communications--leaving a very high profile job as head of IBM Americas communications.

It was just over a year ago that Mr Finn departed from Oracle, where he headed worldwide communications. This was one of the most challenging jobs in Silicon Valley if you consider all the M&A deals Oracle was doing; not to mention working with Larry Ellison, one of Silicon Valley's top business leaders.

Ingres is assembling a stellar executive team and it's ambitions are to challenge the enterprise market leaders with open-source enterprise software. Given the high license and maintenance fees enterprises pay today, Ingres has a nice price umbrella to work under. But enterprise software is a hard sell. Here are some more of my thoughts on the company:
Ingres: Is this the dark horse of the enterprise software pack?

January 5, 2006

Geust Column:What IKEA, Google and the government have in common,

. . .and ten predictions for 2006-the year of "Do it Yourself."
by Giovanni Rodriguez, Eastwick Communications

You can learn a great deal about a culture's greatest anxieties – i.e., the stuff that inspires all great product development and marketing – by examining its greatest fantasies and asking, "what's the opposite of that?"

Fortunately, you don't have to go far beyond your TV set to gather all the data you need for this exercise. The evolution of the modern-day reality show – a window into American fantasy life – reveals just how much we have changed over the past half century, and where our priorities lie today.

Consider: in 1955, a faux reality show called “The Millionaire” had the nifty plot device where each week the producers would surprise a lucky family with a check for $1 million. The opposite of that was the dominant fear of the 1950's working class...

. . .that you can work forever and never get ahead. Fast forward fifty years, and the most often used reality-show plot device is the "extreme makeover." The opposite of that – perhaps the greatest anxiety of our time – is that most of us today are worried about keeping up, let alone getting ahead.

For better or worse, we are evolving into a “do it yourself” economy -- where individuals need to do more and more for themselves. And nowhere is this more evident than in the world of technology, where vendors continue to automate so many of the things that make self-service a reality (more about that in a moment).

In the past year, tech reporters have fallen in love with numerous self-service products and applications, from the sublimely intelligent (e.g., Google’s AdWords), to the sublimely absurd (e.g., Instasong ). And looking at reporters’ own end-of-year predictions, we expect the coverage to continue and intensify throughout the new year.

But what appears to be missing is a name for the overall trend. Many use the overly broad “personalization” to describe at least some of what’s happening (e.g., the Burger King effect – where Internet companies let you “have it your way").

Others use the term “user-generated” to describe related things (e.g., self-publishing tools from the world of new media, such as blogs, wikis, etc.). We prefer the harsher, more direct -- yet ultimately more inclusive -- "do it yourself” (the Nike slogan, but with a “y”) for at least three reasons:

*First, DIY addresses the root cause: the business imperative. There’s a reason our world is so rapidly embracing DIY. For organizations – from governments to businesses to non-profits – the economic incentives for enabling self-service are substantial.

Anyone who has ever spent a day at IKEA will understand the brilliance of a business model that encourages – in fact, rewards – its customers to do things themselves. From the beautifully designed warehouse where you do the job of picking up your items, to the Swedish-company style cafeteria where you take a "work break," to the easy-to-construct products that you, not the manufacturer, have the job of completing, IKEA has found ways to eliminate costs and streamline operations, while enlisting customers to participate in a one-of-a-kind brand experience.

IKEA may not be everybody’s cup of glogg but the basic idea is being applied to many other business models, particularly in the world of web-based software where DIY tools are enabling all the people that make up their organizations – including their customers – to work more efficiently. Lesson: DIY is a business imperative, and it translates into productivity, efficiency, and scale.

Second, DIY also taps into the spirit of the people – not just the organizations – who are embracing the trend. We’re spawning new generations of workers who want to do things for themselves, and DIY tools represent freedom to do things their way. In 2006, we’ll see an evolution of software-as-a-service to teach people to develop their own applications (the trend has already begun, but with little notice).

In a more speculative field, we’ll see further experimentation in the budding field of DIY product development, a field pioneered by MIT Professor Neil Gershenfeld and the The Fab Labs project. The Fab Labs, which are teaching non-engineers to create their own products, stand out as a compelling reminder of the transformative power of DIY.

Finally, DIY illuminates the dark side of this trend – the "whether you like it or not" inevitability of the self-service world. For many, the DIY world is one where you are left alone to do too many things for yourself (as the reality-show analysis above suggests).

But the dark side of DIY creates opportunities for socially-minded technology vendors. Recently, we’ve seen the emergence of search technologies (e.g., Eastwick clients Groxis and Healthline ) that have made the task of searching for vital information a more manageable and rewarding experience.

2005 was also a big year for collaboration – earning a cover story in Business Week – and the tech companies that are helping to enable it (e.g., Eastwick client Socialtext ). Like the extreme makeover producers on contemporary TV, the most innovative technology vendors will help us get DIY with a little help from our friends. But unlike “reality shows,” this is no fantasy. It’s the real deal.

Naturally, all this talk about the dark side will create new interest in public policy, and continue the dominant trend that we predicted for 2005, “The Year of the Lawyer.” In fact, 2005 was quite a year for the esquires of tech. There were many examples of this (we’ve documented them on our group blog, eastwikkers ), but we knew we were right only when Google announced a new PR chief who not only has experience on the policy front, but a law degree as well. It’s a fitting choice for a company at the center of so many industry transformations, not the least of which is the steady march toward all things DIY.

But why DIY in 2006 – what’s so special about this year? Like most prognosticators, we’re operating on little more than a hunch. But the hunch is based on three accelerating, overlapping trends: (
1) the unexpected success of Web 2.0 technologies, which are making the Web an increasingly user-friendly platform for computing;
(2) the rapid convergence of communication networks over IP, which is forcing technologists to solve numerous challenges in the self-service economy;
(3) the enormous reception that new media got in 2005, which has given many organizations a good peek into the DIY future. If you were surprised, or depressed, to see your Mom blogging last year, you ain’t seen nothing yet. It's a prelude to a much more interesting story, and we’re betting that story begins in 2006.

Our top-ten predictions:

10. The resurgence of the UI designer. With so many tools and services shifting to a DIY delivery model, the status of the UI (“user interface”) designer in the tech-business ecosystem naturally will rise. In 2005, Jesse James Garrett took center stage by helping the world to understand one of the greatest innovations in Web 2.0 technology: AJAX , a development technique that makes Web-based applications act and behave like the software we already know and love. But also look for vendors who can improve the quality of web-application delivery as part of the overall user experience (e.g., Eastwick client Netli ).

9. Community support/customer support. Expect extreme forms of DIY to inspire creative community remedies. It will not be enough for software companies to provide “customer support.” A community of like-minded users will go a long way toward filling the void that DIY sometimes creates.

8. Alphas emerge. DIY, in its most Darwinian expressions, rewards workers who have been early to embrace the trend. That’s good news for the alpha workers -- the ones who always lead, because it’s in their nature to do so -- not so good news for others.

7. Experts emerge. But the alphas won’t get all the love. In the DIY world, subject-matter experts also have an advantage. For these folks, some of the more creative DIY offerings – e.g., DIY software – offer personal and professional liberation.

6. A new breed of entrepreneur. Just as eBay created new jobs for the e-commerce savvy, new DIY solutions will inspire alphas and experts to go it alone – into business for themselves. And they won’t chase VC funding the old way – the barriers to entry will be far lower.

5. New social maladies. As we noted above, there is a dark side to DIY. In 2006, there will be public discussions on many areas of life where either government or business has abandoned the individual.

4. New personal maladies. Attention Deficit Disorder and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome – just two by-products of the pre-DIY world – will get renewed attention in the media. Who knows -- in 2006, we may even get a new disorder on the books. Here's one (our invention): “frame fatigue,” the inertia you feel after (a) too many hours behind a search box, iPod, or TV set (i.e., “frames” in the physical sense), or (b) after one-too-many PR many campaigns designed to reach you in this information-intensive world (i.e., “frames” in the rhetorical sense, as recently popularized by UC Berkeley professor George Lakoff ).

3. Organizations and government compete. As the debate on “abandonment” (see #5) ensues, a number of organizations – for profit and not-for-profit -- will compete with government to fill the void. The challenge will look quite different from the kind of privatization we saw in the 1980s. This challenge will have a moral edge. On the immediate horizon: "deliberative democracy," an ambitious citizens movement aimed at reforming the electoral system by enabling voters to better educate themselves in advance of all elections.

2. Opportunity for the incumbents. The opposite of DIY is DIOW (“Do it Our Way”). For every innovation around self-service, the incumbents in the old world will feel a threat, or respond to opportunity. Expect technology companies to employ a host of different strategies to compete in this new world. DIY is about empowerment on the edge of the organization: employees on the front lines, customers on the check-out line -- and businesses will need to adapt, grow and market at the edge. Fuzzy concepts like SOAs, Web services and open standards will come into better focus as businesses begin seeing them as the underpinnings of the self-service economy. And businesses that used to market themselves on the "inside," will now start to market themselves on the "outside" (e.g., Intel's recent announcement that it will be dropping its venerable "Inside" slogan).

1. The DIY Queen. Yes, someone will emerge as the voice of this new era, and she (we’re guessing it’s a she) will have both the business sense and the humanity to speak to the lighter and darker sides of the issues.

She may or may not have ADD, and she may or may not challenge the government, but we’re betting that she’s a champion of collaboration. And we’re hoping she’ll use the eastwiki for that effort. We’re prepping the site so she can do it herself, but with a vibrant community behind her.

Giovanni Rodriguez is executive vice president at Eastwick Communications, a technology PR agency with offices in Silicon Valley and San Francisco.

The Babe Ruth of Silicon Valley . . .

...and SVW's other top bods of 2005.

The Always On generation--Tony is right

By Tom Foremski, Silicon Valley Watcher

I agreed to be a columnist for Always On, Tony Perkins' latest online venture (yes, Tony of Red Herring former fame [not the current one--the pre-dotcom dotbomb Red Herring].

I asked to be paid to be a columnist. I said my kids need to eat, but they said they don't pay columnists. They see a value in my association and I guess my payment is the Always On brand association with Silicon Valley Watcher.

Fine, I said, I'll do it anyway. I can eat at the SF soup kitchens such as Aqua, and Boulevard, and Rubicon where many of my evening industry roundtables are held, and my kids can forage.

And hopefully, I won't have to pay for extra bandwidth this month due to rising numbers of pesky readers ;-)
[Some of my readers were so bored during the holidays, they were averaging 15 SVW pageviews per visitor! Which is damn good...]

Sooner than later, I think people will pay for content because isn't that the differentiator? You can get an algorithm and a server anywhere.

I think I know what the end game is going to be. But in the meantime there is a mid-game--which is where a lot of people are focused. One more bubble, or a least a decent bit of foam, and they are out.

January 4, 2006

SVW's Top People of 2005

Here are some of my top people of the year....more to come... :-)

January 3, 2006

Let the journalists take a year off--let Wonkette do the heavy lifting

This via Poynter.org , Michael Lenehan exec editor of the Chicago Reader:

"proposes a yearlong journalism strike. "I am urging reporters and editors around the world to put down their notebooks, close their laptops, hang up their phones.

Lie down and be counted! Let’s have no reporting, no editing, no application of any human intelligence whatsoever to events public or private till January 1, 2007. I’m calling it the Year Without Journalism.

Let’s all relax, let go, and float blissfully in the information-free state (excuse me, I mean free-information state) that our public awaits so eagerly. ...

Let’s see if Wonkette can deal with the devious bastards in the executive branch any better than Judith Miller did."

New media (distributed) column: I'm a newbie

(continued from: A (distributed) new media column...)

I came late to the blogging scene; I've been at it just a little over a year.

But I'm glad I'm a newbie, because I don't feel encumbered by the religion of blogging, or the do's and don'ts that seem to weigh on the first generations of bloggers in the geek (I always use that term affectionately :-) communities.

Geeks created an incredible media platform that media professionals could never have built. A million monkeys, sitting at keyboards and using Fortran, would have had a better chance of creating the design--and the capabilities of the blogging platform--than a billion media professionals using PHP for Dummies.

And even today, media professionals continue to be among the last to "get it." I was one of them, until I tried it and liked it tremendously.

I love the opportunity to be creative in style, in use of words, in messing with grammar and punctuation deliberately and sometimes subtly. [I like leaving little Easter eggs in my copy.]

The geek community crafted a fantastic media platform but they sometimes get into trouble creating the content, and figuring out the right way to monetize it. For example, there were attempts by some blogger software developers to pay other bloggers to write about their products.

We've been publishing newspapers for hundreds of years and we have developed a few best practices. Let us take the best of both worlds. Some have already done so.

Top bloggers are often media professionals

Take a look at all these examples of top blogs, which are run by professional journalists:

Om Malik (Business 2.0 reporter) and his blog GigaOm.com

Nick Denton, former Financial Times journalist and his Gawker publications, all run by media professionals.

Jason Calacanis and Weblogs, also a long time journalist and publisher.

Rafat Ali of PaidContent.Org

Dan Gillmor, of BayoSphere.

My advice to my journalist colleagues who are still not blogging is always: "Start ASAP because you need to build your media brand."

I used to add: "Start blogging now, before you have to start blogging for your employer."

Unfortunately, it's now too late because the old media finally cottoned on to the fact some of their journalist blogs were becoming larger online media brands than their own! And they were still being paid a day job. Nice work if you can get it :-)

BTW, the above advice is for everyone--no matter your profession. Become known to your community of peers, otherwise you will be unknown--and so will be your career.

And don't be afraid of blogging and being fired. Such things are extremely rare and are always the result of inappropriate comment--which can happen in any format.

Blogging is the most honest form of self-promotion bar none. And it's the best way to further your career.

The dialectic jewels of blogging

It is when you encounter perfect paradoxes that you know you are dealing with something true and real...but more on that later :-)

A (distributed) new media column: It's a New Year and a new media. . .will it be richer or poorer?

By Tom Foremski, Silicon Valley Watcher

What an interesting year it has been! 2005 was my first full year as a journalist blogger.

I left the Financial Times in May 2004. Since then, I've been very much poorer monetarily, but a heck of lot richer in experiences and insights.

I never imagined that something like "blogging" could be so significant and mind-changing. I never imagined that writing in this format/medium could be so powerful, in so many ways. I didn't expect that I would speak on so many panels and share the stage with people such as John Chambers of Cisco, Joe Trippi, the foremost political strategist, Dan Scheinman, head of M&A at Cisco and senior media execs from Disney, Electronic Arts, and many other companies.

I feel silly saying this, but I feel that we are all on the cusp of something so huge, it will be mind/life changing for billions of people. Because there is a new media forming and that means this is great time to be a journalist or any media professional.

There really is a new media--this time. And I'm of the Bachman-Turner Overdrive opinion that you ain't seen nothing yet.

You will know the new media

You'll recognize the new media because it won't be like the old. It won't be a printed page, digitally recreated on a web page that looks just like the old page.

Internet 1.0 was about publishing a printed page online. Internet 2.0 allows us to use unique media technologies such as RSS, Flash, AJAX and a host of other tools, to create something which could never be done on print or radio or TV.

A blog post is one very good example of one form of the new media. A blog post is a page of content that is separated from its format (thanks to cascading style sheets) and, very importantly, it carries its own communications (!)

It is a read-and-write document, a totally unique media entity. We have finally connected up the other end of the internet--it's a two-way medium now, with a host of easy, (nearly) one-click publishing tools and very easy media application development tools.

It is a "technology-enabled" world we live in. Technology now takes second place to the application of technology. At last, the cart is before the horse, and that's the way it should be.

Technology-enabled journalists are the future

(continue reading...)

January 2006 Archives

January 31, 2006

Pulling out the rug: GOOG Q4 shows continued shift away from partner sites

Wonkette, Dave Barry, and Silicon Valley Watcher--in Bacon's secret list of 250 of the most influential blogs

Drawing Flak from the Flacks: Transitions are always painful and emotional

January 30, 2006

Fear and Loathing in VC land--animosity towards VCs is rampant

January 29, 2006

You can't get there from here -- a phrase that helps define disruption

What if Chinese internet users were banned from US access?

January 27, 2006

Concerts by the Sea in Pacifica this Sunday

PR's hand basket to hell

January 26, 2006

VNU in acquisition mode: Dutch global media company buys UK tech news site The Inquirer

Statisticians are needed to keep massive grid systems running, says Sun Services CTO

January 25, 2006

A 1400 mile long corridor of innovation . . .the emerging Silicon Coast

January 24, 2006

Silicon Valley Watcher eclipses WSJ's top columnist Walt Mossberg in PR turnout

Big Brother brings business opportunities

The publishing industry is the new technology industry

January 23, 2006

The ring that binds them all? IBM instant messaging agreements with AOL, Yahoo and Google

The Future Transparency of the Past or why you should get used to living in a glass house...

Some of my Top-Ten people in PR/marketing/communications for 2005

January 20, 2006

This and that: Email or posts?. . .Larry skips Fusion event . . .Forrester Mag is no more . . .Fast search . . . I'll be moderating a panel with Scott McNealy on sharing

January 19, 2006

More SVW top ten people lists, this one in media (the PR list is coming next...)

January 18, 2006

Scoop! Google is considering outsourcing some of its IT infrastructure

January 17, 2006

Business Wire: Is this Warren Buffett's "senior moment?"

Judge a (PR) company by its bloggers. . . pointers for choosing wisely

A Martin Luther King day weekend: The connection between Rap music culture and blogging.

January 14, 2006

This is how the iPod reign could come to an end . . .

January 12, 2006

Early to bed or early to rise says a lot about your focus on the future

Disruption in mainstream media but where is the disruption in the mainstream PR industry?

January 11, 2006

Skinny applications have a bright future

Software 2006 is coming; MBA tours; and the Ruckus Room

Ingres preps assault on enterprise software strongholds as IBM's Jim Finn joins

January 5, 2006

Geust Column:What IKEA, Google and the government have in common,

The Babe Ruth of Silicon Valley . . .

The Always On generation--Tony is right

January 4, 2006

SVW's Top People of 2005

January 3, 2006

Let the journalists take a year off--let Wonkette do the heavy lifting

New media (distributed) column: I'm a newbie

A (distributed) new media column: It's a New Year and a new media. . .will it be richer or poorer?

- The Less talked about feature in New Xeons.

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