Silicon Valley Watcher - reporting on the business of technology and media: New Rules Archives

Prediction: Dotcoms will eat lunch this time around — the Reversal of the Internet Business Timeline. Part I

by Tom Foremski for SiliconValleyWatcher.com

Around about middle of 2003 something interesting happened. I can't quite put my finger on what exactly it was, or what caused it, but the internet business timeline started reversing.

Maybe it was talk about the Salesforce.com IPO that signaled the reversal. Anyway, it started to be increasingly clear we were going to re-run the last seven to nine years in reverse with a few twists.

I've dubbed what's coming as the Greenfield Enterprise Economy. The following will happen:

--Dotcoms will slowly start coming back into vogue, eat the lunch of the established companies, and go on to eat the companies themselves while spitting out the crunchy infrastructure legacy costs and sucking out the fatty stuff-- the IP and brands.

Some of the new Dotcoms will be web services vendors, currently acting in the traditional enterprise software model of "arms dealers," selling their technology to others. And some of these web services companies, while selling their technology to others, will begin using it themselves in new markets and in regional applications. Sometimes this will occur in partnership with other web services companies. For example, suppliers of say, e-commerce ASP services, will establish a regional shopping mall.

The logic will be clear: why spend millions marketing technology, trying to convince potential customers of the gain of large operational efficiencies when instead they can invest that money into establishing new ventures that take full advantage of the technology.

Such ventures would not necessarily compete with potential customers because they will be focused on specific regions or used to develop new types of services. The focus of most of the new Dotcoms will be on cracking the regional business market - currently the single largest commercial online opportunity.

With this strategy, sales to customers will be boosted because those ventures will serve as technology showcases, demonstrating how to combine technologies and business models to recreate profitable ventures in other regions or niches.

Also, those ventures can be flipped -- sold to customers. This generates new capital and sales at the same time.

The best business opportunities will come from the emergence of Greenfield Enterprises -- these will become the true new Dotcoms of the new economy (yes, the term new economy will return).

The Greenfield Enterprises will be absent most of the legacy costs of competitors. The correct application of technology combined with business model innovation will mark the successful Greenfield Enterprise.

The Greenfield Enterprise Economy Dotcoms will then eat lunch. I will explain how in Part II of the Reversal of the Internet Timeline...

cd1050

Posted by Tom Foremski on December 9, 2004 7:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)

Blogging is the most honest form of self-promotion out there...can corporations adjust?

by Tom Foremski for SiliconValleyWatcher.com

Almost every type of commercial venture will be affected by the use of blogging-type communication technologies. The largest question facing businesses, of all sizes, is how to make best use of this trend.

Their thirst for answers can be seen in the explosion of interest in this subject lately, at least by my personal barometer of being invited to speak at conferences! I received two invites in a single day recently, and I’m also increasingly asked to meet with companies and PR firms to chat about blogging. This compares with about one invite per month normally.

I like to get out and about and hear about how companies are thinking of using blogs, and what types of issues/problems they encounter. It's all part of reporting on how media and PR and tech sectors are changing. And there are huge numbers of companies, and their PR firms, struggling to understand and figure out what all this means. Some get it, most don’t, but there are many that know there is something going on, they have a gut feeling that there really is something important happening, even if they can't see it just yet...

I like speaking at conferences and visiting companies to talk about blogging, because blogging is an extraordinary form of communication. And it is ALL about maintaining the best qualities of journalism. Yes, there are innovative forms of journalism emerging from this blogging/process/technology, some you will see here. But nothing has changed the fact that great blogs are about great journalism, which is about telling compelling stories truthfully and fairly (not impartially).

This is why blogging is the most honest form of self-promotion out there bar none.

If you can’t walk your walk, or talk your talk, you will be found out and ignored. Trusted relationships are the currency of Internet 2.0, in this new/next phase of the internet. And it is a message corporations need to heed. (Oh, BTW, watch out for the shift in power structures within your work groups that the use of blogging and wikis can bring...!)

Through the process of publishing Silicon Valley Watcher, we are collecting best practices for this medium and a wealth of information and skills. I want to set up a business that allows us to share this information and show individuals and corporations how to use blogging in the most effective manner -- by applying the best principles of quality journalism. And I want to work with the best journalists/editors, and other top professionals, to further develop this new media and enable the death of marketing.

My goal is to make the term marketing meaningless, obsolete and struck from the dictionaries of the future.

Instead, blogging will enable effective and honest communications. Companies will communicate with their communities of customers.

The future is about the enterprise as publisher/publication.

Here is some proof of this trend, I've been sitting on this one for a while because it is so hot: Did you know that Cisco Systems' highly regarded online magazine, news@cisco.com gets more hits than several of the largest US business and computer trade publications?!

I can step you through this one if you want ... but I think you already know what this means.

More on this topic later this week, with exclusive data on how many hits the Cisco magazine is getting. (Thanks Ron!)

Link:

Cisco

in-house advert:

Are you trapped inside a crumbling print business model? Be a disruptor rather than a disruptee. Ping us...we're looking ;-)

dc451

Posted by Tom Foremski on January 31, 2005 6:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (2)

These are the new dotcoms of the new rules economy...

by Tom Foremski for SiliconValleyWatcher.com

There is a new kind of dotcom company that will emerge during Internet 2.0—this current and very distinct emerging phase of the Internet. I’m not sure what to call the new dotcom but I know what it is. It is a company that plays by the emerging new rules of the economy. New-rules companies will decimate established companies in many/most sectors but at varying rates.

(This “new-rules enterprise” concept is something that I will write about as a series of essays on the “new-rules economy.” I’d like to hear back from you, my loyal readers, if you agree with my logic and maybe we can even turn it into a group project that further defines new-rules business models.)

Here are some of the characteristics of a newrules enterprise:

Continue reading "These are the new dotcoms of the new rules economy..." »

Posted by Tom Foremski on February 2, 2005 2:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (7) | TrackBacks (1)

JotSpot--one of the first of the emerging, disruptive Internet 2.0 technologies...we interview co-founder Joe Kraus

by Tom Foremski and Richard Koman for SiliconValleyWatcher
Joe Kraus, the founder of JotSpot, one of the hottest Silicon Valley startups, stopped in yesterday for a chat at our deluxe meeting rooms (featuring all day breakfast) at the Lucky Penny Diner on Geary St. in San Francisco. He had a glint in his eye, and a grin on his face that some might describe as looking like the "cat that ate the canary."

And why not? JotSpot's enterprise wiki technology has quickly earned a very respectful buzz since its beta launch in late October. It is simple, sophisticated, and easily adaptable for a multitude of corporate IT tasks, with the potential to make a good-sized dent in the enterprise software market. Understandably, Joe would rather not draw that kind of attention from larger players just yet...

"We’ll never be able to produce an application that has the depth of a Salesforce.com," he says. "They will always be better at it than we are." (There you go Marc, no need to worry....)

But it's plain to see that JotSpot has leveraged wikis into a software development platform that fills a large unmet need: create specialized enterprise applications for which there are no vendors (because the market size is too small) -- without involving IT departments. It's also plain that a lot of enterprises are paying huge amounts of money for bloated applications, and that JotSpot apps could deliver required feature sets for many types of businesses.
cd1930

Continue reading "JotSpot--one of the first of the emerging, disruptive Internet 2.0 technologies...we interview co-founder Joe Kraus" »

Posted by Richard Koman on February 8, 2005 11:12 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (1)

RightNow, right time, right place...tales of the newrules enterprise

by Tom Foremski for SiliconValleyWatcher
It’s the Fifth Floor and Greg is buying dinner. And why not? I haven’t seen a paycheck since June 2004 and he is CEO of Silicon Valley’s top performing IPO of 2004 (and it’s not Google or Salesforce.com…)

My good friend Annie Kim is with us, and Greg is telling me about living in Montana. “It’s a wonderful place, I love living there, even though I was born in California. I love the hunting, and we eat what we kill,” he says. Well, you might be eating Siebel Systems soon, I think to myself …

But, I’m getting ahead of myself, let me introduce Greg Gianforte, CEO and founder of RightNow Technologies.

His is a web services enterprise software company, and although it is focused on CRM, it is quickly assembling a full suite of ERP capabilities (you’ll be fine Marc … no reason to worry … keep swimming with the dolphins …)

Continue reading "RightNow, right time, right place...tales of the newrules enterprise" »

Posted by Tom Foremski on February 10, 2005 12:44 AM | Permalink

What is your core originality?

by Tom Foremski for SiliconValleyWatcher
“You can only get it here” has long been the competitive mantra in the news media business. It now also applies in this Internet 2.0 enabled newrules world, as many different types of enterprises increasingly become a publisher/communicator.

In this Chinese Year of the Rooster (Blogger), that means being first to get up in the morning, and crowing about what it is that is original/unique. That's how you establish thought leadership, in your sector, market, …or on your street corner.

During the Internet 1.0 dotcom phase the question asked of businesses was: “What is your core competency?”

In this Internet 2.0 newrules phase, the next question is: “What is your core originality?”

dk0849

Posted by Tom Foremski on February 11, 2005 5:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

If Internet 1.0 was a disruptive technology…where is the train wreck?

by Tom Foremski for SiliconValleyWatcher
I was thinking back to the birth of the mass PC market, which began with Apple Computer and grew into the single largest computer industry. PC technologies clearly are a powerful technology and they carry that characteristic of all game-changing, powerful technologies--they are disruptive technologies.

You could see where the disruption happened: among the minicomputer and mainframe computer companies, and in those companies that were stranded on small islands of users, with proprietary computer architectures.

The East Coast Route 128 companies such as Wang, DEC, and others in Silicon Valley, all became disrupted by very cheap and effective PC computing technologies. IBM only made it through by the skin of its teeth and a massive mainframe user base as a buffer.

The other characteristic of a disruptive technology is that its victims often can do very little about it. They can’t get out of its way. They can see that light in the tunnel and they know it’s a train coming towards them--but they can’t change direction fast enough. It becomes a slow-motion train wreck.

Continue reading "If Internet 1.0 was a disruptive technology…where is the train wreck?" »

Posted by Tom Foremski on February 21, 2005 6:12 AM | Permalink

The Internet train wreck part 2: This is where you can see it...

by Tom Foremski for SiliconValleyWatcher
In the earlier post I asked:

“There is no doubting that the Internet is a powerful technology, and therefore it must be a disruptive technology. But where is the disruption in the tech sector? Intel, HP, IBM, Cisco, and all the other well-established tech companies are still here, after the Internet revolution.”

I realized that I was looking for the train wreck in the wrong place. I was looking in the tech sector, but I realized that the Internet was not about a new technology, its technologies based on microprocessor, software, and network technologies were not that new. Yes, the chips used for Internet systems and so on, were more powerful and cheaper than before, but that was because of improvements to technologies that had already been invented--silicon chip technologies that led to microprocessor, memory chip, operating systems, and related technologies. There were no "new" technologies that enabled the Internet.

The Internet became the first "open source" project

Continue reading "The Internet train wreck part 2: This is where you can see it..." »

Posted by Tom Foremski on February 21, 2005 2:00 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (1)

SimoHealth, a breakthrough health management app built on Firefox, launches

With today's limited preview release of a breakthrough health management program, startup SimoSoftware is really proving the "NewRules enterprise." The product, SimoHealth, is a hybrid software combining a desktop client application with an online component. It's also the first client application built on top of the open source Firefox browser.

Download a free preview version from the SimoHealth website (Windows only)

Created by a pair of former AOL executives and with a programming staff of five, SimoHealth is a personal health management app that is interesting both for how it tackles complex health transactions and how the software was built.

Built on Firefox, SimoHealth is equal parts client app and browser

The company was born because Lash found himself "completely bogged down in trying to get the best care and managing expenses" for his son Simon, who suffers from developmental apraxia. "I realized there were no tools out there to help families manage their healthcare and advocate for the best care," Todd told me when I visited him at his Oakland home. He took the idea to Marty Fisher, former AOL president of technology and development. "Marty's reaction was, 'Oh, my god, this is huge. I can't believe this hasn't been done.' " Todd, Marty and Marty's son Todd Fisher, a software architect, joined forces to cofound SimoSoftware, named after young Simon Lash.

Continue reading "SimoHealth, a breakthrough health management app built on Firefox, launches" »

Posted by Richard Koman on May 15, 2005 2:47 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (2)

The corporation as publisher: Is Cisco's online magazine a sign of further challenges to an already beleagured media establishment?

By Tom Foremski for SiliconValleyWatcher

In my travels around Silicon Valley, Cisco stands out as one of the savviest in its use of new media technologies such as as RSS syndication feeds and blogging.

This might seem surprising, because Cisco is one of the oldest Silicon Valley companies and older cultures resist change. But Cisco is also in the business of communications, and its use of new media could be viewed as adding an eighth layer to the seven-layer communications stack. This additional layer consists of media technologies distributing content such as news, features, and ideas.

Cisco has begun to figure out the emerging "new communications" landscape. This landscape becomes visible when a corporation recognizes that it is both publisher and publication.

In fact, any large corporation can be viewed as a media company in that it constantly seeks to publish content. It publishes what could be called "sponsored" content in the form of company literature and advertising, and it constantly seeks to persuade others to publish its story. Corporations spend a lot of money influencing independent media organizations such as New York Times, Financial Times, Business Week etc, to publish their stories.

A general rule of thumb in the PR industry states that the ROI from influencing independent media coverage of a company is three times higher than an advertising campaign in the independent media.

Continue reading "The corporation as publisher: Is Cisco's online magazine a sign of further challenges to an already beleagured media establishment?" »

Posted by Tom Foremski on June 7, 2005 4:50 AM | Permalink

Using the human touch as a cornerstone business strategy: Can Champ Mitchell remake former powerhouse Network Solutions?

. . . transforming a former mining community into web consultants

By Tom Foremski for SiliconValleyWatcher

I recently interviewed Champ Mitchell, CEO of Network Solutions, a company that once dominated the domain name registration market.

GoDaddy seems to have pretty much taken over this market, in which domain names now sell for as little as $8 per year, making for a $2 profit before expenses ($6 goes to VeriSign to administer the domain name server infrastructure.) During the bubble, people were paying more than $100 to register a domain name for one year.

So how do you revamp a big brand like Network Solutions when your traditional market of selling domain name registrations has become commoditized, and so have all the associated services such as web hosting?

The classic response is to scramble up the value stack and head for higher-margin territory. And that's what Mr Mitchell has been working on, replacing much of the old management and pursuing a strategy that runs counter to the dominant market trends.

Here are the differences between the old rules — the accepted notions about how business is done - and the potential new rules, the emerging business-model innovations of what I call the "new rules enterprise."

Continue reading "Using the human touch as a cornerstone business strategy: Can Champ Mitchell remake former powerhouse Network Solutions?" »

Posted by Tom Foremski on August 3, 2005 3:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The SEA change: Microsoft "Live" is Microsoft the follower and this time around that strategy won't work...here's why

By Tom Foremski for Silicon Valley Watcher.com

The announcement of Microsoft Live seems a couple of years late. Of course, Microsoft has done well over the years by following others that pioneered markets and then cleaning up because of its scale. But following a company like Google won't work for Microsoft this time, because by the time MSFT figures things out the market has moved on.

I spoke with one of MSFT's lead engineers recently and he was telling me about the fantastic search technology that they have in the labs. That it is better than GOOG's. But the conversation has moved on: it's about Search-Enabled Applications now, it really is a SEA change (and the apps are AJAX).

Rebranding some MSN stuff and adding layers of subscription based services is not going to get MSFT very far.

MSFT can live off the fat of its enterprise market but that won't last forever. And it cannot compete against GOOG's low operational costs--GOOG is much more New Rules Enterprise than MSFT. And it will be MSFT's legacy culture and thinking that will sink the company.

BTW, GOOG does not see itself as a MSFT competitor. The fact that it added a few programmers to help out OpenOffice is not significant.

The New Rules business mantra is: just focus on making sure you execute in your own business--the competition will take care of itself.

GOOG just needs to make sure it is always a step ahead of MSFT (and anybody else)--MSFT will take care of itself. Its legacy burdens will see to that.imho.

Cnet's story on Microsoft Live launch:
Gates: We're entering "live era" of software

Posted by Tom Foremski on November 1, 2005 3:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Updated with more comments! The most important rules for today's workforce bar none

By Tom Foremski, Silicon Valley Watcher

My three rules of today's workforce:

--Carry and use your own cell phone/number for business

The workforce now is mobile and temporary even if you have a salaried job. You need to be in control of the center of communications: you.

--Carry and use your own email address even at work

Otherwise your contacts and the relationships you build can be severed when you leave a job, and that is an investment that you have a right to maintain--as does your employer.

--Carry and use your own health insurance

Because otherwise, you will be stuck in a job that makes you sick just to keep the health insurance.

[I've followed these three rules for years...]

From Mitch Ratcliffe: Ratcliffe Blog

http://www.ratcliffeblog.com/archives/2005/11/new_rules_for_2.html

To Tom's rules, I'd add:
Incorporate and work on contract rather than as an employee.

This allows you to negotiate the same kind of stock compensation while allowing you to keep your business costs, even the ones you can't get compensated for at work, on your own taxes while increasing the flexibility you have as a working person.

Carry and use your own hardware, building tech expenses into your compensation.

This prevents lock-in to a job through access to technology. Sure, you may have to work with a less impressive laptop, but you're also forced to think more like the people who really buy computers, software, services and so forth.

Update #2 thanks to Neville Hobson at NevOn, via David Newberger-The Geek Guy Rants

Create a blog and establish your personal presence in the new marketplace
In this new age of global inter-connectivity, linking and influence, a blog is a prerequisite if you want to build your own credibility, be found easily and connect with others. Forget the static website. Forget the fancy brochure. Do a blog. It works - I speak from personal experience.

Join a business network like LinkedIn or OpenBC
However you actively use these or not, they can help establish your individual credibility and provide avenues of contact with others for mutual benefit.

Anybody have any more?

Posted by Tom Foremski on November 20, 2005 6:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (1)

The new rules of competition

By Tom Foremski, Silicon Valley Watcher

Your competition is not your competitors, it is someone's grandmother. . . it is the competition for attention and you had better be good at it.

And you had better give back a lot of value in exchange for that attention--remember, you have to beat grandma.

Posted by Tom Foremski on November 20, 2005 8:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

New rules: The reverse ten-bagger is the model for success

Tom Foremski, Silicon Valley Watcher

There's no doubt about it, Google's patina of goodwill is dissolving. I'm hearing a fair amount of anti-GOOG chatter all over the place.

Personally, I still like Google. I still feel that I get a whole lot more out of Google than Google gets out of me as an internet user.

In many ways, Google exemplifies what I call one of the new rules of the new economy.

Old Rule: Success is the ten-bagger company--returning to its VCs/investors more than ten times their investment.

New Rule: Success is the reverse ten-bagger--the company that monetizes ten per cent or less of the business opportunities it has.

Otherwise it is not providing enough value to its customers and it will be considered as trying to fleece its users.

Posted by Tom Foremski on December 12, 2005 5:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Die! Press release! Die! Die! Die!

By Tom Foremski for SiliconValleyWatcher

I've been telling the PR industry for some time now that things cannot go along as they are . . . business as usual while mainstream media goes to hell in a hand basket. I've been saying this privately and publicly and having some very useful discussions on this topic.

Since I have a disruptive role to play in mainstream PR, here is my demolition of the press release as we know and hate it today:

Continue reading "Die! Press release! Die! Die! Die!" »

Posted by Tom Foremski on February 27, 2006 12:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (45) | TrackBacks (13)

The metrics of influence--the mania for measuring the blogosphere

By Tom Foremski for SiliconValleyWatcher

There is a current mania among corporations and PR companies to figure out which tools to use to find the influencers in the blogosphere. They are combing through the PageRank and Alexa rankings of online news sites and blog sites, figuring out who has the audience, who do they try to engage in a conversation about their clients. It's PR 101.

I am often asked "which blogs are the important ones, which ones should we be paying attention to, which ones should we be reading?" I can give you a decent list, but you should be able to figure that out yourselves.

In fact, you will come to know the important bloggers because they will be the ones that your peers share with you. As blogging moves out of the Geek communities and into many more sectors, that sharing principle is how influential blogs become created and distributed and that is how you will recognize the leaders.

Finding the right metrics to measure a blog's value as an influencer will never be as simple as measuring numbers of links, comments, trackbacks, Alexa rank, Technorati rank, etc. Because you have to understand the context of each blog and how it fits into its online communities. And you can only do that by being involved in those communities, online and offline.

Let me say it again: the best way to figure out who the important bloggers are in your sector is to go into the online communities as a participant. It'll become apparent very quickly.

I'm lucky to be be publishing a popular and influential news blog. Yes, I'm happy that the numbers are very good, but I don't look at them that often. The metrics that please me the most is when I hear back from readers, from emails, from comments.

What I love the best is when I meet people, from the trenches to the boardroom, and they tell me "I read you and I share you with my team." That's the kind of feedback that energizes me and makes me feel that I have one the best jobs in the valley.

Posted by Tom Foremski on March 10, 2006 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (7) | TrackBacks (4)

New rules: emerging mashups in C-level strategy and corporate comms

There is a very interesting trend emerging in how companies are dealing with the key issue of business strategy. The savvy ones are beginning to realize the benefits of combining the roles of business strategy with corporate communications.

And if you think about it--it makes perfect sense because strategy and communications are naturally linked. Yet in most organizations the corporate communications is run by the marketing group. In my opinion, corporate communications and business strategy should be one and the same. And I'm beginning to see some examples of companies implementing such positions.

Here are some examples of strategic and corporate communications roles being combined:

Continue reading "New rules: emerging mashups in C-level strategy and corporate comms" »

Posted by Tom Foremski on March 21, 2006 2:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Defending MySpace: WTF!!! Stay away from the kids let them express themselves any damn way they want!!!!!!

By Tom Foremski for SiliconValleyWatcher

say_what?.jpg I'm sick of all this criticism of the content on MySpace.com. All the fuddy duddies are warning of hell in a hand basket again.

I peeked in on MySpace more than a year ago and I was very impressed with the writing, the tone that teenagers could set with very few words. I found some great writing and I found some writing that could only be described as Joyceian in its form and ambition. I was super impressed. Yes, I didn't understand a lot of it--but I'm not the target audience.

Let the kids express themselves in the manner and way they want to. We are lucky that they feel able to express themselves in such a public way that we can occasionally look at it. They could lock it up and share it only among themselves.

I wonder what they would say if they read our ramblings about Web 2.0, and online business models, and Google this, that and the other?

Here is Scott Karp: Ticking time bomb.

Here is Nick Carr.

Update: Here is Dana Boyd on MySpace.

Here is some wisdom from a Lebanese writer K. Gibran:

Your children are not your children.

They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.

They come through you but not from you,

And though they are with you, yet they belong not to you.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts.

For they have their own thoughts.

You may house their bodies but not their souls,

For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.

You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.

For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.

Posted by Tom Foremski on March 21, 2006 1:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (0)

Scoble and the A-list; a beatblog Howl; Strumpette launches with a trail of breadcrumbs...

By Tom Foremski for SiliconValleyWatcher

Microsoft A-list blogger Robert Scoble says he wants to be off the A-list blog roll--things are getting way too mean. Yep, that's true. I try not to be, it's too easy.

http://scobleizer.wordpress.com/2006/03/16/the-new-a-list/

. . .

I went to the "6 Poets at 6 Gallery" event Friday in North Beach because of my interest in the Beat Generation and its historic lineage to blogging, and thanks to Allison and Erica who got there early, we had the best standing room in the house, right next to the poets. It was a fun event and I met a lot of interesting people.

The rest of the evening, however, is less easily recalled. I remember something about expressing my own personal "Howl" at the world towards the end of the night...

I could claim to have been aroused by the passionate poetic visions so wonderfully recreated. But I think forgetting to eat during the extended social part of the evening had something to do with an interesting, but highly unrecommended odyssey back home.

Let it roll: A celebration of beat and blog literature; shoot-from-the-hip-one-take-journalism

The Beats: celebrating the obscenity of literature

. . .

Strumpette: A naked journal of the PR business is the new chick on the blogging block, smart and se.x.y, and that's just her writing. Her physical description of herself promises pert parts and other fine qualities of a pertinent nature.

And she has the top male PR bloggers eating out of her hand and she just launched(!) Amanda, don't you just feel some days that it is all just too easy :-) Or, are you really A-Man-Da!

Personally, I try to go for the more challenging muckraking--I figure I can do the easy stuff later...

[BTW, Steve Rubel couldn't, wouldn't, and doesn't need to take on Richard Edelman. He'll be there a long time...that's where I'd put my 25 bucks. I'll even put 25 on you making it to Edelman within the year, if you can build your pagerank :-)]

Posted by Tom Foremski on March 27, 2006 5:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Every company is now partly a technology-enabled media company--I explain in moving pictures

Andy Plesser, who organized the impressive Impact '05 conference at New York University in September, sent me this note about his plunge into blogging.

It includes a link to a video clip of myself (blush), I was on a panel with Joe Trippi, Howard Dean's political consultant and probably the most high profile political consultant in the US right now because of his experience with blogging and other media technologies, used to great effect during Mr Dean's presidential bid.

[Andy is a consumate professional and has been one of my earliest and staunchest supporters especially when I left the FT and ventured forth to test out the new media waters nearly two years ago...He and his family are also wonderful hosts whenever I'm in New York, which is not often enough.]

Continue reading "Every company is now partly a technology-enabled media company--I explain in moving pictures" »

Posted by Tom Foremski on March 27, 2006 3:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

The importance of not being Earnest...

By Tom Foremski for SiliconValleyWatcher

Giovanni Rodriguez from Eastwick Communications, seems to think that Strumpette, the latest out-of-left-field blogging sensation written as a stylishly erotic PR blog, by Amanda Chapel--is a fake.

Maybe, but...does it matter? It is wonderfully entertaining and I sent a personal email of encouragement with some of my top blogging tips and said I'm happy to help out with any advice needed. I also said that I would respectfully keep confidential any private correspondence between us--unless agreed otherwise by both parties. [This has to become a basic rule of social etiquette in this day and age when anyone can publish.]

And, I would also keep quiet if Amanda were to be a single or group project. Either way my blogging advice remains the same.

Here is Giovanni's comment and my reply. Let me know what you think about my idea for creating a persona that several writers could share on a weekly basis...I might enjoy it, I'd give it a try, anybody else?

by: Giovanni Rodriguez on March 27, 2006 06:20 PM
Strumpette is a H-O-A-X. Sez me.

Do we have any evidence that "she" exists? Yes, there's a blog. Yes, there's email. What else?

Reply by: Tom Foremski - Silicon Valley Watcher
That's what you said last time G. You said SandhillSlave was a man and I said no way and I betcha I'm right.

Strumpette's Amanda might very well turn out to be a group hybrid personality--it would be fun either way. It is certainly entertaining so far. Maybe we could all take turns to be SandhillSlave or Amanda and play out a persona. Perhaps the real person could be hidden among a flurry of writers and able to protect their insider identity...?

What if we were to adopt a real or imaginary persona, one with a distinct blog voice/online personality, and several people agreed to write one blog post per day within the character of the blog persona? That could be interesting, and maybe even compelling content...

So for example, if Amanda is a composite of several persons then we could have several writers randomly writing as Amanda... They could be semi-fictional semi-factual stories for entertainment purposes only...and they might even protect the anonymity of insiders?

What do you think G? Could you pretend to be Amanda, or an Angela or an Angus, for one day? I bet you could do it with your theatrical background... you could probably manage all three :-)

Posted by Tom Foremski on March 28, 2006 1:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (7) | TrackBacks (2)

Did anybody solve my Google atom bomb/treasure hunt riddle?

By Tom Foremski for SiliconValleyWatcher

More than a year ago, on February 3 I wrote the this post and it caused a stir in the nascent BlogoSphere. I stated a hypothetical scenario and something which could be one of several flaws in the pay-per-click advertising model--the dominant form of online marketing.

There were quite a few people that didn't understand it, but that was fine because I didn't want to seem as if I were yelling "fire" in a crowded place. The people that did understand it understood the significance of the scenario.

Today there are larger numbers of people that will understand the riddle. And although I use Google as an example, it is not specific to Google, it is something that would affect many other advertising networks.

Here is the original post and I'd be interested in an original solution (I think I have one :-)

Here is the scenario:

A billionaire has arranged to give $100m to the first person that clicks on a special link that looks like a Google text ad.

Posted by Tom Foremski on March 30, 2006 1:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

We need a Google AdSense on steroids: The Grand Challenge of Internet 2.0

By Tom Foremski for SiliconValleyWatcher

I've been really enjoying my job lately. I've been writing a lot about the open source movement and the changes it is having on the enterprise software market. Ingres is an excellent example of how the most innovative business model thinkers are taking advantage of the market opportunities.

I feel that I am often in a unique and fortunate position to move quickly on stories. And that is great for a journalist blogger--which is how I define myself.

What is also very interesting is that I don't have a business model to defend, or a boss looking over my shoulder. That means I am free to call things as I see them.

For example, I've been taking on the least progressive elements of the PR industry in my attack on the press release in its current format. I've offered a design for "new media" press release which has inspired many people to create totally new types of news releases.

The role of journalism - professional and citizen

It's not that I'm the only one that sees things "as I see them" because many others understand my positions. But I often am able to give voice to those that cannot speak directly. And that is one of the major failings of "citizen journalism."

There are members of our society that need to have independent journalists tell their stories. And that is what professional journalists do every day--they help our communities tell their stories.

That is our mandate as journalists and nothing has changed in this new media world--except that the delivery mechanism doesn't rely on a newspaper delivery. It's all about the content not the delivery mechanism: paper or plastic (or digital)? It sounds ridiculous to make such distinctions when you think about it.

Dan Gillmor, the great champion of citizen journalism is right when he says his audience knows more about a news subject than he does. But they cannot tell the story. They would get in so much trouble if they wrote about what goes on at work under their own names. That is why journalists cultivate contacts over many years, so that those contacts feel safe in telling their stories.

Yes, there is no transparency in such cases, I will not reveal sources to whom I have pledged anonymity. But it is an important way that journalists can communicate news and information that could not come out into the open in any other way. And the more information is open and shared, the better it is for all.

Media is how society solves big problems

Media is how society thinks, it is how it debates and discusses important issues. That is why it is important to have a professional media class--supported by a citizens media army in the form of blogging and fact checking. That is a scenario for a high quality mediasphere.

And we need a high quality mediasphere because we have some towering problems ahead to solve. Avian flu is the most immediate, but there is a long line of equally disturbing challenges ahead for us that require high quality information widely distributed.

We have one Mediasphere

A couple of Sundays ago, Al Saracevic, deputy business editor at the San Francisco Chronicle was at the CyberSalon in Berkeley. He asked the assembly, [which featured many of the blog/m

Silicon Valley Watcher - reporting on the business of technology and media

Former Financial Times journalist Tom Foremski and team reporting on the business of technology and media . Silicon Valley is becoming a Tech Media Valley.

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