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

I can't tell you how many of Silicon Valley's top executives of top companies have told me over the past three years: "Tom, all these regulations are killing us."

Here is an excerpt from Eric Auchard's Reuters story via Yahoo News:

Sarbox (Sarbanes-Oxley) dictates that I not chair any committee due to the size of my holdings, not be on the compensation committee because of the loan I once made to the company, not be on the governance committee," Clark wrote.

"It even dictates that some other board member must carry out the perfunctory duties of the chairman," he wrote in a letter dated January 1. "What's left is liability and constraints on stock transactions, neither of which excite me."

. . .

Clark, a veteran founder of Silicon Valley start-ups for 25 years, is the father-in-law of Chad Hurley, the co-founder and chief executive of video-sharing sensation YouTube, which late last year was acquired by Google Inc. (Nasdaq:GOOG - news).

"As a technologist, I feel there is little that I can offer to guide what has become a manufacturing company," he wrote.

"It seems pretty clear to me that lawmakers have gone too far in considering a large shareholder to be inappropriate in the roles, but it is equally clear that I have no ability to change this in the near term," Clark's letter stated.

Source: Shutterfly chairman quits, attacks Sarbanes-Oxley - Yahoo! News

RSS Investors, the $100m VC fund, is about to announce its first investments: RSSI and Attensa. I will have more details next week...

Dear SVW readers, I received this note recently from the developer of a new approach to pinging, I haven't tried it out yet but it looks like a novel approach that fixes a few issues. -Tom

From Chris Simpkins:

Hi Tom,

I am a developer of a new XML-RPC ping application called Pong that allows authors to directly notify blog tracking services about updates to their weblogs and feeds from their desktop.

The application is free and available under an Apache 2.0 license. Pong was designed for ease of use and rapid transmission of pings to the tracking servers.

By decentralizing the ping process to a user's desktop, the messages are sent immediately to all tracking services that the user selects. Weblog authors no longer need to deal with delays in their posts as blog authoring software or hosting services attempt to forward pings. They no longer need to open a browser and navigate to multi-service ping relaying sites in order to send these notifications.

And most importantly, control over when and where these pings are sent is placed in the hands of weblog and feed authors, not a centralized service that makes this determination based upon business partnerships and financial incentives (this is happening, see these BusinessWeek and WSJ articles).

I'm a big fan of Rok Hrastnik, who runs MarketingStudies.net.

I first met Rok earlier this year in New York, where I was moderating a couple of panels at the Syndicate conference, and was very impressed by his intuitive understanding of online marketing.

And there is an interesting discussion going on at MarketingStudies.net on the subject of RSS audience metrics. How do you measure audience and collect behavioral information using RSS to syndicate web site content? The answers are crucial because they will determine the business models around RSS and determine its future.

Finding a way to recover the value created by the work of myself and my team, is obviously very important to me, but it is also fundamental to the entire online media world.

It is the holy grail of the online world: how to create what Google calls a "virtuous" cycle, in which content creators are sufficiently well rewarded for great content that they can reinvest in further content creation.

Google AdSense was an important step in that direction, and now RSS might provide additional opportunities. We shall see.

Here is Rok on RSS Average Daily Readership Explained.
http://www.marketingstudies.net/

By Tom Foremski for SiliconValleyWatcher

Last week I wrote about RSS Investors, a $100m VC fund focused on RSS focused ventures. I like the fund because it draws attention to RSS--a simple but very intriguing technology.

Many in the VC community told me that it is a bad idea to launch such a fund. It is too narrow and restricted and will fail.

My interest is not in the success or failure of the RSS fund, (though I think it could do very well) but in the ecosystem of startups that will grow around it. There will be a thousand entrepreneurs rewriting business plans and writing new business plans for innovative startups. Plus, RSS will be transparent and part of the fabric of our lives, as it already is for some.

It is all fodder for our sites SiliconValleyWatcher and ionRSS. Also, writing as someone that has an RSS based startup business, it can't hurt. It's a win-win from where I'm sitting.

I know that we will be all surprised at the many uses for RSS and the successful businesses built around it. And if no one wants to join in launching rival RSS funds, so much the better. Too many investors spoil the market n'est pas?

So, you other VCs, stay away from RSS :-) But I know you won't...

...Part three of a bloggerific week in NYC

By Tom Foremski for SiliconValleyWatcher

Wednesday May 18 was my big day at the Syndicate conference in New York. I started off moderating an early-morning panel with Michael Terner, CEO of KnowNow, the RSS corporate services company, and Ross Mayfield, CEO of SocialText, the corporate wiki company.

Dr. Paul Kedrosky of the University of California and David Schatsky, senior vp at Jupiter Research, talked about how enterprises are using blogging, wiki and RSS technologies to publish to their employees and business partners. Paul made a good point that corporations are loathe to hire editorial staff because they want to keep headcount low - but they are already publishers of information internally and externally.

Strangely, this is one of the only Syndicate sessions that looks at corporate use of these media technologies, and it is well attended. The time flies by and I have to wrap things up. At the end, a large bunch of people rush the podium for more information. Not a bad panel all in all; only one person escaped early, and I saw only one dozer!

Lunchtime super-panel

Yesterday at the Syndicate conference in New York, Yahoo unveiled its Media RSS 1.0 spec and announced support from OurMedia, a nonprofit site that allows users to upload and share multimedia creations, and from blog tools like FeedBurner and blogdigger.

Media RSS is an extension of RSS that allows feed publishers to include rich metadata describing the media content. "It's meant to be a self-publishing tool to communicate information about your feed," explained Brad Horowitz, Yahoo's director of media search. "Podcasting is a way to include enclosures in RSS. Media RSS is the way to make your podcast findable and discoverable."

By Richard Koman

Originally published on ionRSS.com

At the Syndicate conference this morning, I sat down with Nick Bradbury to talk about NewsGator's acquisition of his company, Bradbury Software, which makes the popular FeedDemon desktop RSS aggregator. I asked him why he made this deal.

"The biggest request I've received from FeedDemon users is the ability to synchronize feeds between different computers. I had done limited integration with NewsGator and Bloglines but really limited. I realized I would need to partner with someone, because synchronization really has to be server-based."

By Richard MacManus, ionRSS.com

Reported originally on ionRSS.com

Newsgator confirmed today that it has acquired Bradbury Software [Business 2.0], the creators of the popular Windows-based FeedDemon RSS aggregator. FeedDemon is a desktop application, so it's complimentary to Newsgator's existing Outlook-based product line and its enterprise server edition.

By Tom Foremski for SiliconValleyWatcher

IDG's Syndicate conference this week in New York will explore the business cases for RSS, the syndication technology at the heart of these next generation media technologies such as blogging.

Richard Koman and I will be blogging live from the show, and I will be moderating two panels. I am not boasting but stating a simple fact when I say I have the best two panels at the show bar none. More on this in a bit…

Tom Mahr, one of Syndicate's organizers, tells me conference reservations are going through the roof. We might have to turn people away, the response has been just incredible within the past couple of weeks, he says. More than 30 media have registered.

Take a look at the lineup for my two panels:
[This is from Syndicate, but the comments in square brackets are mine.]

Panel 1: Enterprise Syndication Using RSS

By Richard MacManus for SiliconValleyWatcher

Slashdot, the hugely popular "News for Nerds" website, has also recently started putting adverts in its RSS feed. Joseph Scott investigated and found that the ads are being served by the Feedster Media Network, which is a partnership between RSS Search engine Feedster and AdBrite.

In a comment on Joseph's blog, Mike Rowehl noted that he's been "running the technical part of the RSS ads implementation at Feedster". Mike explained that "we actually have a slot to place an ad every couple of stories" in the Slashdot RSS feed. Mike writes more about FeedsterMedia on his own blog.

By Richard MacManus for SiliconValleyWatcher
In a delicious piece of Web irony, a Microsoft Longhorn blog is the first site to trial Google's Adsense in its RSS feed. Robert McLaws of LonghornBlogs.com says that it's a pilot program and "may disappear for a while, or be discontinued altogether."

RSS feed management company Feedburner, which has been running an RSS advertising service from Overture since late 2004, was quick to announce its piggy-back support of Google's RSS Adsense. Feedburner promises "additional flexibility in determining frequency of ads, ability to prevent ads on short posts and other ad control mechanisms for your feed."

Update, by Richard MacManus: CNET reports that Google has confirmed the test. Also Jason Calacanis from Weblogs Inc, one of the biggest commercial blog networks, has confirmed his company is testing Google adverts in its RSS feeds.

Note also that Robert McLaws from LonghornBlogs.com, the first reported tester, left a comment here on Silicon Valley Watcher questioning whether Feedburner's announcement of support "is legit". My understanding of Feedburner's announcement is that Feedburner will help their users to implement the Google Adsense service into their Feedburner-powered RSS feeds - as well as provide additional flexibility.

By Richard MacManus for SiliconValleyWatcher

Alex Barnett did the math on the NY Times RSS growth trends highlighted in Silicon Valley Watcher yesterday. Alex estimates that if current growth rates continue, in 3 years RSS click-throughs will represent 27% of total page views for the NY Times website!

I wouldn't be surprised if the NY Times' RSS growth rate increases in comparison to total site growth over the next few years, given that only an estimated 12% of the population use an RSS Reader at this time. If RSS reader take-up increases (which I expect it to) we may well see RSS feeds driving 33% or more of the NY Times's total website traffic by 2008. I suspect that's a conservative estimate.

Makes you realise how strategically important RSS feeds are for news media companies, most of which are scrambling to figure out how best to deliver news online.

By Richard MacManus for SiliconValleyWatcher

The NY Times issued a press release today that claims a massive 342% annual increase in RSS click-throughs. RSS-generated click-throughs totalled 5.9m pageviews in March, representing a 39% increase from February's 4.3 million, the press release said, noting that the Washington and Business feeds were most popular.

By Nick Aster for SiliconValleyWatcher

Even among the readers of tech publications like SVW there are a lot of people that don't really know what RSS is all about (or at least they won't admit it). Even if you do know all about RSS, no doubt there's someone in your organization is bluffing their way through conversations about it. If so, quietly slip them this article and help them get up to speed.

RSS variously stands for Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication. As a reader, all you need to know is that it's a way for you to keep track of new content on numerous websites without having to go view each individual site (such a chore!). Microsoft blogger Robert Scoble claims to consume 500 or more information sources on a daily basis, something no human could do without using an RSS reader.

Leading RSS-istas converging on New York City in mid-May for Syndicate conference

By Tom Foremski for SiliconValleyWatcher

I’m not sure how many leading lights there are around RSS but it’s not many. It’s early days yet but RSS is very likely going to be the next important application, rivaling email and the web. We definitely want to be in this conversation, and you will see us expanding our coverage to key emerging media technologies, including RSS.

We're also pleased to sign on as a media sponsor for the Syndicate conference, May 17-18 in New York. Produced by IDG, the conference is an indication of how far RSS has come in the past year.

Case in point: ING Groep, a global provider of information services, recently started using RSS to broadcast information to employees using KnowNow technology. ING found that spam filters make email an unreliable medium for corporate communication.