The Facebook campus sits next to colorful algae on salt flats along San Francisco Bay.

Ten years ago in mid 2004 I left the Financial Times and started publishing Silicon Valley Watcher. Silicon Valley was starting to wake from a long downturn from the dotcom deflation and Google's August IPO was a good sign after several years of bad news.

The culture of Silicon Valley was different then. The software engineering community was more radical than today, and far more socially conscious. The open source software movement was very strong among engineers and there was overall an anti-commercial attitude and a respect for protecting an open commons.

It shared much in spirit with the radical English groups from the mid-seventeeth century such as The Diggers, and also with the The Diggers of the 1960s in San Francisco, who ran free stores and served free food from their kitchens.

The business bible of 2004 was The Cluetrain Manifesto and it came directly from that culture. Here's an excerpt:  

...People of Earth

The sky is open to the stars. Clouds roll over us night and day. Oceans rise and fall. Whatever you may have heard, this is our world, our place to be. Whatever you've been told, our flags fly free. Our heart goes on forever. People of Earth, remember.

Google was a rebel...

Google was very much a part of this radical culture. Its IPO was shocking at the time because it tried to stop the Wall Street bankers and their insiders from profiting from the one-day flips on opening day. Its "Dutch" auction was designed to give small investors the same access to shares as anyone else.

Its passion towards social responsibility was front and center, its "Letter from the Founders" was the first thing you saw in its IPO filing. 

Google was a mystery black box...

I was working at the Financial Times when the much anticipated IPO documents were filed with the SEC. Until then, Google was a black box -- no one knew how much money it was making. We raced back from lunch to comb through the hundreds of pages of financial statements. 

The numbers were fascinating and told an amazing story of how immensely profitable "search" had become. But it was the "Letter from the Founders" that stood out. It was extraordinary, I had never seen anything like it in any IPO filings.

Here was Larry Page and Sergey Brin telling future shareholders that making money was not the prime goal, that building a business that improved the world was their motivation. The founders explained how a dual-share structure, that gave them ten-times the voting rights, was essential to its mission. 

Here's an extract: 

Don't be evil. We believe strongly that in the long term, we will be better served-as shareholders and in all other ways-by a company that does good things for the world even if we forgo some short term gains....

We aspire to make Google an institution that makes the world a better place. . . We are in the process of establishing the Google Foundation. We intend to contribute significant resources to the foundation, including employee time and approximately 1% of Google's equity and profits in some form.

We hope someday this institution may eclipse Google itself in terms of overall world impact by ambitiously applying innovation and significant resources to the largest of the world's problems.

Corporate social responsibility

Google became an important thought leader in the burgeoning social corporate responsibility movement, which was kick-started earlier by Salesforce.com founder Marc Benioff. 

Corporate Social Responsibility was important because it was important to the software engineering community. It was essential in recruiting the best engineers. A company bus and a company lunch didn't cut it with that generation of coders.

Today's Silicon Valley culture is dominated by a peculiar amorality, a narcissism that claims Ayn Rand for its aspirations, even though few have read her books or even their dust jackets.

It's as if everyone has forgotten, "What the right thing to do is." And Google has worked hard to play down its "Don't be evil" rule.

The culture of Silicon Valley today sits somewhere on the autistic spectrum and exhibits the elemental qualities of water.  Water will always find its way, it will find the unseen cracks, and find ways through obstacles and even tear them down, as a tiny leak can bring down a mighty dam.

Water is an amazing disruptor -- materializing from thin air, it can torrent and push aside mountains, or it can patiently work at opening up tiny cracks in solid stone, freezing and expanding, thawing and flowing.

Water doesn't need ethics or morality it is a force of nature. It will always find its right level. It's an appropriate metaphor for Silicon Valley's culture of amorality. For example,  the "Double Irish Dutch sandwich" tax accounting scheme used by (Bermuda based) Google, Apple, and others, to reduce corporate taxes in Europe and the US.

These loopholes in tax laws require extraordinary measures by large teams of accountants and lawyers to exploit, but like water finding its way through obstacles, if the holes are there water will flow through. Or as Eric Schmidt, Google's Chairman told angry British politicians last year: plug the holes if you want more tax revenues. 

This culture of amorality extends to lobbying in Washington where Silicon Valley companies don't see a problem in giving money to re-elect politicians working against measures to control climate change, or restrict marriage to heterosexual couples.

And the amorality of winning at all costs even when you are winning.

Look at the secret conspiracy by  Silicon Valley's most successful and richest companies, Apple, Google, Intel, Intuit, Adobe, against their own workers, to hold down their salaries and restrict their career moves; Zynga's admission of nasty revenue scams; Uber's uber-sleazy growth strategy; Twitter's demands for tax relief simply for locating its HQ in San Francisco's poorest neighborhood -- an economic burden for the city. 

Silicon Valley companies have discovered the simple fact you can have your cake and eat it because there's always more cake. You can be shitty and behave despicably and never have to eat humble pie because there will always be more cake. 

And like water, this culture of amorality doesn't set out to be evil, but it also doesn't set out to do good -- it sets out to see what it can get away with, what holes it can find to win and keep winning. 

Ten years ago Silicon Valley aspired to be more than this. 

- - -

[This is the first in a series of essays marking my ten years as a "journalist blogger."] 

The Digger Archives Home Page

The Cluetrain Manifesto -- Entire Text Index Page

The Cluetrain Manifesto: 10th Anniversary Edition: Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls, David Weinberger, Jake McKee, J. P. Rangaswami, Dan Gillmor: 9780465024094: Amazon.com: Books

Google to "Dutch Auction" its shares - Apr. 29, 2004

But he writes, “The concept of blogging as we knew it has lost some of its meaning and even a bit of meaningfulness.” It certainly has and Om is being too gentle in his criticism because blogging has fallen very far from the promise it once had, and in attaining real meaningfulness.

I started blogging in mid-2004 when I left my job as Technology Correspondent at the Financial Times to become a journalist-blogger. At the time I didn’t know I was the first newspaper journalist to leave his job journalist to become a professional “blogger.” I did it because I felt something fundamental had changed in the media industry and that it wouldn’t be the same again, the media jobs would not come back, and the media business model had seismically shifted.

I wasn’t  sure what I was doing since I had never blogged before. This was when Om was still working his day job at Business 2.0 magazine and I remember at the time that he was very much an evangelist for blogging, urging me to start. 

Dave Galbraith, co-founder of Moreover and Yelp was also urging me to start blogging. I was thinking what is it? I already write five news stories a day plus news analysis and features during the week, blogging can’t be much different. So I left my newspaper job to become a blogger even though I had never blogged before.

Om and Dave were right about blogging, and its importance. I started to see blogging as an incredible superset of all other media.

I found that I could write stories in the same way as at the Financial Times, same interviews, news analysis; but I could also write those 3am posts that played with ideas and even the format of the text, hiding hyperlinks inside a period; writing stories that had text hidden in the source code of the page; playing with it because I could and because of the wonderful flexibility of the medium.

It was intoxicating because I could be creative and innovative in ways that no one had considered before, and that’s still true today. Digital media is an incredibly innovative space.

My Homebrew Club…

Back in 2004 there was a very small blogging community and I was suddenly part of it. They became my “Homebrew Club,” people like Robert Scoble, Dave Winer, Om Malik, Dave Galbraith, Gabe Rivera, Jason Calacanis, Nick Denton, Dan Farber, Steve Gillmor, Chris Pirillo, Shel Israel, Shel Holtz, Jeremiah Owyang, Dan Farber, Doc Searls, Rene Blodgett, Anil Dash, Steve Gillmor, Dan Gillmor, Ross Mayfield, Jeff Jarvis, Mike Arrington,  Scott Beale, Craig Newmark, Marc Canter, Stowe Boyd, John Furrier, JD Lassica, John Battelle, Richard MacManus, JP Rangaswami, Richard Edelman, Steve Rubel, Jeff Clavier, Jeff Nolan, Loic Le Meur, Loren Feldman, Andy Lark, Sam Whitmore, Nick Carr, Danny Sullivan, Charlene Li, Dennis Howlett, and more (see my Twitter “Original Thinkers” list and a description here).

There was much excitement in the air, there was a palpable sense of change, that big changes were about to happen. 

A media meritocracy…

There was a widespread belief that blogging would become a serious challenge to the establishment and its control of ideas, that the blogging movement was intrinsically revolutionary, that it would disrupt everything, and it would topple mass media.  

Armies of of citizen journalists would arise and in their vigilance they would make transparent all government and corporate misdeeds. The hated gatekeepers of mass media would be swept away and their censorship of the truth would be vanquished.

Sadly, things turned out differently. Blogging, and other forms of social media, became mostly amplifiers of establishment ideas, a place for people to share links to mass media content.  Social media became social distribution of mass media (SoDOMM). Blogging failed massively.

And now with the trend toward paid traffic, it’s even worse because money speaks loudest and free speech becomes worthless when no one can hear it.

[The disruption of the media industry is solely due to the devaluation of its business model by low cost advertising by Google, and other technology-enabled media companies — and not because of blogging, or any other social media.]

There used to be a strong camaraderie among the early blog sites and bloggers, yet today, they don’t even link to each other. 

All the blogs/news sites look alike, they look like the mainstream media they were once trying to disrupt. 

We should bring back blogging and some of those early ideals. And bring back the fun and the variety of writing styles. There’s a lot of mainstream-looking media to disrupt.

- - -

Please see:

 5years - Lessons And Insights: Sniggering About Blogging ... And The 'Original Gangsters' Of Blogging -SVW

Social Media Is Not Free - Facebook Wants To Be Paid -SVW

This line jumped out at me as I was reading Irving Wladawsky-Berger's latest post: The Evolution of My Complex Relationship with Blogging

It's a great article about the many wonderful effects that regular blogging has on the person and their experience of themselves.

When I go back and read my entries on blogging in that giddy first year, what comes through is an unexpected sense of wonderment and excitement about being a blogger, part of the emerging, mysterious, amorphous blogosphere. But, after a while, those feelings began to subside.

Over the next few years my relationship with blogging started to evolve into something deeper, darker and . . . more interesting. Even though the blog was something that, in principle, I produced and controlled, it seemed as if it was acquiring a life of its own. I was not sure what was going on and how to best capture and write about those feelings.

This is very much in line with my personal experiences of "blogging" some of which I collected in a short series of essays: 5 Years: Lessons and Insights (see end of post).

I've had some truly incredible experiences through blogging. Some that I could even describe as spiritual epiphanies, even though I'm very aware of how ridiculous this sounds.

There is something in the act of writing that is liberating and stimulating. Sometimes I will sit to write a post and it comes out completely different. It's as if I'm thinking through my fingers and coming up with a better logic. It's great, I love everything about blogging/reporting in this format.

But I remember a time when I didn't think much about "blogging" at all. I remember chatting with Mr Wladawsky-Berger when he was a senior executive at IBM. This was when I was at the Financial Times and I was visiting IBM's stunning HQ in Armonk, New York, set in a bucolic countryside, with deer peeking in through the windows.

We both agreed that there was way too much hype about "blogging" and that there was nothing special about it that was game changing.

Don't knock it until you try it. A few months later I left the FT to become the first journalist from a major newspaper to leave to become a "journalist/blogger" in mid-2004. And in mid-2005 Mr Wladawsky-Berger also started blogging.

I started blogging at the urging of colleagues at IBM. In the Spring of 2005 the company was getting ready to launch a major blogging initiative to encourage its employees to participate in the rapidly growing blogosphere. My colleagues felt that as someone closely associated with IBM's Internet strategy, it was important that I personally become an active blogger.

For several years my friend and colleague John Patrick had been urging me to start a blog. John has always been a pioneer in embracing new technologies. He was one of the first people I knew who had a blog, -- which is still going strong after all these years. I resisted John's exhortations, partly due to the commitment of time and energy it entailed, and partly due to fears that I would not have enough interesting things to write about every week. But, the excitement building up in IBM around the new blogging initiative finally pushed me over the edge. I posted my first blog on May 16, 2005.

Similarly, it was my friends David Galbraith and Om Malik that persuaded me to start blogging. It's been quite the ride.

When I started, I too felt giddy, it felt like I was joining something new, exciting, transformative. There's was a new "spring" in the air, there was something happening that very few people understood. It felt like being part of the seminal "Homebrew Computer Club" the hundred or so members of the microcomputer club that included Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Bill Gates and other pioneers...

These days the giddiness is long gone. These days the new media world seems pretty much the same as the old media world. The same big brands mass media is still there. And the "new media" such as GigaOM, VentureBeat, TechCrunch etc, look like the old media with the same editorial structures, formats, etc.

The army of "citizen journalists" that was going to challenge the old order never materialized. And mass media still dominates the daily discourse. "Social media" seems mostly a place where people Tweet or share on Facebook, links to mass media sources - social media has become Social Distribution of Mass Media (SoDOMM).

And the rest of social media is an ocean of simple clicks on "Likes" that recommend products and services -- it's a mundane marketing channel for large brands.

The promise of the "new media" in creating a new world of pioneering journalism; increasing transparency in government and commerce; and improving democracy and the quality of life, has largely disappeared or has been pushed into the sidelines. Oh well. It was fun for a while.

But I would do it again, and again, and again: because of all the incredible experiences and insights that this simple act of "blogging" has delivered in such abundance.

- - -

Irving Wladawsky-Berger: The Evolution of My Complex Relationship with Blogging

Please see:

5yrs: Lessons From A Blogger/Journalist - The Start of A Series - SVW

5years - Lessons And Insights: Sniggering About Blogging ... And The 'Original Gangsters' Of Blogging - SVW

5yrs - Lessons And Insights: Where's The Disruption From The Internet? - SVW

5yrs: Lessons And Insights - Meeting Cisco's Dan Scheinman and Realizing Every Company Is Now A Media Company - SVW

5yrs: Lessons And Insights: Wish Everyone Well . . . - SVW

It's easy to forget that we are still in the very early stages of the Internet -- a basket of technologies that continues to evolve and affect nearly every aspect of our business and personal lives.

The first phase of the Internet emerged into the commercial space only in the mid-1990s, from military applications at first and then university research uses.

In this first phase of the commercial Internet, the development of web browsers meant that we could now publish a page of content: text, photos, video, to any computer screen regardless of the platform. It didn't matter what the operating system was, or the type of computer: mainframe, minicomputer or pocket computer -- as long as it can run a web browser we can publish a web page to it from anywhere.

That was a significant achievement because you used to have to be on the same network, for example AOL, or CompuServe to be able to publish the same content to other users. There was no cross-platform communications, even email was difficult. I remember it took years for gateways to be developed that could send email between CompuServe and MCI Mail - two popular email networks.

It took government funding and support for industry standard protocols to be able to achieve what we call the Internet. And once the rivalries between the competing self-contained networks could be bypassed, the Internet took off like a rocket.

The Internet's potential effect on business was extraordinary. In the mid to late 1990s, stock market investors built a massive "dotcom" bubble. A company only had to announce that they would launch a web site to have a massive spike in its market value.

Those days seem ridiculous in hindsight but only because we did not yet have the means to truly transform business operations, at least not yet. But the investors were correct in their prediction that there was a truly disruptive force at work and that those companies that were forging ahead would have significant advantages.

In those heady, early days, large corporations were faced with threats that the "dotcom" companies would "eat their lunch." Many companies panicked and launched expensive Internet operations without thinking things through; many companies were frozen in indecision and did nothing.

The dotcom dotbomb soon arrived and established businesses breathed a collective sigh of relief: their lunch was intact and most dotcoms disappeared overnight. A recession gripped the entire tech sector for several years as the excesses of those early years played themselves out.

Recessions, however, are excellent nurseries, it's where innovation emerges. And the early 2000s is where blogging started to emerge, and thats when the first social networks such as Friendster and MySpace appeared. And it is where the roots of what we now call social media emerged.

There is much written about, and spoken about, and tweeted about social media, social networks, social CRM ... "social" with everything. But the "social" part is a red herring because what emerged in the early 2000s was the second phase of the Internet.

The first phase allowed us to publish content to any computer screen. The second phase of the Internet is where any computer screen can publish back.

We now have a two-way Internet.

If you thought Internet 1.0 was impressive then look out because now we have a two-way Internet, and this time, the new "dotcoms" will be far more challenging to established businesses, they will eat lunch, breakfast, and anything else of value. It is an Internet on steroids.

For example, we now have a printing press in our pockets that can potentially reach tens of millions and soon billions of people. It's no wonder that Rupert Murdoch is pissed. You used to have to be a media mogul, buying ink by the barrel to have the potential reach an audience that anyone with a smart phone, or desktop computer can now reach.

The Internet is a powerful media technology, it's a publishing technology. And it has become very easy to use thanks to sophisticated development tools and services that anyone can use.

- You used to have to be a computer expert to set up and publish a web site, now anyone can do it in less than ten minutes.

- You used to have to build a large audience in order for your content to be seen now you can post something to Facebook or Twitter and your network of friends or contacts will republish it and potentially reach huge audiences.

The Internet has become a two-way medium.

What does this mean?

It means that "social" media is just one application of this next stage of the Internet. It means that every company, every person is potentially a media company and has to learn how to use this two-way Internet.

Every company, even if it makes diapers or ball bearings is also a media company because it publishes to its potential customers, employees, neighbors, etc. And it also has to learn how to listen and engage with those communities as they publish back.

Businesses that figure out how to use the two-way Internet will prosper and the ones that don't, won't.

New types of applications will emerge such as personalized advertising that is location based; and a whole host of other applications that have yet to be imagined.

- A two-way Internet means that anything and everything can become connected.

- A two-way Internet means that there is a huge amount of data to be mined that can provide businesses with incredible insights into their markets.

- A two-way Internet can provide businesses with real-time responses to changing market conditions.

- A two-way Internet will unleash a tremendous amount of innovation in the forms of applications, new media formats, and new societies/communities.

A two-way Internet will also transform the way we consume and interact with media. The media is dying but long live the media because we now have more forms of media, in more formats than at any time in our human history.

How will that affect us? Media is how society "thinks" it is how countries develop policies, it is how we figure out solutions to important problems such as the economy, the environment, education, elderly care, energy and those are just the problems that begin with "e."

What are the new cultures being formed? What will the cultural changes mean to business?

A business that doesn't understand its changing culture won't be in business for long.

It is these types of issues that SNCR was formed to research and to try and understand.

We have plenty of technology and technologies in our world but so what? It's how these technologies are used, how they are applied, how they affect and effect our society that SNCR seeks to understand and to share with others.

We now live in a two-way Internet and that's an immense field of study and it is one that will continually surprise us with its near infinite permutations.

For journalists, for professional communicators of all kinds, these are troubled times but also extremely exciting times. At no other time in our professional lives will we see such huge changes in our jobs, our lives, our communities.

We don't know the answers, we know some of them but there are so many more to discover.

We all can take part in figuring out what those answers are. Those answers might keep changing or they might become the new rules for the next phase of the Internet. We don't know yet, we don't even know all the questions but it's sure exciting finding out.

And that's why SNCR has managed to attract some of the best people working in this area, eager and curious about the future and what it might look like.

- - -

If you liked "The Two-Way Internet" there are similar posts in my book: "In My Humble Opinion"

If the campaign succeeds it will be a massive blow to Internet advertising and e-commerce companies because they will lose the ability to tailor targeted commercial messages and discovering user behaviors across a range of web destinations.

Consumer Watchdog has purchased a 540 sq. Ft. Jumbotron digital billboard on Times Square and is showing a video showing an animation of Eric Schmidt, Google's CEO, driving an ice cream truck so that he can spy on kids.

Consumer Watchdog said:

Google has collected massive amounts of personal data from Wi-Fi networks through its Street View cars, made private Gmail contacts publicly available on Buzz, and done a complete about-face on net neutrality, joining with Verizon in calling for toll lanes on the Internet.

Schmidt has appeared clueless regarding privacy himself, Consumer Watchdog said. When questioned about privacy, he has said, “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.” Recently, he suggested children could change their names when they got older if they wanted to escape what was embarrassing and public in their online lives.

- About 80% of Americans support a national "Do not track me" list according to a poll by Grove Insight.

- 90% said that it is important to “have more laws that protect privacy of your personal information” online.

The poll indicated strong support for:

I had very little experience of the blogger world in 2004. I knew that my buddies Om Malik and David Galbraith were bloggers but I didn't read them. I had a typical attitude of a journalist at one of the top newspapers about the emerging world of blogging: Give me a break.

I was writing 4 to 5 news stories a day, plus a news analysis, plus collaborating on feature articles with FT journalists in 200 plus news bureaus around the world.

I remember sniggering about blogging with my colleagues at the FT and other newspapers. I remember visiting with Irving Wladawsky-Berger, IBM's top strategist, sitting in the stylish offices of IBM HQ set in a lush sylvan valley, with a deer peeking through the window, dismissing blogging. (Irving also soon started blogging and is of a much different opinion. Here is his blog: Irving Wladawsky-Berger.)

I thought I knew what "blogging" was about. But it quickly turned out I didn't.

Once I left the Financial Times to become the first journalist to leave a major newspaper to make a living as a "journalist blogger" (and without having blogged at all) it was a huge revelation.

I thought that "blogging" was all about writing lots of news stories and analysis -- it was but it wasn't. It was a whole lot more. And that's what Dave and Om were trying to tell me way back when.

You can't know it unless you do it. And that's what I advise people today, whether it is blogging, Twitter, or anything. Reading about it, being told about it, does very little. Experience it and you will know it so much better.

I finally got it. And it opened up a whole new world of people that I didn't know where there!

Suddenly, I had fallen through a trap door into a whole new world of early pioneer bloggers. I was a newbie and I still feel like a newbie compared with this group.

I'm talking about the pioneers of blogging and the whole new media world. In 2004 there weren't too many of those people around.

And by becoming a journalist/blogger I suddenly was part of a pool of people that were smart as hell, passionate, and crazy in one way or several.

And the extraordinary thing about this group is that they are still (mostly) around.

In the hip-hop culture they would be respectfully referred to as "OG," Original Gangsters. And there is a lot of similarity between the blogging and urban cultures of rap.

- There is the notion of 'keeping things real.'

- There is a lot of braggadocio, a vocal self-reference of great things done, or great thoughts thought first.

- There is a lot of playing with language, deliberate misspelling of words, making up words (I do it all the time.)

The OGs I started off with are still around. But most of these 'Original Bloggers' are much more than that, they are also Original Thinkers and that's what inspires me.

Here are some of them in no particular order (here is a Twitter list: http://twitter.com/tomforemski/original-thinkers/)

Om Malik - GigaOM
Dave Galbraith - David Galbraith's Blog
Robert Scoble - Scobleizer - Exploring the 2010 Web
Dave Winer - Scripting News
Ross Mayfield - Ross Mayfield's Weblog
Renee Blodgett - Down the Avenue
Nick Denton - Nick Denton: The long and illustrious history of bile
Jason Calacanis - The Jason Calacanis Weblog
Steve Gillmor - TechCrunchIT
Dan Farber - Dan Farber
Nick Carr - Rough Type
Jeff Jarvis - Buzzmachine
Mike Arrington - Techcrunch
Danny Sullivan - Daggle
John Paczkowski- John Paczkowski | Digital Daily | AllThingsD
Richard Edelman - Richard Edelman - 6 A.M.
Sam Whitmore - Sam Whitmore's Media Survey
Andy Lark - Andrew Lark
Jeff Clavier - Jeff Clavier's Software Only:
Steve Rubel - The Steve Rubel Lifestream
Dan Gillmor - Dan Gillmor
John Furrier - The SiliconAngle
Anil Dash - Anil Dash
Paul Kedrosky - Infectious Greed
JP Rangaswami - Confused of Calcutta
Tim O'Reilly - O'Reilly Radar
Frank Shaw - Glass House
Shel Holtz - a shel of my former self
Shel Israel - Global Neighborhoods
Dennis Howlett - AccMan
Mike Manuel - Mike Manuel's Blog
Richard MacManus - ReadWriteWeb
Jen McClure - Jen McClure's Ruminations
Jeremy Zawodny - Jeremy Zawodny's blog
Stowe Boyd - /message
John Battelle - John Battelle's Searchblog
Roger Ehrenberg - Information Arbitrage
Marc Canter - Marc's Voice
Gabe Rivera - Techmeme
Craig Newmark - Craig from Craigslist Indulges himself
Jeff Nolan - Venture Chronicles
Chris Pirillo - Chris Pirillo
Jeremiah Owyang - Web Strategy
Charlene Li - Altimeter Group
Tara Hunt -HorsePigCow
Scott Beale - LaughingSquid
James Governor - Monkchips

- - -

Please see:

5yrs: Lessons From A Blogger/Journalist - The Start of A Series

5yrs: Where's The Disruption From The Internet?

5yrs: Meeting Cisco's Dan Scheinman and Realizing Every Company Is Now A Media Company

5yrs: Wish Everyone Well . . .

5yrs: Where Have All The Blogs Gone?


5yrs: Building A Better Mousetrap

When I worked at the Financial Times it was difficult to know who was reading the work of my colleagues and myself in the San Francisco bureau.

Occasionally I would bump into people who would tell me they had read one of my articles, but that was usually because they had read the paper on a recent plane trip. Generally, people on the East coast still read newspapers but on the West coast, they didn't. They might read the FT online but we had a paywall.

I remember trying to encourage my bosses to let my column be free for a while, so that I could help build an audience and then they could put it behind a paywall -- but that wasn't part of their plan.

I think it is fair to say that all journalists abhor a paywall because they want to be read as widely as possible. Journalists are the most enthusiastic proponents of "free" news despite how damaging that might be to their employers. It's a paradoxical position.

Market research to find your readers . . .

The FT management would occasionally commission market research studies and focus groups to figure out who was reading the newspaper and which sections.

For the FT this was a C-suite executive VP readership with an average salary of more than $250,000 and a net worth of at least $2 million. [If the market researchers knew FT journalists read the FT it would drag down the demographics.]

Outside the box...

When I started publishing SVW, I quickly found out who was reading my articles without the need for focus groups. I could see it in my comments, I could see who was discussing my content elsewhere, and lots of people I met would talk to me about my posts.

What was even more eye-opening was that my content was finding readers in places I didn't even know I had readers. If I wrote about a music service I would find my posts being discussed on DJ blogs. If I wrote about video mashups I would find an audience among communities engaged in video editing.

Print publications rarely find a readership outside of their designated focus groups.

On one occasion, there was a group of senior business leaders and academics from Asturias, a region in northern Spain, visiting Silicon Valley who wanted to meet with me and who were avid readers. I was elated.

Here was yet another insight: online content found its own audience rather than the other way around.

Finally, it was true: if you built a better mousetrap the world would beat a path to your door.

- - -

Please see:

Tilting at the windmills of Web 2.0: A Spanish delegation visits Silicon Valley

I had a fascinating conversation a couple of Sundays ago with a visiting delegation of Spanish business and technology leaders from the region of Asturias, in Northern Spain.

I was very flattered and honored that in their very busy three-day tour of Silicon Valley's top companies, universities, and research institutes, they wanted to meet with me. This is one of the wonderful pleasures of my job, finding out that I have readers in places that I didn't know I had readers...!

Asturias is a former coal and iron mining region with about one million inhabitants and it is the fourth fastest growing IT region in the European Union. It has a rich, wonderful history, especially its role in the defense of the republic during the Spanish civil war . . .

Read the rest here...

Previous articles in this series:

5yrs: Lessons From A Blogger/Journalist - The Start of A Series

5yrs: Where's The Disruption From The Internet?

5yrs: Meeting Cisco's Dan Scheinman and Realizing Every Company Is Now A Media Company

5yrs: Wish Everyone Well . . .

5yrs: Where Have All The Blogs Gone?

When I left the Financial Times in early summer 2004 I didn't launch Silicon Valley Watcher until mid-September.

I remember thinking I had better start writing before people forget my name. The summer was over, people were back at work, I had better stop talking about what I was going to do, and start doing.

I found myself staring at a blank screen and wondering how to start? How should I write? What is blogging? What's an appropriate mix of public and personal writing? And many more questions.

I started off doing what I knew how to do: writing news stories and columns. My first post on SVW was a tongue-in-cheek look at my barometer of how well Intel is doing.

Backpack barometer...

Intel is the world's largest chipmaker. What is not generally known is that Intel is also very careful with its money - if it can pinch a penny or two on non-essential spending, it will.

This means that the quality of the backpacks that Intel likes to give out to attendees at its Intel Developer Forum (IDF) conferences, tends to vary according to how well it's doing financially. I called this my "secret barometer of Intel's health."

Intel's IDF backpack in September 2004 looked good. Decent zips, and sturdy construction. I initially pronounced Intel to be in good health. However, my colleague Joe Fay, who was at the time US Editor at Computerwire, later noticed a strange smell of fish coming from his IDF backpack. Clearly things were not quite right at Intel :)

Fun with html...

Writing on SVW I found I could be very creative. I could write in my usual style for news, news analysis, columns, features, etc. But I also found that I could experiment with other styles, the 3am posts could be quite interesting...

I started experimenting with content. I would throw into my copy things that you wouldn't see unless you looked carefully. For example, I would sometimes put a hidden message behind a link. You wouldn't see it unless you clicked on the link. Sometimes the link was behind a period. This made it more difficult to notice.

Sometimes I use this technique to make a comment about a person who is acting in an unreasonable manner. I'll give you an example. I was writing about a prominent journalist and his behavior at a dinner. I didn't write directly about his behavior but I put a link behind his name.

You might assume that the link went to his column but instead, it linked to the Urban Dictionary and its definition of "jerk."

Where have all the blogs gone?

When I started SVW there were lots of blogs around. Om Malik with GigaOm, Robert Scoble's Scobelizer, etc. I was a newbie. But that was fine with me because that meant I didn't have to get into tiresome debates about using strikeouts, commenting policies, updating protocols, and much more.

The blogs at the time were news like but also very personal. I wanted to be less personal, I wanted to publish an online news magazine.

So it is with a sense of irony that five years later, the "blogs" have become news magazines and SVW has become more personal, more blog-like.

GigaOm, Techcrunch, ReadWriteWeb, and others, have become online news magazines with reporters, editors, production staff. Just because they publish using a blogging platform doesn't make them blogs.

They look the same as the traditional media publications of 2004, such as CNET's News.com. The new media now looks pretty much the same as the old media it replaced.

Does this mean that the "new" media might be vulnerable to displacement by a new generation of "blogs" in the same way they themselves displaced the older generation of news sites? Maybe.

- - -
Please see:

5yrs: Lessons From A Blogger/Journalist - The Start of A Series

5yrs: Where's The Disruption From The Internet?

5yrs: Meeting Cisco's Dan Scheinman and Realizing Every Company Is Now A Media Company

5yrs: Wish Everyone Well . . .

When I left the Financial Times in late May 2004, I took a couple of months off. I had lunches, dinners, and drinks with lots of people during that summer.

They would ask me what I was up to. And I would explain. Except that it would take me half-an-hour to explain what I was going to be doing. And to be frank, after half-an-hour they were confused about what I was going to be doing, and so was I.

I would say I want to do this, that, and also this. But not like that, what these people are doing, but more like this, that, and so on. A long list of things (I will spare you the details.) It was confusing.

It took me most of the summer to boil it down to this: Silicon Valley Watcher is an online news site about the business and culture of innovation. Simple and clear.

And this is something that other people and companies need. A simple and clear message.

I meet a lot of companies and very few of them can simply say what they do. And this is a problem. If you don't have a simple and clear message you will confuse others and confuse yourself (and your colleagues.)

Also, I meet a lot of companies and they will tell me more about their competitors than they will about themselves. By the end of the meeting I know more about all these other companies, (and how messed up they are) than I know about them.

My feedback is always the same: If you are right about your competition then the market will take care of them, they will go out of business. Wish everyone well and get on with what's on your plate.

- - -

Please see:

5yrs: Lessons and Insights -

Part 1: Why I left the Financial Times

Part 2: Where's the disruption from the Internet?

Part 3: Meeting Cisco's Dan Scheinman and realizing every company is now a media company

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

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

A suitable transition...

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

That's when I started wearing suits. I didn't wear suits when I worked at the Financial Times, but I started wearing suits when I became a journalist/blogger because I wanted to project a conservative image, I wanted to reassure people that nothing had changed, that I was still "Tom the journalist." (I now have ten suits, Hugo Boss is my preference.) And it was true -- nothing had changed. I was still reporting on the business of Silicon Valley and pursuing the same types of stories I had when working at the FT.

Head of M&A and Head of Corporate Communications

One of my favorite interviews on Silicon Valley Watcher was meeting with Dan Scheinman, who was at the time, head of mergers and acquisitions at Cisco. This was one of the most powerful jobs in Silicon Valley because of the tremendous number of acquisitions Cisco has made - and continues to make. (Here's the list.)

What was extra interesting about Mr Scheinman was that he was also Director of Corporate Communications. I found this combination of two very important jobs fascinating. He could use the considerable might of the Cisco communications machine to make sure that entrepreneurs were working on developing technologies and companies that Cisco needed to fuel its tremendous growth. (IBM does something similar - its VC group led by Drew Clark also let's entrepreneurs know what technologies it needs. It's a VC group that makes no capital investments.)

I had no idea that our meeting would reveal some fascinating insights into the nature of media and the new roles that companies now played in the overall "mediasphere."

news@cisco...

Mr Scheinman was particularly proud of the news@cisco team. This is a large editorial team staffed by former journalists and top editors at newspapers and magazines. It produces content focused on Cisco and its customers. This is a team that produces top-notch quality media in a variety of formats that meets the highest journalistic standards. It's not a typical comms department pumping out press releases and white papers.

Also, Cisco was already using media technologies such as RSS, it already had more than 200 RSS feeds in early 2005! And when Mr Scheinman shared with me traffic figures, I was shocked. Cisco was getting higher traffic to news@Cisco than any of the top IT publications, such as ComputerWorld, InfoWorld, and many other huge computer trade publications. I was amazed.

Cisco is a large media company...

I realized that something truly phenomenal was happening here. This was an example of a corporation as publisher and publication. Cisco makes network gear but it is also a media company -- one of the largest in the world.

I realized that every company is now a media company. It doesn't matter if it makes network gear or diapers, every company needs to publish to its various communities, its customers, its staff, it's neighbors. It needs to know how to produce compelling content, great video, podcasts, etc. And now with this emerging two-way Internet it also needs to learn how to listen, how to get involved in online discussions, how to behave on Facebook or Twitter. Every company needs to master the media technologies of RSS, blogging, and more.

But how does a company know how to be a media company? Companies know how to do what they do, to make diapers, steel, provide healthcare. They are experts at doing what they do. But how does a company know what it takes to be a media company? It's not easy being a media company.

Companies need to do what Cisco does. Companies need to bring in media professionals to help them be media companies. And this is something that I'm expanding as part of my work, advising companies how to be media companies, how to master the many media technologies that are available, help companies develop media strategies, and much more. [I'm a member of the Intel Insiders, a small group of people advising Intel. I am also a founding fellow of the Society of New Communications Research, a Palo Alto based think-tank, which works in this important field.]

Mr Scheinman is now head of Cisco's Media Solutions Group. He is also helping companies become media companies, by making sure they have the hardware and software they need for this role.

I will be writing more on this topic because it is one of the most important insights I've had, and yet it is only now, nearly five years later, starting to be recognized by others.

The fact that every company is a media company is extremely important because this is what will drive tremendous amounts of sales of hardware, software, and services of all kinds. This will increasingly become the point of the spear in terms of driving new business for Cisco, IBM, HP, Intel and a host of other tech companies. And it goes beyond tech...

- - -

Photo: Dan Scheinman and the back of my head from Cisco New Media Summit. Photo by Jeremy Pepper from POP! Pr Jots.)

Come back for the next installment in this series - 5yrs: Lessons and Insights.

Please see:

Interview: Dan Scheinman Cisco's head of M&A and corporate PR

5yrs: Lessons From A Blogger/Journalist - The Start of A Series

5yrs - Lessons And Insights: Where's The Disruption From The Internet?

Also, from Cisco's chief blogger John Earnhardt:

Video of Cisco New Media Summit Now Online

Watch Cisco Media Solutions Group's GM Dan Scheinman talk about the Social Media Explosion. Watch Tom Foremski talk about "Foremski's Law." Watch and learn about Second Life from representatives from BMW, Intel and Cisco. Learn about the ROI of Social Media, Best Practices in Internal Communications and more.

[5yrs: Lessons and insights as a blogger/journalist - This is part 2 published at 4pm Pacific every day (or so). Part 1 is here.]

After leaving the Financial Times in mid-2004 to become a professional "blogger/journalist" I began to think intensely about the nature of media and its changes. Coming from the old world and now jumping into the deep-end of the new world, it triggered some very interesting insights into the nature of the world around me.

At the time, I had the attitude typical of traditional journalists: blogging was merely a hyped up form of self-publishing, a narcissistic trend with very little value, and frankly, we were all sick to death of hearing about it.

Boy, was I wrong, as I soon found out. In fact, soon after I started blogging, I began to see everything as a media "nail" - I had found my hammer. And the more I did it (blogged), the more I discovered . . . and the more I discovered about myself. It's embarrassing to say this, but blogging also turned into an incredible spiritual journey (more on that later).

Who would have thought that an activity that I didn't value at all, and which my colleagues often looked down upon, could turn into such an incredible resource of value to me.

New ways of thinking about old

The more I blogged the more I thought about media and it's role in society, and what it means. This thinking process would happen in the background, it was as my mind would think about such things unconsciously. Then, when it had figured out an answer to a question, it would throw it out into my consciousness, usually during a time when I was doing something else, such as walking down the street.

One of the questions I had harbored for a long time was about the Internet. I had often wondered where was the disruption from this powerful set of technologies?

After all, I could see the disruption from other types of technologies. The microcomputer/PC had had an incredibly disruptive effect. It started off as a simple, microprocessor based technology. The Homebrew Club, a small group of enthusiasts that included Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and a few dozen others, had come together to further investigate the microcomputer and figure out what you could do with it. All the computer companies dismissed it as toy-like.

Eventually, the microcomputer developed into a hugely disruptive force that remade entire industries and threw hundreds if not thousands of companies onto the trash-heap of history.

The microcomputer/PC had certainly made my life as journalist, much better, much more productive. And I could see the tremendous disruptive effect it had had on the world. But where was the disruptive effect from the Internet? Surely this was an even more powerful set of technologies. But where was the disruption? Where were the all the companies dumped onto the trash-heap of history?

In 2004 I looked around and the same tech companies were still around as they were when the Internet began emerging into the commercial world ten years ago. Sure, some tech companies were no longer around, they had been acquired by competitors. But this type of mergers and acquisitions activity was normal in maturing markets. Where was the disruptive effect from the Internet?

And then it hit me. I was walking along Geary Street and I almost fainted.

The disruptive effect from the Internet was not in the technology sector, it was in my sector! It was in the media industry. The reason I could see no disruption in the tech sector from the effects of the Internet was because it's a media technology. And so that's where you would find its disruptive effect!

I almost fell over but everything else in my world fell into place. This was why newspapers and magazines had been struggling for years, a constant stream of layoffs and shrinking revenues. It wasn't primarily because of the economy it was because of the disruptive effect of the Internet!

The Internet is a universal publishing technology, it's a media technology, it enables "pages" to be published to any computer screen regardless of its hardware and operating system platform. This was the first phase of the Internet.

I began to see that blogging represented a second phase of the Internet. Now, any computer screen, regardless of its underlying platform, could publish back. It was as if we had wired up the other end of the Internet, now we have a two way Internet. Now we have an Internet on steroids.

I realized that if Internet 1.0 was disruptive, then Internet 2.0, the two-way Internet, would be even more disruptive. Hold onto your hats...

Next up in this series 5yrs - Lessons and Insights: A visit to Cisco and Dan Scheinman - head of M&A and comms... when every company is a media company.

I didn't realize at the time that I would become the first reporter to leave a major newspaper to make a living as a professional journalist/blogger. It puzzled a lot of people as to why I would give up one of the top jobs in my industry for an uncertain future.

I did it because I could see that there were a lot of changes happening in my industry. I could see that staying in newspapers would mean staying on the sharp, pointy, business end of the disruptive forces that were starting to be felt. I believed it would be better be on the other side of the disruption, afterall, things would not get any better for newspapers, but would gradually get better for online publishers.

I could also see that the management of newspapers, not just mine, didn't see what was going on.

I remember a dinner in early 2004. Our US editor, Lionel Barber (now Editor of FT), was in town, and we were sitting at a table with CNET co-founder Halsey Minor, and leading Silicon Valley investor Roger McNamee. Lionel was talking abut the Financial Times, and saying how profitable the newspaper normally is, and that once this current business cycle had turned around, it would be tremendously profitable again.

I remember thinking, my god, doesn't he realize this isn't a business cycle?! The changes in the economics of the newspaper industry aren't part of a business cycle, they are part of something much larger. The game had changed and it wouldn't go back to what it was.

I didn't know, (and I still don't know what the new economics of the newspaper business will be) but I knew that something fundamental had shifted and it wasn't coming back.

Soon after, I decided that maybe this would be a good time to strike out on my own. After all, I had done it before. I had published a local newspaper in the Haight. I had set up and run a news agency delivering news editorial packages to publications around the world with my business partner Doug Millison. I knew the sky wouldn't collapse if I didn't have a regular job.

But, I had absolutely no idea about what I was getting into. (I usually find that's the best way otherwise I might stay with the devil I know.) I had never blogged, (and I had the attitude of many of my colleagues in mainstream journalism, I never even read the damn things) despite my two good friends Om Malik and Dave Galbriath, both pioneer bloggers, continually telling me I should start to blog.

Next up in this series on 5yrs of lessons from a journalist/blogger: I almost faint as I'm walking along Geary street because of a fundamental insight into the nature of the Internet...