I'm not a fan of Google Glass because I am absolutely certain it won't be socially acceptable to be video or audio recording people around you without their permission, or to be online constantly without others knowing. It's just creepy and people won't put up with people that wear them in their company.

Andrew Chen, a San Francisco based entrepreneur, believes Google Glass will be a failure, he compares it to the Apple Newton. But he's more concerned about the tech than how it'll be used:

One day wearable computing glasses may turn out awesome, but I'm convinced that the Google Glass will be like the Apple Newton- a visionary product well ahead of its time, and maybe 10 years after its release, someone will figure out how to make it mainstream using a different design.

I don't think the failure of  Google Glass and its ilk will have much to do with the technology, that's fairly straightforward and it certainly won't take ten years to sort out. The failure of Google Glass will be because it fails our social norms, namely that we won't stand for being videoed, watched, recorded by friends, family, or colleagues, whoever and whenever.

Surveillance is OK for buildings, but it's most certainly not OK for personal and business relationships. 

With a smart phone at least you know a person is using it, and what they are doing with it. With Google Glass you don't know if it's on, what the device is doing (is the "X-ray" feature active?), what is the user looking at on their screen, are they present, or distracted? Are they publishing this online right now? Or later?

Google Glass a product designed by engineers that clearly don't understand interpersonal interactions. It's for the culturally clueless, who will remain sidelined in social situations as they currently are now, without the glasses. And what will they stare at when they are out and about in public spaces, too awkward to meet people's gazes, if they don't have a phone screen to hide behind? 

In a world of constant digital intrusions and layers of augmented realities, good old unadorned reality will gain a new following; because it can't be manipulated, and it is rare: that sunset only lasts a moment, that connection with your friend, that look, that touch. It's gone in an instant and therefore so much more valuable than a million digitally rendered experiences.

People will show their respect for each other by showing that they are totally present with one another -- and you can't do that if you are wearing Google Goggles.

In the near future, "Be here right now" will be a new (renewed) mantra.

- - -

Related: The Google Glass Innovation Forum is meeting this Wednesday at Citizen Space in San Francisco. It's sponsored by Metaio.

From SEOBook: "A case study in being PRE negatively seo'ed."

Enter www.buymycar.com, an idea I had wanted to do for some time, where people list a car and it gets sent to a network of dealers who bid on it from a secure area. A simple idea but FAR from simple to implement.

...

Satisfied I had ticked all the boxes from hours of Matt Cutts video's and Google guidelines documents, I went to work... I was enjoying building what I had hoped would be a useful site and kicked myself for not having done so sooner. I also thanked Google mentally for being smart enough now to reward better sites.

But after four months of work, testing, and signing up car dealers, and still before the full launch, the web site owner Robert Prime, checked to see what links there were to the site. To his horror he found 13,208 sites had used a link to his site using the anchor text "Buy My Car Scam."

...this was absolutely devastating to see.

A worried competitor had obviously decided I was a threat and to nip my site in the bud with Google and attack it before it had even fully started. The live launch date was scheduled for January 7th, 2013!

... I was faced with death by Google rankings ... before it had any rankings... my site being cited as a scam across the Internet before it launched!

Foremski's Take: Negative search engine optimization was rare until Google changed its algorithm over the past two years and started paying attention to the quality of the sites linking to any web site.

It has led to a huge erasure of hyperlinks as web sites try to clean up large networks of their back-links.

But it has also added masses of new hyperlinks designed to tarnish the online reputation of a competitor and to flag it within Google as a potential scam or spam site.

When competitors gain by using this tactic what is the response of an ethical business? Does it have to do the same because that's what the mechanics of Google's algorithm dictates?

How can businesses behave ethically if Google only responds to unethical behavior by others, such as labeling a competitor a scam?

The Google algorithm is more than a collection of numerical values -- it also has ethical and moral values built in that can't be easily seen. The rise in negative SEO shows how the design of the algorithm can encourage unethical business practices.

Can Google design an algorithm that rewards ethical businesses? Companies competing to be more ethical than each other would be a very good thing to see.

If Google can do one then it can do the other, imho.

Analytics company Mixpanel and its investor Andreessen Horowitz are trying to persuade the tech world to be more honest with itself by reporting numbers that are far more informative: Engagement and retention.

... Marc Andreessen and Mixpanel founder Suhail Doshi have decided they want to raise the shame level by calling them "bullshit metrics."

Foremski's Take: Everyone that uses any kind of metric knows they aren't perfect and that they are often easily manipulated. That was the case back in the day of print, too. Reader numbers were often inflated, and all sorts of tricks were used to help sell newspapers and magazines to advertisers.

Metrics, in one form or another, are one of the chief currencies of the digital economy. That's how publishers get paid, and that's how startups can raise money by showing their popularity.

Publishers and startups know that the metrics they report aren't a reliable way to gauge success but that's what advertisers and investors want to see, so that's what they see.

Mr Andreessen wants metrics that measure engagement and retention. But that's just another thing to be gamed and it's very easy to game things in the digital world. It's still true today, as it was back in the day, that no one knows you're a dog.

The truth about online metrics of any kind is that whatever the metric - its value will degrade over time.

Advertisers want people to engage with their ads so they design them to be engaging such as clicking on what type of ad you want played on Hulu, thus driving engagement metrics for not much benefit to the viewers. How many people want to engage with advertising? None. It doesn't matter because thats what pays the ad agency bills that quarter.

You have to apply your own analysis of the metrics being offered and that's what investors such as Andreessen Horowitz, and advertisers need to do, and that's what the best ones do.

It's only "bullshit metrics" if you don't know how to interpret them according to your needs and goals.

The important thing is not to stop using metrics of one kind or any kind, it's important to be measuring something, even if it needs to be changed going forward.

And it's important to remember that some types of metrics will change over time because they reflect trends and fashions among online users. For example, how people "engage" is constantly changing and shifting, from blog posts, to comments, to photos, to images, to retweets, to ...

Anecdotally, I see people sharing less, I see people sharing things privately, I see an iceberg forming under the public view of our online lives, representing an ever larger mass of our social activities.

Metrics are just metrics - bullshit is how they are sold. And people love being sold to.

There is something extraordinary taking place. Google's war on spam sites is tipping the online world upside down and now threatens that most fundamental element of the world wide web: the hyperlink. There is a massive erasure underway of millions of links and it will only accelerate.

The communications lines are the spider's silk but it's the links that make the structure of the web. But because of Google's battle with spammers, the hyperlink could disappear in its current form, and become a commercial product that's bought and sold, instead of earned fair and square.

Let me explain:

When I ran into Matt Cutts, head of Google's web spam team, at the company's Christmas party, he said that Google would start paying more attention to sites that had lots of links from low quality content sites. Because that would be a signal that there was search engine optimization (SEO) at work, which means those links were likely paid for, in a bid to deceive Google.

It made sense since Google's Panda algorithm, (a major rewrite of its core algorithm launched in early 2011) now had a measure of the "quality" of each page in its index.

Prior to this, Google was measuring the number of links coming into a site, and how many links were going to the referring sites. A link coming from a high ranked site was valued by Google as an important signal and it would raise the "pagerank" of a web site.

SEO's two-edged sword...

This became a weakness in Google's algorithm and huge numbers of sites tried to game Google. A massive SEO industry arose, which exploited hyperlinks and other chinks in Google's algorithm. Creating high ranked web sites for a particular service or product, could often be as simple as buying large numbers of links from other high ranked web sites, that are themselves created by other sites, etc.

These sites would often be disguised by populating pages with low quality content.

Google found it hard to distinguish between legitimate, original content on a site, and the spam, low quality web sites -- until the Panda update.

Panda now gives Google a measure of the quality of a web site. This means it can identify the fake, spam sites, created to link out to others, and it can punish the web sites that are receiving those links, because it's likely those links were bought and used to deceive Google.

Too much SEO = Deceit...

If you are deceitful, you are not trustworthy, therefore Google will sink your listing to the bottom of its search results.

It's a great method to shakeout all those businesses that have tried to trick Google -- you change the rules around links -- and all those companies that tried to game the system are neatly exposed.

What used to be best practices for ensuring a high Google rank: lots of links from lots of other sites, has now turned into a massive marker pointing to an over-optimized, deceitful site.

Unravelling the web, erasing masses of hyperlinks...

This is why there's an accelerating rush to erase hyperlinks. The world wide web is being unravelled. And Google is helping this unraveling, and helping the erasure of millions of links, by sending out warnings to web sites that they have questionable links pointing to them.

Danny Sullivan, a leading search engine expert, writing at MarketingLand:

"...publishers probably understand that links are important, but many of them probably really don't understand what a mess the link situation is."

He notes that some sites are receiving legal letters to erase links while some directories are charging others for not linking.

Pagerank assassins...

Back in April 2006, I coined the term "pagerank assassination" a prediction that described the act of trying to sink a competitor's high rank in Google. It's taken six years and a major algorithm change but it's now possible to do exactly that. We now have negative SEO.

Here's how it works: You pay for thousands of links on low quality web sites to point to your competitor. Google thinks they are spamming its index and sinks them like a rock.

Negative SEO will quickly become a war of attrition that no one can win if everyone does it. The only losers are the ones that don't do it.

Killing the hyperlink...

The hyperlink, that simple yet tremendously important, fundamental building block of the world wide web is under threat because of Google's new policies.

There's now very little incentive for anyone to link to other sites, and all types of risks if you do. Consider this: If Google determines that the site you've linked to is spam-like in any way, you might be tainted as selling paid-for links -- which is forbidden by Google.

Or, if you enjoy a high rank from Google because other sites have linked to you for pure reasons, but now those sites are measured by Panda to be low quality, you could be in trouble.

You can see how this would kill the hyperlink -- it becomes a very risky thing to do.

Measuring 'quality' by algorithm...

The kicker in all of this is that Panda is atrocious at measuring the quality of content.

I've met with several publishers who have been pulling their hair out trying to figure why their post-Panda rankings plummeted, while scrapers that copied their content, now rank higher.

There are probably tens of thousands of stories, in many forums, of small online business saying that the Panda update, resulted in them losing a third or more of their revenues overnight, and having to fire people.

Panda, and Google's preferential treatment of big brands, has had the effect of a mushroom cloud in terms of the destructive impact on small businesses. This comes at a time of high unemployment in the US where national and local governments are searching for ways to encourage small business growth.

[Aaron Wall at SEOBook has been doing an excellent job in covering Google's big brand focused strategy at the expense of small businesses.]

Damned by association...

A low rank from Panda doesn't mean you are operating a spam web site or trying to deceive Google. But because Panda can't distinguish original content from copied content, or truly measure quality, you could be judged guilty anyway.

If you get a link from another site, even one that you know is a good, high quality reference, it now carries a risk to you. You might ask the web site to take it down because Panda might have judged the linking site to be poor quality, or it might do so in the future.

The hyperlink is in danger because you can be damned if you create a link out to others, and damned if others link to you. You ignore this simple fact at your peril because there's few sites that can afford to lose their Google rank.

Also, even if all's well with all your links today, that's not true tomorrow. A future algorithm change could put you in peril from all your legacy links elsewhere.

The only good hyperlink is...

It's a brilliant business strategy by Google [$GOOG] because it makes all hyperlinks potentially toxic. All hyperlinks, that is, except those provided by Google.

---

Please see:

PageRank assassination and other nefarious acts of competitive online warfare | ZDNet

Big Brands As Media Companies - Google Makes It Possible, Destroys Jobs - SVW

Out&About: Media Masses At Googleplex And Why I don't hate Google... - SVW

Google's Search For Quality... And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance - SVW

- The tech industry does not place much value on content -- even the way it calls the subject "content" devalues it. For software engineers, "content" is a database of files that are published via a set of Internet and web protocols, wrapped in an advertising channel.

For example, Google's approach to TV is "search." But is this really the best way to access content? There's no appreciation of the marketing and curation that needs to take place so that people can find good content.

Jordan Kurzweil, head of consultancy Independent Content, notes:

From iTunes, to Netflix, to YouTube, and to Yahoo!, AOL and MSN before them, not a single tech company has been able to build and launch a single media brand that connects in any real way with an audience. They have failed time and again to build awareness and excitement for original shows, live events, new content verticals and new apps with audiences remotely approaching mass.

- The tech industry has no idea how content is created, or how expensive it can be to produce, market, and distribute it.

Yahoo tried many times to create its own content. It used to have a financial news channel with a state-of-the-art TV studio.

It is far easier for a tech company to offer a distribution platform and let the content creators deal with the production and marketing, and let the markets decide what is successful.

- Most importantly: Content production companies aren't very profitable. They don't came anywhere close to 30% to 40% operating profit margins that tech companies enjoy.

Tech company shareholders would rebel if their companies proposed acquisitions of marginally profitable businesses. It would dilute their earnings and affect their share price.

- Why buy the cow when you can get the milk and skim the fat cream. There's no "Long Tail" economics going on here -- it's all creamy short-tail profits to be made. Look at Apple, growing very fat, off of creating what are essentially Media Consumption Devices that need content to exist, yet it isn't the content creators that have amassed a $97 billion cash hoard, or report nearly $14 billion in quarterly profits -- a $1 billion a week.

You can make lots of money off of content without needing to understand, or own the content creators. Google, Apple, AOL, Yahoo, Netflix, Facebook, Twitter, Flipboard, and thousands of startups know this simple truth. If you have to make content to make money, you won't make much of either.

Which is why I wish people would shut up about tech companies buying content companies, they, and the tech companies, are clueless about content companies. Plus, has everyone forgotten the biggest, most costliest, failed merger in US history? AOL - Time Warner. Nuff said.

- - -

BTW, here is a speech given by Courtney Love, twelve years ago. I promise that you will have a completely different view of Courtney Love: her analysis, insights, and trends foresight are remarkable, it's as if it were written today (minus references to dotcoms that no longer exist).

She starts off with a very simple breakdown of a $2 million record deal that a band might be very lucky to get. And she shows how this can result in band members making about as much as they would at a 7-Eleven.

Then she gets stuck into the economics of the Internet and how bands can become the distributors and owners of their music. However, that part of her scenario is still in development, we are getting closer but the record labels are still hanging on, still controlling the business, and still making lots of money while the bands, the content creators get very little.

Courtney Love does the math - Salon.com

To some extent, there is an allegory here that seems to apply to all content creation. Artists, writers, and even journalists, create content for very little money, and that's the way it will stay for the majority. Many will do it for free because they feel compelled, it's their passion, a calling.

However, there is a huge amount of money to made from all the industry that takes place around their content.

In the online economy, money is made from the process of aggregation. This devalues any individual piece of content by placing the value in an aggregate amount of content. The economics of the system is set up that way and set up to maintain things that way.

For example, online advertising rates are essentially set by the main players, largely Google. This keeps rates low but Google can still make lots of money through aggregating lots of content. But this means online advertisement rates are too low to adequately pay for the production costs of individual units of content -- the money is made in aggregating many units.

The system is set up to reward the aggregators.

When I was at school, we studied dynamic systems in equilibrium. Make a change in one part of the system and it rebalances to maintain the equilibrium. The Internet economy is a dynamic system, and systems always move to maintain their status quo, which in this case is of aggregators:creators. By keeping online advertising rates low, it maintains that status quo.

Which is why the content industries continue to be in a tailspin, and why stock markets value content producers at such low levels -- they have a risky future. Flipboard, which produces no original content, has a private valuation greater than that of the McClatchy newspaper group -- with $1.4 billion in revenues.

And that's why tech companies won't be buying content producers anytime soon, or later -- there's no decent money to be made in producing content!

However, at some point, the tech industry's ability to profit off of content will falter, because if the content producers can't cover their costs, then guess what?

These are interesting times.

BlackBerry maker Research In Motion (RIM) has finally rid itself of its founders' disastrous co-CEO/co-chair setup. Yet the stamp of the old management team is still very much in evidence. The founders continue to have a strong presence in the company, with both remaining as board members, and Mike Lazaridis staying on to head a newly created innovation committee.

RIM needs revolution, not evolution, and yet it has chosen to replace its co-CEOs with a company insider, Thorsten Heins, one of RIM's two chief operating officers.

Another example:

Yahoo's decision to hire a new CEO before refreshing its board may prove to be a real detriment to fundamental change, again demonstrating a desire to "manage from the grave."

Jerry Yang may have left, and several other board members may be leaving as well, but by appointing the new CEO itself, the outgoing board has set the company on a path that a new board with fresh perspective might not see as the best way forward.

She explains how this leads to the loss of trust with investors -- and serves to undermine the credibility of the new CEO.

...this CEO will always be perceived as "of the past board" and will have to work that much harder to build trust with the new board and investors.

She offers some solutions on preventing the old regime from continuing its influence. You can read the full article here:

Lead from the front, or manage from the grave? | Lucy P. Marcus

She writes:

With ICANNs New gTLD Program to commence January 2012, the doors will be thrown wide open and virtually any word can become a gTLD if the company or organization meets certain criteria:

-They can pony up the hefty application fee ($185,000)

-They can prove they can afford to run a gTLD year after year

-They can justify why they should own a particular word as a gTLD — e.g. a travel company is unlikely to be successful at justifying buying ".Apple" as a gTLD but they can justify buying ".travel"

...

From a marketer's perspective (and their agencies): Here's the bad news. If you're at a Fortune 300 company, it is likely your IT/ legal department will advise you to purchase multiple (possibly a dozen) gTLDs.

Now even if you manage to avoid getting hit directly with that cost (for now), you will still have to spend a hefty chuck trying to figure out what to do with these new "marketing assets."

Foremski's Take: It's far too strong to call this "One of the Biggest Changes on the Internet in a Decade." It's a way for ICANN and the registrars to milk more money from large corporations.

A domain name has very little value unless it is used in marketing campaigns -- it's the marketing that creates the value -- not the domain name.

(There is value in small numbers of high profile .com names, but that value disappears with other TLDs.)

Also, Google is favoring large brands in its search results, so it's already discounting other TLDs that belong to squatters or small businesses, in its search results. That means there's little value in terms of SEO, and the parsing of keywords in domain names, as there used to be.

But corporate legal departments always bank on the side of caution so it's understandable that they would recommend buying other TLDs to prevent competitors, and also scammers/spammers attempting to hoodwink consumers with look-alike names. But that consumer problem exists today without the new TLDs and is solvable through browser warnings.

Ms. Shapiro is helping to organize a free conference November 1, in NYC, to help brands understand the coming changes, info is here: CADNA - What is at stake?

The News of the World was the first newspaper I bought. I was about seven or eight years old and decided I needed to get serious about life and that I needed to know what was going on the world. I looked around the newsagents for something that could tell me the news of the world, and here was a newspaper that described perfectly what I wanted.

My precious pocket money purchased an issue and I took it home and studied it. But I couldn't find any news of the world in it! It was full of stories about affairs, political scandals and stories about celebrities such as Richard Burton, engaged in drunken acts of violence and infidelity. I didn't understand any of it.

I decided to postpone my investigation of the adult world and went back to buying my favorite comic book "The Eagle" (above) and its science fiction tales of adventure and heroism.

Savviest media mogul...

The demise of The News of the World is just one footnote in the incredible career of Rupert Murdoch, who easily qualifies as the savviest media mogul of all time. He's more Citizen Kane than anyone.

Say what you will about his political views, he is running a media empire that quickly responds to massive changes in the industry and remains relevant during some of the toughest times the media industry has faced in its entire history.

At 80 years old he is a force of nature -- I can't think of anyone, at any age, that has managed to build such an amazing set of achievements.

Born into a wealthy Australian family, he studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Oxford University. Starting with one newspaper in Adelaide, at age 22, he then started and acquired newspapers across Australia, then the United Kingdom, Asia and the US.

From Wikipedia:

Murdoch's first permanent foray into TV was in the USA, where he created Fox Broadcasting Company in 1986. In the 2000s, he became a leading investor in satellite television, the film industry and the Internet, and purchased a leading American newspaper, The Wall Street Journal.

Rupert Murdoch was listed three times in the Time 100 as among the most influential people in the world. He is ranked 13th most powerful person in the world in the 2010 Forbes' The World's Most Powerful People list.[4] With a net worth of US$6.3 billion, he is ranked 117th wealthiest person in the world.

The swift closure of The News of the World could be seen as punishment for unethical behavior by its journalists but it's also a quick way to solve one of Mr Murdoch's business problems: his planned acquisition of full control of satellite broadcaster BSkyB.

Jill Lawless and Robert Barr at AP reported:

His British arm of News Corp. was within reach of gaining the British government's approval to make a bid for BSkyB when the scandal exploded, emboldening rivals and critics, who called on the government to block the takeover.As the week went on, BSkyB's share price sank, reflecting market anxieties there might be no takeover bid.

...

Charlie Beckett, director of the POLIS media institute at the London School of Economics, said it was a bold move aimed at resolving a situation that had got out of control. "This is a fantastically brave move to try and cleanse everything and put a stop to it," Beckett said.

Social media's role...

While it remains to be seen if Mr Murdoch's "bold move" will succeed, there are potential "social media" lessons to be learned, according to Dennis Howlett, writing on ZDNet: News of the World shutters. So what of social media? | ZDNet

Mr Howlett points out that this "is exactly the kind of issue that prompts social media activists to encourage brands into engaging with customers by using social media."

But to no avail in this case, "yet still we see so called social media gurus punting the line that engagement is everything. It isn’t."

Social media by itself was bit player in this drama. It was the UK "mass media" in the form of other newspapers, TV and radio that brought this issue to a boil and kept it there until advertisers started to pull out and politicians began to ask questions in Parliament.

Lots of people played their part and shared links and Tweets pointing to the mass media stories about this scandal.

And that seems to be the future role of social media, that it is rapidly becoming: Social Distribution Of Mass Media (SoDOMM). People sharing links to the stories of the day.

SoDOMM links to stories are often scandalous and immoral -- just the way we like them. It's links about celebrity drug use, political scandals, and egregious acts of callous behavior by the rich and privileged. It's just like what you'd find in The News of the World...

The newspaper might be gone but its spirit will certainly live on, in the type of content that people love to share through SoDOMM.

- - -

Please see:

The Demise Of Social Media And The Return Of Mass Media - SVW

Some more thoughts on SoDOMM - the Social Distribution of Mass Media... | ZDNet

Study Shows How Social Media Amplifies Mass Media - SVW

Groupon filed for an IPO Thursday planning to raise $750 million reports The New York Times. The filing reveals very fast growth:

Shortly after launching in 2008, Groupon notched revenue of $94 million. Two years later, it had swelled to $713 million.

The company reported $644.7 million of revenue in the first quarter of 2011 alone, with 83 million subscribers across 43 countries, according to its filing.

A succesful IPO could boost prospects for the many private tech companies that are waiting to go public. But is Groupon a tech company?

Tech companies scale their business largely through adding servers and software, which is why VCs love to invest in them and that's why they shun investing in services companies where hiring lots of people is required to expand a business.

Groupon, the two-year old Chicago-based group shopping coupon service, now has more than 8,000 staff, at least half working in sales, says Andrew Mason, CEO speaking at the AllThingsD D9 conference. That's up from 1500 staff a year ago.

That sounds like a services company to me.

So why is Groupon lumped in with other tech high flyers, such as Twitter with 300 staff, Facebook with about 2,000, and Zynga with about 1300?

Why does Groupon have a tech company-like valuation of as much as $25 billion?

Or are services companies at the core of many new "tech companies?" For example, Cloud/SAAS companies can require a substantial number of staff:

- Salesforce.com has more than 5,300 staff and a $19.3 billion valuation.

- ADP has more than 47,000 staff and a valuation of $27.2 billion.

The scalability of tech is no longer the competitive factor in some markets.

(Hat tip @JeffNolan)

Groupon Said to Discuss IPO Valuation of Up to $25 Billion - Bloomberg

One of the key findings was a huge expectation that businesses create shareholder value by aligning with "society's interests." In the US, 85% agreed that this is an important attribute in how they "trust" corporations.

That's why so many companies talk about "social responsibility" and how important this is to their corporate mission (Twitter, Google, Salesforce, etc).

States With Households Most Likely To Have Gadgets http://bit.ly/dank2x

- New York has the most iPads - 52% more households with at least one iPad.

- Maryland has the most smartphones - all those connected lobbyists and government workers. - 48% more households have at least one smartphone.

- Colorado has the most laptops - 13% more households have at least one laptop, close: Georgia and Minnesota.

- Massachusetts has the most e-Readers - about 49% more households with at least one.

- Michigan has the most point & shoot cameras - households are 8% more likely to have one.

- Maryland has the most HDTVs - 13% more homes with at least one.

- Pennsylvania has the most feature phones - 14% of households with at least one low-end phone.

- California is the greenest state when it comes to gadgets - 47% more likely to have recycled a gadget.

Other info:

- San Francisco area has the most people using media streaming.

- San Francisco Bay area also has the most energy-efficient gadgets and appliances.

- Greater Atlanta has the most TVs per household.

- Phoenix Metro has the most old technology (VCRs etc).

- New York Metro has the most emerging technology gadgets and devices such as blue-ray.

Details on how the survey was conducted:

"This census was conducted online from March, 2010 through July, 2010 and received over 7500 individual responses from Retrevo users distributed across gender, age, and location. Questions were related to the ownership and usage of the following product categories: TVs, computers, cell phones, home theater electronics, cameras and camcorders, and other consumer electronics. Responses were weighted based on reported demographics to gain accurate estimations of gadget ownership and usage within and across demographics. All data is therefore reported as weighted data in which most responses have a confidence interval of +/- 4% at a 95% confidence level."

Genieo installs on a PC and it helps you find all the news and information that is relevant to you from all your sources. It does this without needing any keywords or any specific settings from the user, and it works across all your computers and smartphones so it never duplicates content already seen.

I first met Ms. Tzvi earlier this year: Genieo's Sol Tzvi: Why Doesn't My PC Know Me?

Genieo is one solution to the media tsunami that is building into towering proportions.

The media is not dying, we now have more media, in more forms, at more times of the day and night than at anytime in our history -- and there's more to come as individuals and companies learn how to use inexpensive media technologies to produce and share masses of content (87 Old Spice videos in one day...). (Every company is a media company.)

Using old style filters to try and manage all this content won't work: it requires sophisticated algorithms that can manage all of this for us, transparently and in the background. These algorithms must also bring to us serendipitous content - the stuff we didn't know was there and thus can;t search for - another reason why traditional keyword filters are of little use.

Last week I met with another favorite entrepreneur, Barak Hachamov, co-founder of My6Sense - an iPhone application that seeks to do the same as Genieo but takes a different approach.

Mr Hachamov says that there is tremendous interest in the My6Sense API. Many companies are very eager to add My6sense capabilities to their online services. I can't reveal the names of the interested parties but they are household names.

There are other companies that have similar capabilities but different approaches. One of these is Sidebar, which offers technology for e-commerce sites serving mobile users.

These are all part of a very important trend because without such solutions we will drown in the media tsunami, and we won't be able to find the content that we want to see. Without such solutions the Internet is a giant mess where search doesn't help much: search only works if you know what to look for.

We need systems that know us and work for us.

The Internet acts very much like an operating system, everything on the Internet points to something: pages, data, images, services such as search, maps, etc.

In the world of operating systems there are proprietary and open systems.

- Microsoft's Windows family is proprietary and Linux is open. You can make changes to Linux as long as you share the changes and keep everything open.

- Open operating systems provide a commons where everyone shares in improvements but it is more difficult to make money from open systems.

Hybrid OSes...

You can have hybrid operating systems such as Apple with its Mac OS X, which uses a version of Linux (BSD), combined with proprietary software. Apple saves money on core OS kernel development and it can focus on the proprietary modules where it builds value.

The Internet is very much like a hybrid operating system, making use of core, open standard technologies such as the Internet Protocol, HTTP, HTML, CSS, XML, etc. These are mixed with proprietary technologies such as Adobe's Flash, Google's Search, Facebook's Social Graph, MPEG-2 video, etc.

And the race is on for companies to try to own as much of the Internet operating system they can manage.

Tim O'Reilly, the head of tech book publisher and events organizer O'Reilly, has written a great essay that describes this competitive race. In State of the Internet Operating System Part Two he evaluates the competing contenders to the Internet Operating System throne.

Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and VMware all have credible platforms with strong developer ecosystems. Then there is a collection of players with strong point solutions but no complete operating system offering.

Mr O'Reilly does a good job in analyzing each company, what it has and what's missing. No one company comes out with everything--at least not yet.

He writes that the alternative is to have the Internet become a collection of services connected with open standards.

I've long used Tolkien's "one ring to rule them all" as a metaphor for platforms that seek, like Windows before them, to take control of the entire developer ecosystem, to be a platform on which all applications exclusively depend, and which gives the platform developer power over them. But there is another alternative. Both Linux and the World Wide Web are examples of what I call "small pieces loosely joined" (after David Weinberger's book of the same name). That is, these platforms have a simple set of rules that allow applications to interoperate, enabling developers to build complex systems that work together without central control.

This is the way things work today: small and large pieces loosely joined. This is the Internet that startups want because it helps to create a level playing field with open access to data and services. But this is not the reality we see.

The trend is for companies to try to own as many "pieces" as possible, or to have as many companies as possible use their "pieces" through APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) -- such as Google with its Maps API.

The problem with building a business with APIs is that you are at the mercy of the API provider, they can share a lot of their service or restrict it with little warning. Ross Mayfield, from SocialText calls this strategy "Ajar"-- the APIs are partially open.

Mistrust...

While APIs are a great way to have companies use your "pieces" and develop new applications around your technology, there is growing mistrust of this strategy by startups. For example, Twitter recently become a competitor with many of its application developers using its API. And this same scenario will be repeated repeatedly by other companies.

This will affect how the "small pieces loosely joined" Internet develops, or not. This ideal Internet is disappearing and being replaced by a familiar pattern of consolidation and greater aggregation of value by each of the large Internet players. It's the same pattern we saw in the PC market.

Time will tell...

While no company is close to having all the parts of an Internet operating system there is another way to look at this scenario and that's to see who has the most attention of Internet users.

And Facebook gets a lot of user attention and in my opinion is the best placed to become the Internet operating system for many users.

Take a look at these numbers:

- Nielsen calculates that in March, 2010 US Internet users spent 1 hour 19 minutes on Google.

- Those same users spent 7 hours on Facebook.

Google is better at monetizing attention but Facebook will have plenty of opportunities to monetize all that user attention.

Facebook is busy creating the parts of the Internet operating system that it lacks, and it partners with companies for the rest. Eventually, it can fill in all the parts it needs. This is the company to watch.

In the meantime, all the other large Internet players will be trying to own as much of the Internet operating system that they can manage -- which means there will be lots of developers and companies that get caught in the middle. Some developers will do well by being bought, others will be left to struggle against huge competitors that can scale competing services across a massive user base.

Size matters...

Scale is rapidly becoming the differentiating factor that determines Internet success. While this has always been the case to some extent, as the industry consolidates and user bases grow to ever larger levels, the scale of the Internet players becomes huge and hugely important.

The difference between a competitor that has 20 million users and 50 million users is large but it's not insurmountable, Facebook has 400 million users -- that's a tremendous barrier to competition.

This next stage of the Internet will gradually become less startup friendly as the big players suck up more of the value creation.

Take a look at what happened in the PC industry. Intel and Microsoft managed to use their scale (and proprietary technologies) to suck up most of the value creation, they regularly report profit margins of 60 per cent plus... while PC makers and others in the PC ecosystem, survive on single digit profit margins.

That's the same trend we see developing in the Internet market. The race is on to aggregate the most value (profits) while using tremendous scale to protect against competitors.

It has always had control over its hardware and operating system but it now has control over the apps that run on its latest devices.

The iPhone launched the AppStore and this strategy continues with the iPad, with every application requiring Apple approval.

Although many have criticized Apple for becoming an ever greater control freak, it might be better to look at Apple as if its platforms, especially the iPad, were a newspaper or magazine--and Apple is the editor, or curator. of that content.

For example, every newspaper editor wants to ensure a high quality experience by employing or contracting with the best writers it can get. In this regard Apple is not much different:

- Apple produces a lot of its own content (apps) for its iPad/iPhone platforms and it controls the publication of third-party applications in the same way a newspaper editor controls which freelance content to publish.

- Apple pays iPad app developers based on what it earns. It's not much different from Demand Media, or Associated Content, which pays writers a share based on the online earnings of the content they produce.

[Please see: Interview With Patrick Keane - Associated Content . . . And The True Value Of Online Content - SVW]

In the Apple world, the New York Times, Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and all the other newspapers and magazines that publish on the iPad or iPhone... they are all essentially contributors, freelance writers that get paid by Apple based on their sales, with Apple retaining 30%.

Google's approach...

Google has a different model -- it's not interested in editing or curating content -- yet like Apple, it also makes money from other people's content.

About 31% of Google's revenues come from third-party web sites. The money is collected through placing ads on non-Google sites through its AdSense network.

Google's cut is about 20% compared with Apple's 30% but Google does far less work than Apple, it does very little to edit or curate the web sites that feature its ads. That's why there are a lot of link farms and sites that scrape content illegally in the Google AdSense network.

Comparing the two companies' strategies, it can be seen that the Apple approach requires more work but earns Apple 50% more in revenue share. It also results in an excellent customer experience because Apple actively curates iPad/iPhone content.

Google doesn't care if the Internet user comes across a spammy site carrying Google ads, it doesn't care if an Android app is great or bad. That hands-off policy can also be seen with YouTube and the trouble it got into in Italy, where an Italian court convicted Google execs of publishing a video showing the abuse of a handicapped child.

Google has chosen a hands-off approach in terms of editing or curating anything. But is this the better strategy?

The Apple approach is based on the belief that greater control, active curation, will generate more value than a hands-off approach.

The Apple approach can be seen elsewhere, such as on Facebook, where people choose which content to share, what to publish on their pages; it can be seen in Twitter where the content is hand selected by humans (mostly); it can be seen in people's blogs; it can be seen on Techmeme where 6 editors choose the content.

Active curation creates value.

And Apple's approach has created tremendous value for its shareholders. If you bought AAPL stock on the same day Google went public you would be far richer today than buying GOOG. AAPL recently passed MSFT in terms of market capitalization.

Apple is creating more shareholder value than Google because of its active curation of its platforms.

Active curation creates value.

Twitter Has a Business Model: 'Promoted Tweets' - Advertising Age - Special Report: Digital Conference 2010

A single ad will appear at the top of a search. That ad is itself a tweet, and users can "re-tweet" the ad to pass it around, make the ad a favorite or reply to it.

Tweets as ads
Not surprisingly, Twitter's first advertisers, Starbucks, Bravo and Virgin America, are also heavily into Twitter as a communications medium.

The Geekorati aren't sure about it. Robert Scoble made the point that "I put a lot of value into Twitter but I don't get paid by Twitter. I doubt I'll see anything from these new ads."

And he's right. Twitter is nothing without content. And as users that's what we like about Twitter -- its content.

For a power user and a keen promoter of Twitter, Robert Scoble hasn't been paid by Twitter yet he has done a heck of a lot to promote Twitter. Without people like Robert Scoble and his 33,154 Tweets, Twitter wouldn't have the traffic to attract advertisers.

Should he share in Twitter's revenues? Should other Twitter content creators share in Twitter's revenues?

Filthy lucre...

'Monetization" has a dirty connotation in SocialMediastan, and you can see that in the criticism Twitter is receiving over its ads programs and its move into Twitter apps.

This issue of appropriate business models has been with us since year dot on the Internet. I remember the very early days of the Internet when users were aghast at the prospect of advertising. At the time, many Internet users said that ads would ruin the Internet and that people wouldn't put up with it. It was a very big deal when Yahoo first started showing ads.

We know how that turned out. The Internet didn't collapse because of ads. And now it seems drenched in ads, advertorials, spam, scam commercial ventures, malware, Demand Media-like content-lite content, and more... More in this context is definitely less -- the Internet is becoming a less compelling experience.

Yet we still turn up every day, logging in, for hours at a time... How much crap can we take before we switch off? I guess we'll find out soon enough.

But, let me get back to the subject of my post.

Twitter and the commoditization of apps...

Even though my colleagues would chuckle about Twitter's lack of a business model I always thought that the heckles were misplaced because Twitter had plenty of time and plenty of opportunities to create a viable business model. And that's what is happening now.

Twitter is vacuuming up all that money it left on the table and that Twitter apps companies tried to fill in. Twitter's recent acquisitions have shocked Twitter app developers and now there is a movement among them to try and create an open-source Twitter platform.

Yet Twitter's willingness to compete with its apps developers shouldn't have been surprising. After all, it has investors and it has a fiduciary duty to maximize profits.

But there are consequences to its actions. It will result in all apps developers becoming very suspicious of all other platforms and their owners. This will chill the rate of all apps development.

And that's a potentially good thing for Twitter because any rival platforms will not have the same mass of developers helping those platforms drive usage.

Apps and media...

There is also another trend -- the commoditization of apps. The hundreds of thousands of apps developed for iPhone, Android, Facebook, Twitter, iPad, etc, has created a perception that apps are plentiful and thus have less value.

Yet apps development has become more complex because there are a multitude of platforms and thus development costs are rising.

The issues facing apps developers are very similar to those in the media industry -- content is expensive to produce but it's consumed for free. Apps are expensive to produce but are consumed for free (mostly).

And as in the media industry, the media aggregators seem to be ones that make the money, which in this case are the App Stores, which take a cut, or the platform owners, which use the traffic generated by the apps to sell ads. The app developers, like the media creators, earn crumbs while the aggregators make the millions.

What's the solution?

I think that just like in the media industry, media becomes the loss leader, you have to have something else to sell.

In the apps world, apps become the loss leader, you have to have something else that your app is helping to sell.

For example, I'm now offering media consulting services to support my journalism. SVW is a loss leader for my consulting services - 415 336 7547.

(Please see EC=MC - Every Company is a Media Company.)

From Guhmshoo:

Engadget reported:

Microsoft just mentioned in a Q&A session here at MIX10 in no uncertain terms that clipboard operations won't be supported on Windows Phone 7 Series

And:

Update: We just super-double-ultra-plus-confirmed this with Microsoft -- Windows Phone 7 Series will not have copy and paste functionality. There is a data-detection service built into the text-handling API that will recognize phone numbers and addresses, but Microsoft says most users, including Office users, don't really need clipboard functionality. We... respectfully disagree?

I agree with Engadget. Copy and paste makes life a lot easier, it saves having to rekey data from one application on the phone, to another.

Apple first ran into problems, and now Microsoft. It could take years before it's added to Windows Phone, says Engadget.

Copy and paste must be a very difficult technical problem on smart phones, and I have to admit, that I don't understand the scale of this problem.

Microsoft said it plans to spend $9.5 billion on research and development this year, which is $3 billion more than its closest rivals. I hope a few billion dollars of that budget goes on solving the copy and paste problem. Microsoft could gain a significant lead over Apple.

I have had others unfollow me too because my Twitter stream was feeding directly into Google Buzz and taking up most of their stream.

Louis Gray often says that information overload is a failure of your filters. That's true. I just don't know how to set the filters on Google Buzz beyond 'unfollow' and I expect others don't know too.

It would be great if there was a dial, where you could 'dial down' some people, and raise up others. That's a simple interface control that everyone knows how to use.

Twitter, and to some extent Facebook, are good tools to promote blog posts, videos, micro-posts, etc, because there is less danger of dominating a followers' stream. That's because unlike Google Buzz, those streams are organized in ways to tend to limit such potential for annoyance.

I'm sure that Google Buzz will evolve to be more like those streams.

In the meantime, I would love if Google Buzz didn't keep telling me the number of new 'buzzes' in my stream. I'm less likely to check them when there is a large number of them. As it is, I don't like going to Gmail much anyway, because of my 67,265 unread emails.

Gmail feels like "Guilt mail" because I haven't replied to so many messages. GBuzz is far less guilt ridden, but it does feel like a lot of extra work, a lot more extra interactions that need to be done, when I'd rather be interacting offline.

Friendfeed (now owned by Facebook) attempted to do the same but Friendfeed suffered from a perception that it was mainly for the geek elite. Will Google Buzz face a similar fate? It's too early to say.

What is clear is that Google Buzz can be viewed as just one version of the 'one ring to link them all' model that many other businesses are trying to attain. If you can own that ring, you rule them all.

You can see that strategy at Facebook, Twitter, and at other companies in their fields, such as Salesforce.com in enterprise apps.

Owning instead of linking...

Google says that its future plans include integrating Buzz into its other services, and that they will observe how people are using it. And this is where Google has an advantage in that it owns many web services such as email, photo sharing, document sharing, voice calls, text messaging, maps, news readers, etc.

Facebook is also trying to become the 'one ring to link them all.' And like Google, it has its own services; it is about to launch a new souped up email system; it integrates Twitter updates; it has become one of the largest photo and video sharing sites; it has event services, and more services are on their way.

Microsoft Live has a similar strategy and similar services. And other companies are moving in the same direction, for example Nokia, with its OVI push around mobile maps, and other online services.

It will be important to own your own Internet services because third party services will undoubtably start to limit how much of their user data they are willing to share with other businesses. Such data is made available through open APIs (application programming interfaces). Open APIs are essential for social networking and sharing across many different Internet sites.

Increased competition will very likely be reflected in constraints on open APIs. Why make it easier for another business to roll up your user data? Each business will try to make life difficult for its competitors, and for future ones.

From open APIs to ajar...

APIs will become 'ajar' in that they will be partially open. Limited APIs are hated by the geek community but they make perfect sense for businesses trying to stop competitors from profiting from their user communities.

Limited APIs will make it very difficult for Google, or any other company, to create a 'one ring to link them all' model. We are much more likely to have a series of separate 'rings,' each one representing a fairly closed, self-contained world, where common Internet services are aggregated.

Unfortunately, this all points to a future Internet that is increasingly closed and proprietary.

- - -

Introducing Google Buzz

Microsoft Slams Google Buzz

Yahoo: We've Had Our Own Google Buzz For Over A Year (YHOO, GOOG)

How Google Buzz Validates but Marginalizes FriendFeed

Google's poor social score

Why would they do that? What advantage is there in allowing third-party services to undermine their business?

I have rarely been able to find a straightforward price comparison that was able to factor in everything, such as shipping, taxes, and extras.

The East coast camera retailers, for example, would advertise low prices online but then charge you extra for flash memory, shipping, warranties, and 'camera kits,' that quickly negated any savings.

And it makes sense that retailers would try to make it as difficult as possible to get a clean price quote because otherwise they are at the mercy of the lowest price competitor. They would also be at the mercy of their stupidest competitor -- the one that charges an unrealistic price, too low to maintain profitability or viability.

Today's New York Times has a report by Brad Stone on yet another aspect of online pricing - manufacturers seeking to control what price retailers can advertise on their products.

The Fight over Prices on the Internet - NYTimes.com

On some pages of e-commerce sites selling products like televisions, digital cameras and jewelry, a critical piece of information is conspicuously missing: the price tag.

Customers have to go to the online checkout to see the price. These missing prices are more likely to be methods of thwarting price comparison engines rather than manufacturers' price controls.

Retailers have long managed to get around pricing controls by giving other things away. For example, Apple dealers aren't allowed to under cut each other on price but they can give away printers and other products, which effectively undercuts Apple's recommended retail prices.

What is much more interesting is this tidbit, buried deeper in the NYTimes article, almost at the very end:

Instead of selling e-books wholesale to retailers like Amazon.com, the publishers want to sell them directly, setting prices and having the retailer act as an agent, taking a fixed 30 percent commission.

Wow. Turning Amazon into an affiliate! How ironic, since Amazon is one of the largest affiliate marketers, offering a percentage of revenues sold by third parties.

This is the danger that online retailers now face: what if their suppliers want to sell direct?

A search engine, such as Google or Bing, would be able to make it very easy to find the online stores of the manufacturers of many goods. This would be like a huge outlet store in the cloud.

In most cases manufacturers are already drop-shipping orders on goods collected by online retailers. Why not cut out the middle man?

In addition, the manufacturers would be collecting important customer data -- data that is currently kept by the retailer. They would be able to develop a direct customer relationship for the very first time (beyond the voluntary 'warranty' cards found with many products).

And if you know who bought what and when, it becomes easy to work out who will probably be needing a new washing machine, or computer, because the old one is on its last legs. Your marketing goes direct -- which cuts out a lot of costs.

Fortunately for the retailers, manufacturers don't know how to market well, or how to manage a direct customer relationship. At least, not yet...

Amazon has some protection from this trend in that it has layered on a lot of cool features and services, such as customer reviews, and secure online payment systems. That will help in retaining customers and making it less attractive for its suppliers to sell direct.

But it's clear that there are troubling signs ahead, that the Internet does make it possible for manufacturers to sell direct; and that search engines could create the storefront; they could aggregate customer reviews; and offer secure payment services (Google Checkout).

Online retailers are caught between a rock (search engines) and a hard place (suppliers selling direct). Both have sound business reasons to squeeze out the middle guy.

This is less true for retailers that also have physical locations such as Wal-mart or Best Buy. Will Amazon make a bricks and mortar acquisition?

Take a look at this graph from Clearspring's AddThis, which shows the stories that people have been sharing:

It seems President Obama has lost a lot of public interest... he should have gotten up on stage with Steve Jobs.

The media is dead, long live the media. We now have more media, in more formats, in more times of the day and night, from more people -- than at any other time in history. And we will get even more in 2010.

The many different forms of media will continue to flourish and splinter and to compete with each other in 2010, only at a far greater scale.

This is all made possible because of the availability of very powerful and inexpensive self-publishing tools and services:

- Blogging software helped make self-publishing easy. Movable Type was a breakthrough product in the early 2000s, the 'Pagemaker' of its day. But you had to know how to install it and configure it. These days, there are multitudes of hosted publishing platforms that make everything simple. Posterous, for example, allows you to blog by simply sending an email to your account.

- Twitter makes self-publishing even easier, using the simple text message format to send a short post.

- Facebook and other social networks are set up to make self-publishing tremendously simple. Facebook, for example, automatically creates a news feed based on what you did: Tom uploaded some photos, Tom is going to Jill's party... all without having to actually write anything.

- Same for video, music, podcasts...

The single most important technology of the past decade has been the development of self-publishing tools and services.

And very importantly: we have now traversed the cultural change that questioned whether we needed these tools, whether blogging or Twitter or Facebook or YouTube really mattered, or have a future. We've moved on.

We're now entering the full-blown creation and publishing phase. It's not just a relatively small group of early adopters that used and evangelized these tools and services, it has now moved mainstream. It is now involving millions, tens of millions, and soon hundreds of millions of people.

We have all the elements in place for a media Tsunami. A giant wave of media of all types will wash over us.

And it won't be all dross -- there will be a huge amount of great media, great blog posts, great Tweets, great videos, great discussions, great music.

What will this mean?

This Tsunami will wash away at the value of all media. By value I mean the monetary value.

-If you are trying to make a living as a media professional it's going to be even tougher this year. You will need something else to sell aswell.

- The advertising model will continue lose value simply because there is more competition for attention and it is tougher to aggregate large numbers of readers or viewers. This will affect established media brands and also new brands entering the market.

- All the ills affecting the media industry in TV, radio, newspapers, book publishing, etc, will continue, and will accelerate in 2010.

- PR and marketing will be even tougher in 2010. It will cost more for a company to rise above the noise. But few companies will realize that they need to spend more on PR and marketing because they think that you can use 'social media,' which is free. When in fact it's all media and it's not free because people's labor isn't free.

- It will become tougher to have good government, to make good decisions as a society, to vote for the right solutions because it will be difficult to communicate amidst all the noise and clamor for attention.

The media Tsunami will come in waves but it will eventually break. And much of the freely generated media will eventually come under commercial control.

The media brands that survive the Tsunami will do very well. From a highly fragmented media landscape will emerge some very large and very profitable media businesses -- unencumbered by the restrictions that currently govern media conglomerates.

However, we face a tough time, a disruptive period, a wild west of sorts. A very interesting time. Paradoxically, media is the worst business to be in right now but media is the best story around.

Welcome to 2010 and a decade that will be defined by its media and will redefine media -- time and again.

- - -

In an effort to make a living as a media professional in 2010 I realize that I will need to expand into consulting services to support my 'habit.' You can contact me at 415 336 7547. Or Tom at Foremski.com.

Let me give you a point of comparison. On March 3 2009 I wrote: Internet Myth: Watch What You Post Because Search Will Reveal Everything Forever.

At that time I Googled "Tom Foremski" and it came up with a search result of 135,000 pages in Google's index.

Today, I did the same, and came up with 102,000 pages in Google's index.

I tried Bing and got 157,000 results.

What's going on? Has Google run out of room? Is it deleting older content from its index? It's grown smaller by almost 25 per cent, at least when it comes to my content. At this rate, by the end of this year it's index will be half the size it was in March.

Is it just me? I've no other points of comparison. Let me know if you've noticed something similar.

]]> Thu, 13 Aug 2009 08:40:36 -0700 https://content.presspage.com/clients/150_2054.jpeg?10000 https://content.presspage.com/clients/150_2054.jpeg?10000 https://www.siliconvalleywatcher.com/trendwatch-the-media-dilemma---which-places-should-i-publish-and-how-much/ https://www.siliconvalleywatcher.com/trendwatch-the-media-dilemma---which-places-should-i-publish-and-how-much/240365The questions I struggle with the most these days are these: Where should I publish and how much should I publish?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There is no Google juice.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If you want to be successful as Robert Scoble in social media -- here is what it takes:

I asked Robert how much time he actually spends on those services. He monitors them all day, he said, hitting refresh over and over on both (he doesn't use desktop clients to manage the services, and he says he doesn't like real-time streaming feature on Friendfeed). In addition to watching all day, he says he spends at least seven hours a day, seven days a week, actually reading and responding directly on those services.

That's 2,555 hours over the last year.

Which is more than a full time job (2,000 hours/year).

It is more than 106 full 24 hour days interacting with those services in aggregate.

. . . What has he gained? On Twitter Robert has nearly 45,000 followers and has written over 16,000 messages. On Friendfeed Robert has nearly 23,000 subscribers.

Other social media stars put in the same kind of hours.

(Interestingly, some of them have young families. Maybe it gets them out of diaper duties :-)

But what happens if you are shy? What happens if you don't want to flood your Twitter, blog , Friendfeed, and Facebook streams with a bit-torrent of messages and posts? I prefer to post less rather than more, but that hasn't done me much good when it comes to expanding my traffic at the same rate as others.

I will cut people off if they are too loud in my streams because they push other people out. But maybe that's the best strategy for online success -- the cuckoo strategy -- become so prolific that you push the others out of people's real-time streams.

What do you think? Do you prefer less, or more?

So what will happen to online advertising, and the "old" media? There's no real-time ad networks right now and none on the real-time media that I see.

The old media (we used to call it mainstream) has barely gotten used to the "Always-On-Media" of blogging, etc. Now they have to jump into the real-time web.

And they can't.

Because there isn't a business model in the real-time web. (Just as there isn't in online media.)

By the time they jump in, there might be a business model then. Maybe. But I bet it won't be enough to support professional work.

For example, just a few minutes ago I noticed that blogger Louis Gray complained that Robert Scoble's recent post took more than two hours to reach his Google Reader.

I can understand the need for real-time information for stock trading but I don't know why I would need near real-time access to Robert's posts. Yet we constantly hear from many people these days about the need for real-time communications and Internet services, corporations need to monitor the web in real-time, etc.

What's happened to all the chatter we used to have about everything ever created on the Internet is available for ever? (The Eternal Internet.) Or, that the Internet operates on your time, when you want it. (The Tivo Internet.)

I'm not sure either exists completely. If things take just a few too many clicks to find, they might as well not exist.

For example, yesterday I was trying to find some of the writings of "Wendy Kroy" at Sand Hill Slave, a hilarious bitch-goddess account of working with VCs. She stopped publishing a couple of years ago yet I was having a lot of trouble finding some of her posts. Even the Way Back Machine was giving me lots of dead-ends. (I did finally find this: VC stands for very clueless.)

Even the Tivo Internet is not really there. When I try to find something I already watched on Hulu, the program is often withdrawn.

Now, with our seemingly collective passion for all-things-real-time, if you blink you've missed it. For example, I often post or Twit late at night and my Twitter and Facebook feeds get seen by people who are either waking up somewhere, or are late night owls like myself.

The same is true for myself. I can only dip into the real-time streams of my Twitter and Facebook communities a few times for a few minutes a day. If I didn't see your post then, then I most probably missed it. Yes, I could review my rivers of content but I'm unlikely to do that, and that's true for most people.

Paradoxically, I think that there is less reason for corporations to keep track of how people are talking about their brands because of the temporal nature of things. If conversations happen in real-time then they are done and dusted, fewer people are likely to notice, and therefore there isn't much that a corporation can do.

This temporal nature of content has been with us for a long time. Newspapers quickly became yesterday's fish-wrap. And blogging exacerbated things because new content would push older content steadily down the page and then into the oblivion of the archives. Yes, you can search but only if you know something is there.

So does that mean it is OK to re-post, maybe several times a day, because the likelihood of people seeing the same thing twice is small? I think that's fine. I sometimes republish SVW posts written many years ago and they find new audiences because the content is fresh to them.

I have an idea for a site that republishes great content, dredged up from the past. For example, that viral video from five years ago would certainly look fresh to many people today. New is new when it's new to me, real-time or not.

So what's beyond real-time? That's next.

. . .

Please see:

Carl Honore praises slowness | Video on TED.com

"Journalist Carl Honore believes the Western world's emphasis on speed erodes health, productivity and quality of life."

Today's Real-Time Web Makes Blogging and RSS Seem "Too Slow" - louisgray.com

Modern maladies: I have the attention span of a gnat | Tom Foremski: IMHO | ZDNet.com

VC stands for very clueless

An ode to Slave Girl. . . - SiliconValleyWatcher

I don't mind that my friends and family don't really know what I get up to online. But I do know some people that are upset that their friends don't have the same interest in their online worlds as do strangers thousands of miles away.

I asked on Twitter: Do you find that your closest friends tend not to follow you on Twitter or Facebook or your blog?

Here are some of the replies:

@peter that's absolutely true for me. Of course, most of them are not online all the time like I am. :-)

@meredithob - yes, i interact w/ my closest friends on a more personal level. communication is exchange-driven, they don't "follow" me.

@mindblink yes, it's mostly totally random strangers like me.... :)

@tiffanyanderson Some of my closest friends don't even know what twitter is. (^;

@JohnRourke ...So true

@chrissfife I tweet and blog mostly about marketing, many of my pals couldn't care less about marketing so they don't follow or read blog

@ginavon yes- I would agree w/that.

@james3neal - My best friend and my sister know that I love Twitter but neither one reads my Twitter feed. Sometimes my Mom does. :-)

@emiliecole I'd say more so on Twitter, as it seems to be most used for professional interests, convos and connections...

@SMCreative Yes, but they read it and make comments. Oddly enough I believe they're reluctant to have to redefine you in their heads.

Maybe it's the company I keep online, mostly media, PR, marketing specialists. We're interested in these media as extensions of what we do rather than using them for what they were created for: allowing friends and family to stay in touch more easily.

Since most people are expected to go through more than a dozen jobs, and even several career changes, throughout their life, I think the following rules are more than necessary:

- Use your own cell phone/number for business.

Don't use a company provided cell phone because if you lose your job you lose your number, and you lose your business contacts. Your employer can pay your cell phone expenses.

- Use your own email address for business.

Again, you want to be able to be reachable by your business contacts and vice versa, if you lose your job.

- Carry your own health insurance.

It's a lot less expensive than Cobra, and it means you aren't stuck in a job that makes you sick because of the health insurance. Again, some employers will give you a credit towards your health insurance costs or you can negotiate for a benefit when accepting a job. Employers might even choose someone with their own insurance over someone else, since healthcare is such a huge burden for a lot of businesses.

I got some additional tips from fellow bloggers. Mitch Ratcliffe wrote:

- 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.

From Neville Hobson at NevOn:

- 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.

Today I would add:

- Join Facebook

Facebook has become as important as LinkedIn in certain ways. It is a good way to establish your online identity - both professional and personal. It makes it easy to stay in touch with people and contacts even if jobs and addresses change.

- Join Twitter

Twitter is another good way to establish a personal and professional presence. And it rewards those that share good information and insights. Plus, sometimes people post about job openings before they are advertised elsewhere.

Rule number ten is ...

What do you think it should be?

Communities are encouraged to express themselves and when they do, you tend to get a uniformity of thinking.

I was always brought up to question the wisdom of crowds, to question the accepted beliefs of the majority. I tend to stay away from "crowd" thinking. As a younger man I was always pleased that there was a "Doubting Thomas" that I could draw inspiration from.

If anything, there are many examples of the "madness of crowds." Pogroms, Adolf Hitler coming to power, wars, are easy ones to spot where there has been a huge lack of wisdom from the crowds.

I wonder if the recent financial speculative bubbles will do much to erode the accepted notion of the "wisdom of crowds."

The "Four Scenarios" brings to mind the "Four Horsemen" as a metaphor for describing these extraordinary times.

It's an interesting essay. I love the imagery of scenario #3 and that is my pick because governments think they have control but they do not and thus will continually put markets out of balance. And the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

IMHO, the thing to do is to let it all play itself out, since no one can understand the complexity of today's global markets.

[BTW, the third horseman rides a black horse and represents famine and carries a scale. Scarcity and judgement?!]

The Four Scenarios: Debt Deflation, Hyperinflation, Quadrillion Play and Muddle Through.

By DK Matai

From the vantage point of November 15th, 2008, whilst the Washington, DC, summit is underway amongst the leaders of the G20 nations, it would appear that there are four distinct global economic scenarios that may unfold towards the tail end of this year, 2009 and 2010:

Scenario 1: Debt Deflation

Most product, service and asset prices keep falling and the vicious circle of deleveraging causes many businesses, factories and support sectors to shut down. This in turn causes rising and out of control unemployment and falling living standards quarter-in, quarter-out with a severe and ongoing headache for some governments to provide stimulus in the face of declining revenues. This is a similar scenario to the US in the 1930s post the 1929 Wall Street crash.

Scenario 2: Hyperinflation

Some governments print money to try to stave off a recession / depression and end up stoking large scale inflation in a similar way to the Weimar Republic in Germany around 1923 post the first world war's conclusion in 1919. Hyperinflation is the flip side of currency collapse, which then leads to multiple domestic and trans-national black swans.

Scenario 3: Quadrillion Play

The invisible one Quadrillion dollar derivatives equation underpinning the hundred trillion dollar plus debt pyramid manifest as "Eight Bubbles" (Ref: ATCA briefings) continues to experience trillion dollar black holes in which capital on the balance sheet vaporises without warning, month-in month-out. Governments via central banks try to hyper inflate and levitate the system by pumping trillions of dollars of liquidity into the system. The net impact is manifest via two opposite north and south directional vectors -- hyperinflation and deflation. The two vectors collide continuously to create several vortices as the markets change direction nearly every day exhibiting high volatility. The consequence of being caught up in the resultant eddy currents of those vortices is that some asset classes levitate and give the impression of rising, albeit temporarily, and other asset classes fall or simply cease to exist as their underlying asset-base vaporises within the gravitational pull of the nascent financial black holes.

Scenario 4: Muddle Through

Given that fiscal stimulus is one component of GDP over which there is direct policy control, the muddle through is another possible scenario. However, government spending is always far too slow and occurs at some point in the future so we can expect a lunge towards cutting taxes or offering tax holidays, which is the high velocity component. The massive public sector borrowing requirement may have an adverse impact by way of currency devaluation. There is some probability that the governments' massive stimulus packages and central banks' interventions, after a while of uncertainty in the minds of people, act as a partial, deferred offset to the ongoing global financial system deleverage. Then markets may revive, although some of the eight bubbles are only partially deflated. Life goes on in a new muddled way as new and larger bubbles are created. Politicians stop panicking and get re-elected and a new bigger set of bubbles prepare themselves for collapse a few years later, say, 2015 or 2020. This is similar to the scenario post the dotcom and 9/11 crashes in 2000-2001 and the muddle through which occurred until 2007 on the back of extremely low interest rates, credit card, car and housing loans and the other eight bubbles. There is, however, one caveat. Countries without reserve currencies -- of which there are really only two -- and in particular those with with large financial sectors given the base of their GDP, can practically prime the pump only in a very limited way and in doing so risk moving from a banking crisis via a currency crisis on to sovereign default. That would mean expectations from fiscal stimulus are far too high, and not all countries would be able to muddle through.

Conclusions

Whilst the fear is that we may be heading for Scenario 1 and the way to avoid it is via a benign form of Scenario 2 coupled with Scenario 4, it may be important to ask, what if, Scenario 2 has already happened and the Weimar Republic's printing of money is manifest in this broadband internet and high performance computing age, via the complex securities and instruments that private financial institutions created and sold between 1995 and 2007. This has been manifest via the invisible Quadrillion dollar derivatives equation and the associated hundred trillion dollar plus debt securitisation pyramid. Banks and brokers were, in effect, printing their own proprietary issues of "money" via complex securities and as a result their supply of money grew to exceed by at least one order of magnitude the money printed by central banks. Central banks failed to recognise this phenomenon and continued to focus on monetary growth and money velocity utilising old metrics rather than acknowledging the wider spectrum of public (central bank / government) and private money taken together. How could the central banks possibly fail to recognise this new phenomenon while securitisation and derivatives, the tools of liquidity creation, were a central obsession of the financial industry? In fact, the central banks played along, humming the mantras of privatisation and deregulation.

These quadrillion dollar worth private currencies -- paper assets -- have fuelled the globalisation process, massive and unprecedented world GDP growth, mergers and acquisitions, and large scale industrial / infrastructure projects, until natural boundary conditions kicked in, ie, the earth ran out of raw materials and natural resources in sufficient quantities. Scenario 1 started as commodity prices -- food, fuel and raw materials -- went into hyper drive to trigger the catastrophic demand collapse we are now witnessing. Now what we may be heading towards is in fact Scenarios 3 or 4, which are post the Weimar Republic's hyperinflation manifest in most assets' pricing and Scenario 1, which is yet to play its full course. In a nutshell, "1923" already happened up until "2007", "1929" happened in 2008, and the 1930s equivalent is now unfolding. Given that the Great Unwind is happening near the speed of light because of the internet, mobile and satellite communications, as well as high performance computing, it is possible to move to Scenarios 3 or 4 and out of Scenario 1, much faster than was practicable before World War II.

In parallel, the central bankers would like us to believe that they have been and are still in charge because they can print fiat currency at will and set monetary policy at near zero rates if they like. This is governance by magic. What if they can no longer exercise sufficient control and have become co-dependent on the parallel printers of money -- manifest as paper assets -- which happen to be the private financial institutions? What if the central bankers and regulatory authorities are encumbered by what the private financial institutions have done during 1995 and 2007, during which time the policing of the global financial system was inadequate and cross-border arbitrage opportunities exploded? This may mean that we are still living within a myth that central bankers can resolve the mess in the real economy and actually they can't because the paper fuelling the real economy was not issued by them and large quantities of it resides off-balance sheet in a non-transparent way. Yet, the central banks have to mop up the ongoing toxic liabilities and black holes, which may or may not be possible ad infinitum given the unprecedented scale of this challenge. The quantum of asset price deflation underway post the collapse of the Weimar Republic type Quadrillion dollar paper asset bubble is so large that all the kings horses and all the kings men may not be able to put Humpty Dumpty together again. The power of central bankers may have been permanently eroded given that the centre of gravity has now shifted. It lies with the financial markets and their participators who transact the deflating quadrillion dollar plus paper asset equation of which fiat currency is a much smaller quantum.

Which scenarios do you think we are heading towards and in what sequence?

We welcome your thoughts, observations and views. To reflect further on this, please respond within Facebook's ATCA Open discussion board.

Best wishes

DK Matai

Chairman, ATCA Open

-- ATCA, The Philanthropia, mi2g, HQR --

This is an "ATCA Open and Philanthropia Socratic Dialogue."

The "ATCA Open" network on Facebook is for professionals interested in ATCA's original global aims, working with ATCA step-by-step across the world, or developing tools supporting ATCA's objectives to build a better world.

- - -

Please see:

Beyond The Sub-Prime Bubble: The Other Seven Deadly Bubbles . . .

The Size of Derivatives Bubble = $190K Per Person on Planet

Mr Wladawsky-Berger draws upon a long career within IBM and also from his experiences working with thousands of companies around the world.

By Irving Wladawsky-Berger

In most companies, just about all the cards are stacked against the nurturing of innovation, especially the kinds of new ideas and disruptive innovations that generally lead to major changes in the marketplace and within the business.

Is that too pessimistic a view? Perhaps. Let me discuss some of the behaviors I have observed through the years in various companies, which have convinced me how difficult it is to create the proper environment for innovation to flourish.

Indifference. While just about every CEOs and senior executive of a company will pay lip service to innovation, many do not really mean it. It is not because they are not good, smart and highly competent people. It is just not part of their DNA. Of course, they mouth the words – it would be politically incorrect for them not to embrace innovation. But they do little beyond that.

Why is that? The majority of executives make it to top positions by being very good operational managers: meeting sales objectives, improving products and services to keep up with competitors, supporting existing customers and acquiring new ones, managing mergers and acquisitions, achieving the required financial results quarter after quarter, and so on. These management jobs are very tough and getting tougher, given our rapidly changing, fiercely competitive, global business environment. Being a good manager takes very hard work, attention to detail and organizational discipline. . .

. . . Hostility. In general, managers who do not actively encourage new ideas and innovations in their organizations do so because of indifference. It is just not who they are. They will typically listen politely to your new idea, provide some encouragement and offer good advice. If they are being honest, they will tell you that they barely have the time, energy and budget to help much beyond a pat on the back now and then.

But some managers - fortunately, a relatively small number, in my experience - go beyond indifference. Their initial reaction to any new idea is negative, if not downright hostile. This is particularly true if the idea comes from someone outside their own organization. They tend to be poor team players and autocratic.

Some of them also exhibit characteristics that many of us would associate with being a bully. The Merriam-Webster online dictionary defines bully as "a blustering, browbeating person; especially one habitually cruel to others who are weaker." Wikipedia's entry says, "Research indicates that adults who bully have personalities that are authoritarian, combined with a strong need to control or dominate. It has also been suggested that a deficit in social skills and a prejudicial view of subordinates can be particular risk factors.”

These words pretty much fit the behavior of the corporate bullies I have met. Typically, they have achieved their high management positions because, despite their poor interpersonal skills, they are very good at other parts of the job. Sometimes, they are excellent innovators themselves, but given their autocratic tendencies, innovation to them is a one man/woman show. Collaborative innovation is not for them.

I would further add that another reason people with such behaviors are tolerated by upper management is that they generally are very respectful of hierarchy and authority and treat those above them very differently, reserving their worst behaviors for colleagues and subordinates.

Such hostile behavior is particularly detrimental to a healthy innovation environment. People championing new ideas, especially if they are potentially disruptive new ideas, are doing so by going against the grain of what the business is currently doing. Rejection is painful, especially coming from people in positions of authority. Senior managers can nurture those new ideas through positive words and actions, or they can stop them on their tracks by being overly negative and combative. . .

. . .Fostering innovation is very hard, especially if the innovation is disruptive in nature. A spirit of innovation and collaboration does not come naturally to an organization. For such a spirit to take hold, it must become an integral part of the company's culture. None of this is easy, but it is what a company must do if it truly wants to create a healthy environment for innovation to flourish.

- - -

You can read the entire article on Irving Waldawsky-Berger's blog: Indifference, Hostility, Isolation and Other Obstacles to a Healthy Innovation Environment.

We see the fragmentation in media in terms of the larger number of smaller media channels. It used to be relatively easy to run advertising in the publications that mattered. And easy to target those same publications for public relations.

These days large media companies are downsizing and the number of smaller media companies, most consisting of blogger journalists with uncertain reach and influence, are still being formed.

In the communications arena there are many new channels. Companies are trying to market through Facebook, Twitter, Friendfeed, MySpace, Digg, and several dozen more "social media" sites. Also, there is blogging by company representatives, video on YouTube, etc. And it is all still going on, continuing to get even more fragmented.

Then there are the many new conferences plus all the existing conferences and trade shows to deal with.

Marketing through strategic alliances with the right partners was also much easier. Now there are many choices, and a lot more potential competitors, which complicates things.

Good news . . .

The good news about the new media and communications channels is that it is all measurable. You can measure things in incredible detail. You slice and dice the measurement data in ways that were never possible before.

The bad news about the new media and communications channels is that it is all measurable. There is a mountain of data that can sliced and diced in so many ways. What is worth measuring? How much should you measure? What do the measurements mean? How can you relate the measurement data to revenues?

We are still figuring out these and many other questions. And that's why marketing and communications today is so challenging and it isn't going to get any easier.

- - -

Support the source: Silicon Valley Watcher - Save a forest! - Order the amazing Amazon Kindle Electronic Book Reader!

This evening my fingers have been writing about OpenID and VeriSign:

- Could there be a Potential Privacy Issue with VeriSign's OpenID and its Internet Directory Name Services?

Could some uses of OpenID create a large privacy issue? | Tom Foremski: IMHO | ZDNet.com

As I've written these pieces I've started to question some of the basic ideas and concepts that surround OpenID and DNS.

It increasingly seems to me that OpenIDs benefit social network companies that don't have many users. While OpenID users could become vulnerable to the risk of easy tracking or monitoring: of not only their identity, but also the identity of their friends, family, work colleagues, contacts --and much of their online communication.

That's a much bigger exposure than revealing an individual's identity on the Internet.

Right now, the major social networks keep their user's social network information--and their user's identities--under lock and key. Ross Mayfield from SocialText likes to call their API strategy "AJAR" only slightly open--and for good reasons.

It seems to me that the widespread use of OpenID potentially exposes an individual's entire social network across the entire Internet. Right now that data is fragmented and difficult to acquire by anyone interested in nefarious uses .

Wouldn't it be better to keep that data fragmented and deal with the hassles of portability? Porting a few dozen contacts?

For most folk that's not an onerous task. If you use OpenID it effectively centralizes that data because it has to run through the central DNS service and through other databases and that potentially makes it easier to track.

The community wants it . . .

I've often heard OpenID touted as a "community ID" and that the "community wants it." I don't remember being consulted on this. I remember some bloggers loudly touting that they want something like OpenID for data portability.

But for those leading bloggers this is an easy method to bring their readers to new social network sites and to publish as widely as possible. Most people don't have 5,000 Facebook friends as do the top bloggers/publishers/ media companies. They represent an extreme example of social network usage that is far from typical of the mainstream user.

OpenID seems to benefit publishers not individuals. . .

It benefits the top bloggers/publishers to be able to port what are essentially reader connections wherever they want but does OpenID benefit an average user with networks that are counted in dozens rather than thousands?

OpenID is not much of solution in typical social network usage when the numbers are small. Where was the hue and cry about data portability from the average social network users? I don't remember seeing that. All I remember is the din from a dozen or so publishers.

Yes, you can find companies have come out in support of OpenID but most of them seem self-serving in their support because they don't have much of a social network to begin with and they would like to have one.

Maybe 3 social networks . . .

I can't handle more than 3 social networks -- that's my theory and I think it might apply more broadly :-)

When I leave my apartment I remember my keys, wallet, and phone but a fourth item is usually less reliably remembered.

Currently I'm cool with one main social network, which is Facebook; LinkedIn as a secondary/business network; and then my GMail/Twitter/SMS network - my social/communications (socco) network contacts.

That takes care of most of my business/personal/social needs. For some people, a third network might be a church group or hobby group. Or maybe other people can manage four networks or more, that's great.

The point is that for the vast majority of people, they are not going to be active in more than half a dozen relatively small social networks--so what is the purpose of OpenID?

Let me ask again: Are individuals going to benefit? Or is OpenID an opportunity for mass media publishers and businesses trying to create a business?

I don't have much of need for OpenID right now. What about you?

There are some rapidly growing publishers in the tech space such as Michael Arrington's TechCrunch, GigaOm, and VentureBeat. They all make heavy use of an advertising network, in this case Federated Media Publishing (FM), founded by John Battelle, the search guru. And there are other online publishers that have become high flyers in fashion, food and woman's sites that also use FM.

FM takes about a 40 per cent cut of advertising revenues, but each deal with its some 200 publishers is private, so its share could be higher. It's a nice margin and well deserved compared with other networks because FM goes out and bangs on doors and sells ads.

But at some point soon, FM's largest publishers are going to be large enough that they won't need FM any longer. They'll do it themselves or sell to a higher bidder. For example FM lost Digg last year to Microsoft.

I was interested to see that FM Publishing recently raised funding that was reported to be as much as $50m.

That sounds like a war chest to me.

If I was Mr Battelle I would start buying up my online publishing partners. FM can monetize its publishers better than they can. FM knows exactly how much traffic, and the quality of the traffic hitting its publishers, it knows their business very well.

By acquiring their publishing partners they get an immediate boost in advertising revenues, they get to keep 100 per cent--nothing needs to be shared. And J.B. is a former publisher he understands how to run a media company.

The math is compelling. Ad networks will start buying up online publishers because: they'll make more money, they won't get dumped, and they can monetise online content far better than the online publishers currently can.

Of course it could go the other way (except where is the publisher's war chest...?) There is more here about the potential publisher strategy.

- - -

Please see: Arrington's Roll-Up The Blogs Strategy Won't Work

Please see Sramana Mitra's excellent recent analysis: Federated Media Needs to Focus

In 2007, FM raked in a revenue of $22 million, out of which $14 million went to the publishers. That indicates a gross margin of 36%. After deducting the operating expenses, what remains is a thin operating margin, not one that should bring forth a very large multiple.

On the positive side, some of the blogs that FM represents are earning over $50,000 per month, although Mike Arrington (Techcrunch) keeps complaining that they don’t sell enough of his inventory.

That's what it might feel like but that's not what is potentially lurking below the surface. In conversations with local entreprenuers I'm hearing more stories about funding problems because of the recession, the real estate market slump, and the investment banking crisis.

In one story, a startup that had $7m in funding promised by large angels (arch-angels) lost much of it because the investors had lost money in real estate. Also, some angel investors have lost money because of Bear Stearns and now have less to to fund startups.

Angels gone?

The loss of the angel investors is potentially a big problem because Silicon Valley VC firms have outsourced much of the seed investing to the angels. The angel investors are a more important generator of the next wave of startups now than ever before, this could hurt Silicon Valley. [Please see: Jeff Clavier.]

I was at Lunch 2.0 at Ogilvy PR on Tuesday and I ran into James Hong, one of the founders of Hot or Not, a tremendously succesful web site. Hot or Not was sold in February to private equity firm Avid Life Media, for a reported $20m. He said fears of the recession were the prime reason Hot or Not was sold. "I'm telling all my friends to either get out now or buckle up for the long term."

"I'm not going to plan my next venture until it is clear what is going on with the economy," he said. I pointed out that Silicon Valley always produces its best ventures in a recession, Hot or Not came out of the recession. He nodded but said that with a new venture it is important to know how the economy will play out.

Jeff Nolan, a former venture capitalist and now at Newsgator, said that a lot of money moved away from VC funds and into hedge funds. Now, the large institional investors will be rebalancing their portfolios and more money will come into VC funds.

James Fisher, a local entrepreneur says that M&A in the valley is going to be disrupted by the turmoil in the investment banking sector. Investment Banking Crisis Will Freeze Silicon Valley M&A Deals

We can see Internet companies exploiting such micro-markets everywhere, well before the concept was popularized by Chris Anderson, editor of Wired magazine in October 2004.

We see it in Amazon and Ebay, they host the many millions of small markets that are interested in obscure books or collectabilia.

We see it in Google, which monetizes interest in the most obscure parts of its index. We see it in MySpace and Facebook, which seek to monetize markets that can consist of many thousands of "friends" but are mostly groups of just a few dozen people.

The trick to success is to have as many Long Tail markets as possible. Each micro-market generates micro-profits therefore the more the better.

Selling free content...

If you can get that Long Tail content for free, that's the best kind because producing content is expensive. For example, Flickr, a Yahoo company, hosts people's photos for free. In exchange for free hosting it sells advertising around the photos.

Users come back to visit their photos, and they also share them with friends, and sometimes complete strangers are attracted to the photos too. That's a lot of free traffic and you can make money from traffic.

YouTube hosts people's videos for free and in exchange it sells advertising around that content. Again, as in the Flickr example, users created the content, and brought traffic to that content, and YouTube monetized that traffic.

Not a bad business model and one copied many times over: user generated content comes with its own viral marketing, which equals free monetizable traffic. And user generated content can sometimes catch much larger viral traffic, such as LonelyGirl15, or a skateboarding dog.

Facebook viral marketing tools built-in...

MySpace and Facebook are examples of trying to grab even larger amounts of user generated content. On Facebook I can upload my videos, photos, blog posts, movie tastes, etc.

It also provides me with viral marketing tools through my news feed which automatically informs my friends of what I've done, "Tom uploaded photos, Tom wrote a blog post," etc.) I didn't have to email, or text, or twitter anyone at all, Facebook did it all automatically.

Again, it is the same type of business model: user generated content of all types, aided by automatic viral marketing tools, creates more monetizable traffic.

This is the business of the Long Tail, making money from tiny markets. And this has been the business of the Internet in one form or another, for two decades.

How much can be made from the traffic to my YouTube videos? Not much. How much money can be made from traffic to my Flickr photos? Not much. But aggregate many millions of such tiny long tail markets and you can make billions in revenues and hundreds of millions in profits.

Profits from free content...

It's not a bad business: you get the content created for free, and you get the traffic for free. It is like having a shop with many customers buying products you obtained for free. Your cost is the store rent and cashiers to take the money.

Another cost is the warehouse space. In the online world the warehouse is your data storage systems, which is far, far cheaper than physical warehouse space. Hosting digital content such as photos, blog posts, video, digital books, etc is extremely inexpensive. That is why Google, Amazon, MySpace, etc, are profitable - their costs of doing business are less than their revenues.

As long as user generated content keeps flooding in, it brings its own traffic, and that fuels the business.

-As long as people keep creating new online content, Google will index it (and store a copy) and make money from the traffic that seeks that content.

-As long as people create content for free, and upload videos to YouTube, or photos to Flickr, the same business dynamics apply. As user generated content increases, it leads to more traffic, which leads to more profits.

The burden of free...

What would happen if user generated content decreased? Clearly, it would lead to less traffic and lower profits.

What could lead to a decrease in the amount of user generated content?

Consider this scenario:

The cost of hosting the massive amount of long tail content, all the photos, video, etc is very small. As the amount of this content increases, the hosting costs rise.

As long as traffic also rises, the costs of business remain in balance with the rise in revenue.

But traffic growth is limited. There is a limited number of people in the world, there is a limited number of hours in a day. There are fundamental limits to the rate of growth of traffic.

But the amount of content collected by Google, Flickr, or YouTube, for example, grows much faster, and there is ever more of it that has to be stored and hosted. There is a legacy mountain of content and it's becoming a mountain range.

That means expanding your data storage systems, that means more power needed to drive those systems, it means administering the storage systems, which is people intensive, the data has to be made secure, the data has to be backed up. These are the exponential rising business costs of Long Tail economics.

As the number of long tail micro-markets increases, the less profitable each one becomes. This is because each long tail micro-market competes with an increasing number of other long tail micro markets.

More of any product or service means less revenue for that product or service. A current example: more housing on the market means a lower price for housing. Same thing applies in any market.

There is no way that increases in Internet traffic can keep pace with the growing number of long tail micro-markets.

The costs of hosting long tail micro-markets will continue to increase until they exceed the profits that can be made from them.

I was recently speaking with David Scott, CEO of 3PAR data storage systems, and he pointed out why 3PAR stays away from certain markets.

I might view a photo of my grandma, and that might be once a year or less. Yet that data still has to be hosted, secured, managed, and backed up. What is the business case for that photo? The cost of keeping that photo and others like it, will continually force companies to cut their storage costs and that will lead to them to storing the data themselves on cheap disk drives.

High traffic from skateboarding puppies, or Brittany Spears photos can subsidize hosting Mr Scott's grandma photos but that is only true for now.

At some point, businesses will be chocking on the costs of supporting the Long Tail of data that makes up their micro-markets. The costs of the Long Tail will twist tighter around the neck of profitability. What happens then?

Dump the grandma photos...

Companies have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders to maximize profits. They will have to dump the data, dump the grandma photos.

That means dumping the many links that users created to their content. The idea of permalinks, links that will remain rooted forever in the concrete of the Internet will become a fallacy.

Even though the online companies make no guarantee in their terms of service that users' content will be always available there is an implicit guarantee that user content will be always be there. When that implicit contract is broken users will be less willing to spend all that time uploading and tagging their content.

They'll be less willing to tell their friends about it, to post links to it, etc, because there is no guarantee it will be there next year or beyond.

That's the scenario that will dry up the flood of user generated content to online firms. And that is the great flaw in the business of the Long Tail.

Businesses making money from the economics of the Long Tail will be dragged under by mounting costs of maintaining Long Tail micro-markets.

Maybe this should be the title of my upcoming book: "The Unbearable Burden of the Long Tail - How Internet Commerce Will have to hack-off the Long Tail to Survive."

[Saturday Post is the name of a series of essays. This is the first in that series.]

Please also see:

Long Tail Economics - Bonanza or Bogus

Have we misinterpreted the business value of the long tail?

Toktumi is an interesting telephony startup. I spoke with Peter Sisson, the founder of Toktumi. He described the service as the "Skype of the hosted PBX market." It is focused on the very small business market, 1 to 9 employees is the sweet spot.

Getting started is easy, Toktumi provides a free phone number and you can use it with the Toktumi client software (PC only Mac is coming) to receive calls and call other Toktumi users through a regular phone. Additional lines are $12.95 per month plus 2 cents per minute and it can be set up in less than five minutes.

It has deals in the works with office retail stores so that you can walk in and buy a Toktumi phone and service. Calls go through its own data center so that you never miss a call. And developers can use the Toktumi API to develop telephony applications for small businesses such as dental or medical offices.

Unlike consumer VoIP offerings, Toktumi provides the advanced features businesses require, and a few they've never seen before. Auto-attendant, call transfer, visual voicemail, instant conferencing, and call waiting are all standard. Toktumi's unique search dialing capability allows calls to be placed by typing a name or keyword of the person or product desired. Mobility is automatic: calls ring wherever you login: at home, the office, a hotel, or your cell phone if you are on the road.

More info on Toktumi

Adify enables publishers to create advertising networks and then manage their advertising inventory in real-time and sell a wide variety of online ads according to geography and time of day. It provides clients with a dashboard that shows the performance of individual sites and individual advertising campaigns.

The company has been winning some large publishers such as Martha Stewart Publishing. But it can also be used by smaller publishers (Silicon Valley Watcher ad network coming soon!). Adify takes a cut of 12 per cent to 20 per cent of the advertising revenue.

Also, the company's platform has been certified by the IAB, which makes sure that its metrics accurately count advertising impressions. Only 12 ad serving technologies have this certification, says Joelle Gropper Kaufman, VP of marketing.

However, it doesn't work with RSS only with display ads on a web page. An interesting beta project is the development of widgets for distributing content between web sites within a network to help drive traffic.

Adify seems to be very well positioned for becoming the standard interface for the management of advertising networks.

More info on Adify.

Technorati Tags: adify, toktumi

So many startups have business plans that predict riches can be found in the long tail of commerce. Yet their first target should be the fat, high margin sector of any commercial market. You can always slide down the value chain over time and monetize the long tail.

Which is why you should be wary of companies that are focused on the long tail first rather than later.

Technorati Tags: long tail, startups

The enthusiasm was electric, it felt like the Homebrew Club, early pioneers encouraging each other.

Facebook has overwhelmed the web 2.0 social media sector in the same way hurricane Katrina overwhelmed New Orleans. It is a dramatic metaphor but a fair one.

If you are not thinking about developing Facebook apps then you should be. I've got great video coming from Saturday's Facebook Developer Garage that will appear on TechOne. Be sure to subscribe so you don't miss it. You won't regret it.

It works in this era too. I come across too many startups that are great widgets but poor businesses.

Take a look at Facebook this company has managed to roll up much of Web 2.0, Twitter, flickr, LinkedIn, etc. All into one page.

Saturday afternoon I spent 3 hours looking at YouTube through the my FaceBook portal. YouTube is a widget on FaceBook. A $1.6bn widget.

Garrett Rogers, over at ZDNet has an interesting post about Google Zeitgeist 2005.

It is an end of year report from Google on popular search terms for the year.

Google's year-end report is a very weak and skimpy report, and tells us nothing much. And nothing much that we didn't know already, or could have guessed.

For example, under natural disasters, the tsunami and earthquakes and hurricanes featured in a lot of searches. Wow.

Under movies, the release of the DVD of Star Wars was not as highly trafficked a search term as the release of the movie. Wow.

The release of the Harry Potter book drew as many searches as the release of this year's Harry Potter movie. Wow.

However, Brad Pitt got a lot more action than Jolie or Jen. Well, we knew that.

All in all, Google kept the good stuff to itself: all the billions of queries, the time of them, which region, even which person (name withheld, of course.) That is a database I'd like to mine.

Also, it is a misuse of the term zeitgeist. Here is the definition from Google:

zeit·geist | Pronunciation: 'tsIt-"gIst, 'zIt | Function: noun | Etymology: German, from Zeit (time) + Geist (spirit) | Date: 1884 | Meaning: the general intellectual, moral, and cultural climate of an era.

If Google wants to "re-brand" the term zeitgeist, then we need something else. How about "kultura?"

I've used the term before, in the context of how quickly (or slowly) ideas and culture spread across the planet. It seems to take about 6 months to travel from Silicon Valley to the East coast of the US, and another 6 months to travel to London/Europe.

I call this effect the Foremski's universal constant of kultura--for which there is no polite acronym :-)