Today, as I am sure you have noticed, I'm short on my five blog posts a day by about . . . um, five. That is until now.

I've been down with a bug all day and feeling a little better thanks to a great post from Bruno Giussani on his blog Lunch Over IP. The post is titled, Tips for Conference Bloggers, and includes an incredibly insightful and well designed PDF cheat sheet.

His post from a little over two years ago holds strong today and is resonating with me enough to crank this post out. Timing is important in this case since we are beginning a new conference season with mega events like SXSW on the horizon.

I spent nearly the entire last week at CES and had my pride handed to me by this monster trade show/conference/press extravaganza. I was ill prepared for everything that the event would throw at me and approached it like an average conference. This is a mistake I won't repeat.

What I learned at CES was that there are two types of attendees: those doing business and those covering the event. Those in the first category are more concerned with parties, sales and future business relationships. Those in the latter are analyzing, comparing and framing the event for publication.

Publishing from CES is a formidable process. Most press covering the event have teams of people dedicated to gathering information and creating media needed for a final publications. This is a smart move for an event with over 100k attendees.

In addition to the excellent PDF from Giussani's post that addresses the 95% of the concerns of a blogger in 2010 there is 5% that could be added for the here and now. There are new event realities and technologies that can enhance his original thoughts.

1. MiFi is a must have for connectivity. This is especially important for Giussani's rule of blogging an even no later that 10 minutes after it has ended. Conferences don't as often have wifi available as they did back then except in a few locations like press or blogger lounges.

2. Photo/Video lighting gear. Get used to shooting in dark to minimal light and learning your cameras settings well. Check your first few shots or reel to view the quality and make corrections as needed. Much of this can be enhanced with lighting rigs that will allow you to get the shots you need when they happen . . . not when you are ready for them with white balance or aperture settings.

3. Backup workflow. You have a machine that you love and take every where with you, right? What happens when it goes down? Before the event or during you should have a backup plan for gear failure so that it doesn't destroy your workflow. Blogging an event can be difficult in the first place, but when the workflow you went into the even is disrupted it can be detrimental to timely coverage.

4. Speak to previous attendees of the events you are going to be covering. This falls under the guidelines on page 6 of the PDF of collaboration. However, this is a proactive measure before the conference begins so that you can understand what obstacles you might be up against.

5. When the authors recommend having fun, it shouldn't just be at the end of the day for parties or networking. It should be throughout the day. It is counterproductive to be worried during the day about connectivity, media fails or missed opportunities. If something happens that you're not happy with, put it in the back of your mind or write a note down for it and move on. Dwelling on something that you can't do over is to your detriment and that of your readers ro viewers.

Please head over to Bruno Giussani's blog and download the PDF that he has made available. Even if you're not blogging a conference or trade show, there is great value in these tips for any writer publishing to the web.

Image: Screen shot of the PDF cover (Bruno Giussani).

Related articles by Zemanta

• Wins and Fails While Covering CES 2010 (jkontherun.com)
• Hack: Use Your iPhone on Verizon . . . MiFi (techstartups.com)
• Tech Podcast Network from CES (techstartups.com)
• CES Postmortem: So Long, And Thanks For All The Press Kits (crunchgear.com)

How To: Conference Blogging is a post from: TechStartups.com

I say mistake because that browser incited geeks and technophiles everywhere to start complaining about the page rendering, the speed and the fact that the iPhone browser was so much better. Many bloggers and even digital media industry insiders decried that the connectivity was poor and really meant it was only good for reading your ebooks.

My response to this was twofold. First, it's an eBook Reader, people! That's what it was designed to do not make phone calls, browse the web or make julienne fries. Second, who wants to read eBooks or other long form content on an iPhone? The screen just isn't optimized for that type of experience. (Nerd Disclosure: I've since read some significant portions of some books on my iPhone so that my wife could use my Kindle. It wasn't terrible, but I still prefer my eReader.)

And the chatter continues: The Apple iTablet (if it's ever released) will kill the Kindle and all other eBook readers! Netbooks will kill the Kindle! The [insert gadget with a screen here] will do everything!

Today, I saw this post on Gizmodo about the possibility of eBook Readers having gaming capabilities.

Why? Is there a significant subset of the gaming community that loves books or avid readers who love games?

Just because a device can do something, doesn't necessarily mean it should.

I'm happpy with a certain amount of convergence when convergence make sense, but to integrate features and functions just because you can doesn't always make market sense.

Damn you, iPhone.

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/0

How the iPhone Changed the Expectations of Gadget Consumers is a post from: TechStartups.com

One of the great speakers, or swimmers, from the Audience Conference was Melanie Notkin. She is the founder of Savvy Auntie. A website dedicated to the cool aunts, great aunts, great mothers and all women who love kids, with a special focus on those that don't have children themselves.

Before this event I hadn't ever come across the site and it was missing from the conversations that I have those that needed a good shave. The niche that Notkin built her site for was the driven career woman that loves her neices and nephews but, like her core demo, she had no idea who Dora, Diego or Yo Gaba Gaba were. She was missing a connection with the little ones that she loved dearly. She decided to fix this, not only for herself but for all women.

The site that Melanie Notkin launched, Savvy Auntie, is more of a portal than a traditional informational website. It allows users to enter channels for general information, activities, shopping and social. Each channel delivering a similar experience to the next while allowing the users to find there way back to a central point to try another channel.

General Information

This channel has information regarding nutrition, books. learning, health and more. Two interesting components of this channel are the Auntipedia and the Q&A section called Dear Savvy Auntie. The Auntipedia is, well, pretty much what the name implies. It is a knowledge base that can actually get an aunt up and running in the areas most pertinent to being a prime caregiver to the little ones.

Activities

This channel provides a ton of useful and engaging activities that can keep you on the go with the kids. From crafts all the way to family reunion activities there is something here for every type of auntie. It is such a robust list, I'll be coming back to it on my own as a bearded one with two kids of my own. I'll also be recommending it to my friends with children and without.

Shopping

That is pretty straight forward. However, the Savvy Auntie has a hook that you can't deny. It is brilliant and creative marketing that most bloggers couldn't pull off Savvy Auntie 2009 Coolest Toy Awards. With great graphic design and a clean user interface it is easy to see toys that will make you cool with the tiny set. My only gripe with this area of the site is that many functions are tab related and triggered with JavaScript interactions that don't allow for direct linking within the site or to these specific sections.

Social

I've seen this quite a bit more lately on the sites that I review. Social is becoming a larger part of sites as they try to become a destination for their faithful. In the past it was forum or comment based. Today, sites like Savvy Auntie are working to create a community of like-minded individuals that want to share their experiences as Aunties by Relation or Aunties by Choice.

These social components can be a huge success for creating loyalty and brand evangelists. They often need constant grooming but can pay huge dividends. From what I can see on Savvy Auntie, not only is it an active community but there are new sections of it under work that grooming component.

What I would love to see on Savvy Auntie is Facebook integration like StyleCaster. Holy smokes. I was effusive in my praise of StyleCaster for doing this and thing that with the power of the biggest social network behind the Savvy community it would be major growth area. One key to this growth being Facebook integration and the other being the ability to still host it on SavvyAuntie.com.

If you are looking for some inspiration on how to get a startup off the ground you need to look no further than Notkin's Savvy Auntie. This is how execution of a great idea gets done.

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/0

Savvy Auntie For The Holidays is a post from: TechStartups.com

Blogs.mu has been around for a while but I'd bet you haven't heard of it. I'd also bet that if you have heard of it that you forgot all about it. If you fall into this latter category then consider this a refresher about the easiest way to run a WordPress blog network without installing WPMU yourself.

For the uninitiated, WPMU stands for WordPress Multi-User. It is the same WordPress that you can download from their .org site except that it allows you to create unlimited blogs from one upload to a web server. It is powerful and built from the same code that runs WordPress.com. Though I highly doubt the out of the box ability to run millions of blogs form a single installation without countless hours of coding.

The folks at blogs.mu have come close to doing exactly that for the end user of their service. They have taken an off the shelf version of WPMU and spent the hours coding, hacking, theming and delivered it as a product that anyone can use with all the bells and whistles build in.

I've run a couple instances of WPMU over the years on my own servers and if I needed to run it again I would go about doing it on my own. However, I am a tech masochist that stubbornly decides that sub domains are the the best way to run these installs and then spends days hacking around Apache and other config files. Blogs.mu has taken care of all of this.

They have even taken care of themes, plugins and advanced user management for you. Believe me, this is a big deal when you want to run a network of blogs. Being able to manage bloggers, themes and plugins effectively can leave you more time to create editorial or your own blog posts.

Blogs.mu is a free' service but one that I would recommend that you pay for. Partially, because their business model and your ability to unlock some of the best tools depend on it. You can use their free version to get your feet wet and create a couple blogs to use as demos for the decision makers at your job or within your group of friends. Then upgrade to the paid version once you are comfortable and ready yourself to blog like a pro.

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/0

Multiple Partner Blogs is a post from: TechStartups.com

A piece ran this afternoon in the NY Times site about their hometown rival, The Wall Street Journal. The focus of this piece being that the WSJ is hiring roughly a dozen journalists to fill a local NYC bureau in a print media local build up.

The first engagements in what is becoming a fight for survival are happening in local markets. And in this battle of media titans, the WSJ and the NYT are set to square off over the streets of New York City.

The most intriguing element of this move by the WSJ isn't that they are broadening the scope of the news that they deliver to take on The Times but they are moving in a direction that local, independent bloggers have had their eyes on for some time.

It will be interesting to see what impact this has on the WSJ's circulation or web traffic. A mobile app for this new local channel could make this offering stronger.

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/0

The Print Media Local Build Up is a post from: TechStartups.com

This is my last feed post for a while. I swear.

That said, it might be the most important one that can help startups, bloggers and established media makers begin to deliver new and better experiences to users.

Check out the Kris is reading section of Croncast. Go and check it out, be quick. I'll be here when you get back.

Glad to have you back.

So what the was that, right?

Croncast is my playground for all things nerdy that I can then apply to in my trade without doing it with a client's dime. So when things break I am not on the hook .

What you just saw was an interesting concept that enhances sharing information online and makes it more personable. You just met the full content feed reader, Kris the Filter'.

I'm going to describe that link destination the best way I can.

1. My server reads my Google Reader shared feed and stores it in a database. This is done with a script that runs on a cron (timed job) every two minutes to get new items post title, description and timestamp
2. The script stamps the item with the current time that I most likely read the item
3. This is cool the server runs a script to generate keywords (subjects) from the shared item. The script needs to mature a bit but it is effective enough for now.
4. Then cached posts are pulled up in to the Kris is reading section of the site and ordered by the time that I read them. Really the only way to organize them coherently since the post original times vary based on the author's time zone.
5. Keywords are displayed below each post. Each keyword is a link that will search all of my other shared items for related posts, has a link to Technorati and is an entry into a RSS feed for that keyword.
6. I have added a Search my read items' function so that you can search my shared items for whatever you like. If you want to find items that I have read about about ceratin topic like, Facebook, you can.

What's happening here is that I am giving you, the reader of my shared feed, the ability to use me as a content filter. And the best part is that you didn't have to ask me to read up on a given topic that you are interested in. I didn't have to add it to a to-do list, I was already doing it. And now I'm able to give you access to it in a few ways:

1. Here's everything that I have read and shared from Google Reader
2. Here's everything that I have read now search it by subject
3. Here's everything that I have read now subscribe via RSS to a subject (keyword) and get updates every time I read an item about your subject without needing to come back to this post or the site

In this scenario I have become a 'social filter'. I am able to share an item from a publisher that my current readers might have never found. In a strange way it gives an individual like myself the chance to create a low threshold directory with the ability to be distributed simply by marking items that I like.

It takes Google Reader to a new place beyond a feed reader and makes it a platform for syndication. Google Reader becomes a powerful tool to create new channels of distribution for content that usually meets its end on a subscribers computer. Now it has legs.

How can I see other people using this? Tons of ways.

1. The same way that I am using it to create a history of my own reading with the ability to share right down to the topic level.
2. By individuals respected as gate keepers like librarians. Example whether the source feeds were running on their library content or the internet they could mark items from those feeds and then give the feed based on a topic to a patron, i.e. happy computer savvy student who doesn't need to come back and ask for help again.
3. Could be used to share information behind a firewall from corporate blogs. Great way to fatten up a corporate knowledge base by picking and choosing from your qualified authors.
4. You could create micro-repositories based on topics
5. A million other ways that I haven't thought of yet. Not even quite sure I could come up with a million.

I know that I am not the first to work over a shared feed this way but it was fun to build and I am sure it will be useful in making something else. Maybe it will inspire someone else to do something cool.

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/4

Make Use Of Google Reader Shared Feeds is a post from: TechStartups.com

The future of local journalism was the topic for the most recent meeting of the Future of Local Media NYC group. The conversation though fell short of anything resembling a dialogue about the future of local journalism. It was another example of the turf war that is plaguing publishers today Bloggers vs. Journalists.

In usual fashion only one side was present to represent their viewpoint. In this case, bloggers. If there was a journalist in the room of about 50 attendees they went unnoticed due to silence. Which was warranted given the conflicted and at time antagonistic nature of the answers panelists were giving to questions.

The panel could have been titled the Future of Local Snark. If a journalist had challenged the prevailing wisdom in the room they would have left bloodied from the snark bites. Gems like, I won't hire a journalist. They can't write what we need. and my fav The papers rip off our stuff, were guarantees that guests on the panel would have delivered swift verbal jabs to any journo speaking out of turn.

When the moderator would try to loop them back to elaborate on their answer he was typically met with the same avoidance and flippant, We rock. They suck., response.

Maybe it was brewskis that some panelists were drinking before hand that elevated their disdain for the topic at hand? Maybe is was that they really didn't have anything to offer to such a topic? Maybe they just didn't care?

It doesn't matter what the real answer is. I will never get those two hours of my life back. Much of my own emotion about this stems from the fact that these bloggers are held up as the thought leaders by the community and groups because they have traffic. Big deal when it comes from photos of a rat stuck in a sidewalk.

The fact of the matter is that the chasm is widening between bloggers and journalists even as we are being pushed closer together by digital delivery and crumbling business models. Bloggers and journalists are now face to face competing for the same eyeballs. The equation goes like this: Eyeballs equal traffic and traffic equals the ad dollars that fund both sides. Also known as the page view model.

For now it is adequate for bloggers to create life-style companies and brands around themselves. At the same time, it is the same model and the reason that print publications are being shed by the media companies that own them. Something that the panel seemed to be woefully neglectful of.

I am picking on my own people here, the bloggers. So let me address journalists for a second.

I admire the fact that journalists have chosen a profession that is supposed to reward them for their talent and skills with the written word. I do. For many decades journalists have made a go of it from the hands of global fat cats and local gentry that have two agendas making money and spreading their views.

Journalists have been eager to distance themselves from bloggers by calling them unprofessional, hacks and much worse. I was stopped by a journalist that I spoke with in preparation for this piece when I mentioned that bloggers and journalists are now competing. Oh, no we aren't. A we rock, they suck response from the other side.

It was then my turn to remind her that Rome was burning and if their isn't some innovation in how content and the production of it is paid for, not only would they be out of their current gig but they would be unable to find another that doesn't rely on test of their manual dexterity skills.

I don't know with any certainty what the future holds for journalists or bloggers. I do know, however, that right now the lack of dialogue, dismissal and inaction while great media empires fall are making the future of media less predictable. It's kind of exciting.

This is the time when the participants on both sides have the rare opportunity to shape the models. There will be winners and losers in the race to shape the future of media. But if this snark continues from both sides we're all going to be losers and our daily news will consist of Willard Scott in a tutu making fart sounds and photos of rats stuck in sidewalks while bloggers and journalists, dressed as a marching band, are led by Bill Moyers and Lady Gaga.

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/0

The Progeny of Neglect and Great Technology is a post from: TechStartups.com

A few weeks ago the FTC updated their advertising guidelines for endorsements and testimonials to include blogs and other new media publishing methods. In the time between this update and today, DigComm (short for the Digital Communications Group), a company that builds digital communications tools for PR and social media agencies, has released CMP.ly.

CMP.ly is a simple solution for what could become a confusing and complicated landscape of sorting out what types of disclosures are needed different circumstances. CMP.ly makes this easy by allowing bloggers, SMS, tweets and podcasts simply link to a standard human readable disclosure.

The six standardized disclosures include:

CMP.ly/0 No connection, unpaid, my own opinions
CMP.ly/1 Based upon a review copy
CMP.ly/2 Given a sample by vendor/agency/brand
CMP.ly/3 Paid post cash payment or other compensation
CMP.ly/4 Employee/shareholder/business relationship
CMP.ly/5 Custom Disclosure

And for my disclosure I am a co-founder of CMP.ly. I have worked very hard on this project with a great friend, Tom Chernaik. I believe that this is an important tool for any publisher to remain transparent as the old guard is now prepared to regulate this medium starting December 1, 2009.

What is most important for us is that a site like CMP.ly is coming from people within the independent publisher community. It is our belief it can be used as a platform to prove that we're not new media, but the media.

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/4

Post from: TechStartups.com

With the new FTC guidelines for bloggers and other new media types taking effect December 1, 2009 it is a perfect time to point out why this is a good thing for bloggers. Bloggers have had the opportunity to grow unrestricted for years. These guidelines should allow bloggers, hobbyists and professionals alike, not to be pushed up against a wall.

Copyright attorney and intellectual property rights expert Evan Brown said in a recent interview, The new guidelines play the important role of showing participants in the marketplace how the FTC will enforce the laws that help consumers have a better understand what they're seeing or hearing when they view an advertisement or promotion.

Here are five more reasons that it is important

1. Bloggers were the first in this new media push to be paid for their work, community and influence.

2. Without a clear disclosure guideline within the professional blogger community between agencies, brands and individual bloggers much if not all disclosure fell through the cracks

3. With a clearer disclosure guideline structure in place from the FTC it is now understood that this space will be regulated . . . meaning it is a business.

4. To continue being a professional, one must be paid for their skills. If guidelines and or enforcement of those guidelines weren't a reality many businesses that have been looking at this space would withdraw and turn back to traditional media for their buys. Lippe Taylor's SVP of Digital Marketing, Matthew Snodgrass agrees, The blogosphere seems to be forgetting that advertisers are also on the hook with these new guidelines. It will be in the advertiser's best interest to only deal with blogs that will also be adhering to these guidelines.

5. It puts a new emphasis on transparency in new media communications that can only help improve the culture of paid endorsements and the material connections that the FTC monitors to protect the public interest.

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/0

Post from: TechStartups.com

Elaine is exactly the right leader for b5media, with her strong leadership and proven ability to lead top performing teams, said John Albright, managing partner of JLA Ventures.

Kunda herself said this in the press release:

I believe there is an extraordinary opportunity to create additional value and new possibilities for our customers, partners and employees. The Company has accomplished a great deal in its relatively short history and I look forward to working together to take it to the next level.

Wright will stay on the board of directors, but why do this now, and make it effective immediately?

The answer is the ever so useful personal reasons explanation. Wright said:

I was burned out, unhappy in the work I was doing and looking for something more to life. I'm still exploring what that is, but suffice to say it should involve playing around with projects, family time and consulting while I figure out what makes me HAPPY.

He also elaborates in a blog post about where to go from here, and what sparked this decision in the first place. Basically, he wants balance in life, and find his flow again. I'm sure hundreds of hard working entrepreneurs out there can sympathize with that.

And while at it, he also launched netmobs, his getting shit done agency. No time like the present huh?

Wright was one of the original b5media founders. It'll be interesting to see how the blog network will continue to evolve under new leadership.

Possibly Related Posts

• B5media Revamps Pay Model, Bloggers Lose Money
• A Blog About a TV Network? Really?
• b5media Goes Community

Background

The most interesting area of new development on the web is the innovation happening around realtime messaging, the ability to deliver updates to a website or application in one or two seconds. While various systems like Yahoo News Alerts or feed readers like Google Reader have offered some simple ways of delivering fairly fast notifications, they are still built on an infrastructure that relies upon requesting a web page repeatedly. These systems do the equivalent of hitting the "reload" button in your web browser over and over.

While those systems have been using these inefficient methods to deliver updates, newer platforms like Twitter, Facebook and FriendFeed have focused on building the infrastructure for efficient large-scale delivery of updates using their own proprietary networks. A lot of attention has been paid to Twitter's 140-character limit, or Facebook's News Feed, but the compelling technology that enables the user experience on these platforms is the immediacy with which updates are delivered. Earlier systems like instant messaging or chat allowed realtime messaging on a one-to-one or small group basis, but it's been harder to deliver those realtime messages to anyone in the world who wanted to receive them unless you had a lot of money, expertise and infrastructure.

Another barrier is that, while there are many different programs and clients that let you connect to Twitter or Facebook with your own applications, there haven't been any free and open options for delivering realtime messages to a large audience if you couldn't, or didn't want to, rely on those companies.

But recently, a few key pieces have fallen into place that make it inexpensive and relatively easy to add realtime messaging as an incremental upgrade to existing websites and web applications. This set of related technologies, which I'm calling the Pushbutton platform, will yield a broad new set of capabilities for users, publishers and developers on the web. Best of all, Pushbutton technologies are free, open and decentralized, meaning that the arrival of realtime on the web will not be owned or controlled by any single company.

Defining Pushbutton

The concept and potential of Pushbutton is a lot like Ajax it's not a single technology or invention, it's a whole family of technologies, some of which have been in development or deployment for nearly a decade, that together enable this new realtime web. Pushbutton's foundation is built on these systems:

• Atom and RSS: The most common feed formats, for syndication on the web
• PubSubHubBub and RSSCloud: Powerful new "hubs" for distributing messages
• Web Hooks: Simple web services for receiving messages, rather than sending them

Pushbutton systems rely on the web's fundamental HTTP protocol for communication between these component parts. The architecture of Pushbutton message delivery is also simple to understand. Before Pushbutton, in today's systems, when you create a message (a blog post, tweet or other update) that's published in your RSS or Atom feed, every application or site that wants updates from you has to repeatedly request your feed to know when it's updated. You can optionally notify ("ping") some applications to tell them it's time to come collect your new updates, but this is time-consuming and resource-intensive on both sides, especially if you want to notify a lot of people.

In the best case, the system we have now is analogous to a person coming by your house and saying "Hey, there's a new edition of your favorite newspaper today. You should go get it." And then you have to go to the newspaper's printing plant to pick it up. In a Pushbutton web, that person is delivering each story to your house the moment it's complete.

That's because Pushbutton-enabled applications will improve upon the current state of affairs by proactively delivering not just the notification that there's a new message, but the content of the message itself. And instead of requiring all those applications to come to your site to read the update, it uses a hub server in the cloud to pass along the message directly to all the receivers that are interested in it.

1. You, the Sender, create a message to be delivered via RSS or Atom
2. Your application gives the messsage to one or more PubSubHubBub or RSSCloud hubs, which reside in the Cloud
3. The PubSubHubBub or RSSCloud hubs deliver the message to any Receivers, the applications or sites that have requested updates from you

In this way, each time you create a new message, a large number of Receivers can consume that message in near realtime (usually less than a second) without a lot of complexity. This kind of messaging has been possible with custom-built or more obscure technologies in the past, but the Pushbutton ecosystem is a breakthrough for a few reasons:

• Sending messages just requires a minor change to an RSS or Atom feed, and a simple, well-defined update notification, instead of major changes to the application where you create your messages.
• Receiving messages is also very simple, only requiring a developer to handle incoming notifications of updates.
• Most of the system's complexity is handled in the hub servers, which are well-documented, implementable in a variety of programming languages, and built around open code that will likely attract a large developer community.
• Most of the scaling effort and expense happens at the hub level, and all current hubs are designed to run on inexpensive cloud systems like Google App Engine or Amazon's EC2.
• The software for Sending, Receiving or running a hub is free, open source and available on almost any platform.
• Messages sent on Pushbutton platforms are delivered via HTTP, which is familiar to any web developer and runs well on any hosting environment. All requests between the different layers of a Pushbutton system can be made as simple REST calls.
• Pushbutton technologies can be adopted incrementally, so that features can be added piecemeal on either the sender or receiver side, without requiring a wholesale upgrade to infrastructure or application architecture.

Who's Behind Pushbutton?

Pushbutton technologies have been created and advocated by some of the most credible and experienced developers of social web technologies. Here's a brief overview of the impressive pedigree of these components:

• PubSubHubBub was co-created by Brad Fitzpatrick and Brett Slatkin of Google. Brad was founder of LiveJournal, and created or co-created fundamental social web technologies like Memcached, OpenID and more.
• XML-RPC update pings, RSS and the RSS Cloud ideas were pioneered by Dave Winer, who has been actively developing open implementations of each of these technologies.
• Web Hooks have been evangelized by Jeff Lindsay, and have been deployed by a variety of different companies and platforms which all independently developed the technique.

In addition, Google has supported Brad and Brett's development of PubSubHubBub, and enabled it on the Google FeedBurner service. A number of smaller companies are deploying large parts of this infrastructure as well. In short, some of the best reputations in developing open web systems have made Pushbutton possible, from the biggest tech companies to the most steadfastly independent developers on the web.

Related Ideas and Prior Art

There are a lot of existing technologies that have influenced the creation and evolution of Pushbutton technologies; If you're familiar with any of these systems, you're probably already ahead of the curve in understanding part of what Pushbutton is trying to enable.

• Twitter Firehose, FriendFeed SUP, TypePad Update Stream: These realtime delivery systems offer up the content of their respective platforms as an unending stream that developers can consume and use in their applications. At the present time, they all have varying licenses and degrees of openness, and slightly different formats for delivering updates, but have proven the utility of the "sending" part of Pushbutton's realtime functionality.
• XMPP (Jabber), NNTP (Usenet), IRC: These older internet protocols all delivered various degrees of realtime messaging and distributed messaging capabilities, and can form a very useful base of experience for Pushbutton developers to learn from. In some cases, fundamental architectural choices about security, authentication or architecture were made when the Internet was less populated and less complex, making them inappropriate for today's applications. In all cases, these protocols are less-known by most contemporary web developers, and thus lack familiar toolkits and development resources, which make them quite challenging to deploy in common, inexpensive environments.
• TrackBack and Pingback: These systems for delivering updates between blogging systems were very effective in enabling rich distributed conversations in the early days of the blogosphere. These have declined in usefulness due to poor or missing implementations of authentication, which led to spam problems, and a general lack of understanding of their utility by a lot of newer bloggers. Pushbutton may offer an opportunity to restore some of the value of the idea behind these systems.
• Reverse HTTP may end up being a useful component of some Pushbutton deployments, as a complement or companion to Comet and related techniques.

What should we worry about?

• A format war? If you're familiar with the communities around technologies like feeds, you may know they have a deserved reputation for being contentious and even breaking into heated disputes over arcane details. I don't think that's likely to happen this time, because there are only one or two viable formats for each layer of the platform, and the creators of each part have shown some consistent good-faith efforts to promote interoperability where possible and peaceful coexistence where necessary. In the Ajax community, for example, the "X" in Ajax often stands for JSON instead of XML, but this hasn't hindered its broad adoption at all. I'm also willing to personally commit to try to prevent any kind of interpersonal conflict that would inhibit the adoption of Pushbutton technologies. Worry? No.
• Scaling issues? There will inevitably be some learning to do about how to scale the resource-intensive hub layer of a Pushbutton system. But because the hubs live on cloud systems that make enormous amounts of computing resources easily available, because the coders creating the reference implementations of the hub software have great experience making web-scale systems, and because it's relatively simple to introduce new hubs as needed, this will likely not be a gating factor for adoption of Pushbutton. Worry? No.
• Intellectual Property Concerns? I'm not a lawyer, and this isn't legal advice. But there has already been a great deal of interest in these systems, and it's likely that any bad actors who were interested in throwing their patent lawyers at this sort of system would probably already be suing people left and right. And the main players who are already involved have shown a consistent desire to make truly open systems that don't have IP encumbrances. Put simply, I think anybody smart enough to invent these kinds of technologies is smart enough to not want to look like jerks by suing somebody for using them. Worry? Probably not.
• Competition from centralized systems? Pushbutton technologies are not just free and open, they're decentralized, which is a serious threat to the "lobster trap" model of social software. We can expect serious competition from the centralized networks that are currently building these sorts of systems. If a threat arises to Pushbutton's adoption, this is the most likely source. Worry? Definitely.
• Bad user experience? One of the worst things we can do in making use of new technologies is to ignore the social, personal or even political implications of their use. Messages that are immediately delivered can't, by their nature, be erased from all the places they appear. The idea of permanently archiving these types of messages is unfamiliar to a lot of less technically-savvy users. And whenever we see something shiny and new, we have the temptation to use technology for technology's sake, whether or not we're solving a real problem or providing a real value. If Pushbutton gets a bad rap early on despite having tremendous potential, this will be why. Worry? Hell, yes.

Conclusion

I have tremendous excitement about the new realtime era of web applications. While I'm fundamentally an optimistic person, I have great skepticism when it comes to mindless hype about new technologies, so it's with a bit of reluctance that I indulge in some hype myself. But I think the Pushbutton web has the opportunity to give individuals and organizations with distinct and passionate voices the ability to be even more immediate and expressive on the web, and after ten years of publishing on the web, that's the part I love the most.

I have no doubt that some skeptics will say "Pushbutton is just PubSubHubBub by another name", just like they said "Ajax is XMLHttpRequest by another name", and if that's what the super-geeky guys want to believe, I'm fine with that. And I'm sure there will still be some significant technical details to resolve. But I think by giving the overall concept an approachable, understandable name and (hopefully!) an explanation that can be understood by anyone with an interest, it can catalyze interest in a whole new area of innovation on the web. And to be honest, when I see folks like Brad Fitzpatrick and Dave Winer hacking on the same set of problems, I can't help but think something interesting will come of it.

Over the next few days, I'll be outlining some of the opportunties around Pushbutton, espousing more of the philosophy that has the potential to imbue Pushbutton with a bit more meaning than most new web tech, and providing some simple explanations of how you can get started both learning about and taking advantage of these technologies. Most of all, I hope you'll offer your pointed criticisms, thoughtful critiques, detailed corrections and even better ideas. I'll be following the conversation here in the comments, across the blogosphere, and on Twitter using the tag #pshb.

We're not only losing journalists, we may be losing journalism, according to Copps.

Some blame the Internet and bloggers, and that's certainly a part of the story. All that consolidation and mindless deregulation, rather than reviving the news business, condemned us to less real news, less serious political coverage, less diversity of opinion, less minority and female ownership, less investigative journalism and fewer jobs for journalists.

The decline of traditional print and broadcast outlets is the primary focus of the report. The report also loks at possible ideas for addressing these issues.

How about journalism? asked Copps. Will anyone figure out a business model to support in-depth, investigative journalism or must we develop something completely new, perhaps based on philanthropy, non-profit models or public media?

Back in June 2008, I wrote Hey AP! How About Running A Real News Web Site?, which in the wake of AP making noise about fair use guidelines examined how the organization failed to provide any central article that anyone could point at. A key part of my article:

To get back to the bloggers, let me point out a key problem you have. Your stories appear everywhere, like weeds. Then they die, unlike weeds. Like they disappear after roughly 30 days. This was an issue I pointed out when the Google deal was struck.

Now skip ahead to this past May. In writing Do Newspapers Owe Google Fair Share Fees For Researching Stories?, I said:

Let's consider last week's wonderful story from the AP about how old Japanese maps on Google Earth are causing problems with some in that country. Given that news stories have a tendency to disappear, I'm going to link to the story using its entire headline: Old Japanese maps on Google Earth unveil secrets. Now if the story should move for some reason, as least with the headline, there's a chance of locating it in some new location.

Try to go to that story today, where I linked to it at, and you get a 404 error:

The page you've requested does not exist at this address.

Nice. As Jean commented, you can still find the article over at the Huffington Post. Perhaps HuffPo's deal with the AP allows stories to be up longer than 30 days. Certainly the Seattle Times still has it, also. But the copy over at Yahoo is dead, meaning all that Digg love it had generated is now going to waste.

If people wonder why I might seem so hostile to newspapers screaming about how badly they're being done by Google, bloggers and aggregators, it's stuff like this that does it. This is lunacy. It doesn't engender respect or a believe that the AP or other organizations really understand the world they're operating in.

I linked to the article the AP itself had put out on its own web site. They kill it. Links from Digg that would generate thousands of visits are allowed to die. Duplicate content across the web isn't regulated by the AP itself there's no instructions for publications to block that content from search engines; no thought about consolidating links; no thought about how no one can tell what's the authorative piece that they should link to.

And yet the AP and others yap that they don't get credit enough, that people rip them off, that Google should somehow have supernatural abilities to make up for the mess they contribute to. Please.

But hey, it's all going to be better now. AP proposes new article formatting for the Web from the Associated Press itself tells us of a new standard (write that headline down, so you can find the article in 30 days when it dies). It involves meta tagging articles, which will:

The tag[s] identifying usage rights could allow Web sites that aggregate content to automatically sort articles by copyright terms and let publishers more easily track how their stories are being used, said Srinandan Kasi, AP's general counsel.

If you want to know more about the system, visit the Value Added News site. Don't worry as you're told:

Adding semantic value to your news is not rocket science. It doesn't even require serious plumbing in the depths of your database.

Then scroll down after that intro, and your head will hurt. Like if I use the microformat for Daily News, which Daily News is that? Because there's a number of them out there. The tech specs don't help.

As for the AP already using this, when I looked, I didn't see tags on some selected articles I examined. I certainly didn't see them on AP content being redistributed by AP members. I even wonder if the tags will carry over across the various content management systems out there, once they leap forth from the AP.

But wait, there's more. What about ACAP? That's supposed to be a shining star in the rights management area that AP signed on to ages ago. ACAP, which is being positioned (see also here) to European legislators as part of a solution to protect newspapers and publishers from those evil aggregators.

So now AP is going to use a second system in addition to ACAP? And yet meanwhile fail to follow the most important system, basic SEO?

Sigh. Maybe later I'll ask the AP about it. Maybe they'll even decide that someone from the AP can speak to me, unlike earlier this year. Believe it or not, I'd like to see them succeed. I only wish it were less talk, less smoke-and-mirrors, less we can't unless and more action with what they really can do now, in an action that technically makes sense.

The last few years that has kept me in early stage investments and my own startups.

The stock market, like any other career, is a full-time job. As the world shrunk the last 15-20 years at an exponential rate, full-time job has come to mean 24-7-365. Cellphones, email and now Twitter have put the teaser of non-stop market and business activity in front of us. If you are not devoting that time to the markets, you should step aside and do less.

Despite the relentless 24-7-365 grind, I want my business and the businesses that I invest in to remember my Too Small to Fail' adage.

This morning, Meredith Whitney is bullhorning $GS on the unbiased CNBC and stocks are up. She is the new Too Big to Fail' analyst. No longer will she be wrong, because CNBC will have so much tape on her to edit as they please. We, the anonymous bloggers' know better. Meredith could have slipped away on top, but like most including Dennis Kneale, anonymity sucks balls .

The Fly had a fun post this morning reminding me of Too Small to Fail:

Earlier this morning, while reading the paper in the backyard, I saw a giant crumb moving on one of the pavers. After further inspection, I discovered it was a little fucking ant, carrying a gigantic crumb to some egregious ant clan, or whatever the fuck those pesky vermin like to call home. I admired the little fellow, as he struggled mightily with the crumb. He was a greedy little fucker, trying to carry the big piece, while there were plenty of other smaller pieces nearby. Super Ant was trying to feed the whole damn ant universe with that monstrous crumb, instead he got his face smashed in with a giant sandalif you know what I mean.

The moral of the story: Carry the smaller crumb, eat well, and go unnoticed.

Good advice Mr. Anonymous.

1. Has anyone noticed that its impossible to trust a single word uttered about coaching changes, the draft, trades and even celebration parties these days ?

Bloggers, sports websites and even the print media have gotten so desperate they seem to have come to the conclusion that fabricated stories, passed off as rumors, are a better way to drive traffic and create awareness of a website or blog than actual reporting.

Unfortunately, ESPN and local newspapers, radio and TV media have become the patsies of bloggers. If some random blogger reports that he has heard that a trade of Joe for John is being discussed, then the traditional media, as they have told me many times is requested by their editor to run it down and see if its real. Its almost like a sad joke. How do you make an ESPN reporter jump ? Make up something and put it on your blog. Somewhere a bunch of sports bloggers are playing a drinking game. Chug if the other guys made up trade rumor makes the ESPN crawl.

How to stop it ? ESPN.com puts up a page of blacklisted blogs and websites who's posts they wont comment on or report on in any way. It will create a short term surge of traffic for those sites, but then they will go away as the proprietors of the sites realize that being discredited is not a good thing.

2. I did a quick and dirty interview with The Motley Fool. They asked me about Buy and Hold for Stocks. My answer was simple.

Buy and hold is long dead. It has always been a sucker's bet. Proponents point to charts of index performance over the long term; unfortunately, things like house repairs, kids, and college tuition don't follow the same chart.

Buy and hold is a great marketing slogan for funds that want to take your money. Nothing more or less.

Then they had John Bogle ,founder of Vanguard and creator of the Vanguard 500 comment on what I had to say. I'm glad to say that Mr Bogle made my point. In what should have been a simple answer for him, was not. Plus he managed to take a few shots at me. Hey, if you can't counter a point, slam the messenger ! Here is what he had to say. Notice all the qualifiers.

Cuban embargo is what we need after those silly statements.

Of course buy and hold is a sucker's bet where individual stocks are concerned (just ask the guys that bought and held Mark's own company!)
And while buy and hold for all of American business (a stock index fund) may produce long years of plenty interrupted by years of famine, putting equity capital to work in that way will be great so long as America is great.
And as a group, all investors, by definition, are buy and hold investors! Not complicated! And mathematically, those who themselves are buy and holders (without costs) will not might outperform those who trade back and forth with one another, who capture the same market return but let all those croupier costs destroy their returns.

Finally, if buy and hold refers not to stocks or the stock portfolio but to one's aggregate investment portfolio, reducing the stock commitment as age takes its toll, it is the most certain way to wealth that exists in our uncertain world.

He's right about the marketing slogan except when it is applied to the strategy described in the immediately preceding paragraph.

I stand by what I had to say. Buyer beware.

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Never underestimate the power of first-mover advantage, especially when being one of the first movers gets you bought by Google. Back in August, 1999, Pyra Labs launched Blogger. LiveJournal had launched six months before and Open Diary in October of the previous year. But it was Pyra Labs which was acquired by Google in February, 2003, and the rest was history. Now, nearly ten years later, Blogger is still the dominant hosted blogging platform. In May, 52 million individual people from the U.S. visited a Blogger blog, almost twice as many as the 28 million who visited a blog hosted by Wordpress.com (comScore). Six Apart properties, including Typepad.com, attracted 14 million.

Millions of bloggers still use Blogger because it is easy. However, Wordpress.com is making steady gains and growing its aggregate audience in the U.S. at more than twice the annual rate of Blogger (40 percent versus 14 percent). These numbers don't count all the blogs that host Wordpress on their own servers, such as Techcrunch.

The vast majority of Blogger traffic comes from outside the United States, where its annual growth rate is 38 percent compared to Wordpress.com's 59 percent. On a worldwide basis, Blogger blogs have a readership of 267 million people a month, compared to 143 million a month for Wordpress (comScore, April, 2008). The biggest countries are, in order:

1. U.S.
2. Brazil
3. Turkey
4. Spain
5. Canada
6. U.K.

From a business standpoint, Blogger is good for Google because it creates millions of sites which can show AdSesne ads. It creates more inventory for Google. Only recently has Google bothered to start showing ads to the users of Blogger itself every time they publish a post.

Can Blogger keep its lead indefinitely, or will Wordpress eventually catch up? Or will something else entirely overtake both of them?

Today, two of the people behind the original Blogger, Evan Williams and Biz Stone, have another little service that is capturing people's attention. It is called Twitter, you may have heard about it. In May, Twitter.com had 17.6 million unique U.S. visitors to its Website alone, making it bigger already than Six Apart.

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Check out what the High Court said as reported in the article:

"In the first case dealing with the privacy of internet bloggers, the judge ruled that Mr Horton had no reasonable expectation to anonymity because blogging is essentially a public rather than a private activity.

Coming down in favour of freedom of expression, the judge also said that even if the blogger could have claimed he had a right to anonymity, the judge would have ruled against him on public interest grounds"

This case will send a shockwave through the legal community. What effect will it have on Internet Defamation Law in the United States?

So far, American legislators have done everything possible to protect freedom of speech; and really, to do the EXACT opposite of everything the UK has been doing in terms of online defamation law.

This is HUGE.

Thanks to @Vbalasubramani for giving me the heads-up on this!

Media analyst Clay Shirky has some interesting thoughts on the steady stream of photos, Twitter posts and videos coming out of post-election Iran:

I'm always a little reticent to draw lessons from things still unfolding, but it seems pretty clear that this is it. The big one. This is the first revolution that has been catapulted onto a global stage and transformed by social media

I've been thinking a lot about the Chicago demonstrations of 1968 where they chanted the whole world is watching.

Really, that wasn't true then. But this time it's true and people throughout the world are not only listening but responding. They're engaging with individual participants, they're passing on their messages to their friends, and they're even providing detailed instructions to enable web proxies allowing Internet access that the authorities can't immediately censor. That kind of participation is reallly extraordinary.

Shirky goes on to suggest that microblogging service Twitter has made the most impact on the events in Iran and their coverage:

One thing that Evan (Williams) and Biz (Stone) did absolutely right is that they made Twitter so simple and so open that it's easier to integrate and harder to control than any other tool. At the time, I'm sure it wasn't conceived as anything other than a smart engineering choice. But it's had global consequences.

Twitter is shareable and open and participatory in a way that Facebook's model prevents. So far, despite a massive effort, the authorities have found no way to shut it down, and now there are literally thousands of people aorund the world who've made it their business to help keep it open.

While Twitter has been huge in the last few days, YouTube videos, like the one embedded above, and the images coming through sites like Flickr are incredibly important, too, because they let you see the scale of what's happening.

Iran's military is warning online media of a crackdown over coverage of the country's election crisis. The country is trying to block access to social media sites, and said that Iranian Web sites and bloggers must remove any materials that create tension or face legal action.

At this point, though, it looks like the only way to cut off the flow of citizen media in and out of Iran is to eliminate access to the Internet itself.

See Shirky's full comments at the TED site.

From Ben Joseph via Buzzfeed.

It's really interesting to see what people choose to use to represent them online. The simplest thing is a headshot and I suspect that's what the majority of people use when they are asked to upload a profile picture. That's what Kara Swisher chose (she's the top profile, my most recent follow).

But even with the headshot, some people go for the funny picture, adding some character to their profile. Mike Doughty (second profile) has his head on the table and some sort of box between him and the camera. Stuart Ellman (fifth profile) is dressed as the court jester (probably a halloween pic). Both of those profiles tell us a bit more about those two.

Some choose to use a photo of something or someone else. Lauren (fourth profile) seems to have chosen a family photo of some kind. Howie (sixth profile) has a photo of his friend and Springsteen's guitarist Nils Lofgren. We don't get to see these people's faces, but they are telling us something about them nonetheless.

I've been online since the early 90s and I've gone back and forth on what kind of profile I like to use. But for the past couple years, I've settled on the image that I now try to use everywhere online. It's my online brand and I stumbled on to it accidentally. I thought it might be interesting to share with all of you how that came about and what I learned from it.

In the middle of 2006, Howard Lindzon approached me about getting involved in a web video show he was going to produce called Wallstrip. In the initial incarnation of Wallstrip, there was going to be a daily video talking about the stock of the day, and then there was going to be about a dozen bloggers who would do a short post on what they thought of the stock as an investment idea.

Howard asked me to be one of those dozen bloggers. I thought about it for a while and then agreed to do it. Then, unbekownst to me, he asked an artist friend of his in Phoenix to go on the web, find photos of each of the dozen bloggers, and draw up a sketch that he could use as their Wallstrip avatar. This was mine.

From the minute I saw it, I liked it. It uses my favorite color (green) as the backdrop and the eye color (my eyes are sometimes blue and sometimes green and sometimes something else). It looks like me, but not too much.

So I began to use it a bit here and there around the web as I set up new profiles. But by no means was it the only profile picture I used. For corporate oriented services like LinkedIn, I'd use my Union Square Ventures headshot. For social nets like Facebook, I'd use a regular headshot. I used a photo of me taking a photo on Flickr for a long time.

But then I started to realize that the Wallstrip avatar was becoming my online identity. People would comment about it all the time. Around the time we sold Wallstrip, Howard had his artist friend (her name escapes me, pls Howard leave her name and a link in the comments and I'll update this post) do a real painting of it which I now have in my office at Union Square Ventures. It's a real conversation starter.

So sometime last year, I just decided to go with it everywhere. It's at the top of this blog and everywhere else I have an online identity. And I think that decision is having some important effects.

As I said earlier in this post, it's become my online brand. It's simple, small, and very recognizable. By putting it everywhere that I am online, I've used frequency and reach to power home that the avatar is me. It's become my visual handle and it's also a signature and a sign of authenticity.

But there's also a risk in standardizing on an online identity. Someone could grab that image and use it to pretend to be me. That's a concern and probably one reason why many people choose to change their profile picture/avatar on a regular basis. It hasn't happened to me yet, but I am sure it will and then I don't know what I am going to do about it.

Online identity is a big issue and a big opportunity for entrepreneurs on the web. It seems like Facebook is quickly becoming a major provider of online identity authentication and that's a smart move for them and a good thing for the web as a whole. But there is still a ton of opportunity out there to provide services in and around what Facebook and others are doing. Because online identity is powerful and becoming more intertwined with offline identity every day. My avatar is a good representation of that.

The blog Wonkette reports that this over-reaching requirement was removed from the final bill by Senate Republicans. All but six of our freedom-loving Democratic majority voted to keep the registration requirement in the bill, but these votes allowed the Republican minority to remove the requirement.

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Internet defamation attorneys and bloggers listen up! A new law will take effect in California on January 1, 2009, which allows online speakers to obtain attorney's fees if they successfully oppose a subpoena to obtain their personally identifying information in California involving out-of-state litigation.

For all of the millions of blogs on the web, only an incredibly small fraction generate enough revenue to serve as full time jobs. Most people are happy enough with just sharing their thoughts with the public, even if they only see a few hundred hits a months with the very occasional comment. But what if there was a way for even these small-timers to generate enough money to put food on the table?

Larry Genkin, the founder and editor of Blogger and Podcaster Magazine, is looking to help the long tail of bloggers turn their hobby into a lucrative job. He has started the Blogger and Podcaster Media Network, a consortium of bloggers and related companies looking to help bloggers of all sizes effectively monetize their sites without having to worry about having a relatively small audience. The site is currently open for signups, but won't go live until early next year.

At launch the BPMN is a rollup of companies including Genkin's magazine, Fuel My Blog (A bloggers' social network based in the UK), Podcast Pickle (a podcasters' social network), and SocialRank, a company similar to Sphere that monitors blogs for related and popular content.

Each of these companies will help promote the new network, and will also offer technology to help bloggers build out their site (for example, they'll be able to use SocialRank's technology). The BPMN will also try to partner with large media companies to help give blogs more exposure. To help each blog get started, the company has partnered with PR NewsWire, which will offer each blogger a promotion package Genkin says is worth $2000.

The BPMN will also have a dedicated sales team for advertising. Genkin says that large ad networks like Federated Media cater to large blogs, leaving most of the long tail bloggers to fend for themselves. Because BPMN will be representing a large number of blogs at once, Genkin says it will be able to secure more favorable deals. The network will have a rev-share agreement with bloggers, giving 70% of ad revenues to members.

Beyond advertising, The BPMN is also employing an affiliate scheme to help bloggers generate revenue. Genkin says that for every blogger a member brings into the network, they'll earn around $500-1000 a year. It sounds like this is the primary way the BPMN expects to help small time bloggers earn full-time salaries (just recruit 50 bloggers and you're set!), but recruiting bloggers is more difficult than it sounds, which is where I think the BPMN might fall short. To further entice bloggers, The BPMN is offering a (presumably small) equity stake in the company to early adopters on the network who sign up by the end of the year. And the last selling point: bloggers will have healthcare coverage, though the details for this have yet to be worked out.

The Blogger and Podcast Media Network is going to have a long struggle ahead. Even if advertisers are enticed by the ability to make large ad buys across the network that are more favorable than AdSense, most individual bloggers still won't be seeing much income from their ads. And the affiliate scheme sounds too good to be true - I doubt many people will be able to recruit enough bloggers to earn a sizable income. If Genkin can pull off some partnerships with large media corporations (his magazine already scored a deal with USA Today), these bloggers may be able to increase their traffic and generate some revenue, but I have a hard time picturing small time bloggers earning full time wages.

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Every blogger can bloviate and tell you what he or she sees happening. But I'm noticing a trend among bloggers. Very few listen. I read hundreds of bloggers on a regular basis, along with many thousands who are brought into my view via TechMeme and my hundreds of Google Reader friends.

How many actually are actively seeking out the opinions of others and trying to bring those to their readers. I can tell you how many: almost none.

How many have a Google Reader Shared Items feed like the one I have done for years? A few. Louis Gray is amongst the ones I read often and regularly, but despite a few exceptions here and there very few of the top bloggers do that.

How many aggregate thousands of people's tweets, blogs, photos, videos together and go through and tell you which ones are best like I've done every day on FriendFeed since I joined in February? A few do, hello Louis Gray again, but not enough of the top bloggers.

So, if we're really in an economic crisis (we are, despite the stock market going up 600 points so far today) how can bloggers really be knowledgeable if they don't read other people's blogs and prove that over and over and over again by using these tools to demonstrate what they are reading?

Why do I think that's so important? Well, for balance, for one thing. You saw some people thought I was too negative last week. But if you had looked at EVERYTHING I was putting into this system and reading and writing and doing videos on you would have seen a much more balanced and nuanced view of the world.

I assume my audience is smart and wants to see the world through many viewpoints. I hope you are reading these feeds because there are some damn cool things going through the system and these are my ways of highlighting them and making us all smarter in this time.

Also note that I overlink to people who disagree with me. Why do I do that? Because in these times it's too easy to buy into your own press releases and start believing you have all the answers. In these times it's even MORE important to consider the other side, whether we're talking about the economy or politics.

But maybe I'm alone in that view, it sure seems not many bloggers are willing to show you what inputs they are reading and what's informing their judgment.

Continue reading The little Leopard laptop

Friends, Romans, countrymen, followers, page views, in-bound links, share of voice, unique visitors and subscribers. These are just some of the more common ways serious content creators (and those who hope to reach them) measure online influence. However there are big flaws in all of these metrics.

Followers and/or RSS subscribers are nice to count. But given the Attention Crash, it's a good bet that many of these people aren't as engaged with your content as you might hope. For example, I follow several hundred people on Friendfeed but I only see a fraction of their stuff because I don't have time to actively read or even scan.

Unique visitors and page views - which I said was dying back in 2006 and is dead as far as I am concerned - are also largely empty numbers. Lots of people visit my blog. However, many of them arrive via Google, the web's version of Ellis Island. And then they're gone.

After thinking about this a lot I have reached the conclusion that Google Page Rank is the ultimate way to measure online influence. It's far from perfect. However, several other metric candidates I addressed in February 2007 haven't panned out. There are three reasons why Google Page Rank rules.

1) Page Rank is something you earn by producing high quality content that people link to - or what John Bell describes as socially connected

2) It enables you to influence people on the Internet's biggest stage - Google - and just as people are searching for the topics you are knowledgeable about. This means it amplifies your influence because the press start at search engines when researching stories

3) Finally, Page Rank is channel agnostic and takes the entire online ecosystem into account. It judges you based on links from all kinds of sources, not just people who live in the same fish tank. In other words, it goes beyond people who hang out on Twitter who love people who Tweet or bloggers who link to other bloggers, etc. It eschews the echo chamber

PageRank takes time to earn. There are no shortcuts. Google is democratic and rewards professionals and amateurs equally if they do their job well. Create high quality content that earns links from other quality sources and, over time, your Google Page Rank grows as does your influence and responsibility.

(Yes, I did say responsibility. My blog has a Page Rank of 7. If I were to actively blog about Edelman's clients, it could alter Google results and thus their reputation. That wouldn't be ethical now would it?)

Many bloggers monitor their Google Page Rank. The AdAge Power 150 and the Healthcare 100 lists allow you to sort bloggers this way. But Page Rank influence is not limited to blogs.

Did you know that individual identities on social networks like Friendfeed and Twitter have Page Ranks that are independent of the main site itself? Its; true. Someone new on Twitter has a Page Rank of zero. While those who have been on the site longer have a higher rank. The same goes for Friendfeed where I have a Page Rank of 4 but Robert Scoble has a 6.

It would be interesting to take lists like the Twitterholic 100 or the FFHolic 100, both of which rank influencers based on followers, and run them through a Page Rank checker. While followers and Page Rank are probably linked I wonder if some interesting anomalies might pop up in the process. (If you want to check the Page Rank for any site you can use this bookmarket. However, note that results can vary based on the tool you use to check.)

Until someone comes up with a better metric, Page Rank to me is the ultimate measure of online influence. Do you agree?

In essence, Google has applied the same EULA that it uses for Gmail to everything you put into the Chrome browser. What, you never read the gmail EULA? You do realize it gives Google copyrights in your email, right? Yeah, it does.

Anyway, here's the relevant clause from the Chrome EULA:

11.1 You retain copyright and any other rights you already hold in Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services. By submitting, posting or displaying the content you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services. This license is for the sole purpose of enabling Google to display, distribute and promote the Services and may be revoked for certain Services as defined in the Additional Terms of those Services.

That's potentially very bad. Should Google ever choose to make use of those rights it could cause problems ranging from simple embarrassment to loss of serious value. For example, I work at a company that makes Web-based tools for securities traders. If someone runs our tools in a Chrome browser, does that mean Google owns (or thinks it has any rights to) my customers' financial data? Should I be telling my customers not to run Chrome? Does this principle apply to anyone who ever does any home banking in the Chrome browser?

This condition seems completely unnecessary for a browser. I can't find any similar language in the Firefox EULA. The Internet Explorer EULA has language some people object to in terms of disabling and potential interference, but it doesn't seem to contain any terms claiming ownership of content. WTF, Google?

Yesterday at the Mobile Web Wars event (here's video of that), held right before the TechCrunch party, David Hornik, partner at August Capital (he's the host of the TechCrunch party) told the audience that he would not invest in pure iPhone apps because the iPhone had too small a market share and that anyone who wanted to get big in the mobile space should go after all phones, not just the iPhone, which, while it's hot with early-adopter types and is seeing people waiting in lines to buy around the world, hasn't yet made a dent in, say, Nokia's market share of cell phones overall.

Let's call this the Silicon Valley VC Disease. This disease has been going on for a long time. Seagate's CEO Bill Watkins told me a few months ago that Seagate almost didn't get started because they couldn't get funding from VCs who didn't see a potential market for hard drives.

It's a corrosive disease, too, and is why we get tons of stupid Facebook apps and tons of easy-to-make and likely-to-go-viral iPhone apps. Quick: explain why we don't yet have a really brilliant travel app or even a single political app for the iPhone, despite lots of interest in those topics (especially in this political year). Not to mention many brilliant apps like Evernote (my favorite app so far)?

What is the disease? That you must make bucketloads of money (or at least have a shot at doing that) in the first two years of business.

If you have a plan to make just a reasonable amount of money, or if it will take decades to make a big amount of money, don't come to Silicon Valley.

Walmart would NEVER have gotten funded by Sand Hill Road. It took decades to make bucketloads of money. That kind of business plan would never fit in here.

Why? We have the Silicon Valley VC disease.

I imagine that if we went back in time to 1977. Imagine a small group of geeks wanted to get funding to build apps for the Apple II. It didn't have much market share yet. But imagine those developers wanted to build just Apple II apps. Would they have gotten funded? Probably not. And types like David Hornick would have told them you gotta build apps for mainframes and DEC's, because that's where the market is, not in that Apple II toy.

So, is Hornik wrong? No, he's exactly right. The much bigger market is with regular-old-single-chip-cell phones. You know the type. They are the kinds of phones that make phone calls and maybe do SMS texting. If they have a Web browser it's a small tiny black and white one that can only look at WAP-style text-centric sites, not the full-blown Web that the iPhone has.

But while Hornik is right, he also has the Silicon Valley Disease. He forgets that the small, seemingly unimportant platform today that gets early adopters excited will become the large, dominant platform of tomorrow. It might take 10 years, though, which is too long for VCs to care about. How long did it take Visicalc to happen on the Apple II? Or Aldus Pagemaker to happen on the Mac? A few years at minimum. iPhone is only one year old.

But already we're seeing the writing on the wall. If you can get past your Silicon Valley VC Disease.

First, our society's most valuable audiences are getting iPhones. Last week when I was in Los Angeles, both of the famous architects I interviewed already had 3G iPhones.

Those two guys are HUGELY valuable for advertisers. They are representative. They aren't the only ones.

But even better than the demographics that the iPhone is getting is the usage patterns.

See, I have two Nokia phones and a Microsoft Windows Mobile phone too. They all suck for using the Web. Fine for email and for texting, but really suck for using the Web.

Go see Google's Vic Gundotra (he's Vice President and runs a bunch of the teams that build things for mobile phones). He told me that usage on the iPhone is off the scale when compared to other phones.

Simply translated: people who have non-iPhone phones simply aren't using them for anything other than email. This is easily verified. Sit next to a Blackberry user and watch what they do. I do that all the time. All you see them doing is email and light Web use. Now sit next to an iPhone user and watch what they do. Much more heavily used on photos, maps, Web, and video.

An iPhone user is easier to reach and is easier to get to try new things. Plus, the iPhone app store makes it very easy for an app to be tried out and loaded.

But back to the Silicon Valley VC disease. It's the same disease that Microsoft execs have. Or, really, most big company execs, or worse yet, our government workers, have truth be told.

They won't adopt anything until it's safe and until there's a HUGE business reason to do it. It's why huge parts of our government are still run on paper. Why there isn't a database anywhere of all of our elected officials in the United States. Why Microsoft didn't compete with Google until too late. Why General Motors won't build great all-electric cars until after Tesla or Toyota beats them to the punch. Etc. Etc.

Luckily the Silicon Valley VC Disease is having less and less effect lately.

You can startup a company with very little cash, because you can build it on cloud-based services like Amazon's S3, which let you get started and show the world you're getting adoption even before you go for VC money.

And, luckily, not every VC has the Silicon Valley VC Disease. Lots invest in stupid, small, weird, ideas for platforms that only have a percent or two of market share. Go see Jeff Clavier, for instance. He's been doing that a lot lately. I met him in the office of Tapulous last week, which makes iPhone apps.

Why shouldn't you listen to Hornik and others who have Silicon Valley VC disease?

1. It's easier to start a company on new platforms. Why? Because the big money probably hasn't moved in yet, or at least they haven't become established.
2. People who buy new things are FAR EASIER to convince to buy other new things than people who have had the same stuff for years.
3. It's easier to build a brand on a new technology than it is to do that on an older, more established one (hey, everyone has a radio in their cars, but you don't see VC's funding new radio stations, do you? Why is that?)
4. The best, most transactional and monetizeable audiences are those that pick up new things. Think about it, would you rather have a customer like Dan Reis, one of the world's best architects or someone like my dad who still uses the same TV that he bought from me in the mid-1980s? My dad is a nice guy and very smart, but he's a horrible customer to have and is going to be very expensive to get to adopt something new.
5. It's a lot cheaper to get adoption when influencers (read bloggers and journalists and Twitterers and FriendFeeders) are talking about you. What are they talking about right now? iPhone apps. Look at Summize, the search engine Twitter just bought. What's one of the trending topics on the home page? iPhone. Get over it. They ain't talking about Nokia or Microsoft.

Anyway, I just find it interesting when VCs start telling people not to support a platform when there's lines around the world waiting to buy that platform. If everyone listened to that sentiment we'd never see any innovation in the world.

So, who is working to prove Hornik wrong? Drop me a line.

Oh, and David's a nice guy and throws great parties. Thanks David for letting me in last night and for giving me something interesting to blog about today. :-)

UPDATE: As usual lately a much more interesting conversation about this post is happening over on FriendFeed.

The Wordpress for iPhone app is looking pretty full featured. Both Wordpress.com and self-installed Wordpress blogs are supported, along with full tag and category support. Embedded Safari provides true previews, and posts are auto-recovered if your blogging is interrupted by a phone call. It even supports multiple blogs.

Not shabby. Price? Same as Wordpress: totally free.

Wordpress for iPhone [Official Site]

Here are the details you must be 21+ to attend and must be on the RSVP list for the event to get in.

When: Wednesday, August 20, 2008 - 6:30 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. EST

Where: Boulder Theater

What: A cocktail of TECH people

Price: FREE thanks to our sponsors listed below.

Sponsored by:

If you are interested in sponsoring or demoing at TECH cocktail Boulder 2 please contact the organizers Frank Gruber and Eric Olson ASAP at cofounder [at] techcocktail dot com.

CASE A
A public relations person starts working for a Bed & Breakfast in New England. The person comes up with the idea of inviting high profile A List bloggers up for an all expense paid weekend, flights, room & board, meals the whole shebang including activities are comp'd. In exchange they ask the bloggers if they had a good time please write about it on their blog and post some pictures to flickr. Total cost of the PR event $10K.

CASE B
An SEO starts working for a Bed & Breakfast in New England. The person comes up with the idea of buying some on topic text link advertising on travel related blogs. Total cost for 6 months of link advertising $10K

So I ask you dear readers and specifically you Matt Cutts what's the difference? At the end of the day $10K was converted into links. Why does Case A get rewarded and lauded as a success? Why does everyone involved in Case B get called out for being the scourge of the internet? Why are all of the websites in Case B penalized, filtered, or in some cases completely annihilated from any and all internet visibility, while the sites in Case A bask in their ego stroking navel gazing glory?

Why does Google aggressively go after the SEO's and ignore the PR people? Why do people continue to tolerate Google's double standards and two tiered justice?

The example presented in Case A has been examplified here to protect the innocent but if you don't think things like this are going on every day your kidding yourself. In fact Elisabeth Osmeloski wrote about this earlier this year (see Why All Links Are Paid Links in the Travel Trade). It's not just the travel industry, how many gadgets, cell phones, digital cameras, and even computers are sent high profile bloggers in exchange for visibility and links?

Hey Google Want to prove that you are being fair and shut me up? Get your human editors to review the top A list bloggers in the technorati 100. Look for posts where gifts were exchanged for links. Put your money where your mouth is and start banning or dinging them for the exact same behavior you are attacking sites in the paid link advertising space for. Start banning and blocking the A List attention whore bloggers, cut off their payola and side income. Something tells me they'll stop singing your praises and a few GB of free Gmail storage wont shut them up or solve the problem. How about it Google prove that you are fair and equal and that justice is blind, because from where I sit your rules are selectively enforced and you take an aggressive hard line stance against internet markters, while little Mary A List gets off scott free

This post originally came from Michael Gray on his SEO Blog.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.

Hey Matt Cutts Be Fair if You Are Going After Paid Links

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