everwas

a blog by Ian Kennedy

Category: Work

  • Yahoo cuts to the chase

    We’ve seen it played out over and over again. The internet has enabled consumers to go directly to the production plant for disintermediated product. Covered in detail in Michael Lewis’ book, Next, the internet has upset age old business models, putting raw materials within reach of the everyman and providing a platform for a thousand new business models to bloom. 2004 was another banner year for online vendors as more go with a source that, because of its virtuality, can offer better inventory and price that a brick & mortar counterpart. Amazon vs. the Mall; it’s like watching mountains crumble into the sea.

    Today’s announcement by Yahoo that it will source quotes directly from the stock exchanges is another notch towards the reinvention of the information industry. Reuters, the traditional source of market data, built its business on charging a premium for market data which it sourced from the markets, both in bulk from the exchanges, but also aggregated, from the banks that wanted to list their prices on the Reuters network. It is rare when you have a business model that allows you to charge not only for subscriptions but also for contributions. As any CEO of a public company will tell you, it is hard to fix something until it’s broke.

    “This significantly increases our ability to extend our brand outside of our network,” said Craig Forman, vice president of information and finance at Yahoo. “We will have more control of financial information that we can then distribute.”

    Depending upon the deal they cut with the exchanges, Yahoo may become the preferred provider of market data on the internet. Superior price and integration options are something that I’m sure they will aspire to and advertising can help offset their costs, an option that’s not part of Reuters’ corporate DNA. Abstracted to our earlier example, is Yahoo going to become the Amazon of Financial Data while Reuters continues to charge a premium for access to a relatively closed network of proprietary information? We certainly do live in interesting times.

  • New Communications Forum

    Just got back from two days at the New Communications Forum which was an interesting mix of old hand bloggers meeting with PR professionals to talk about the impact of blogging on the art of Public Relations. Lots of interest as everyone understands the potential of this new medium but we all realize that we’re grasping for a way to measure it in a way that it maps to the usual methods of getting the word out.

    Some highlights:

    • The Kryptonite/Bic pen scandal cost the company $10 million in just 10 days because they had to replace over 100,000 locks. That’s almost half of their $25 million annual sales.
    • Yahoo’s Searchblog went from 0 to 500 subscribers to it’s RSS feed in just 60 days.
    • “Email disseminates information, Blogs discuss information.” Neville Hobson
    • “RSS is like TiVo for the web.” Andy Lark
    • the blogosphere loves Bob Lutz as a CEO who “get’s it”
    • there’s money to be made in “blogsaulting”
    • the difference between a message board and a blog
    • stripes and checks don’t mix (inside joke with Stowe Boyd)
    • “blogerrific” – an new adjective coined by Tom Foremski to describe something that’s been improved with either RSS or blogging technology, i.e. the new, improved C|Net that now accepts Trackbacks.
    • “The days when you could control the message are over. Now the best you can hope to do is influence the conversation,” says Shel Holtz. I would add, this is why companies need to participate in the blogosphere with an active blog. If a person runs into a room at a party going full tilt, they are not going to have a hard time getting anyone to listen to them if they just stand at the transom shouting. They need to mingle and get to know people first.
    • the concept of “darkspots” on corporate websites. FedEx has one – it’s a blank area reserved on their top page for where they might put a tab to announce updates on a labor dispute that might impact shipping schedules. The area is kept free so that the tab can be put in place at a moments notice without disrupting the layout and design of the page.
    • it’s always great to see your company’s product being used in realtime to update the conference’s web site

    My favorite take away from the two days is Elizabeth Albrycht’s snappy answer to the “What’s the ROI on blogging,” question. Nail down and measure the “Investment” so that you can properly frame and measure the “Return.” If someone is investing time into posting a company blog, think of the time they are saving by not having to call or email everyone individually to maintain that a connection. Think also of all the new conversations that get started as a result of that post.

    ROI is going to be a hot topic as blogging gets evaluated as a tool for the corporation. What the industry needs is a new metric by which influence can be measured over time as corporate blogs are launched – it’s not page views, it’s not quite RSS subscribers either – we need a way to measure topic “buzz” and site “authority” – there’s a business opportunity there for someone.

  • Taquitos.net

    yahoorss_1.JPGNo lie here, click the screen shot on the left – the 12th most popular RSS feed on My Yahoo is Taquitos.net

    Let’s see, Techbargins.com. . . check, CNET News.com, ok, that seems right. Wired News, yes, I’ll take that. Braingle brain teasers – yep that might be fun . . . and – Taquitos.net? It’s even more popular than the NYT Business section! Either the geeks or the MyYahoo readers are eating way too many Doritos!

  • Google Video Search

    Google Labs just announced that they are now providing a video search engine. Details in a BBC article here. This is slightly different than the video search announced by Yahoo earlier in that is indexes the closed caption content provided with television shows and returns results that show where in television segment the search terms were spoken and then shows a screen capture from that segment.

    For an example, here’s a persistent search showing mentions of the word blogs.

    It’s still in the labs so the actual video footage is not available but if they do point to when the show aired and when you might be able to catch the segment again. If Google delivers on what they are writing about, this could be a version of Google acting as a gigantic, internet-enabled TiVo for the rest of us.

    More detail with screenshots here on the about page.

    UPDATE: According to CNet, Yahoo has been working on a similar index of closed caption video text of Bloomberg and BBC programs in their partnership with TVeyes. The article also mentions Blinkx but I couldn’t get it to pull up any meaningful results.

  • Technorati Tags

    Our friends at Technorati have launched a service that pulls together a view of the blogosphere through the lens of user-defined tags. The growth of user tags in services such as Flickr and Del.icio.us have broken through the dilemma of the Semantic Web which was struggling for a standard taxonomy to help define it.

    The debate over a "folksonomy" vs. a structured taxonomy is ongoing but this new development, coupled with the blogger megaphone effect may push things over the tipping point in favor of the 80/20 efficiency of user-generated tags. Google came to become the resource of choice much to the chagrin of professional librarians that knew that no one really scanned past the first few pages of results. The search engine relevance ranking convenience eventually won out over the professional researcher’s judgement – lament the loss but people are lazy and will always go for the quick and easy solution, even heard journalists talk about Google as their research tool of choice leaving one to worry about what they miss.

    Clay Shirky comments:

    Any comparison of the advantages of folksonomies vs. other, more
    rigorous forms of categorization that doesn’t consider the cost to
    create, maintain, use and enforce the added rigor will miss the actual
    factors affecting the spread of folksonomies. Where the internet is
    concerned, betting against ease of use, conceptual simplicity, and
    maximal user participation, has always been a bad idea.

    But in the ever increasing amounts of data that are being thrown at us, user-generated tags and a way to harvest them is a necessary evil. Sure it’s going to miss sometimes, tags will be mis-applied, misspelled, and mis-interpreted, but in order to get things tagged at all, you need to harness the power of the many. You can’t ask people to consult some taxonomy guide nor can you ask them to label their docs using a form that gets in the way of the data (does anyone ever fill out the "properties" of their Microsoft Word files?)

    Play around with it. Try some tags. Click here to see Technorati’s harvest for the tag macworld

    In the meantime, I’ll do my bit and will load up this post as related to:



     

  • Steve Case talks his game

    Steve Case talks his game

    One thing I love about being in the Bay Area is that there are so many interesting events related to my industry going on all the time. Just up the street MacWorld is going off as Steve Job’s counterpoint to the CES show in Las Vegas last week. A lot of us at Six Apart are Mac fans so it’s not surprising that one of our developers went on record to gush about Apple’s latest.

    Last night I headed down to Stanford to catch Howard Rheingold’s Literacy of Cooperation class and ran into Niall Kennedy who told me about a Walt Mossberg/Steve Case event over at the Computer History Museum. The format was an interview and Steve retold stories from the early days all the way up through the AOL/Time Warner merger.

    Steve got his early training in marketing at P&G and one of the first lessons he learned was the value of the “free sample” in the consumer market -now we know the origin of those giveaway CDs. We also heard about his first foray at running online forums in which his strategy was to bundle access with the computer manufacturers and also make the “peripheral” modem part of the standard PC bundle. Apple was first, Tandy (Radio Shack), and then IBM. It was only when “the Apple deal blew up in our face” that Steve was forced to remove the Apple brand from the service that the AOL brand was born. Apple basically pushed Steve into the consumer business.

    As someone who built a business on member-generated content and later the Chairman of a traditional media company, I was curious on Steve’s opinion of weblogs. There was a Q & A segment at the end and I took the opportunity to ask Steve this question. He was strongly in favor of this explosion of new voices and predicted that the media brands of tomorrow will rise up out of these new voices. When I followed up to ask about the role of editors in this new world, he noted that, “once you give the tools for everyone to be a publisher, you find out that not everyone is a very good publisher. There will always be a need for editors.”

    [picture by Niall Kennedy]

  • Commuting Choices

    At long last our offices are now up in San Francisco so I am no longer taking the automobile down the freeway to work each day. Now the choices of how to get to the office abound:

    1. The bus can take me from Alameda to the Transbay bus terminal. There is a stop about five blocks from my house for the morning and the return lets me off just three blocks from home. On the San Francisco end, it’s a good 15 minute walk to the office through a dreary (in the rain at least) fringes of the warehouse district. There are three different bus routes to choose from, including a fancy coach-like bus (The “OX” Express) that has cushy seats and nice lighting.

    Cost? $3/each way, $100/month if you buy a monthly pass.

    Pros? Can drop Tyler off at school on the way to the bus stop if we motivate early enough. It’ll be nice to walk with him to school each morning when the weather gets better.

    Cons? The folks that ride the bus seem a bit ground down – usually clutching crumpled up and slightly damp newspapers. With fogged up glasses and overstuffed shoulder bags, these are the worker bees.

    2. There are two ferries, one from the West End of the Island and the other over in Harbor Bay. I’ve only taken the Harbor Bay but it certainly is a treat. A 15-minute bike ride along a bike trail (no traffic lights, beautiful views of the bay) takes you to the ferry dock where boats leave on the half-hour. The riders are definitely the movers and shakers, overheard conversations are of family vacations in the tropics and visits to ivy league alumni events.

    Cost? Pricy at $5.50/each way, includes a “gasoline surcharge”, $150 if you buy a monthly pass.

    Pros? If you absolutely must ignore the views, they have wireless. They sell coffee in the morning and beers at the bar for the ride home.

    Cons? There’s a sign up for an emergency email list which indicates to me that this service is not totally reliable. At $150/month you’re talking about a $1800/year commitment.

    3. I could still take a car to work and most likely will on days when I have to drive somewhere later in the day. It’s a real grind but do-able if you go either *real* early or after 9 am. Trouble with going after 9 am is that all the good city parking spots are gone so you end up paying for it on the other end. Going home is a drag too b/c of the traffic on the bridge, bring good music for the radio!

    Cost? $3 going into the city on the tolls or you can go free in the carpool lane if you pick up 2 riders on the way over. Parking is the kicker – some places advertise an “early bird special” of $8/day but you need to get there fast. Usually it’s more like $10 – $15.

  • Six Apart & Live Journal

    The internet has been on fire the past few days here at Six Apart sales with the announcement that we are acquiring Live Journal. I’ll be the lazy meta man and link to our very own Jay Allen who’s done a great job of pulling together the “must reads” on the topic.

    I will continue to plug Movable Type and TypePad as the best publishing tools for the corporate market because these products are best suited to achieve most business objectives that I hear about.

    Continue to contact me if you’re interested in:

    • Purchasing a custom license of Movable Type for a large number of seats
    • Hosting Movable Type as an ISP or Hosting partner

    Do not contact me for Live Journal partnership opportunities. Our intention is to do no more than touch it up a bit; smooth the edges & nothing more.

    LiveJournal is going to be a separate brand from the Six Apart products much like there are Mercurys and Mustangs in the Ford family. Six Apart makes publishing tools that can be used to broadcast a message out to the world at large, Live Journal makes a collaboration & communication tool best used to keep members of a group in touch with one another. Weblogs & Live Journal are as different in application as email and IM – yes, they both communicate in the broadest sense but if you use both, they difference in use morphs the “culture” built up around them.

    If anyone appreciates that, we do.

    The funny thing is, you can have a weblog and a LiveJournal. The fact that some of the funniest and smartest people I know have both only reaffirms that we shouldn’t limit ourselves to one sort of publishing/communication mode.

    – Mena’s Corner

  • Office Party

    dsc02512.jpgOn Friday, my company held its Christmas Party in its new offices in San Francisco which are getting spiffed up for us to move into next week. The place was decked out in holiday lights with screens for a DJ to play slow motion snowboarding movies as background to his mix. It looked smashing. I was too busy to take many pictures but my moblogging sister covered for me.

    Julia couldn’t wait to wear the dress she picked out for the event ($10 at the local consignment store), sleeping with the dress by her side every evening of the week leading up to the party.

    Towards the end, there was a secret Santa gift exchange. Tyler won a Moleskin notebook (which he gave to dad), some funky socks (which he gave to mom), and a $10 Starbucks gift card (which he kept for himself). Julia scored the game, Operation to the Ooohs & Ahhhs of the collective crowd. When was the last time you played this game?