The Conversation

Sense, Common Sense & Nonsense

Val Landi's Weblog, Tuesday March 7

A year ago or so my good friend and colleague, Web 2.0 evangelist, Tracy Sheridan hammered me because I had never read Seth Godin’s famous marketing tome Purple Cow (Tracy was featured in his follow up ebook, 99 Cows—Companies that are Going for the Edges)

It‘s taken me a year, but I’ve finally caught up with Seth’s thinking thanks to Tracy’s post today.

Don’t miss this video of Godin at the Googleplex!

Watching the video, I see what Tracy’s passion for Seth’s message was all about. He’s not only a terrific speaker, but he’s a great and clear thinker as well. His three major takeaways are that all great marketers are great storytellers, great companies make something worth talking about, and that it’s at the edges where people notice you.

Godin goes back to 1999 and compared Yahoo with Google. Yahoo, busy establishing itself as the uber-Portal had something like 116 entries and links on it’s homepage vs. the 1999 version of Google, which is the exact same minimalist homepage we use and see today. What did Google do that was so brilliant? They differentiated themselves from the pack and in the process created a great product that was worth talking about, and they haven’t stopped since with GMail, Google Earth, Google Maps and Google DNA search all following in march step. Great stories, all.

I  agree one hundred percent with Godin in his conviction that all the serious innovation and value creation occur at the edges, that the edge is the new core. We’re seeing examples of the this Web 2.0 value creation every day for the past year on the posts at TechCrunch and Memorandum and at Fickr, del.iciou.us, 37 Signals, Skype, Pandora. All companies that make sense and provide value and offer solutions to existing problems. All are examples of pure common sense.

The Web 2.0 boom is also creating some nonsense at the edges, where VC dollars are being spent on ventures that don’t solve existing problems or adhere to a basic common sense test.

Edgeio, oddly enough founded by TechCrunch  media entrepreneur Michael Arrington and edge-guru Keith Teare, is one of the new edge companies that falls into the nonsense camp.

Edgeio offers a service that allows you to tag your blog posts with listings that let you sell personal items and or post jobs.

As Nick Carr, former editor of Harvard Business Review wrote:

“Cofounded by Michael Arrington, the madam of the great Web 2.0 brothel TechCrunch, Edgeio gathers specially tagged classified ads from sundry RSS feeds, aggregates and categorizes them, and then republishes them at its own central site. (Or, as it snappily says of itself: "Edgeio dynamically organizes listings published from RSS enabled websites making them discoverable via the Edgeio website and through an open set of web services.") So, let's say I finally decide to unload the old canoe that's been patiently wasting away on sawhorses beside my garage for the last three years. I could post a little ad on this blog, wrap the text in a special tag and, thanks to the genius of Dave Winer, it would soon show up among various other disused personal flotation devices over at Edgeio. Now, of course, I have no desire whatsoever to start sticking classified ads on my blog, but never mind that - it's the elegance of the idea that counts.”

Carr takes out his mallet to hammer the final nails of common sense into the lid of the Edgeio coffin:

“But most of all there are the two problems that Mike at Techdirt highlights: a lack of barriers to competition (the downside to building a company on "an open set of web services" is that your business model is really easy to copy) and a lack of meaningful differentiation from the customer's perspective ("We hadn't heard of people complaining that Craigslist and eBay were too centralized," says Techdirt, dryly). It's hard to see exactly how Edgeio will pry a lot of customers away from an entrenched player like Craigslist or protect itself from a head-on assault by, say, Google or Microsoft or Yahoo."

To sum up, Edgeio enters a crowded market with “a ton of pizzazz” and not an ounce of common sense.

(BTW, I went to both Arrington's personal blog, Crunchnotes,, and Keith Teare's as well. Oddly, again, neither had Edgeio listings for inflatable or any other type of personal devices, 63' Chevys, used gadgets or other sundry items).

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Smoke Signals: Business 2.0's "NextNet"

Val Landi's Weblog, Friday March 3rd

Business 2.0 has a great feature on the NextNet and the top 25 Web 2.0 platform companies.

Here's how it's described:

"The Next Net will encompass all digital devices, from PC to cell phone to television. Its defining characteristics include the ability to interact instantaneously with any of the more than 1 billion Web users across the globe. The Next Net is deeply collaborative: People from across the planet can work together on the same task, and products or tools can be rapidly tweaked and improved by the collective wisdom of the entire online world."

The top 25 are presented in four broad categories:

Social Media (Digg, Last.fm, Newsvine, Tagworld, YouTube)
Mashups and Filters (Bloglines, Eurekster, Simply Hired, Technorati, Trulia, Wink)
The New Phone (Fonality, SIPphone, iotum, Vivox)
The Webtop (JotSpot, 30Boxes, 37Signals, Writely, Zimbra)
Under the Hood (Brightcove, Jigsaw, Salesforce.com, SimpleFeed, Six Apart). 

The editors added an incumbent to watch for each category (Yahoo, Google, eBay/Skype, Microsoft, and Amazon, respectively).

The defining DNA code of this broadband-enabled ecosystem will the ability to interact instantaneously with any of the more than 1 billion Web users across the globe by evolving instant-voice-messaging and instant-video-messaging apps that will make today's e-mail and IM seem like Indian smoke signals.

The hottest, most productive space of the “NextNet” is the ability to create an endless menu of mix and match: anyone with a touch of a geek-gene and a browser can access vast stores of information, mash it up, and serve it in new ways, to a few people or a few hundred million.

The most useful sites will be those that either help mash up content from other parts of the Web or act as a filter for the overwhelming mountains of information at our fingertips.

My personal favorite is Eurekster: terrible name, but great potential. Eurekster is a search mashup, a do-it-yourself search engine, or swicki, allows you to define sites you want to search, post the results on your blog or website, and get a cut of any search ads your audience clicks on.

From a pure, marketing professional’s POV, SimpleFeed is totally cool, enabling companies to use RSS feeds as an opt-in marketing tool. The feeds can be customized to each recipient and tracked individually for both internal messaging and external marketing campaigns. RSS will be the next great ad platform. SimpleFeed is in a great place.

In exchange for your own contact list, Jigsaw will provide access to a virtual Rolodex of some 150,000 companies and managers. It sounds a bit counter intuitive to me. Salesmen's contact lists are like the books at Tony Soprano's olive oil company: there are always two sets; one for me, the real, coveted for my-eyes-only list and there's the public company, Goldmine list. We'll see...

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Reuters & the Live Web

Val Landi's Weblog, Monday February 27

One of the more fascinating topics we discussed at my Friday NYC  brainstorming session with the interactive team at one of the world’s largest ad agencies was Reuters brilliant example of Web 2.0 marketing.

Reuters is hosting a Financial Glossary wiki that will put them at the center of their industry by creating a shared language and critical resource.

Here’s how Reuters describes the venture:

“The Reuters Financial Glossary has been developed to give you quick and easy access to definitions of terms and concepts related to the financial markets. It is a community-created collaborative project, based upon a published book written and edited by Reuters Editorial staff. Now anyone can edit, build upon and add entries to the glossary to create a helpful source of information.

“The Reuters Financial Glossary covers foreign exchange, treasury, money and capital markets, mortgage-based assets, equities, commodities, sovereign and corporate debt, technical analysis, and macro-economic terms. Also included are a number of IT related references that will help the transition into the new digital business world. It has a simple alphabetical format and is fully cross-referenced.

“We encourage you to contribute to the Glossary so the content stays fresh, relevant and improves over time. In the spirit of the Wikipedia , we ask contributors to live by some basic principles, including neutral point of view , only using verifiable information and keeping the wiki free from abuses such as personal attacks or copyright infringement.”

So, what’s the upside for Reuters?

It’s simple yet profound: they are putting themselves at the center of their industry in cultivating a community, a shared language.

This is community marketing at its best – as the Web 2.0 platforms and tools moves innovation and value creation to the edge, to people as both creators and customers, trust and influence also shifts from institutions to peers.

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Brainstorming the "Live Web"

Val Landi's Weblog, Thursday February 23

I have a “brainstorming” session tomorrow in NYC with the Interactive Technology Marketing team of one of the nation’s largest advertising agencies. The focus is on content as “demand generator” for several Fortune 500 technology firms.

My focus will be to lead a discussion on what Doc Searls, one of the early pioneers of blogging and co-author of the Cluetrain Manifesto, calls the LiveWeb vs. the static websites of the pre-Web 2.0 Era. We’ll be discussing blogs, expert-led interactive communities, podcasts, and RSS and tagging as both integrated and standalone content delivery platforms.

The market segment focus will be creating content for small business communities within vertical segments.

One of special areas of interest is looking at RSS as a micro-targeted advertising platform. It should prove to be a very interesting conversation. I’ll let you know how it goes in Monday’s blog.

PS: I’m also bringing 10 copies of Naked Conversations (check out my earlier blog The Naked and the Dead) by Robert Scobel and Shel Israel as a gift for the assembled VIPs.

Barrier Reefs, Blogs & the Web 2.0 World

Val Landi's Weblog, Tuesday February 21

“The Future is already here it is just unevenly distributed.” William Gibson.

The recent Slate article –Twilight of the Blogs: Are They Over as a Business-- triggered an image of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef and the nature of change.

The Great Barrier Reef, the world’s largest coral reef system and one of the great natural wonders of the world, stretches for 1250 miles off the northeastern coast bordering the Coral Sea. This intricate network of reefs and islands, built over thousands of years covers about 14,000 square miles.

It is the world’s largest structure made by living organisms.

It’s also the world’s largest skeleton—like all barrier reefs, the new, living coral thrives at the extreme edge, at the reef’s violent churning, nutrient-rich intersection with the continental shelf.

The barrier reef’s living edge is a perfect metaphor for the violent change and transformation the Web is having on all forms of traditional media and marketing.

A decade ago, at Ester Dyson’s annual PC Forum, I listened to Paul Saffo of the Institute of the Future talk about the importance of what he called “field events”—symbolic  harbinger’s of massive change soon to come.

This past week, a field event occurred that symbolizes in a nutshell the new landscape of the media and marketing world we’re living in.

The concept of the edge is fundamental to this transformation.

In our networked Web 2.0 world the edge is people, where the edge plays the role of both consumer and creator. The some 28 million blogs in existence are a perfect example of the edge as both subject and object, as consumer and creator.

Keith Teare, the founder of Edgio, has observed that the growing role of the edge as the originating point of content and the end point of its consumption forces the redefinition of the function and meaning of the core or center of the network.

“Today’s edge is tomorrow’s core” is the mantra of John Hegel and John Seely Brown. The edge is where the action is in terms of growth, innovation, and value creation.

Successful companies thriving at edge of the Internet’s unparalleled distribution systems will by definition be pull models that treat people not as passive consumers whose needs are anticipated and shaped by centralized decision makers, but as tech-savvy networked creators and customers.

This past Friday, TechCrunch held a party –with open invites via a Wiki that closed out the 300+ attendee list within hours of posting—at founder Michael Arrington’s house in Atherton to honor Robert Scoble and Shel Israel, authors of Naked Conversations—How blogs are changing the way businesses talk with customers.

What the event symbolized for me was the déjà vu, parallel-world shift, and contrast from the first Internet Era and the advertising and marketing revolution it ushered in to the current Web 2.0 world—The Internet Summit ’99 in Laguna Nigel vs. Web 2.0 Conference Fall 05 and TechCrunch Party 06;  The Clue Train Manifesto in 99 vs. Naked Conversations ’06;  Industry Standard magazine and Cnet in 99 vs. TechCrunch and Tech Memorandum blogs as the new industry news bibles in 06; Stewart Alsop InfoWorld industry pundit '99 vs. Rob Hof and John Battelle, bloggers '06; the Yahoo Search Directory in 99 vs. Technorati and Google Blog Search in ’06.

The differential in ’06 vs. ’99 is sustainability. The marketing platforms and opportunities offered by the new weblog media and RSS and podcasting are following the Newtonian Laws of media, the evolution from the general to the specific, from the mass to the personal, from push to pull, from the center to the edge.

LeadershipCasting

Val Landi's Weblog, Thursday February 16

I’m enthralled with the potential of podcasting.

Most of the newly minted Web 2.0 companies are being run by visionary founders and their 1st generation teams.

Podcasting is a perfect vehicle for emerging brands to gain mindshare and aggregate and convert a community of marketplace evangelists.

The key to developing and launching a successful in-house podcasting center is to hire or identify a brilliant audio-skilled storyteller and interviewer and engage your team in weekly or daily riffs on your technology platforms, human interest bios, or cool new product releases.

It’s a perfect platform to hold conversations with partners and industry experts on trends and issues impacting your market segment.

Think of the fascinating programs that could be built around interviews with a Guy Kawasaki, Edgeio founders Keith Teare and Michael Arrington, search guru John Battelle, Technocrati’s  David Sifry, Jeff Clavier, Microsoft’s Robert Scobel, blogging pioneer Doc Searls or Dave Winer, NetIQ's Marc Andrews, VoIP pioneer Jeff Pulver, Pandora’s Joe Kennedy, Salesforce.com’s Marc Benioff, NetSuite’s Zach Nelson, Trip Hawkins,  Google’s Larry Page, or Skyp’s Nikolas Zennstrom.

Just about every company in our industry has a star of this quality that you can use to engage in conversation to gain mindshare.

But only if it’s done properly.

In May 2000, I launched Redband Broadcasting to create streamed audio programs integrated within then state-of-the-art GUIs that we created for major media and entertainment companies.

Redband, a Sony venture, folded after our world went south post 9-11.

The takeaway lesson I learned was the critical importance of hiring CNN or NPR-level talent to deliver both the content and production values needed to enthrall and hold an audience of professionals.

World-class production and delivery skills are precisely the DNA missing in 99% of today’s podcast programs. Many are downright embarrassing.

Great blogging talent does not translate into or guarantee great podcasts. The best example of how to do it right is John Furrier's InfoTalk Podcast: daily interviews with the leading voices of Silicon Valley.

One of my major tasks in the month ahead will be apply these lessons as we integrate best-of-class podcasting platforms into our soon to be released Realtime NexMedia suite.

Archimedes & Web 2.0 Marketing Levers

In my last Realtime blog, I talked about the evolution of media from standalone products to interactive platforms.

My major function at Realtime is to design and integrate Web 2.0 marketing tools into a publishing platform that allows IT companies to engage in meaningful conversations with their customers and prospects where they live and work: online in expert-led conversations, blogs, and podcasts—all based on the first law of  Web 2.0 publishing:

Using interactive two-way platforms to create great user-generated content. 

I was doing some heavy digging on the Web over the weekend, searching for new points of view and tools that our industry needs to engage in conversations with their customers and came across Michael Arrington and Keith Teare’s Archimedes Ventures.

Arrington is also the publisher of TechCrunch, a leading news-source for Web 2.0 ventures. Teare is a true visionary thinker and  the founder and former CEO of Realnames. Together, they are doing some of the best "future of media thinking" and investing on the planet.

Archimedes views the evolution of the Internet morphing from a publishing platform into a transport for a diverse set of human interactions.

They see, mirroring our view at Realtime, the Web 2.0 world dominated by two major trends:

Firstly the trend towards the two-way web, where new content is published in large quantities and in real time by millions of people at the edge of the network (the edge defined as the user, customer, and prospect universe).

Secondly the trend for the separation of content from its old forms. Text is no longer necessarily embedded in a web page, it can be syndicated through RSS or ATOM. Audio is no longer tied to the radio network. It can be Podcast or streamed or downloaded. TV shows are no longer necessarily tied to TV Networks. They can be delivered on demand across IP networks.

These trends will change the business models of several platforms. For example (I’ve quoted verbatim):

Publishing 2.0

Weblogs are simply the first incarnation of self-publishing. They have all the limitations of most first versions. Archimedes will be working with others to help develop subsequent, and more flexible and powerful tools for self-publishing in all mediums - text, audio and video.

Search 2.0

Searching old content by crawling and indexing it was the right solution for the early Internet. AltaVista first, and then others, did a great job of this. Google perfected it and applied a relevance and ranking algorithm that made it stand out from the crowd. However, as the velocity of change of data has increased, and the proportion of new data in the whole has grown, indexing and crawling appear dated. Relevance measured by links seems irrelevant for data only just published. Other measures of relevance need to emerge. Search will change more in the next 10 years than it did in the first 10 years of the Internet.

The Steve Jobs, Small-is-the-New-Big World

Val Landi's Weblog, Thursday February 9

Is Steve Jobs too much a product guy to succeed as the head of a major media conglomorate at a time when media products need to become media platforms?

John Hegel, the former McKinsey consultant and acclaimed author asks this question in his current Edge Perspectives blog.

The key to Hegel’s question is his observation, which we at Realtime believe is fundamental to building a 21st century media company, that in a world of scarce attention, media must be an interactive platform, not a standalone product that you buy and then read, or view, or listen to in the specific way that the content creator intended.

Our new media world is a rip, mashup, blog, podcast, RSS delivery, small-is-the-new-big, world.

Media platforms use the Internet to build relationships with specific market segments and communities in a world dominated and driven by attention scarcity rather than distribution scarcity, which empowered the old top-down push world of the dying media conglomerates (the current Time-Warner/Carl Icahn/Bruce Wasserstein proxy battle is not a historical blip—as my grandfather used to say: if you find a turtle on a fencepost, it’s not an accident). 

21st Century media platforms are designed to be built upon – they create opportunities for the original creator, for third parties, and for your customers and prospects to extend, enhance and tailor the content in ways never anticipated. As Hegel stresses, offered as a platform, content can create far more value than any equivalent standalone product.

I, for one, think that if anyone can walk the bridge from a product-centric media world to a relationship-centric media world, it’s Jobs. Steve is at the top of my list of people I’d most enjoying sharing a leisurely diner with (Well, sorry Steve, but on second thought, maybe second to a dinner with Uma Thurman).

But as Hegel underscores: the new media creators and their sponsors will need to develop the skills required to use the deep understanding of their markets to become ever more helpful in connecting them with content (and other relationships) regardless of who produced the content.

The mindset shift required to do this is not trivial; neither is the opportunity.

Apples, Oranges & Monkeys

Val Land's Weblog, Tuesday February 7

It happened when the PC and Mac was adopted at the revolutionary grassroots level by corporate America.

I remember vividly an ad that ran in the computer industry trade rags back in 1987: “MIS Director Buys Mac, Keeps Job.” It signaled the acceptance of the personal computer as a competitive asset in corporate America.

It happened in 1994 when Netscape introduced on-the-fly display of webpages, where text and graphics appeared on the screen as the web page downloaded.

It happened when Google perfected their ranking algorithm and changed the face of search.

It happened when Apple introduced the iPod and changed the physics of the music industry.

It happened this month when Arctic Monkeys Whatever People Say I am, That’s What I’m Not reached the top of the charts with some 363,735 over-the-counter sales during its first week of release. Downloads from iTunes and other online venues will likely push the total over 400,000.

The biggest names in the music industry must now bow to the young Sheffield band whose records are distributed by an independent label. The Beatles’ 1963 debut Please Please Me spent 30 weeks at No 1 but took more than a year to sell 500,000 copies.

And they did this by bypassing the music industry, relying on the Web, free downloads, playing live gigs and word of mouth.

But they’ve done more than set a new record, they’ve created a new model that allows emerging artists to bypass the dysfunctional roadblocks of a broken industry.

The lesson here is starkly simple: break the rules, disrupt your market, and capture market share by engaging your prospects virally where they live: on the Web, on blogs, on podcasts, and live, at seminal, core events.

Thoughts on the Web 2.0 Boom

Val Landi's Weblog: Friday, February 3

“Please, God, just one more bubble!”

Read bumper stickers in Palo Alto and other hotspots on the Silicon Valley map.

I almost got a case of hives when I read this opening line of Chris Anderson’s feature article in the February Wired. But, thank God, Anderson was feeling the same, saying "be careful what you wish for."

Anderson, Wired’s editor in chief and author of The Long Tail blog, observes that it’s getting wild again in the Valley.

This time it’s the Web 2.0 boom. Anyone doubting the number and growth of new Web 2.0 companies should go to Michael Arrington’s TechCrunch blog and read the past week or two’s postings. You’re guaranteed a third-degree migrane trying to put all the pieces together into a coherent picture.

But this time the good news is that it’s a boom with solid underlying economics and expectations.

Further good news is that advances in core Web 2.0 content formats and distribution channels—blogging,tagging, RSS, podcasting-- will continue to empower users and accelerate the opportunities for creative conversations with the marketplace that will allow smart emerging companies to fill functional niches.

Like the first Internet boom, which was triggered by the Yahoo IPO in fall of ’98, the early stage of the Web 2.0 boom was underscored by the Google IPO this past fall.

But unlike the original boom, which spawned instant moguls like Killer Yap, Mark Cuban, who sold Broadcast.com to Yahoo for stock valued at some $4.5 billion that, had he sold three years later, probably would have been worth some $460,000 (ditto for Geocities and others of the pre-Bust Era), the valuations this time around are seriously more sober.

Compare Cuban’s haul with that of Flickr’s founder’s sale to Yahoo, reported in the $20-30 million range; ditto for tagging startup de.lic.ious.

This time around, as Andersons emphasize, things are saner with real marketplace values and functionality. He cites several reasons for the new, saner look and feel:

1. Technology adoption has continued at a torrid pace (and even accelerated at times) despite the bust. It's hard to find a technology-adoption projection from 1999 that hasn't come true. Meanwhile, broadband is now maintsream and the digital-media boom sparked by the iPod and iTunes has blown through even the most aggressive forecasts.

2. The sunk costs of the dotcom era make the economics of entrepreneurship more favorable. In the bad old days, companies bankrupted themselves building out their fiber-optic networks. We're now enjoying supercheap bandwidth. So, too, for storage, screens, and a host of other technologies that are benefiting from profligate '90s-era investment and research.

3. Open source software has come of age, and computer hardware will soon cost less than the electricity it takes to run it. The result: “industrial-strength servers that are cheaper than desktop PCs . Or, if you prefer, you can buy hardware and software even more cheaply as a hosted service (there's that inexpensive bandwidth again).”

At the end of the day, you can start a company today for a fraction of what people spent five years ago. Companies are starting small and lean and staying that way - no more blowing the first-round funding on SuperBowl ads and South-of-Market parties. As a result, Anderson points out, they're hitting break-even sooner.

In this new environment, young companies like Realtime can grow organically. That means less venture capital is needed - and that's a key reason this boom is different. Less venture capital, Anderson stresses, leads to fewer venture capitalists hustling for early exits at high valuations, which “reduces the pressure to go public and translates to fewer undercooked companies launching IPOs on hype alone.”