Wordyard

Hand-forged posts since 2002

Archives

About

Greatest hits

JPG Magazine drama

by

Derek Powazek has a distressing post about what, sadly, is a fairly common small-business story: Powazek and his wife, Heather Champ, started a cool little photography magazine built around contributions from a community of users. Both of them have a little experience in the online community-building area, and their magazine, JPG, was a smart experiment in combining the talents of online contributors to produce an offline (i.e., paper) magazine. (I’ve known them both for several years and have high respect for their work.)

A little startup company formed around JPG, Powazek formed a partnership with a friend who’d helped build the site’s software, and they took some investment from a tech-publishing mogul. I think you know where this is heading: there was a falling out, and Powazek and Champ have now left the company and the magazine. (There’s a Metafilter discussion.)

As Powazek tells it (and Champ confirms), the dispute was chiefly over their friend’s desire to expunge the record of the first six issues of the magazine’s history. On the face of it that’s a dumb idea. Presumably the partner who now runs the company will step forward and tell his side of the story, but it will take a lot of telling to make that look like anything other than a petty or stupid move: At best it places some wrongheaded notion of market-positioning above honesty, and at worst it’s an effort to revise the company’s story for financial/ownership reasons. A publishing company’s archive is its history. With Salon, we’ve kept our earliest issues live on the Web in all their crude glory; a lot of faces have come and gone since then, some acrimoniously, but we’ve never taken down a whole issue or removed an executive’s bio.

No matter how you cut it, this sort of fight sets a company on a lousy course: users suspect foul play, and often they’re right. The emotions are like those in a messy divorce. The people involved feel it’s difficult to tell the whole story; sometimes (as is the case with Powazek) they still have a stake in the company they’ve left, and are torn — they want their baby to prosper but they’re angry at no longer having custody.

Powazek draws the right lessons from his experience (roles and responsibilities — like, “Who’s the CEO?” — really matter; “communication between partners is mandatory”). But the larger lesson, I think, is that, no matter how idealistic you are when you start a company, the moment you take on investors, everything changes. You may still be an idealist, but the people around you are thinking about maximizing return. No matter what they say, you’d better assume that — or you’re likely to be disappointed, or even cheated.

LATE UPDATE: In the last couple days Paul Cloutier (Powazek’s business partner) and Jason deFillippo (the company’s CTO) have both posted about this story from the other side, and, no surprise, there are multiple perspectives here, and it’s nearly impossible for an outsider to get a clear fix. (Derek has more too.) It’s sad to see all this bad blood flow.
[tags]startups, publishing, online community, derek powazek, heather champ, jpg magazine[/tags]

Snail mail: do I hear a shell crunching?

by

Postal mail has been on a slow downward spiral for some time, but it seems to me these new postal rates represent the acceleration of that process.

As email eats away at one end of the service and FedEx, UPS et al. chomp away at the other, the Postal Service’s business shrinks to the center — remnant bills that can’t be paid electronically, personal cards, and commercial messages (mostly unwanted credit card pitches that can become identity-theft bait and forest-devastating catalogs).

I suppose the new rules doubling the fees for bigger envelopes and so on represent the Post Office’s desperate effort to keep bringing revenue in on a dwindling base of use. But it’s a sure way to drive people away: Now there’s one less reason to hesitate about overnighting that full-size 8 1/2 x 11 envelope — who’ll want to scratch their heads and figure out how much to pay?

Too bad. As a teenaged publisher of mimeographed magazines in the 1970s, I was a bulk user of postal services, and there was something wonderful about how you could count on your six-sheets-stapled zine getting where it was going in the continental U.S. with a single stamp. Who knows how such publications would fit into this new postage world — but they’ve pretty much all gone Web anyway.

Links for May 11th

by

Chevron’s big pile

by

The current favored information-overload coping mechanism is exemplified by Gmail: Don’t bother sorting or deleting. Storage space is cheap. Life is too short to take out the info-trash. Just let everything accumulate in one big pile and use tags and search tools to get what you need.

The “one big pile” method has the overwhelming appeal of liberating us from the role of digital janitor. (The principle lies at the heart of David Weinberger’s new book Everything is Miscellaneous — more on that soon, since I’m interviewing Weinberger for Salon.) But our opportunities to employ it remain limited. Gmail lets us treat our email as one big pile. Delicious lets us treat our bookmarks that way; Flickr, our photos.

But the biggest piles of all can be found on our hard disks. And they remain nearly impossible to treat in “big pile” mode. Google Desktop gives us an inkling, but its uses are limited. WinFS was supposed to transform the Windows file system into a Web 2.0-compliant, metadata-rich delight, but it’s vaporware. ITunes relieves us of managing our music files, but that’s just one corner of the personal-data universe.

And if it’s this bad for each of us as individuals, it’s way worse for big companies. Yesterday the Wall Street Journal featured a story by Pui-Wing Tam, titled “Cutting Files Down to Size,” about Chevron’s data-overload problem. The company’s store of office data is growing 60 percent a year; it’s got 1,250 terabytes today.

The article paints an alarmingly rich picture of the company’s problem, but is not nearly so convincing about the solution. Chevron is trying to cut back on document overload by deploying Microsoft’s SharePoint, so that instead of multiplying email attachments, all the people who use a particular document can work off a single copy. That’s just fine, but it can’t begin to be enough. With stuff that’s tagged as lower-priority, Chevron will begin deleting after 90 days. Its new plan “will require a team of 250 staffers and nearly two years.”

The Chevron exec in the article concludes by noting that “Half the battle will be changing people’s behavior.” Good luck. Asking people to do the clerical work of organizing their computer files is a losing battle. Better to try to deploy tools that help them do their work more easily — and maybe get the files organized as a side benefit along the way.
[tags]chevron, information overload, information management, data management, wall street journal[/tags]

Ambiguity near and far

by

In Dreaming in Code I wrote a lot about the difference between ambiguity in programming, where it is often a source of trouble, and in “natural” languages (i.e., English or French or Mandarin), where it is often a source of value.

Jason Kottke points to this fascinating essay by Perl creator Larry Wall, in which Wall distinguished between “local” and “distant” ambiguities:

People thrive on ambiguity, as long as it is quickly resolved. Generally, within a natural language, ambiguity is resolved rapidly using recently spoken words and topics. Pronouns like “it” refer to things that are close by, syntactically speaking. Perl is full of little ambiguities that people never even notice because they’re resolved so rapidly. For instance, many terms and operators in Perl begin with identical characters. Perl resolves them based on whether it’s expecting to see a term or an operator, just as a person would. If you say 1 & 2, it knows that the & is a bitwise AND, but if you say &foo, it knows that you’re calling subroutine “foo”.

In contrast, many strongly typed languages have “distant” ambiguity. C++ is one of the worst in this respect, because you can look at a + b and have no idea at all what the + is doing, let alone where it’s defined. We send people to graduate school to learn to resolve distant ambiguities.

[tags]larry wall, perl, ambiguity, language, natural language, dreaming in code[/tags]

Liberals yawn as Journal burns?

by

Greg Sargent wonders why the liberal blogosphere isn’t squawking about Rupert Murdoch’s bid for the Journal. Obviously most of the liberal blogosphere hears “Journal” and thinks of the Whitewater-crazed loonies who spent most of a decade spinning Vincent Foster conspiracy theories. For anyone inclined to view the world through a partisan lens, the Journal’s editorial page has long overshadowed its higher-quality news coverage. Murdoch buying that gang? It’s “Shelob acquiring Barad-Dur, Inc.” Let them eat one another and spit out the bones!

But there’s also a sense in which the defense of the Journal’s “quality” newsroom is a rearguard action on behalf of a dying tradition. And many people who identify themselves as bloggers, whether on the left or the right, and whether they value the Journal’s great features (as I do) or not, may feel about that tradition the way they feel about the 19th-century novel or the Hollywood comedies of the ’30s. These things are grand, but, like it or not, their time has passed. A newsroom like the Journal’s will not and cannot exist a generation from now unless someone starts figuring out how to pay for it.

John Heilemann’s take in New York is a little contrarian and well worth reading:

Did anybody at Dow Jones ever contemplate purchasing MySpace? Did Arthur Sulzberger or Don Graham? I don’t know, but I’d wager they didn’t even know what MySpace was. The obvious retort is, Why should they have? What does social networking have to do with journalism? And, no doubt, a precise answer is hard to conjure. But if you don’t believe that the intermingling of these spheres will be central to how future generations consume their news, you’ve apparently been sleeping—and clearly don’t have kids.

Not that Murdoch or his people have the future figured out. But they’re groping toward it with purpose and energy—which is more than you can say for Dow Jones. God knows Murdoch’s politics aren’t my brand of vodka. But you have to admire the way he’s been an unrelenting force for change and modernization in the media racket, the way he’s shaped and adapted to epic transformations of platforms and technologies. The problem with America’s newspaper-family dynasties is that, to a greater or lesser degree, they still believe they’re in the same business they were in 30 years ago. Murdoch doesn’t—and he knows, too, that newspapers can’t be any kind of public trust if the public sees them as yesterday’s news.

For those who think that the Bancroft family’s pride-of-ownership will save the Journal from Rupert’s clutches, I say, think again. Murdoch has offered a huge premium on the Dow Jones stock price. The Bancrofts’ control is apparently only a little over 50 percent. All Murdoch needs is one or two heirs or heiresses to say, “Wait a minute, this is good money, what are we thinking?” and the prize is his. I don’t think there are too many other people out there with the resources to pay such an inflated price or the desire to sink that much cash into what market analysts politely call a “sunset industry.”

Every year the Journal’s publisher seizes the op-ed page for a letter to readers, and every year this missive touts the publication’s “faith in the wisdom of markets.” What’s happening here is simple: the market is having its way with the Journal. The result may not be ideal for those of us who love 5000-word features, but it is surely a kind of ironic justice.
[tags]Wall Street Journal, Rupert Murdoch, journalism, dow jones[/tags]

Microhoo… Yacrosoft?

by

This time the noises about a Microsoft acquisition of Yahoo sound more serious. We’re also in one of the financial markets’ combination-mad moments — these merger frenzies often arrive at a market peak.

Remember January 2000? We woke up one morning shortly after the millennium to discover that Time Warner was buying AOL. I wrote one of the few dissenting columns about this deal, arguing that both companies were acting out of fear, not vision. I got dragged onto CNN that afternoon — I think they had a hard time finding someone to trash the deal — and the hosts treated my skepticism with disdain. Who was this punk from an upstart Web site to be questioning the actions of titans like Gerald Levin and Steve Case?

We know how that one played out. Acquisitions at this scale virtually never lead to useful combinations, strategic synergies, or anything else of use. They are financial engineering. What’s happening with this one is pretty simple: Microsoft and Yahoo have both found themselves at dead ends, but they both have formidable assets, and their leaderships are acting out of desperation. Microsoft can’t build a successful search engine, Yahoo can’t gain traction against Google, and each may think the other can solve its problems. In the event of a deal we will probably hear, as we did with Time Warner/AOL, that it’s a merger, not an acquisition, but don’t be fooled: Microsoft has the extra billions here.

Prediction: If Microsoft acquires Yahoo, the companies’ stock will initially prosper and the media will cheer on a new round of the War on Google. But seven years from now Yahoo will be as much of a shell as AOL is today. The talent will flee, the user base will stagnate, and Yahoo’s ability to innovate will wither under the weight of Microsoft bureaucracy and the pressure to serve Microsoft’s software interests.
[tags]microsoft, yahoo, mergers[/tags]

The surge Catch-22

by

The date by which we are supposed to judge whether the “surge” is working keeps getting pushed back, but even slippier than the timeline is the total absence of any administration yardstick for success.

In theory, you’d think that the goal of escalating the war is to reduce the violence. Right there we’re already in topsy-turvyland of the “destroy the village in order to save it” variety. But it only gets more illogical. The administration warned that we should expect a rise in casualties as the surge works its magic, because we’re putting more boots on the ground and in harm’s way, and we’re fighting the bad guys, so there’s likely to be more violence, not less, for some indeterminate time.

Now we’re hearing the next level of this Catch-22: Once we really do start achieving some effective “stabilization” of parts of Baghdad or Anbar or wherever, this will only enrage the insurgents and make them more desperate, so they’re going to attack harder. In other words: we can tell we’re achieving stability because of all the instability our success is provoking!

This may sound insane, but here it is, on Tuesday’s New York Times op-ed page. Owen West, a Marine major and veteran of two tours in Iraq, tells us that the Democratic effort to set a withdrawal date will undermine the progress that’s visible to him on the ground:

The Iraqi battalion I lived with is stationed outside of Habbaniya, a small city in violent Anbar Province. Together with a fledgling police force and a Marine battalion, these Iraqi troops made Habbaniya a relatively secure place: it has a souk where Iraqi soldiers can shop outside their armored Humvees, public generators that don’t mysteriously explode, children who walk to school on their own. The area became so stable, in fact, that it attracted the attention of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia. In late February, the Sunni insurgents blew up the mosque, killing 36.

Huh? Look, the bad guys blew up the mosque — that’s how you can tell how stable the area had become!

The value of this mad rhetoric is obvious: Any way things go, the administration wins. If violence decreases, the surge is working, and if violence continues or increases, the surge is working, too. The only losers are the American soldiers and Iraquis who keep dying, abandoned in a game of run-out-the-clock.
[tags]iraq, surge, new york times op-ed[/tags]

Only connect

by

Walgreens signThere’s a Walgreens on the corner I pass every morning between BART and the office. (There’s a Walgreens on most corners that haven’t already been occupied by a Starbucks.) And recently, every morning I have seen this sign, and every morning I experience a little twinge of awe.

All Walgreens are connected!

Are they like the Indian restaurants clustered on 6th street in New York’s East Village, long rumored to be connected via underground tunnel to one central kitchen?

Or is this connection more metaphysical — do the stores experience that oceanic feeling of connectedness that tells them, yes, they belong here, they are at home in the world?

I knew Walgreens was a chain. I didn’t know it was a great chain of being.