A brief interruption to the political season to bring you some technology news: Google Desktop Search. John Battelle has a lot on this. I’m going to test drive it soon. Dave Winer has already begun.
Nobodies business
I want to pick up a few threads I’ve been collecting and meaning to post about but haven’t had time for till now.
Let’s start with Matthew Klam’s New York Times Magazine cover story on bloggers from a couple of weeks ago. As a group portrait of a handful of high-profile political bloggers it was, I thought, a good read, and reasonably accurate, based on my own impressions of some of the people covered. But this passage jumped out at me and screamed for comment:
“In a recent national survey, the Pew Internet and American Life Project found that more than two million Americans have their own blog. Most of them, nobody reads. The blogs that succeed … are written in a strong, distinctive, original voice.”
This passage crystallized the fundamental and profound divide between most professional journalists and most bloggers. “Most of them, nobody reads.” Now, even the world’s most neglected, forlorn and unpopular blog has at least one reader — the author. So Klam’s first message to these bloggers is, “You are a nobody.” But in fact most of the millions of not-terribly-well-known blogs on the planet do have a handful of readers: friends, relatives, colleagues, the person who staggered in the door from a Google search and stuck around.
“Everyone’s famous for 15 people.” Not a new concept (here’s a reference from 1998), but still a valuable one. And one that continues to elude most journalists, who can’t lay aside their industry’s yardstick of success long enough to understand what’s happening on the Web today.
For Klam, as for so many of us media pros, “the blogs that succeed” is synonymous with “the blogs that reach a wide audience.” But publishing a blog is a nearly cost-free effort compared with all previous personal-publishing opportunities, and that frees us all to choose different criteria for success: Maybe self-expression is enough. Or opening a conversation with a couple of new friends. Or recording a significant event in one’s life for others to find.
Many of these blogs do not meet the definition of “journalism,” but who is Klam, and who are we, to say that they are not “successes”? Who are we to discount the human significance of untold numbers of personal stories and thoughts and ideas communicated to handfuls of readers — to dismiss this vast dialogue as the chatter of “nobodies”?
(David Weinberger has a similar reaction here.)
Of course there are blogs and bloggers who judge their enterprises according to the traffic yardstick. Steven Levy’s recent Newsweek column even suggested that some bloggers are beginning to become what is known indelicately in the Web industry as “traffic whores”: “The low road is a well-trodden path to big readership.” As some bloggers try to turn their pastime into a business or a livelihood, this is inevitable.
Unlike Levy, though, I’m less worried about the occasional “ankle-biting” blogger who grows hoarse-voiced in hope of page-views — and more impressed by the unflagging explosion of memorable new blogging voices and contributions to the burgeoning pool of human knowledge online.
This is the dark matter of the Web universe, the stuff J.D. Lasica is writing about in his book. Collectively, it outweighs all the “bright” matter of the more commercial Web sites with their vast traffic. This much was known as early as the mid-’90s, when we began to see that, though the top 20 Web sites may have dominated the traffic claimed by the top 100 Web sites, the top 100 Web sites still commanded only a fraction of the Web’s total traffic. This was a new world.
What’s happening today is that, thanks to Google and RSS and other technologies still aborning, that world is beginning to get organized, and as it becomes better organized it can’t help becoming more economically significant.
Here’s where I’d bring in Wired editor Chris Anderson’s now justly celebrated “Long Tail” piece. Anderson takes a look at consumer behavior patterns on Amazon, Netflix, Rhapsody, and other “big catalog” services online. These services restore back catalogs and “mid lists”; they restore a nearly infinite number of oldies into circulation. Individually, these works have minuscule demand; collectively, they’re huge:
“Not only is every one of Rhapsody’s top 100,000 tracks streamed at least once each month, the same is true for its top 200,000, top 300,000, and top 400,000. As fast as Rhapsody adds tracks to its library, those songs find an audience, even if it’s just a few people a month, somewhere in the country. This is the Long Tail.”
People don’t get this yet, Anderson writes: “We assume…that only hits deserve to exist” — just as we assume that if you don’t have a big circulation, “nobody” reads you.
Anderson’s piece focuses chiefly on the entertainment industry, but the principle is a broader one. If you want to keep climbing the ladder from blogs to the entertainment industry all the way up to the global economy, the next piece to read is James Surowiecki’s little essay on “the bottom of the pyramid,” which talks about the vast economic opportunity in creating products for the planet’s teeming billions of poor customers. (“Though developing nations don’t have much money on a per-capita basis, together they control enormous sums.”)
There’s an old saying in the land of the Broadway theater, where once I tarried, that you can’t make a living there, but you can make a killing. Perhaps the Internet’s fate is to transmute the worlds of publishing and entertainment and even global trade from the hit-or-miss nightmare of a Broadway-like lottery into something more hopeful — a world where it’s a lot harder to make a killing but a lot easier to make a living. Is there anyone, outside of a few boardrooms, who’d find that a loss?
Some things never change
Back in 1999 I wrote a column that pointed out that it’s really hard to get accurate numbers on visitors to Web sites, that MediaMetrix can’t be trusted (it undercounts critically important at work users), and its competitors aren’t much better.
Fast forward to 2004. Wired News’ Adam Penenberg writes a column that says that it’s really hard to get accurate numbers on visitors to Web sites, that MediaMetrix (now Comscore MediaMetrix) can’t be trusted (it undercounts critically important at work users), and that it’s competitors aren’t much better.
Adam’s right. Plus ca change… And today, the whole explosion of RSS and blogging promises to further cloud the statistics that marketers want.
In my column, I argued that the whole concept of “reach” as the be-all and end-all yardstick of success on the Web had some pretty negative implications, favoring sites and services with broad and superficial followings. I still think that’s the case. If there’s a future for businesses and services that offer depth and rich value rather than “quick hit,” low-loyalty visitors — and of course, sitting here at Salon, I think there is — then we need to do better than MediaMetrix, Neilsen and company.
What’s wrong with this picture?
Christopher Alden presented Rojo, a new Web-based RSS aggregation service with social-software features built in, yesterday at Web 2.0. Alden, a former exec from Red Herring, gave a good presentation, and some of the Rojo features look cool — particularly, the ability to send specific RSS posts to contacts, so that you’re basically building a reading list for colleagues or friends.
But look at this photo — specifically, the fine print at the bottom:
Memo to presenters: don’t label the documents you’re presenting in public as “confidential”!
This is, of course, the exact label you see on presentations intended for potential investors, and no doubt it made its way onto a public screen by accident, when slides from just such a presentation got repurposed.
But still, the little slip was illustrative of the unusual dynamic here at Web 2.0: It’s definitely a wary mating dance between the tribes of the geeks and the suits, whose customs are not fully in sync.
What we’re seeing is that a lot of the ideas and technologies that have incubated over the last couple of years, and have been showcased at places like the O’Reilly Emerging Technologies Conference, are now on the radar of the venture-capital world. Ideas for new web companies built around RSS syndication and blogs, wikis and social software, innovative search technologies and mobile applications are hatching. And once more we’re witnessing the strange, messy process by which the enthusiasms and ideas of technologists are packaged, streamlined, prettified, sometimes improved and sometimes wrecked, as business people struggle to figure out how to make them work for the general public — and how to make money from them.
In terms of the evolution of the Web as a collective human endeavor, this conference’s name is a little off — I’d say we’re on Web 6.0 or 7.0 by now, at least. But in terms of the evolution of the Web as a place for people to try to invest, for a lot of the people here — “scarred veterans,” as William Janeway just described them, of the turn-of-the-millennium speculative frenzy — I guess it feels like only the second time around.
Bubble 2.0?
John Battelle is moderating a panel of financial guys. (Yes, they’re all guys.) It’s titled “So is this a bubble yet?” Starting with the Google IPO.
William Janeway of Warburg Pincus: Google was making lots of money, they had to go public to create liquidity for stakeholders, and because they’d reached the point where legally they had enough owners that they had to start reporting anyway. That’s different from the situation in which VCs are basically arbitraging companies, trying to sell them off to the greater fool. As happened during the bubble. I doubt that anyone in this room will be active professionally when the next true bubble comes along.
Safa Rashtchy of Piper Jaffray: Today, only 25% of the use of the internet is for consumer content, 75% is as a utility — for communication, essentially.
Janeway: We funded enormous productive waste. Trial and error. How many startups were funded in order at the stsatrt of Web 2.0 we could have Amazon, Ebay, Google, Yahoo? There will be a lot of smart people productizing smart ideas that will be acquired.
Janeway: One of the things we like about this environment is the number of scarred veterans who survived the bubble and are actually building businesses today. Theyu’re expecting it’ll be a 5-7 year time horizon. If we do that, build a real business, generate positive cash flow, we’ll be rewarded. That’s what the Valley requires.
Lanny Baker of Smith Barney: The overall market cap of internet sector is smaller than at the peak of the bubble. Companies are generating more cash. The jokesters running the scam companies have probably been weeded out. It’s a safer pool to swim in.
Inside the adult industry online
Andrew Conru is talking about the adult industry. He’s the CEO of Friendfinder. Stanford phd 1997. Cofounder of AdKnowledge in 1995. 180 employees. Started as a personals site. Huge traffic.
What really drives the adult business: scary, hardcore … mathematics. They know about short-term conversion ROI.
How can I get visitors cheaply? How can I convert visitors to paid members using any trick in the book? Separate companies: ones that get people to the front door, and other ones that do the conversion.
Tools for getting traffic: Affiliate marketing, popup ads, toolbars, spam and spyware, collaborative traffic networks.
Tools for conversion: subscription models, ID verification, traffic filtering, credit card processing and alternative payment systems, cookies and tracking, live streaming and audio.
What drove adult sites to be innovative? Hundreds of thousands — hyper competition among small operators. Traffic source owners determine what advertising is run, not the advertiser. CPA is the norm, not CPM.
Adult industry takes in $445 million last year online.
Trend: margins are getting tighter. Lots of free content. Hard for sites to differentiate.
I assume no one here goes to adult sites, you might not see these changes going on.
Shifting focus to longterm relationship with their visitors. Reduction of popups, adding registration and personalization. The pitch is becoming softer, less intrusive.
Lessons for the mainstream world? Adult webmasters often collaborate together — “co-opetition.” Mainstream sites are becoming more open to making money with adult content even as the adult industry is having a “self-regulated cleanup.”
Key takeaway: as people are optimizing every little bit of their web sites, you can over-optimize, hurt the user experience, reduce longterm ROI.
Brewster Kahle at Web 2.0
“I’m probably best known for being part of Web 1.0.”
“I’m going to argue that Universal Access to All Knowledge is possible.”
Altavista said, let’s just index the whole web. Jeff Bezos said, let’s just sell all books. People who focus on doing it all are being pretty successful in the business world.
Texts: how much is there? Library of Congress = 26 terabytes. $60,000 of storage. Price of a house — or, around here, a garage. Costs about $10 a book to scan a book. $260 million. [I’ll need to doublecheck these numbers!]
Question of copyright. What do we do with the out of print but still under copyright stuff? the orphans? — most of the 20th century. 8 million books. We’re not allowed to digitize them. We filed a lawsuit. Kahle v. Ashcroft — to try to allow us to bring out of print but under copyright works onto the night. To do this in the not-for-profit sphere.
It turns out you can print and bind a book for a buck. That’s cheap — cheaper than a library, Harvard says it costs them $2 to lend a book. Bookmobile project. The idea of going book to book — book, scan it, put it on the net, download it, print it, bind it: book to book.
Let’s go to audio. 2-3 million disks that have ever been sold. It’s a very litigated area. Lots of people aren’t served terribly well by the publishing industry. Bands that want to circulate their concert recordings: Grateful Dead. Community-based thing. Folk music, “fringe” areas. Non profit record labels. To people publishing under Creative Commons licenses, we are offering unlimited storage, unlimited bandwidth, forever, for free. If you want to give stuff away, there’s institutional support to help make it happen.
Moving images. Isn’t that too big to do the whole darn thing? Most people think of Hollywood films. 100-200,000 theatrical releases. 1/2 estimated to be Indian. It’s a few more bookshelves, but it’s doable. Copyright issues. Educational films. Mostly being used by others to build new films. Genre of Lego movies.
Television. Recording 20 channels of TV 24 hours a day. Around a petabyte of this stuff. Making it available is still problematic.
Software: copyright office allowing them to archive it.
The Web archive. [He’s showing the original Yahoo home page.’] Kind of looks like Google today. Pets.com.
Preservation and access: the idea is to not have one copy on top of the san andreas faultline. Copies in Alexandria and Amsterdam.
Will we do it? Lots of business opportunities, already spun off four little companies. This is interesting, it requires govt, non-profits and for-profits to work together. Make something we’re really proud of to pass on to the next generation.
Joe Kraus talks about Jotspot
Live at Web 2.0 today. Joe Kraus, Excite founder, is debuting “Jotspot.”
First trend: “Wikis are growing like weeds.” They centralize information that had been scattered across companies and “allow people to loosely join small pieces of information together.” He’s quoting David Weinberger’s “small pieces loosely joined” (without crediting David.)
Second trend: customization of software. Software’s way too brittle, it doesn’t work the way you work, it works the way the software wants you to work. Excel was revolutionary. Bring similar concepts of customizability ,flexibility, to Lightweight web applications.
On the surface, it looks like a wiki, you can use it that way, but at its heart, it’s a service you can use to loosely join information together.
Integrating email — each page is addressable by email. Adding structure incrememtally to pages. Turning pages into forms. Some spreadsheet-style features. Pulling in Yahoo news search results and google search results. You can add structure and then alter it as you go.
It’s a dozen-person company. He’s going pretty fast in the demo, but it looks pretty cool.
Random links
This fast-cut edit of Republican convention rhetoric strips the Bush campaign down to its essence.
John Darnielle, the amazing singer-songwriter mastermind of the Mountain Goats, also runs a Web site of writing on popular music called Last Plane to Jakarta. He recently switched to using blog software on his site, so there’s an RSS feed you can subscribe to. I have.
Flickr, the superb photo-sharing web application I wrote about last month, is now selling “pro” accounts for people who expect to upload a lot of photos. (“Preview pricing” is about $40/year, discounted for now from the planned full price of $60.) I’ve signed up for two years. Great design and good service online are worth paying for.
The spirit of startups past
Nine years ago, just about to the day, I left my job at the San Francisco Examiner — where I’d worked for, oh, nine years and a few months — to join the handful of people who at that time constituted Salon. We’ve been through a lot of different offices in our existence, starting out with rented space in a downtown architecture firm on Main St.; then to our first real digs in China Basin Landing, down the hall from Howard Rheingold’s Electric Communities and the old Well Engaged, but otherwise isolated from civilization by the vast tracts of empty space below Townsend Street that have since been crammed with development; then to the corner of Third and Mission, just upstairs from Rochester Big & Tall, a perfect perch from which to watch the dot-com bubble begin to inflate; then, aloft on that bubble ourselves, over to the top two stories of a fancier building on Fourth Street off Mission; then consolidating on one of those floors; then moving downstairs to our comfortable, slightly smaller digs in the same building.
During the bubble’s boom years we’d see, through the lenses of retracting elevator doors, the hustle of VC-inflated commerce on floor after floor of expensive office space. Then, from late 2000 on, we observed the gradual depopulation of those same floors, as one failed dot-com after another dismantled its cubicles and closed up shop.
In my current office, every time I lean back in my chair and stare at the ceiling I’m faced with a grim reminder of that era, a memento dot-com mori in black Smartie ink scrawled on an oh-so-fashionably exposed duct with the name of the company that preceded us in the space:
I don’t know why it was important that these ducts be so labeled. It’s certainly not worth the effort to efface the writing. It’s just one of those little bits of office archaeology serving to remind you that we’re all just passing through. Still, I’m sort of grateful for it. As I read intimations of a new wave of speculative excitement in the industry, I lean back in my chair, let my eyes float up ductward, and vow, never again!
Bonus link: While we’re musing about the Internet Bubble, Paul Graham (of “Hackers and Painters”) has written a thoughtful essay on “What the Bubble Got Right.”