One Man and His Blog: Web 2.0 Archives

Plurk: 3 Week Verdict on MicroBlogging Service

By Adam Tinworth on June 18, 2008 12:20 PM | 4 Comments | 0 TrackBacks

As of the time of writing, I'm the top 23rd Plurker in London. But what, I hear you ask, is Plurk? Well, it's an interesting cross between Twitter and a forum. It has the same philosophy of short posts, but instead of a rolling stream of updates, Plurks from my friends are presented in a timeline:

Continue reading Plurk: 3 Week Verdict on MicroBlogging Service.

How To Be a Community Editor (in 2 posts or less)

By Adam Tinworth on June 18, 2008 11:01 AM | 6 Comments | 0 TrackBacks

A couple of useful links for community editors (or aspiring community editors):

Tish of the Constant Observer shares her Seven Traits of Highly Effective Community Developers. I know some of ours might not be keen on number 3:

3. Must enjoy technology. These days, the tools of digital media are (or should be) easy to learn. Your community manager will understand -- and be able to adapt quickly to -- upgrades in tools. She or he also might suggest new tools, and will learn new tools pretty quickly.

Meanwhile Howard Owens shares some tips for newspaper people new to community management. I like this one:

Participate. When a reader posts incorrect information, offer up a correction or clarification. When a reader posts an assertion that would benefit from factual support, ask for it. When someone makes a statement that reminds you of an interesting quote or event that didn't make your story, leave your own comment about it. Your participation not only makes the conversation more interesting, and keeps people coming back, it gives you credibility when it comes time to play cop.

One day I'll figure out why that one is so hard for journalists. And then I'll become a consultant and make a fortune... :)

Scaling is Hard

By Adam Tinworth on June 6, 2008 6:14 PM | 0 Comments | 0 TrackBacks

Been seeing a lot of this for the last few days. Makes me feel better about the problems we had with our blogs for a while...

The One Man Report - June 2nd

By Adam Tinworth on June 2, 2008 9:47 PM | 0 Comments | 0 TrackBacks

Back in London, back at work. And this is what has been occupying me today:

Movable Type 4.1 has been working very well for us during my week away. We're into "steady as she goes" mode, until we go up to 4.2 next month.
The bad family news seems to have mysteriously, but pleasingly, changed into good family news
This blog is now protected by Typepad Antispam, rather than Akismet. I hope this will solve problem discussed in posts passim.
Is is me, or is Twitter really up the spout?
What is this Plurk of which you tweet?

Digital Journalism on FriendFeed

By Adam Tinworth on May 27, 2008 12:49 PM | 0 Comments | 0 TrackBacks

I've been experimenting a little more with FriendFeed over the last few days. The fact I can follow my stream in Thwirl makes it much easier.

The idea of topic-focused rooms on the service intrigues me, so I've set up one for digital journalism. Feel free to join in, if you want to share and discuss material on the transition to online journalism.

The Online Conversational Onion

By Adam Tinworth on May 20, 2008 6:21 PM | 1 Comment | 0 TrackBacks

[Gaping Void, of course]

Yesterday was one of those days where I felt like I'm stranded in two disconnected worlds. On one side, I have people in my RSS and Twitter feeds discussing the dispersion of conversation into the likes of FriendFeed and Disqus. And on the other, I sit through meetings where we discuss how to drive more traffic to our forums. These two discussions have one thing in common: they're about discussion in the live web. But they're utterly disconnected, as if the two groups were utterly unaware of the other's existence.

And perhaps they are. There's a tendency amongst the bleeding edge web people to dismiss older forms of social media, just as people on the other end of the bell curve tend to lump them together in one, undifferentiated mass.

I'm increasingly coming to the conclusion that there are three distinct layers of social conversation on the web, and people tend to exist primarily in one of the three. And I need to develop a language for myself to dicuss these ideas, both with the neophiles who chase after the latest and greatest, and with the tentative newcomers who are just getting their heads around these new forms of media.

Here's how I would (tentatively) articulate them:

Continue reading The Online Conversational Onion.

The History of Online Communities

By Adam Tinworth on May 16, 2008 4:57 PM | 0 Comments | 0 TrackBacks

This is pretty essential viewing, giving people some context on how online communities have developed. And no, it's not just a Web 2.0 thing:

[Via Kristine]

I was trying to work out the other day how long I'd been participating in virtual communities of various sorts, I think the answer is "13 years", starting with a mailing list for a game back in 1995. This is a topic I ought to revisit. I might even explain how I became the Ashtray on the Edge of Oblivion.

But then again, maybe not.

The 3 Best Quotes from the Journalism Leaders Forum

By Adam Tinworth on April 30, 2008 4:05 PM | 2 Comments | 0 TrackBacks

Yesterday evening I happily spent some time following the Journalism Leaders Forum through Twitter and a live video stream. There was much debate about the vague pointlessness of one of the sessions - "Why isn't more media translating into more money for mainstream media companies?" - with the feeling that the time for talking about this is pretty much over. It's time to start getting out there to find the answers.

Ironically, this morning I woke up to find some excellent blogging around the session (much of it critical, mind), the choice meats of which I present for your enjoyment:

"I get annoyed when people suggest that the only people who can deliver news to the public are newspaper journalists. I believe that is an arrogance based upon fear." - Joanna Geary.
"Er, sorry to be the one to break it to you guys (and it was all male), the horse hasn't just bolted, he's built his own nice new stable in your garden." - Sarah Hartley
"In case some of the mainstream media haven't got this yet - 'THE WEB DOES NOT OWE YOU A LIVING'. It doesn't care that you have been doing this for years, you have to earn your eyeballs like everyone else." - Andy Dickinson

Like many of those actually present in the room, I do find myself wondering how often we're going to have to answer the same questions from our journalistic colleagues about the web.

Static Stories must give way to Live News

By Adam Tinworth on April 30, 2008 2:13 PM | 1 Comment | 0 TrackBacks

The BBC is carrying what amounts to a "no shit, sherlock" story: Web is in its infancy, say Berners-Lee. And I suspect that the creator of the web is busy wondering why anyone thinks that this is news. (Update: It appears that quite a lot of people are thinking the same thing)

After all, the web is a scant decade and a half old, yet most of the innovations that people are using daily, from streaming flash-based video, to social networking, have only come to prominence in the last half-decade. And, as Alan makes clear, that's just a blink of the eye in terms of most technological adoption.

We're only just beginning to understand what the implications are of moving from a static web to the live web (as Doc Searls has so delightfully termed it). His presentation at Le Web 3 '07 has stuck in my head for the last few months, and has finally bubbled its way into something meaningful in my conciousness. And here it is: .

Continue reading Static Stories must give way to Live News.

UK ISPs Need To Recongise The New Media Landscape

By Adam Tinworth on April 30, 2008 1:08 PM | 0 Comments | 0 TrackBacks

Om Malik is suggesting that the slowing rate of broadband adoption in the US will lead companies to try and boost their speeds to upsell consumers. It makes sense, as it will allow them to continue growing, even as the early boosts from the initial wave of broadband adoptions start to fade.

Now, that's a much more positive angle on the broadband industry than the UK is showing. Virgin's call for the BBC to contribute to the bandwidth costs of the successful iPlayer is just ludicrous. For one, the BBC is already paying its own supplier, and at the other end, the customer is already paying for the bandwidth. If the ISPs were genuinely committed to serving their customers, they'd have been following the rapid growth of audio and video streaming and downloading amongst their users, and putting plans in place to facilitate it. Penalising another company for being popular with their customers is just not the way forward.

This is an important debate for those of us in the media to keep a watch on. This fundamentally affects both the major future content delivery platform for our work - and our costs for accessing it.

Thoughts from The Tuttle Club Breakfast

By Adam Tinworth on April 23, 2008 11:17 AM | 0 Comments | 0 TrackBacks

I've just left today's Tuttle Club (or should that be Social Media Café?) Breakfast, held at the rather lovely One Alfred Place.

As always at events organised by Lloyd, it was a bit of a brain-stuffer. Lots of chance to chat with people from a wide variety of fields all of whom have an interest in social media.

In no particular order, the ideas I took away from the session which I'll probably blog about more later are:

How you might facilitate real-time metrics for journalists
How to maintain passion as a medium endures, and what we can learn from the mistakes made as business magazines matured
How job titles can be the biggest barrier to organisational change
Is routine the enemy of passion?
What can we learn about physical working spaces from online social media spaces?

As you can see, it was a very trivial, light-weight discussion...

Posting a Blog Post From Facebook

By Adam Tinworth on April 16, 2008 10:21 AM | 2 Comments | 0 TrackBacks

Good morning all.

I'm posting to this blog in a whole new way this morning. I'm actually typing this in Facebook, using the new Blog It Facebook app released by Six Apart over night.

Now, it's not massively sophisticated. No WYSIWYG. No tagging, or categorising. With a bit of luck we'll see some of those levels of sophistication developing as time goes on.

And, much to my surprise, it supports for more platforms than the 6A Trio (Movable Type, Vox and Typepad). You can post to both the .org and .com flavours of WordPress, to Blogger and to Livejournal as well. And you can set it to auto-notify services like Twitter and Pownce when you post.

It's a neat little way of linking your blog and Facebook more closely, though, and that appeals to me.

Twitter Beats Facebook (any day)

By Adam Tinworth on April 14, 2008 4:41 PM | 0 Comments | 0 TrackBacks

Nice video from journalism student Alana Taylor:

[via Joanna Geary]

Flickr gets Video

By Adam Tinworth on April 9, 2008 11:52 AM | 1 Comment | 0 TrackBacks

So, Flickr now has video uploading. And, rather curiously, they've restricted video to 90 seconds. That's a good call. It makes their video more akin to long photographs. Something that gives you a "snapshot" of something, but without the time to get too in depth - or too boring.

And talking of boring, here's my test video:

Something more interesting next time. Promise.

Update: Here's one of the spring snow:

Your Site Doesn't Have a Homepage. Get Over It.

By Adam Tinworth on April 7, 2008 4:06 PM | 2 Comments | 0 TrackBacks

The one idea I wish I could instil in more people I work with is that the idea of a web site breaks down when that site is content-focused. Or, to put it another way, all the time that you are lavishing on your front page? It's wasted. Because people aren't coming straight to your homepage.

One of my colleagues mentioned this at the editors' conference we had last year, to something akin to a stunned silence. I don't get the impression that her point really sank in with many of the people present. And it's not like it's a new idea. People have been talking about the web's ability to explode conventional content structures for half a decade.

This is, and always was, an inevitable consequence of the structure of the web: the link. Any page can link to any other. And as the social internet has developed we have more and more ways of recommending links to others: e-mail, instant lessening, blogs, bookmarking sites, forums, Twitter, social networks and so on. And that was the point of the video I posted the other day - people aren't going to come and visit you in the same way they pick up and read a magazine, they're going to come to you via a link shared in any number of ways - or through that 800lb gorilla we know as "search",

Continue reading Your Site Doesn't Have a Homepage. Get Over It..

How News Finds Us - The Social Graph

By Adam Tinworth on April 2, 2008 10:26 AM | 0 Comments | 0 TrackBacks

This is interesting:

It's a nice visual summary both of what this social graph business is all about, where it's going and the desire for people to have a "hub" for it. I'm hoping that the Action Streams plugin I'm using here will move that way for me, but we'll see.

Internal Blogging & Digital Journalism Lessons

By Adam Tinworth on March 27, 2008 3:34 PM | 0 Comments | 0 TrackBacks

two lessons from a busy day:

First of all, as I comb my e-mails for details of Movable Type problems and bugs past, I really wish I'd been keeping an internal blog from the start. Then I could just click the "server issues" tag and have a handy list to print out and give to the testers.

Secondly, I've realised just how much of a mental re-engineering needs to go on for journalists to adapt to the Web 2.0 age. Traditional publishing fundamentally had one process: research, write, edit, publish. Online journalism provides us with a range of tools, so you still research, but then you pick whichever medium best suits the story: text (long or short form), image, audio, video (streamed or recorded and edited). So, instead of a linear production workflow, you actually have a branching one, with critical choices to be made. And then you start factoring in interactive media, and the complexity goes up another level. That's a huge, huge change in the job. No wonder it takes time to enthuse people about this.

Showing Seesmic to Journalists

By Adam Tinworth on March 27, 2008 2:33 PM | 0 Comments | 0 TrackBacks

I just did a quick presentation to a bunch of our journalists about how easy it is to get video online, as part of Andrew's video club.

Here's how I demoed Seesmic:

And, here are the responses:

Continue reading Showing Seesmic to Journalists.

Quick'n'Dirty Video

By Adam Tinworth on March 27, 2008 12:47 PM | 4 Comments | 0 TrackBacks

Why TV Doesn't Know How To Engage

By Adam Tinworth on March 18, 2008 4:06 PM | 1 Comment | 0 TrackBacks

Those naughty folks at Computer Weekly's Downtime blog are taking the mickey out of one of my colleagues with this video:

Now, I reckon that that they're missing the point and Mr Rogers will have the last larf here. The video isn't mocking user generated content in general, just that slightly cheesy way TV and radio solicits user feedback to give them a thin patina of interaction, which is wholly fake. Compare the "reckons" on TV to the debates found in blog comments or forums, and you'll see how shallow these efforts really are.

I hereby coin the phrase "cargo-cult engagement" to describe this phenomenon. My licensing rates are very reasonable...

What to do about FriendFeed?

By Adam Tinworth on March 14, 2008 8:29 PM | 1 Comment | 0 TrackBacks

So, like the good wee social media sheep that I am, I just signed up for FriendFeed. And I started entering all my social media sites. And then I realised that this all seemed very familiar. I was duplicating something I'd already done. I'd entered all this data before..

The problem is that I already, in effect, have a FriendFeed, built using the Movable Type Action Streams plugin. You can see it in detail either on the sidebar of this blog, or on a page of its own. You can even subscribe to it as an Atom feed.

Now, I though this is what all the work on opening the social graph was meant to solve. What I really want to be able to do is point FriendFeed over at my Action Streams feed and say "there you go. That's where it is". And then FriendFeed just sucks it in and I'm done.

Any chance, do you think?

4 Things Journalists Can Learn from the Lacy/Zuckerberg Interview

By Adam Tinworth on March 10, 2008 10:02 AM | 6 Comments | 0 TrackBacks

At the risk of beating a dead horse, there are a few points arising from the Mark Zuckerberg / Sarah Lacy interview at SXSW yesterday that I'd try to guide journalists I work with towards. Jeff Jarvis has already done an excellent take on this issue, and I'd encourage anyone interested to read it, but there are a few specific points I wanted to go into in more detail. Interested parties might also want to refer to this piece by Mike Butcher, analysing Lacy's coverage of the UK startups market, as background.

1. Engage

Sarah Lacy is taking a battering in the blogsphere today. And she has no direct means of replying that isn't mediated by others. She can be interviewed on video, phone in to TWiT or post angry tweets, but she doesn't have a blog to respond in kind. Her website is a classic brochure site, and she uses Twitter in a broadcast manner (Follows 33, followed by 817).

For a journalist who works in the social media arena - or who is trying to build a reputation in this area - this is an error. It makes you look like a typical dilettante mainstream journalist, picking around the edge but never truly getting involved.

2. Know Your Occasion

Both at Le Web 3 '07 and in the video of yesterday's SXSW interview, Lacy displays a very common interviewing technique amongst attractive female journalists working in male dominated industries: flirting. What ever you think of the ethics of it, it works. I've seen former colleagues at Estates Gazette deploying it to devastating effect, culling stories from over-eager young property chaps, desperate to impress the pretty young thing in front of them and quite forgetting that she has a mind like a steel trap. That works in a social, intimate environment. On stage? It's just plain embarrassing.

Also, the way she uses personal opinion and anecdote to try and draw out and relax the interviewee is a pretty common feature writer interviewing technique. It allows you to engage with your subject on an emotional level, and they're more like to open themselves if you've opened yourself first.

The problem with this on stage is two-fold: first of all, the audience doesn't care. Really. You're there to draw out your interviewer's views and opinions in a limited time period. The more time you spend expressing your own views, the less they're getting of what they really want. In a magazine, you chop out the bits about you. You can't do that on stage. Secondly, it makes you look, at best, self-involved and, at worst, arrogant. In an occasion when you are secondary to the interviewee, that's bad.

Continue reading 4 Things Journalists Can Learn from the Lacy/Zuckerberg Interview.

Explaining Twitter (and why you should use it)

By Adam Tinworth on March 6, 2008 5:30 PM | 2 Comments | 0 TrackBacks

Another of those great Common Craft videos, as spotted by Robin.

Sure beats the one-pager on "Explaining Twitter" I was about to write.

(You can follow me on Twitter, if you're so inclined)

Bored of Facebook

By Adam Tinworth on March 1, 2008 3:00 PM | 1 Comment | 0 TrackBacks

Amen.

Social Media Café, London

By Adam Tinworth on February 15, 2008 2:16 PM | 1 Comment | 0 TrackBacks

I spent the morning at the Social Media Café, held in the upstairs room of the Coach & Horses in Soho (yes, that Coach & Horses)

I was, in a word, packed. I got to catch up with some old friends, and meet some new ones, but there were so many people networking in that small room that any idea of it being a co-working session disappeared out of the window fairly swiftly. And that's no bad thing. The social media space is packed with people who work alone - either because they're freelancers, or because they're isolated within a large business. The chance to catch up with like-minded folk, share gossip and swap ideas is invaluable.

An absolutely wonderful way to spend the best part of a day. But I'll leave the final word to the organiser, Lloyd (and a special guest star):

Going Solo: Conference for Web-Savvy Freelancers

By Adam Tinworth on February 13, 2008 5:40 PM | 0 Comments | 0 TrackBacks

When I was over in Paris for Le Web 3 '07 last year, one of the friends I met the year before, Stephanie, was in buoyant mood. She was telling everyone she could about her new venture, Going Far, and the series of events she's hoping to run. The first of these is Going Solo, a conference for freelancers and small business owners taking place in Switzerland on May 16th. The general thrust of the conference looks fascinating: everything from the hard business end of closing deals, through to meeting your social needs when you work alone. It's the sort of niche micro-topic conference that the internet can really enable.

And because I trust Stephanie and the plans she outlined sounded so cool, I'm giving the conference a free plug here. (Yup. I'm not getting paid a penny for the plug. I can hear members of our sales teams clutching at their hearts from here...)

I'm seriously considering going along. I'm not actually a freelancer or small business owner, but you never know what the future might bring...

You can find out all you need to know at the Going Solo site. Early bird discounts until this Sunday (£140), and then a reduced rate (£190) until the middle of March.

Facebook on iPhone

By Adam Tinworth on February 6, 2008 9:37 AM | 0 Comments | 0 TrackBacks

Oh, dilemma.

Apple has put out a new advert which combines on of my great loves, the iPhone, with Facebook, my current bugbear. Confusion... Love/hate... Two sides of the same coin...

Damn you, Jobs! I'm going to be logging into Facebook in just a moment.

Hot Dates & Social Engineering in Facebook Apps

By Adam Tinworth on February 4, 2008 6:02 PM | 4 Comments | 0 TrackBacks

Oh, look. It's been over 48 hours since I was rude about Facebook. Time for another pop at it...

In my in-box this morning sat this:

Facebook social news? How exciting! Maybe a summary of activity amongst my friends? Uh, no. The sender is a dead give-away. It's e-mail from a Facebook app that I installed back when I went through my brief enthusiasm phase on the site.

What's really interesting to me is the way they try to encourage you to come and use the app:

Important, Your help is needed!

Wow! Really? Better read on:

Six of your friends have pending dating requests:

Crickey! They need my help to date? Wow.

However, the list of six lovely women is rather suspect...

Continue reading Hot Dates & Social Engineering in Facebook Apps.

Blog Azeroth: Mashing Blogging and Forums

By Adam Tinworth on February 3, 2008 12:10 PM | 5 Comments | 0 TrackBacks

There's plenty of evidence that people who are very into social media tend also to be committed neophiles, rushing after the latest, greatest thing on the internet and assuming that it will supplant that which came before. It's all nonsense, of course, as good tools will continue to have their place even as new ones come along.

I've been reminded of this in one of my other blogging lives as a World of Warcraft blogger. In the last six months the number of bloggers in that particular blogosphere has grown exponentially, to the point where it's become hard to keep up with it.

One blogger, Phaelia of Resto4Life came up with a solution that's so simple and effective that the idea seems blindingly obvious, but only in retrospect: she set up a forum. She then kicked started the community by inviting bloggers she'd already interacted with to join, who then posted about it on their blogs, so the bloggers who read them came and join and, lo, a community was born.

Except, the community wasn't born - it already existed. It was just hungry for another way to communicate, one that supplemented the "public" communication between the blogs. In effect, the creation of Blog Azeroth enabled a level of meta-discussion around a social object - in this case the activity of blogging, rather the subject that they're blogging about. It's without doubt one of the cleverest pieces of blog/forum interaction I've seen in a while, which has created a new site which is helping drive traffic to all the participating bloggers.

In fact, it's such I neat idea that I decided to ask Phae how the idea came about:

Continue reading Blog Azeroth: Mashing Blogging and Forums.

Facebook: Don't Be Too Web Active, Now

By Adam Tinworth on February 2, 2008 8:08 PM | 2 Comments | 0 TrackBacks

Here's a weird thing. An old acquaintance just e-mailed me:

I'm removing you as a friend on facebook but just writing to let you know its nothing personal! You have so many status updates or blog posts every day that like half of my news feed is purely from you and there's no room left for news from my other friends.

The strange thing about this is that I haven't actually logged into Facebook in something like 10 days now. I'm not a great user of the site and, while I'm not tempted to commit "Facebook suicide", I only login in response to prompts from friends to do/reply to things.

So how did I end up overwhelming this guy's news feed? Well, my Twitter updates and blog posts are pushed to my news feed via various apps. I tweet a fair bit, and I'm a pretty frequent blogger. That can add up over the day (as my new Action Stream in the sidebar makes clear).

I've argued before that Facebook is pretty much "training wheels Web 2.0 for those of low web activity". This tends to provoke a defensive response from people who love the site (one example: "I know people who are giving up blogging for Facebook". Of course you do: blogging is a high investment activity, Facebook is a low investment one. You're making my point...), but I think it's pretty accurate. If you want the social interaction that Web 2.0 provides, but don't want the level of creation investment that goes with blogging, posting photos to Flickr or even keeping up a Twitter or Seesmic stream, then Facebook rocks. For those of us who are already active on the social web? It's too limiting.

Back in Seesmic

By Adam Tinworth on January 30, 2008 5:14 PM | 0 Comments | 0 TrackBacks

I've got back into Seesmic now I have a webcam for my work PC. However, my presentation skills aren't always what they should be:

The service has been revamped somewhat since I last had a play, and the new view which compiles replies in the timeline makes it much easier to pick up interesting new conversations than it was before. It gets ever more interesting, for a service in Alpha.

How I Use Feed Subscriptions: Part 1

By Adam Tinworth on January 9, 2008 9:36 PM | 3 Comments | 0 TrackBacks

Dan recently asked how many RSS (or atom) feeds I subscribe to, and how I manage them.

Let's start with how many. Well, in my main subscription group, I have just shy of 400 feeds. I have two other subscription groups, but I'll come back to them in another post. Those feeds generate up to 1,000 post per day.

Yes. yes, I know. I have a problem. I'm an addict. So we'll gloss over that and move on to Dan's second question: How do I manage them?

(The rest is behind a cut to spare those whose eyes are glazing over already.)

Continue reading How I Use Feed Subscriptions: Part 1.

Facebook Owns Your Friendships

By Adam Tinworth on January 3, 2008 3:45 PM | 0 Comments | 0 TrackBacks

I've been Twittering about this all morning, after I spotted the story on Techcrunch UK, so it's about time I posted about it. That shy, retiring blogger known as Robert Scoble has managed to get himself booted from Facebook. His crime? Using a script to "scrape" out the friendship relationship he's stored in Facebook. (Those relationships are known as "the social graph" to techie types.)

Now, to be fair, he has violated the terms of service, as Paul Walsh points out on the BIMA blog. But it does point to a larger issue. Paul points out that "social media gurus" should be well aware that the relationship data you enter into Facebook is theirs, not yours. You can use it within Facebook but you can't export it out and use it elsewhere.

This isn't an exclusive problem to Facebook, admittedly. I can't export the friendship relationships I've put into Vox, Flickr or Livejournal either.

And Facebook et al almost certainly have good commercial reasons for that. In many way, the ability to input and use that data is the key selling point of the social network and they want to keep that unique to keep the users attached to the service.

Continue reading Facebook Owns Your Friendships.

Blognation: finished

By Adam Tinworth on December 19, 2007 6:20 PM | 0 Comments | 0 TrackBacks

Blognation is dead

Everyone I talked to about Blognation at Le Web 3, after the controversy a couple of weeks ago, seemed to think the site was dead in the water.

Turns out they were right.

Nice idea, but rather short on money and management…

Le Web 3 '07: Jason Calacanis on Spam Pollution

By Adam Tinworth on December 12, 2007 5:16 PM | 1 Comment | 0 TrackBacks

Usenet? Killed by spam. Google? Search has been diluted by comment spam. Squidoo? Overwhelmed by affiliate spam.

Those issues were at the heart of a presentation by Jason Calacanis, late of Weblogs Inc and now behind Mahalo. And he had a warning for internet businesses:

"You can't pretend you don't see the abuse so you can make money," he said.

Another example he gave of spam polluting Technorati - do a search for "Paris Hotels" - all you get is spam hosted on Blogger. Dave Sifry and Evan Williams, "nice, clever guys" who are (formerly?) friends of Calacanis created a system that can be abused for spam.

Some people (like the spammers and those who tolerate them) think that because you can do something technically on the internet you have every right.

Continue reading Le Web 3 '07: Jason Calacanis on Spam Pollution.

Le Web 3: Kevin Rose of Digg

By Adam Tinworth on December 11, 2007 10:53 AM | 0 Comments | 0 TrackBacks

Sarah Loves Kevin

In the fine tradition of Le Web 3 softball interviews, Sarah Lacy just gave Kevin Rose of Digg a warm, fluffy loving feeling up on stage, and she asked him again and again why he's so awesome. I made a few notes in between the moments of nausea:

There was "no Web 2.0" when Rose started Digg. He would have been happy with it paying his rent through AdSense. At the time there were a handful of editors controlling the front pages - he wanted to empower the masses. (The masses being the top 100 users, presumably)

He recommends that you don't start three companies at once. He also thinks that people raise investment capital too early sometimes - when they don't need it. Scares me when ideas are unproven. All three start-ups grown organically. Rose was working a day job when started he Digg. Pownce, was launched the same way.

Lacy asked how he keeps control of the company now venture capital is involved. Apparently it's a matter of picking the right investor. Yes, but how?

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