Thursday del.icio.us Links

A Keroauc inspired post : "Yahoo goes RSS, with a training wheels version that "scales up" to the same A-List level Apple's podosphere does. Dive deep, and you switch… to Bloglines/Ask Jeeves/IAC. Bloglines / Newsgator / Pluck break when the news explodes. In the last week, we've seen Microsoft teleport themselves to 2010, Apple beat their iTunes deadline by a month, and the Supreme Court carve out a huge win for the P2P clueful, namely Skype. Net net: I'm overwhelmed by quality on top of quantity. Relevance is the byword, and attention is the lingua franca. Who can play that game? Rojo is already in the hunt. Startups are flooding my Gmail. Off the record, everybody gets it. On the record, it's always darkest before dawn."

When blogging, and reading blogs is a chore. "I would like to. I really would. I like it and I like you. But we're now well past the point where any of us can keep up with all the blogs worth reading from the people worth keeping up with. Even with an aggregator. I just can't do it any more. I've been faking it for a while. Months. Maybe a year. If we've met and I look confused about something you told me, and if you said, "I blogged it," as if that should be explanation enough, I've made some excuse as if I read every one of your posts except that one."

Feedburner keep up to date : "For the more than 7,000 podcasts currently running through FeedBurner, we will very soon provide the ability to enter additional podcast description data via our SmartCast service, which we will ensure gets delivered with the appropriate RSS extensions to iTunes, Odeo, and others."

Newsgator keep up with the back end syncronization and enterprise feature-set, but what will we see in the consumer space ? "We've developed what we have called our 3rd-generation synchronization API. NewsGator Online implements this API, and Outlook edition 2.5 uses it for content sync. The upcoming FeedDemon 1.6 uses this same API for sync. And we're opening up and documenting the API for you to use, too. Watch for more about this in the next couple of days - as soon as we iron out a few things, we'll publish the docs and sample code, and we'll tell you about some folks who are already working with it."

Congrats to Topix for looking outside the U.S even if it is only to Canada ;) ! "Overall, Topix.net currently crawls and aggregates content from over 10,000 sources. More than 300,000 "news channels" are available including one for every US and Canadian public company and Zip Code. Every channel also has an RSS feed. In March of 2005, three large newspaper publishers acquired 75% of Topix net. The company also has partnerships with Ask Jeeves, CitySearch, AOL, Wondir, and Findory."

Scobleizer talks about what might be the ultimate meta-scrape-trackback-rss-tool ever ! :"I'm playing with some secret new technology that makes the tech blogging world even flatter. Not from Microsoft (the inventor asked me to keep it quiet until he's ready to release it). But, it totally is going to change how I blog (and it really already has although I can't change my style until you all get it too). It brought me Leslie's blog, for instance. It also will make comments unneccessary. Why? Because there are systems coming that'll match up -- in minutes -- a main post and all the comments being made about that post."

Is the Shuffle going multi-meg - Im a believer and a user, but with that much memory I will really need a screen to find podcasts : "there’s a report that Samsung and Toshiba are ramping up production of their 8Gbit NAND flash chops because Apple is planning to bust out a 2GB version of the iPod shuffle in June, with a 4GB version to follow in August."

Podcasting is an "Onslaught" for Apple's Itunes

wednesday afternoon ride
Originally uploaded by benbarren.

He was 20th rating podcast yesterday but he is now number 6. Just listened to Curry's 201 Daily Source Code and the quote is Apple was 'brought to its knees' once 4.9 launched; as tens of thousands of people tried to subscribe to podcasts, and it was supposed to be Akamai hosted "oops", but "they pointed it to" Currys servers (100 megabit server) and he upgraded quickly adding another 200 megabits. ("stil a little bit crunchy") This is interesting - Apple's users are testing the "indie" bandwith, changing the business models and it looks like there will be a commercial use for Bit Torrent - compressing and distributing podcasts. Tivo for Radio, hehe beavis thats funny, fire, titties, hey beavis there's wayne... or is that mike myers with steve jobs ? "The 100 Million Listener March" according to Curry is on. He's more fun than Winer thats for sure. "It's all good stuff as CC Chapman would say" finishes Curry.

UK Media Start to get RSS

melanie now on big brother
Originally uploaded by benbarren.

UK media organisations are starting to get RSS. From The Telegraph :

"At the moment, RSS services are offered free by broadcasters including Sky News and the BBC - which started actively promoting it last month - and by newspaper groups such as the Telegraph Group, which owns this newspaper"...

"Increasingly, the online strategy for Sky is to give a more personalised and relevant service to our subscribers and users, both in terms of content and functionality," says Dominic Collins, the head of commercial development at Sky Online. "RSS feeds are an excellent way for users to control what they consume from Sky News online and when."

RSS services are growing in popularity. "RSS is shifting from the tech savvy to the mainstream user," says Collins. Sky will not reveal figures detailing the use of its RSS feeds, but the BBC does. In May, there were 20m "click-throughs" from headlines on RSS news readers to news and sport stories on the BBC website. Of these 20m, just 40 per cent were from UK users, which may also demonstrate how RSS can give news organisations a greater international audience."

Yahoo's RSS Mail Client

blogging this ?
Originally uploaded by benbarren.

Dave Winer tells us the Oddpost acquisition will give us a webbased Outlook Yahoo Mail that will have an RSS based back-end : "More intriguing to us is what Yahoo may have planned down the road. RSS is a given. It was in Oddpost and will be in the new Yahoo Mail. But Diamond said that Yahoo has also created an API for the mail backend. This means Yahoo developers will be able to create a wide variety of interchangeable user interfaces that can be laid on top of the core mail technology. As an example, Diamond said, Yahoo could build a UI aimed at youths and another for Japanese users. Yahoo users might even be able to pick their own UI's someday."

"Ethan Diamond, the designer I spoke of, added a very simple RSS aggregator to Oddpost. When I saw it then, I thought it was kind of sad, like a mouse crying at the sight of a piece of stale cheese (inside joke, sorry), but no, it turns out Ethan was doing something brilliant (duh)."

Being a GMAIL addict I agree more with this : "I like Ajax-y online email app Oddpost, and was a paying subscriber before it was purchased by Yahoo, so apparently I'm going to get to play with the new Yahoo/Oddpost beta ... but I have a confession to make: I like Gmail better. While Oddpost is nice, and it's cool in sort of a dancing dog way -- it isn't that the dog dances well, but that it dances at all -- it feels like the wrong UI paradigm. Gmail seems faster and more responsive, with a tag/hotkey/conversation-centric interface that just plain work better for me."

$2.1B of GOOG Insider Sales

flinders with a view
Originally uploaded by benbarren.

Forget pubsub, technorati and the future of "future" search, ditch your recency over relevance algorithm, just read it and weep : "In May, Googlers sold just shy of $400 million of stock, second nationwide only to the $515 million in sales by Microsoft insiders, according to Bloomberg News data. Since the Mountain View company's IPO, Page and Brin have sold stock worth $619 million and $589 million, respectively, while Schmidt's sales have totaled about $191 million. In May, Page and Brin sold 400,000 shares each, fetching $93 million and $90 million, respectively. Schmidt sold $29 million. Page and Brin have sold similar numbers of shares in June, too. Thanks to the stock's steady rise, the sales totaled nearly $116 million for Brin and $111 million for Page." Thats $2.1B US since IPO last August for insider sales.

Just In : Review of I-Tunes 4.9 with Podcasting

The release of ITunes 4.9 (with podcasting) has just come up on my RSS-Reader '1 minute ago' so I thought I'd real time blog my experience of Apple's embrace of Podcasting and the Wayne's World of Internet Radio. Here goes : As usual the installation + re-start runs seamlessly on my IMAC G5. I now boot up I-Tunes.

I'm greeted by exactly the same I-Tunes screen, with the left Nav having the usual Fields : 'Library' 'Artists' 'Store' etc but there is a new one there I notice in small font; 'Podcasting' : Its not that obvious, but even though my Itunes folder is full of podcasts already, I'm excited.

I click on the little text link for podcasts and expect something to come-up but there's nothing, just a blank screen as if its a empty folder which I guess it is. But right down the bottom I just see another little text link : 'Podcast Directory' - This is something I would notice but not my Mom.

I then have to wait a few seconds post click as the service 'accesses the music store', and then finally I am at the screenshots page similar to what has been circulated in the blogosphere. And guess what the PodFather - Adam Curry occupies a dynamic rectangle in top centre nav, of which there are 3, approx 200X100 each, except Mr Closing Address Gnomdex is referred to as the Podfinder, not the Podfather - maybe Puzzo wasnt happy ;) or Steve has some John Sculley like plans for the podcasters.

The rest of the page is kinda odeo meets cdnow, with old-school 1997 display advertising units. The professional podcasters to quote Steve get centre space eg ESPN, Jamie + Danny - whoever they r, and Q-104... the sorta shows which curry took off well in DSC 200 approx 28 mins in ;)

Interesting the right nav has a title called 'Top Podcasts' : The ratings dont look anything like podcastalleys, which everyone begs for (and there are more one click applications developed for than 1-click subscription to podcasts themselves !) The Top 10 goes something like :

1. Inside Mac Radio
2. Itunes New Music Tuesday
3. ESPN Radio
4. Engadget
5. Disney Insider
6. KCRW Bookworm
7. ABC News
8. KCRW Le Show
9. KCRW To The Point
10. KCRW The Treatment

In the top 20 there is also some godcasting (Catholic Insider) some more KCRW, bit of BBC, and Adam Curry's Weblog (curry.com) comes in at 20 (Im assuming people have downloaded his 200th show thru itunes requesting curry.com)

On this major home page (the only one I find with real graphics and text) : No Dawn and Drew from their farm, or Keith and the Girl talking New York Clown parties in the Hamptons, or Nate and Di from their human storage facility they live in, and no PK & J, or high quality shows like Coverville, and others I like such as Bitterman Circle (soundie from Weezer band on world tour) or Reel Reviews (talking Swingers, Raging Bull) or Tech Podcasts (Gnomdex) or Chris Pirillo (how he met Ponzi on Match.com) or Dave Winer's Morning Coffee Notes (about Ron Bloom ;) - for starters.

Steve Jobs wasnt joking when he talked about 'professional' podcasters vs 'amateur' podcasters - Apple seem to be promoting the repurposed radio content over their amateur unemployed siblings, who are actually funny and in the case of Keith and the Girl put out a good hour 5-6 times a week.

Funnily enough, some of the more popular 'amateurs' do get to the 'bottom' of the top of the 'home page', with small buttons kinda below the fold. Podshow rep'd Dawn and Drew for example get a little logo and header under 'Indie Podcasts' - I guess Dawn did meet Kurt Cobain once !!!!

The general look and feel is farely non-interactive and actually makes Odeo's implementation seem very sophisticated in a mainstream way, in that you can easy listen and subscribe, plus read the cutesy logo and headings. Both still make me want to boot up ipodder lemon, and use my own networks and research to find the great new podcasts coming through, as well as updates to my favourites. But I have been staying up late, and not bringing home fish sometimes.

There is also a classic ABC directory : Arts, Entertainment, Blaaagh (i was sick) - Has anyone told Apple about tagging - If Feedtagger, Rojo, Furls, Odeo and of course the master del.icio.us can use tags, cant we see Apple create a mainstream, non-offensive way of offering this to the 1.2m song buyers per day ? When you click on the category eg 'comedy' you get a shortlist of 'comedy' podcasts, in a text/playlist manner which I assume they've ripped from ipodder/podcastalley - overall done in a pretty average to bad way. If you are going to start with the cheesy dynamic graphics, you may as well keep the metaphor as they say. To me its a bit like odeo, build the easy part of something, then try and ship something quickly because your boss told you. (It aint yet the google or yahoo of podcasting ! but it will work)

So when you actually click on the podcast you want to listen to, depending if you are on the front graphic page, or a playlist/directory category, the actual podcast goes into Itunes - There is summary information and interestingly the field 'price' is retained, with a 'FREE' badge next to it - So it will be very easy for one click podcasting ecommerce.

What is interesting is you can 'Free Subscribe' or 'Get Episode' - If I chose Free Subscribe it warns me that it will download the current and all future podcasts of this service. Again give me ipodder and let me choose my shows. If I subscribe to 50 podcasts, which I do, I dont want to download every single episode or my bandwith costs would be crazy and my PC would slow to nothing. Alternatively when I 'get episode' that seems to play the episode, rather than download it directly onto my IPOD for later mobile listening. I cant seem to easily choose here ! I had similar lack of user control with odeo, and result in me not using their Synch solution.

For mainstream Internet users who are comfortable with Itunes, I think they will find this an interesting experiment, but without any real guides as to do what to do, my bet is they will ironically not use the podcasts for the Ipod but rather 95% will just listen to the podcasts in real time, with buffering issues, on their PC. They will get bored and go back to music 85% of them. This isnt podcasting. Very few will click, as we know from web behaviour, past the first page, when the cute graphics end. The need for directive explanatory content (even audio !) would really help people here I think. And as mentioned, the podcasts promoted are 'too professional' for me. I left FM radio for a new type of content and to receive repurposed, limited out of date, non-top rating FM radio within my podcasts mix is the antithesis of what I am looking for.

Dont get me wrong Im all for professional content : Cant wait till record labels and movie studios hand assistants and A-List stars Irivers and say "Record your Life" What I would pay for some MP3 files from Katie Holmes at the moment.

But this will drive the market forward, and the quick shipping means we will quickly see 4.10. 4.11 Itunes etc as they improve. I'm off to download Daily Source Code 201 and Morning Coffee Notes ! through my trusty Ipodder Lemon Open Source Client.

Porsche Club 911

porsche_clube_911
Originally uploaded by benbarren.

Im sure Jerry will get one to add to his world class collection; "People are stopping for coffee on their way to Starbucks," he says as part of a very funny riff on Americans and their beverage fixations. If manufacturers can be so presumptuous as to name a cereal "Life," Seinfeld wonders, then why not go the next step, throw caution to the wind and just call it "Almighty God"? (A devoted cereal eater himself, or maybe he just played one on TV, Seinfeld speculated that the escalation of the raisin wars among makers of raisin brans could lead to the ultimate insanity: "all raisins, one flake"

RAZRberry

RAZRberry
Originally uploaded by benbarren.

More engadgets to pour over : "Ok, so here’s a quick refresher for you, in case you’ve forgotten just how much we’ve been anticipating the RAZRberry. Last we heard, Motorola was working on a Blackberry-killer type qwerty candybar that was going to be done in the style of the RAZR, which some were referring to as RAZRberry. Well, we’ve got the exclusive for ya: the device is codenamed the Franklin, and will have quad-band GPRS/EDGE, 128MB flash and 64MB RAM memory, Bluetooth, a 1.3-megapixel camera, MiniSD slot, 2.4-inch 320 x 240 65k color screen, and will apparently run Windows Mobile 5.0. Oh, and did we mention it’s freaking 112 x 64 x 11.5mm (4.4 x 2.5 x 0.45-inches) and won’t weigh more than 115g (4oz)? So this is what it feels like to be in love."

The First Real Bloggers : Suck.com

australian trailer park
Originally uploaded by benbarren.

Their first paragraph - which compared to todays "I'm an executive at a major software company and I'm really busy so I'll just link to people that linked to me and talked about new cool software that doesnt directly compete with what I do" SUCK.com were legends way before their Web 2.0 time.

"The chokers, the people who pay for all this stuff. They don’t get it. You’ve heard it a million times—at the water cooler and in shot-through newsgroups—but it’s absolutely true.

They don’t browse. They don’t keep up. They read about the Web, fer chrissakes, in the New York Times and in the Wall Street Journal. They tell their flunkies to order up some presence and have no idea what they’ve done or what it should look like.They’re virgins who’ve been told about sex and think they have a clue. They’re experts vicariously."

'The deal with Wired gave them $30,000 plus HotWired shares, an arrangement Anuff later categorized simply as “shitty”. “It’s a sell-out, but it’s the kind of sell-out that matters a lot to you if you’re a writer, or an editor, or a content producer,” says Gary Wolf. “People like that, people like us, are notoriously poor at extracting value from the economic systems. My understanding is that they sold out not because they were going to become millionaires, which they weren’t and didn’t, but because we promised them a stable platform for doing what they wanted to do, which was to publish this website. They got certain commitments. They were able to hire a staff, they were able to leave their day jobs, which they were working, doing production work for HotWired. They were able to become full-time working on Suck and not have to do it all night long. Eventually, they had four or five other people working for Suck. That was really what that was about. It was about making Suck.”

"(Heather)... Her greatest source of inspiration was the Suck office itself, beginning with Polly Esther, her angrier, meaner, foul-mouthed alter ego. “It’s like the worst aspects of your personality magnified. Those are the kinds of characters I like, you know. It depends on the way you’re most comfortable seeing yourself. I think that for me in order to accept my rough edges, I sort of use really strong language to describe them. I think I view myself in really strongly negative and strongly positive terms, so it was naturally to have sort of a caricature. I was comfortable with a negative caricature of myself, let’s put it that way. It was like a cathartic thing to have this really, really harsh, kind of disgusting doppelganger.”

"Craig : In some sense it was the most unprofessional group of crybabies, prima donnas, and problem employees. Everybody there was a problem. I don’t even think I knew any better, because I was a problem too."

Does this sound like the blogosphere : "that one of the most important things you can do is create this illusion of an ‘in crowd’ that you’re not in on. And it really does work, right? The ideal for a magazine would be like Mad’s usual gang of idiots, where you have this sense that there’s this really wacky crew all getting together to come up with these really great ideas. You really want to be part of that, you feel like you’re on the outside looking in on that. That was the key"

About the wonkette.com editor, part of nick denton gawker blog-empire : "“I think Suck changed when other people started writing,” says Beato, “and when Ana became the editor, because Ana wasn’t nearly as web-centric as Carl and Joey. She was more interested and more coming from traditional cultural criticism perspective, and I think a lot of the writers—myself included—were similar.”

“The last thing we were looking for was people who were looking to extend their authorial brand name,” says Anuff. “Who gives a shit about that? That just wasn’t what we were looking for. The idea was that we were trying to get people who were more concerned with getting an idea out there or a message out or something out, than trying to become known as great writers.” (sounds different to todays brand name conference bloggers eh ?)

“The style, the thing is, I kind of felt like you had it or you didn’t,” says Cox. “It was an easy and hard time finding freelancers, in that I knew right away if someone was going to work. Either you had the voice down or you were never going to get it down.”

“Begin with a dependent clause that lasts for a few paragraphs,” explains Havrilesky. “‘Despite the burgeoning blah blah blah.’ It was like a wordy, run-on sentence, lots of dependent clauses—almost like a coy, ironic kind of style. Once you learned how to write in that style, it was easy to write. It was like writing in a different language. It was like you could turn to certain reliable turns of phrase. It’s hard to describe. In some ways it was like having that really stylized, weird way of writing made it easier to make basic arguments more fun. But sometimes it was impossible to understand, too.”

“I still remember Gillespie’s piece,” says Anuff, “an illustrated feature he did with Terry about Christopher Reeve, right around the time Christopher Reeve remade Rear Window. Nick Gillespie wrote this illustrated feature, I think it was called ‘Strangers on a Gravy Train’. The premise was what it would look like if Christopher Reeve remade all the other Hitchcock films. Somewhere in each thing Robin Williams made a cameo appearance, because it had somehow come out at the time that Robin Williams was always this secret best friend of Christopher Reeve, so it kind of seemed like grandstanding on his part. It was written so that Christopher Reeve would be in his wheelchair, being chased by a plane ala North by Northwest, and Robin Williams would be the pilot, doing shtick. I remember this because Terry refused to illustrate it, which was a rare occurrence. Terry’s not the guy who’s going to be refusing on principle to be illustrating. I managed to talk him into it just by asking him if, when he read the script, he laughed, and he had to admit that he did. I said, ‘That’s the final defense. You’re morally obligated to illustrate it if you enjoyed it.’”

Wired, meanwhile, was in trouble. After two failed IPOs, the financial health of the company worsened daily. “It was pretty hard, because it seemed inevitable that that would entail some layoffs,” says Owen Thomas, who left in early 1997.

After Cox’s departure as editor, rumors of the imminent demise of Suck began to circulate. “Joey was out of town at the time, so nobody could get a hold of him,” says Tim Cavanaugh, who published a Suck obituary on his own website, Simpleton. “From Friday to Monday the story had become, ‘Suck is out of business and Joey has disappeared and there’s going to be no more Suck.’”

“I even wrote a last Filler ever, where the hack kills the fish and then turns the gun on himself,” says Havrilesky. “I remember writing it and saying to Terry, ‘Oh god, I feel like the fish is dead now. I feel like I lost my good friend the fish because we killed him off.’”

The Old New Economy - CMGi

the old new economy
Originally uploaded by benbarren.

Post Gnomedex and Microsoft's RSS announcement + Apple's impending Itunes podcasting play, as well as Google's "largest media company in the world" C2C classifieds, RSS Itunes and Adsense/Paypal Killn, Skype biting rumours, plus their 25 X price/revenue multiple - I'm going back to the lead internet investor of the dot com age - David Weatherall of CMGi - The pre-eminent evangelist investor (pre-Scoble/Feld/Mobius/Masthead/Union Square/Curry/Winer/RSSaggravator days)

"The New England Patriots have now played their last game at Foxboro Stadium, and I'm a little disappointed. It's not so much that I'll miss the stadium. By all accounts, the new one is impressive. I'm disappointed because next year, instead of playing at the simply named Foxboro Stadium, the Patriots will play at CMGI Field, which doesn't exactly roll off the tongue."

CMGI, which owns and invests in an array of Internet companies such as AltaVista, will receive promotional and sponsorship rights around the stadium. The company will also provide Internet services, such as streaming media broadcasting and Web hosting, for the team. "The 15-year deal requires CMGI to pay $7.6 million a year to the Patriots for the first 10 years."

"And, finally, please name the stadium after a successful company. It cannot be a good omen for the Patriots that CMGI stock has dropped 95 percent since the company announced that its name would go on the stadium. And I wonder how the Houston Astros now feel about playing at Enron Field after Enron's massive collapse. Will they have to rename it Bankruptcy Field (not to be confused with Bankruptcy Court)?"

"The Michael Jordan of this business - the one that more-recent firms look at with awe - is CMGI Corp. of Massachusetts. Founder David Weatherall has built a company with a market value of more than $25-billion(U.S.) by investing in Internet startups, some of which have become wildly successful. For example, after spending about $6-million on GeoCities, which it helped set up in 1996, CMGI made $1-billion when Yahoo bought it last year.

In 1995, the company bought 80 per cent of a search engine called Lycos for $2-million. Its 17-per-cent stake is now worth about $1-billion. NaviSite, a Web-hosting company CMGI started, went public in December at $14 and has been as high as $161 -- CMGI owns 72 per cent, worth $2.7-billion. The company has used its high-flying stock to buy even more companies. It bought Web portal AltaVista for $2.3-billion and on-line ad firm Flycast for $700-million, and more recently snapped up auction site uBid.com for $400-million and e-commerce company Tallan Inc. for almost $1-billion."

"For someone under such intense pressure, Wetherell exudes serenity. With his piercing blue eyes, trademark black T-shirt, and dark gray suit, he has the look and sound of an evangelist who has glimpsed the true order of things: the almost infinite business potential of the Net. Few things get Wetherell as excited as waxing endlessly about the ''viral'' growth prospects of Web sites, with their ability to make exponential leaps in traffic every day.

"We have 2,000 business plans a month coming in, says Wetherell. The power of innovation, of entrepreneurial motivation, has never been greater because of the Internet. "Because of CMGI, we have an extra $22,000 in the account which will help put our daughter through college", gushed one day trader."

So where is David Weatherall now ? He's not on the Technorati/Always On A-List Blog 2.0 List.

Apple to launch Itunes

Adam Curry Podcasting his Keynote on the Daily Source Code Live from Gnomedex
Originally uploaded by Matt B..

The rumour from Dave Winer : "Heard on the California grapevine, Tuesday is the big day for iTunes and podcasting. The client will be released and Apple will announce a big corporate content partnership. Still waiting for confirmation on who the partner is."

Adam Curry Product Placement

flinders coastline
Originally uploaded by benbarren.

If you listen to The Daily Source Code religiously - Adam mentioned The Lascivious Biddies, whose music he has played before (very kewl) that sold 200 CD's the day he mentioned them.

I thought I'd mention it so I can get onto the Gnomedex Top 10 results on Technorati while I listen to the 200th DSC for the second time. I was also interested in their music as it is great Dinner Party Music.

Find them here : http://www.biddies4ever.com/

"The Power of Subscription" as Curry referred to it in his closing address at Gnomedex.

Microsoft pre-Web 2.0 : IE 4 Launch : Sep 1997

Flinders on a beautiful sunday afternoon
Originally uploaded by benbarren.

Just listened to the Microsoft RSS podcast from Gnomedex and Adam Curry closing speech both of which I'd highly recommend.

Here's a direct quote from Brad Chase, once of Microsoft at the launch of IE4 back in the day (at Gnomedex they were previewing IE 7)

Active Desktop was a pre-cursor to RSS - or a previous attempt at 'push' media : The difference today is the focus on consumers being able to 'subscribe' to their favourite sites, who themselves will ensure their site is formatted in the right RSS (or Microsoft ?) format to ensure subscription can occur seamlessly. Active Channels had a handful of 'professional' content sites (to quote Steve Jobs on 'professional' podcasters)

Curry made an impassioned plea to let consumers 'get their media back' and also pushed that all industry players should be pushing for one click subscription. I'd recommend his talk over Steve Jobs 'Stay Foolish Stay Hungry' any day - His 'every user is a developer, and every developer is a user' is on the money at this juncture of RSS.

From Brad Chase @ IE4 launch many years ago : Microsoft is focused on "a newer way of getting information, some people call it push, we call it sometimes Webcasting. It's the ability to have Web sites delivered to you. So not only do we think primarily people want to browse, but we also believe there's a set of people that want content to come to them. I know that I travel a lot, for example. And so it's really convenient for me to be able to take a set of sites, download them onto my notebook and browse them right on the plane, even though I'm not connected."

Bill Gates said at the same launch "Certainly, we believe we've made a lot of progress in the browser space. One thing we feel is that with this product, Internet Explorer 4.0, during its lifetime, we will go to over 50 percent market share of browser users. So IE 4 is a major event. Dynamic HTML, active channels, the mail client we've got here, the advances in Net Meeting, all of those are based on the feedback from the people who are out there using the Web in very interesting ways."

It's almost Ten Years on ! Who will have the last laugh ? and where is Rupert ?

Gnomedex Podcast Links - Curry, Winer, Microsoft

the whiner is barely audible
Originally uploaded by benbarren.

I'm blogging in Flickr, and Ive inserted the links straight for the podcasts from Gnomedex.

Great job to technorati, their page was the best entry point to gnomedex if you weren't there.

For Dave Winer's opening keynote address and the Microsoft RSS announcement go to techpodcasts.com. Or check my del.icio.us links for exact URLs. To hear closing address by adam curry, his 200th show of dailysourcecode, go to curry.com, as at moment it is not yet up on ipodder, ipodderx or dailysourcecode.com but it is up on curry.com !

I've got my Shuffle and we're going to listen to the podcasts on the hills of the Mornington Peninsula, Australia.

Wireless RSS Readers

no more simple life
Originally uploaded by benbarren.

Seems the RSS reader battle is heading to the wireless space with FreeNews taking an early lead. From Steve Rubel : "Over the past several months I have been playing around with mobile RSS readers. These include Newsgator Mobile Edition, Bloglines Mobile and My Yahoo! Mobile. While any of these online tools are very adequate for reading feeds on the go, I found them lacking in a few areas.

On the upside, by using Newsgator or Bloglines you will only read a feed once now matter which device you're using. I particularly like how Newsgator allows you to specify which feeds you want to read where. I set up a handful for my mobile device and read the rest on Newsgator Online. All three of these services, however, are all hampered by same problem - the speed of the browser/wireless network. What's worse, in Yahoo!'s case they don't link to the full post so - at least for right now - their mobile RSS reader is very limiting.

The market is ripe for a killer feed reader that does not rely on HTML/WAP. Thankfully, FreeRange Communications is fulfilling this need. Their FreeNews RSS reader (which actually is not free, but well worth the $20/yr.) is an absolute winner. It runs on virtually any phone that supports Java - including the Windows Mobile, BlackBerry and Palm platforms. You can find the full feature set here.

What I love about FreeNews is its speed. It downloads RSS feeds lickity split. In addition, when you follow a feed link FreeNews provides you with the full text of the page in a stripped down, graphics-free readable format. FreeNews also supports offline reading and they make it very easy to subscribe/unsubscribe from feeds via the Web or the mobile client. My only wish is that they would sync up with a major online player, such as one of the aforementioned three horsemen of the news aggregation world."

How to Turn $12.5M into $4.3BN

charity
Originally uploaded by benbarren.

Awesome post by billburnham.blogs.com : "As many may know, all the way back in 1999 Kleiner and Sequoia each invested $12.5M in Google for a 10% stake. Fast forward to the Summer of 2004 and these stakes were worth $2.03BN at Google's IPO price of $85/share. While they originally intended to sell about 10% of their stakes in the IPO, both Kleiner and Sequoia backed off from this plan when the IPO ran into some investor jitters over valuation (which in hindsight look somewhat misplaced). Lucky for the VCs, Google's shares have basically been on a straight line to the moon since IPO and now trade at $290/share less than a year after the IPO, so being forced to hold on to their shares was a blessing in disguise.

As it currently stands, both Kleiner and Sequoia have already distributed the vast majority of their stakes to their LPs. Thanks to the wonder of the SEC's Form 4, it's possible to go back and calculate exactly how much money the firms have made for their LPs to date. It's also possible to see how much the individual VCs have received (John Doerr and Mike Moritz) and even to make a realtively precise guess at the specific carried interests that each VC has in their respective fund.

In the case of Kleiner, they made their first big distribution of shares to LPs on 11/17/04 when they distributed about 5.7M shares, about a quarter of their total stake, at $172.5 a share which equates to about $983M. They made another distribution on 2/4 of 11.4M shares, about 54% of their stake, at $203.66 per share for a cool $2.3BN. On 5/2/04, they made another distribution of 1.1M shares worth $247M. In total, to date they have distributed shares worth $3.549BN. They still have another 2.6M shares worth $752M as of yesterday's close, so the total value of their stake is $4.3BN which represents a 344X return on their investment of $12.5M ... not too shabby."

Video Flash Love

iriver U10
Originally uploaded by benbarren.

Only 1 meg, pack of a size of cards, plays videos, can record podcasts/mp3, touch-ish screen, from i-river, I want it please.

How much and when I-River ? Don't tease me. I'm on the edge already as I need something that records MP3 and all podcasters mention Iriver. (and my Shuffle dont record, and I also want FM radio and a screen would be a luxury but not key !)

It's so hard to pick a device these days. None of them are perfect, but waiting is no play. But then you buy one and 6 months later you are justifying to yourself why (another) new device (you want) is for a different more serious, work related, actually productivity related benefit.

But it's just one night gadget lust.

Like a closet full of sneakers, previously loved and left.

If Apple can upgrade my Shuffle to record, that will keep me happy, as I love the 22 gram neck chain as I ride my bike.

Microsoft + RSS

ie7 ms' tag- rss
Originally uploaded by benbarren.

Reading the transcriptions of MS' RSS strategy which now seems fused with Longhorn, which means either it wont be out for 18 months or it will arrive through IE 7 browser.. anyway, I had a dejavu moment (their screenshots shown) : "Dean Hachamovitch, general manager, Longhorn Browsing and RSS Technologies, and Amar Gandhi, group program manager, are on stage @ Gnomedex."Syndication is powerful. Syndication is amazing." We tried a long time ago and made mistakes (with Active Desktop and Channels in IE 4 and 5). We started to get it one person at a time. Scoble is a platform; it's not clear what he is evangelizing, but he is a platform."

Remember Active Desktop ? wow I was at msn (ninemsn here) and remember trying to implement this; everything old is new.

From the MS' speaker/PM'b 'IEBLOG' I found this most interesting :

"I also announced some enhancements to RSS, which we call the Simple List Extensions. The Simple List Extensions can be used to enable websites to publish lists such as photo albums, music playlists and Top 10 lists as RSS feeds. RSS can be used to publish lists like these today, but our extensions really enhance the experience that users can have when subscribing to these kinds of lists. We’re very excited about the great scenarios that these extensions can enable.

One scenario I’m particularly excited about is the idea of being able to subscribe to my wife’s Amazon.com wish-list – we’ve been talking to the great folks at Amazon.com about using these extensions, and, at Gnomedex, Amar and I showed a prototype application working live against Amazon.com wish lists built using Amazon Web Services (built with the invaluable help of the Amazon.com Web Services team). You can see that on the Channel 9 video as well – it’s the best way to understand why this is so useful and interesting."

To me seems a combination of Safari Browser RSS, Pub-Sub, Technorati and throw in specifics like RSScalendar.com , plus some RSS developer evangelism. I hope Microsoft dont wait till Longhorn is out to do something.

"The best part is that we’re showing a deep commitment to the RSS community by making the specification for these extensions available under the Creative Commons license, the same license under which the RSS 2.0 specification was released. You can read the Simple List Extension specification on the MSDN site linked below. In layman’s terms, we’re saying that anyone can implement these extensions on their site or in their application."

Podcasting Personalisation

jenna_iriver
Originally uploaded by benbarren.

Just read a great post from GenuineVC.com about online music start-ups and a section on the personalisation players : I wonder when these players will connect the dots and realise the algorithms and community sharing models they have developed, when tweaked would work perfectly in the 'search/discovery/sharing' space of podcasting, which needs it even more than music due to its more decentralised organic model vs label driven popular music.

"How do music listeners find and discover new music? Startups like Musicmobs, Audioscrobbler, Savage Beast, and many others offer consumers music recommendations (direct and via distribution channels). Some services plug directly into iTunes to gather listening history & preferences, and others gather data in other ways. Some engines base recommendations on what other users with similar habits listen to, and others try to directly discern qualities inherent in the music itself. All in essence are taking a step towards what I’ve called predictive personalized media."

Podcasting vs RSS

fixes 911s silhouette
Originally uploaded by benbarren.

Newsgator just announced 'podcasting support' - From Greg Reinacker :"You can now find podcasts from within NewsGator web edition, click "Add to Podcasts", and download them to your iPod (or other portable device) using FeedStation."

This deserves a full post but I totally agreed with Dick Costollo that there will be many flavours of RSS clients. Its the order of the universe.

In a world where design and focus is everything, and an IPOD is the player, you need a podcasting specific client.

I dont think podcasting will become a subset of RSS players in the near term. Until someone figures out how to do tabbed RSS reading (my "news" "auctions" "classifieds" "music" "podcasts" etc) we will have segment leaders in the RSS space.

And anyone that thinks the ipodders (lemox and x), nimiq, doppler, podcastalley etc are all going to just stop what they are doing is wrong. Expect the small players to get together where the podcast directories and podcatchers become even more integrated.

Cant wait to see what is coming out of Gnomedex conference, from both big and small players, especially to see what new podcasting and RSS software is demo'd and released :

"On Friday you'll see how deeply integrated RSS is in the architecture of the browser. But that's just the tip of what may turn out to be a very big iceberg. The people at Microsoft noticed something that I had seen, only peripherally -- that there were applications of RSS that aren't about news. Like Audible's NY Times Best Seller list, or an iTunes music playlist, or lists of Sharepoint documents, or browser bookmarks. Lists are all over the place, and people are starting to move them around via RSS, and they are not the usual kind of data that has been carried by RSS in the past."

Is Yahoo Big Brother ? : 10th Anniversary

Is Yahoo Big Brother : 10th Anniversary
Originally uploaded by benbarren.

Hi Tony Faure ! ;) For those of you that read 'burn rate'/'eboys', worked for the same company taken over 5 times, got a too big mortgage and were retrnched early 2000's and u r just getting back into the space, and your skills are 'of interest' to 'stealth start-ups' again : - this interview wont mean much, but its a nice reminder, that even Jerry Yang is getting grey hair :

What was the original plan for Yahoo? It began as a hobby in 1994 as we wanted to keep track of our personal interests on the web, but the lists became too long so we broke them into categories, then subcategories and basically the core concept behind Yahoo was born. We shared lists with friends to help them navigate the web and when we celebrated our first million-hit day in the autumn, we realised maybe we had a potential business.

Did you envisage lasting 10 years? When we were a handful of people in a small office in Mountain View, we used to say "We're making a real difference." I believe we still are. Our 10th anniversary is a milestone, a great sense that we have accomplished a lot, but it's not a time for complacency. We still have a long way to go. Companies such as Microsoft, Cisco and Intel were just starting at their 10-year anniversary.

"What helped you get stronger when other portals fell? People regard Yahoo as a platform for essential services and it's had a profound impact on the way people obtain information, communicate and their entertainment. We've stayed ahead of the trend curve, plus we've had some luck. We are driving innovation to be leaders in areas such as advertising, music, broadband, and search. Consumers vote with their mouse every day and we never take their choices for granted.

What was it about Flickr that made it such a must-have acquisition? There's a lot we can achieve through this acquisition because we'll be able to leverage their leading technology and product features such as tagging (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tagging). The internet's a driving force in the change from mass media to "my media", in which consumers will be their own programmers. User-generated content or "social media" will be a large component, and Flickr (www. flickr.com) has one of the strongest, most active communities out there.

How do you feel about internet telephony? Voice over Internet Protocol is one of the most exciting developments. We believe Yahoo Messenger (http://messenger.yahoo.com) is the ideal platform for extending VoIP services. We chose it because we want to bring together the most relevant features into one comprehensive communication suite.

Have advertisers found their way back to the net? In the UK, online marketing budgets saw the strongest growth of all media in the first quarter of 2005, according to the IPA's Bellwether Report (www.bellwetherreport.com) and they're expected to surpass the £1bn barrier by mid-next year.

Do you see more convergence of TV and broadband services? A lot of the technologies we talked about in the late 90s are starting to become a reality. If you look at the under 35s, who grew up with the net, their media consumption and approach to technology is completely different to their parents' generation. They rely on the net for information, work, entertainment - and keeping in touch with friends and family. "

Newsgator Enterprise VP Quits

rships
Originally uploaded by benbarren.

He was hired through a blog, now he leaves by a blog; Charlie Wood - Moonwatcher. This part of his final post I liked; "They want to monitor sales leads, customer support incidents, supply chain metrics, and project status. They also want to be able to deliver product updates, technical support information, and promotions to their customers. They see RSS as an enabling technology for these applications. Nearly every one of the enterprise customers I've talked to wants to do these things but doesn't know where to start."

But if anyone mentions Steve Jobs "Stay Foolish, Stay Hungry" Stanford address again, as motivation for doing a start-up, I will spew.

I say this to parody myself as our new business venture will be released in next fortnight, but 2nd dot com time around, Im thinking more commercial business, than arts degree idealistic.

The Google Scroll

The Google Scroll
Originally uploaded by benbarren.

This image is a covert camera's snap of the real time 'SCROLL' @ goog - all the search terms in real time in multiple languages.

Google today - I agree with exactly what John Batelle says below, as I have been saying for weeks with rumours of C2C classifieds, RSS web based music and paypal killn.

" I recently sent a note to the folks at Google PR. It went something like this:

So, in the last week, it's been

1. Google is starting a Paypal killer.
2. Google is starting a craigslist killer.
3. Google is starting an iTunes killer.

So, any thoughts about all of this?

Steve Langdon, who works with Google PR, got back to me yesterday. He sent me comments from Eric Schmidt regarding the PayPal rumours. They go as follows:

"We do not intend to offer a person-to-person stored-value payments system."

"We believe that ecommerce can be improved and we are working on ways to improve the user experience. We are working on things in ecommerce."

"The payment services we are working on are a natural evolution of Google’s existing online products and advertising programs which today connect millions of consumers and advertisers."

"We are building products in the area to solve new problems in ecommerce."

These sound a lot like "We are not planning to introduce a browser" comments. In other words, why do what's already been done, when we can do better!?

As for the craigslist and itunes whisperings, Steve had this to say: "rumor and speculation."

Keep your Friends close....

lying
Originally uploaded by benbarren.

Interesting post from a key exec at Topix.net : "You've made many successful partnerships with media sites, and then sold a 75% stake to three major newspaper businesses, Gannett, Knight Ridder, and the Tribune Company. Was this the plan from the get-go? Were you building this business with those "exits" in mind?

Markson: Well, when we started out, I was wondering what media companies were going to think about this. I'm a deal guy. I want to build partnerships. In the beginning, it was like 3,000 media companies wanted to be a part of our crawl, and 4 or 5 said no. We've always had an opt-out policy. It was pretty obvious that newspapers understand the value of aggregation and traffic. Gannett, Knight Ridder, and the Tribune Company all saw us as a product development team that they wouldn't know how to build themselves.

We were very focused and head-down on building our business from the start. Topix.net was started by a pretty tightly knit team - we go way back. Four of us went to high school together. We have two brothers and two brothers-in-law as the founding team. I was number five. All of us have had the positions at other companies dealing with VCs, the big-wig strategic partners like HP, having to go through the stress of M&A, etc. I worked for Terraspring and saw it through to acquisition by Sun Microsystems. So, we really wanted to build a fun company and a cool place to work that we would love to wake up to in the morning and go to every day! Then before we knew it, we're getting calls and talking to all the Sand Hill guys, and we're like, "Wait a minute. This isn't fun anymore!"

But I'm a partner guy, so I don't turn down any opportunities. We were approached by lots of people to do lots of different things, and we explored them. I approach every deal as a partner opportunity, and that's how I talk to VCs. It's like dating. When you're looking to get a date, it doesn't happen, but when you just want to hang out at a bar and have fun, that's when the opportunities come up!

IBDN: So what's your advice to start-ups as they pursue multiple exit strategies and opportunities?

Markson: Don't smell like you're trying to get liquidity. That's not very attractive. Pursue your core business, grow smartly, and others (VCs or potential acquirers) will see what an integral part your business could play that will benefit them, and that's where you will find yourself - cutting the deals.

Michael is the vice president of business development for Topix.net, where he leads the company's strategic partner efforts. Prior to Topix.net, he was the general counsel and director of business development for Terraspring, Inc., where he led the company's strategic partner program, forming valuable alliances with entities such as HP and EMC. In addition, he headed the efforts involved with the final sale of the company to Sun Microsystems."

The Role of The VC in 2.0

odeo comedy
Originally uploaded by benbarren.

Nice post from A VC : "Have you ever heard someone say, we "roll up our sleeves and help the entrepreneur build the business"?

If you are an entrepreneur who has raised venture money or if you are an LP who invests in venture funds, I am certain you've heard this cliche.

It's in the same category as "value added investor". It sounds really good coming out of your mouth. But its not what you say, its what you do.

And how many VCs really do this?

In my experience, not enough.

Rolling up your sleeves means getting your hands dirty.

It means making a conscious decision that you are going to focus a significant amount of time and energy away from finding deals and raising funds and actually work on portfolio companies.

That's not always something many VCs want to do when they really think about the opportunity costs.

My favorite story about this goes back to the early 90s when I was a wet behind the ears VC who had just taken his first board seat.

I went to the first board meeting. It was in Buffalo, NY and the two entrepreneurs were Ron Schreiber and Jordan Levy, both of whom have become good friends and great VCs.

After the meeting, Jordan took me aside and said "Freddy (he still calls me that), if you want us to listen to anything you say in these meetings, you are going to have to spend some serious time getting to know our business".

I guess Jordan and Ron didn't like the idea of some wet behind the ear VC trying to tell them how to run their business.

I quickly recognized that I had to earn the right to tell them what I thought they should do.

So a couple weeks later, I cleared my calendar for 2-3 days and flew to Buffalo.

Jordan had arranged for me to spend time in every part of the business, from help desk to finance to sales and everything else.

I rolled up my sleeves and got my hands dirty.

I met almost every employee and learned what each job entailed. I even did some of the jobs.

By the end of my stay in Buffalo that week, I had a much better idea of what the business was all about.

And it made me a much better Board member.

I am glad I learned that lesson so early in my career as a Board member and I have Jordan to thank for it.

It's a lesson that has stuck with me. My first instinct after I make an investment is to jump in with both feet and get wet.

Use the product/service. Talk to customers. Sell the product/service. Get feedback. Recruit management. Generate PR. Whatever it takes as long as its legal and ethical.

It makes me a better investor and a better Board member.

And if you think about it like you are working for the CEO, not the other way around, it generally is appreciated.

Then when things aren't going so well, you can start making suggestions and you'll be heard. And the suggestions you make wil be good ones.

So I think rolling up your sleeves is the best thing you can do as a VC, but its work and it requires a committment that not all VCs have."

NHL NFL Teams with Branded RSS Readers

NHL NFL Teams with Branded RSS Readers
Originally uploaded by benbarren.

LA Raiders hats when I was a teenager in Australia, following the NWA Trend (Eazy but not that eazy to deal with ;) were a very big thing. They were worth alot of bling and you could get "rolled" but most of all if you get it, you got 'cred' and 'respect' : A bit like 6 NFL, NHL teams that are using branded RSS desktop readers. Word Up !

From Micropersuasion : "Six NFL and NHL teams are using (this) tool to distribute desktop RSS news alerts. This includes the Oakland Raiders and Buffalo Bills.."

MTV buys Neopets for $160M

Angelina Jolie in alice cooper t-shirt staring right through you
Originally uploaded by Wilgar.

Great post about inconsistencies of coverage in the social software/blogging space that will run stories for 2 weeks based on one sentence on a rumour from Dave Winer about Google launching an Itunes like service (remember Microsoft's mantra, where I worked; "Emulate and extend") but there is no coverage of MTV buying neopets for $160M. These guys have been in it for the long haul. And nice to see some M+A not from Yahoo or Google.

"I'm fascinated by Viacom's decision to buy Neopets, the wildly popular online synthesis of Pokemon and Sim City. And I'm equally fascinated by how few people are seemingly paying attention. Here we have one of the most successful pieces of social software ever, so successful that it is being purchased by a major media company for $160-million, and the story is getting remarkably little play in social software circles.

Why is the acquisition interesting? Well ...

* Neopets has grown from 90,000 subscribers in 2000 to more than 25-million today

* The social software company has eight-figure revenue and is cash-flow positive

* It has taken no venture money, and no professional outside capital of any kind that I'm aware of

* It is one of the fastest-growing sites on the web, and is consistently among the 10 stickiest sites in the world (according to Nielsen/Netratings)"And yet, no-one seemingly cares that this wildly successful non-venture-backed social software company is being bought for a nice chunk of change by Viacom. It is worth paying attention to -- something important been proven here, and folks in social software should be noticing."

I also liked this post from Tony Gentile of Buzzhit :

"Regular readers might remember that I was graciously included in the launch of Feedster's Media Network offering back in late April. At the time, I mentioned that I was experimenting with a variety of RSS ad providers, that I would run Feedster's ads on my blog until their RSS solution was ready, and that I'd report back on my results/findings.

Well, after roughly two months of poorly targeted contextual ads, I have a whopping $1.87 "pending" in my Feedster/Adbrite account. (It's pending because $1.87 isn't nearly enough to trigger a payout.) During the period, there were 14,253 impressions and 24 clicks, for a CTR of 0.00168 (or roughly a sixth of one percent), an effective (i.e., my share) CPC of $0.078, and an effective CPM of $0.13. I received zero offers to run ads directly on my site for the automatically computed price of $11.88/day or $285.00/mth; two notes on that... 1) who would given the published CTR of the house ads, and 2) I did zero to promote this myself, relying on the "your ad here" link to do its thing.

So, experiment over, and I'm moving on. Next up is Google Adsense (for the blog). It will sit in the same location as the Feedster/AdBrite ads, and will be Google's standard skyscraper form-factor. Details when I hit a comparable number of impressions (which may be a bit, as my Google traffic has fallen off significantly since the last dance).

On the RSS Ads front... still waitng for something compelling enough to turn you all into a bunch of guiena pigs... perhaps new options will be available after Gnomedex? ;-)"

Finish my quick blog today with the as usual brillaint round-up of the gawker tom cruise/scientology/kate holmes story :

Fox 411s Roger Friedman makes the alien abduction comparisons seem much more literal, reporting that Katie Holmes suffered 16 missing days between a Save the Music concert and the infamous day the flacks announced her relationship with Tom Cruise. Only one thing seems certain: Probing was not involved [Fox 411]

Those missing days probably flew by while the preclear ? Holmes slogged through the 343 questions on the Scientology auditing list. (Sample: Have you ever made a practice of confusing people ? Have you ever smothered a baby ? We're pretty sure the one about the baby is a trick question. [Radar Online]

�� DreamWorks and Paramount will probably get stuck with Cruise's massive hotel bill from the French leg of his WOTW tour, as 34 rooms worth of security and Scientology staffers can wreak some serious havoc on the minibar."

Will VC's Invest in Podcasting ?

Brad Feld, the world's leading RSS venture capitalist, posed the question on his blog yesterday; "I don't get podcasting - Yet" This is what he concluded :

"I’ve been paying attention to the various areas that are being focused on by VCs, including creation, subscription, hosting, and search / discovery. I’m really struggling to see how it’s different from features that are quickly being rolled into other services, other than the nuances associated with dealing with audio (and video for vLogs) vs. text. We’ll see."

Below is part of what I posted back (with some "exclusive" parts for my RSS readers !)

First a Long Tail joke from Infoworld executive speaking at a conference about the Long Tail : "My blog is part of the Long Tail. (comedic pause) Which is just another way of saying no one reads it. [rim shot here]." It killed, I tell you.... I flew all the way from Boston to San Francisco last night (comedic pause). . ...and boy are my arms tired. [rim shot here]"

Back to Podcasting... I have been trying to get my head around the same question "I don't get podcasting - yet", mainly from an 'import the best model to Australia' perspective but also from a what is the world's best niche to invest and play in. It perplexed me that I got so much satisfaction from podcasts, and knew they were 'different, even better' than radio, but I couldn't put my finger on a specific part of the business model that, as a wannabe mobius or kleiner perkins venture capitalist, would work.

I wanted to feel I could identify the unique bilion dollar opportunity; I had re-read my "The First 20 Million Dollars is the Hardest" by Po Bronson, even one of my faves Burn Rate - starting price 21c on amazon, plus John Sculley's (the guy in-between Steve Jobs, ex Pepsi CEO) "Odyssey" (not Fagles interpretation of Homer) and wanted to be able to categorically say to a bunch of Web 2.0 amnesiacs, that didnt include ex-Google employees or MTV hosts : "This is it, I have cracked it. Brief Bangalore, and lets get the viral happening. Supersize me on my Libsyn Podcasting Hosting account, get Soccergirl around for a podcast, we're putting on our headphones and having ourselves a party."



Rant aside, I myself listen to a podcast before Music on my Shuffle now; Pier to Pier, Bit Torrent, Limewire, eDonkey, Kazaa, blaaagh; Over it. Give me an MP3 Mashup and a podcast knocking bloggers ! I go back to my ipodder client hoping there is a new podcast from keith and the girl, and the daily source code, I wonder what happened to the Dollar Show and Sam and Jim go to Hollywood, but find an even better substitute in the HollywoodPodcast.com stalking Gwyneth and interviewing the Paparazzi. I download Coverville 3 times a week and listen to covers of Talking Heads, Jimi Hendrix, Kelis, Police. I even listen to Dave Winer driving to a Miami Podcasters meet-up on some highway out of a Charlie Kaufman script as he argues with his GPS system in his van (but still listens and ends up where he started) : This is post reality TV, without the images (so you can work on your PC or do stuff on the move and listen to your ipod - people who say podcasting arent interactive are kidding because A. you have to find them first B. you subscribe C. you are doing a million other things while listening usually !)

So if Podcasts are better than music, which is now my temporal thesis, there is definite value in disrupting the how the Itunes, Yahoo Music, Napster, Rhapsody play goes. Why else is Steve Jobs spruiking podcasts and putting 8000 of them into Itunes in the next month ? So what will the other portals do, esp as Google is rumoured to be bringing out an Itunes killer. (and Yahoo is already well on the way of doing this within the 30% non-IPOD mp3 player market.)

The two players in this space to date (as you know I have written about) with the most 'start-up' visibility I would say is Adam Curry and Odeo (ex Blogger founder Evan Williams) Curry's approach is the more organic and probably the more on the money from an end-end value chain perspective. (you need to download dailysourcecode.com)

I use Ipodder as much as Newsgator and I think it will be very hard to change this behaviour even if an RSS reader (as netnewswire 2.0) reads the MP3 enclosure - You need an app/reader just to deal with the podcasts. (although it could be a tab on the reader I guess, but would bet the leaders in each space stay separate for a while)

At the moment, it is quite hard to find a podcast, then to sync it, and then once you are sick of blogging and listening to other people's podcasts, you want to create your own. So people will make money by selling the tools to the goldminers, not the gold itself.

I think there will be definite value in the search side (like technorati and feedster did for blogs - which they dont do for podcasts) Also, there will be real value in podcasting directories, but more so (because of all the new ones etc) in the ratings and personalisation side : How else am I going to find a podcast that suits me with all the millions of them going on.

The tool I go back to every day - in fact multiple times a day - is in the reader (ipodder - lemon and x, nimiq etc) and then its in the tools I need to make a podcast (which is impossible to achieve and someone like apple is going to have to develop or buy someone) followed by podcasting specific hosting and tools (feedburner meets libsyn.com for podcasters) and finally in the monetisation/ad sense/network models.



So Curry has the ipodder directory which he has hired a new person to really develop (6K+ podcasts, updated in real time, pinging etc incl !) then he has his digital satellite 4 hour daily radio show with sirius, his 5 times a week 40min daily source code, and he has the beta of cast blaster and megaseg which are the tools you need to make a podcast. Finally he has the podshow network of podcasts incl quite a few top 10 podcasts by traffic eg dawn and drew, yeast radio, his own show etc

Not a bad strategy if he can pull it all together and monetise it with software sales to newbie podcasters backed up with sponsorship revenue for high trafficked podcasts - eg when paris hilton was in house of wax movie, they developed a branded reader for warner bros and promoted her 6 series podcasts (6 minutes of paris at red carpet premieres talking into an iriver) and the ads went over the podshow/curry network

odeo is trying to equally do an end-end podcasting play with their mantra being listen-sync-create, but the create part is not yet finished because it is so hard. Their sync feature is like an ipodder etc or is meant to be but I found it had lots of problems so I only use their listen feature which is like a magazine format which allows me to preview and listen to podcasts - They have a top 40 based on number of their members subscribed.

The number 1 place to get podcast ratings is podcastalley.com which has monthly ratings based on the number of votes, which is flawed as all the upncoming podcasters - soccergirl, keith and the girl etc all say "please vote for us on podcast alley" - its not really a test of what is best or suited to my taste.

But podcastalley has definitely developed a community but needs to be turned into a business - Nice little turnaround growth play.



Which gets me to the part of the business which is most interesting and actually mimics what is going on in the RSS reader market you know well :)

"Personalisation" : The holy grail for all RSS including podcasting.

Personalisation and Ratings : Companies that develop real time, large sample, proprietary podcasting ratings, which enable users to have recommendations made for them, or be told reliable ratings by category, that is a great service.

The Billboard Ratings of Podcasting

So whats the business model ? Well yeah I guess its just advertising. But it would also be a great software/data play to the major portals etc as it would power their recommendations when they embrace podcasting as we r told they will.

And an industry ratings subscription service for all the podcasting networks and podcasters themselves. (ala feedburner analytics for podcasters again !)

Yahoo for example with their new music service have a personalised radio channel. The Feedburner CTO wrote a great post about how it recommends songs to you eg "hey you just listened to white stripes, other listeners that listened to white stripes like Jet's new album" - I spend hours each week looking for podcasts, and yahoo/google's audience is going to have real trouble.

In the short term, I'd buy the Podcasting readers with the biggest audience and best technology - ipodder, ipodderx, and I'd also buy a podcasting directory/content site - maybe ipodder.org plus podcastingalley.com, I'd also offer $70K plus ea + % of ad revenue contracts to 3-5 of the best podcasters out there (and already in the top 20) who are unemployed and cant pay hosting costs.. then I'd find a piece of software that enabled people to create podcasts easy, and Id commission a 100 page functional spec on 'Personalisation and Top 100 Real Time Podcasts' then send it to Satyam in Bangalore to build.. Wrap it up... and fold it into whichever is the leading RSS platform player at the time.

OK, back to keithandthegirl.com for me, and coverville.com - some great music covers, they just had their 100 show, it comes out three times a week, and to quote Steve Jobs address (in the inverse) when announcing podcasting "Its very professional".

Monday del.icio.us Links

the conti on a sunday
Originally uploaded by benbarren.

I should be working, but these links needed to be distributed :

'Folksonomic Discovery' to paraphase the rise of tagging : King del.icio.us and upstarts gataga (social bookmark meta-engine) and 43 things (I'd like to do) funded by Amazon

Pubsub and the future of 'future search' and whether Bambi thinks Google will morph adsense into an ad exchange (after they launch their paypal, itunes and craigslist competitors - all rumoured to be launching soon)

Feedburner metrics continue to impress - 5% growth in RSS feeds under management each day (growth that hedge funds would love to emulate)

Who said social networking online for teenagers interested in social networking was dead, with 2m members a month.

Why stealth start-ups suck, which I kinda agree with and this guy has founded and sold his previous company (One-List) to Yahoo and Bloglines to Ask-Jeeves/Interactive Corp.

Vincent Gallo who made Buffalo 66 (a personal favourite) shoots a 53 second Warhol like Paris Hilton Video (probably when he slept with her) and distributes it as a viral video file online.

Or try an extract of Bobby and Whitney's new reality show. Do not try crack kids, this is what will happen.

Check out Forbes list of brands that "have the best extension opportunities according to consumer perceptions."

Long Tail jokes

The RSS Remix Economy

"Ziggy (departing CEO of Australia's number 1 telco - Telstra) is guided by his children when it comes to picking future trends, and RSS is the game for the Moment... RSS allows you to play the news editor, and somewhere in there Ziggy thinks there is a bankable model to work on. AFR June 18, 05"

Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary is now utilised by the majority of US websites, as a means of increasing traffic to their services - Namely through repeat traffic. Websites need to code their site into RSS format (a form of XML) which can take anything from 5 minutes to 3 hours on average and users then view any updates from the website (usually headline, teaser or full text and images) through one interface, provided in a desktop or web application by Newsgator, Feedtagger (as well as MyYahoo - although if you are Australian you need to say you live in Beverly Hills 90210) The end result for the publisher or website owner is more eyeballs and more advertising revenue, in theory.

Some website editors though have begin to become as paranoid as print publishers are about the web. Matt McAllister, online editor of Infoworld said : "I started thinking a frightening thought: RSS is doing to the Web today what the Web has been doing to print for the last several years. We have disintermediated our Web site by offering our news in an easier to access format...again. Just as the Web ultimately created more opportunity rather than less, RSS will open up some new doors for the media business."

RSS also has the search engines and convergent telco/yellowpages business worried, and internally acting as if 'the best form of defense is offense' : When Sensis or Google aim to be 'the first contact point for commercial and social search and communication' RSS is now the default home page for millions of 'Web 2.0' internet consumers. Yahoo's 'MyYahoo', Google's ineffective Personalised Home Page, Microsoft's not so secret start.com RSS alpha, and AOL's MyAOL, are the latest attempts at 'Personalisation' - bringing the internet i want, with the information i need, to the device i use when i decide.'



RSS is absolutely different to Netscape or Pointcast; Netscape was merely a browser, which never became a 'portal' play as much as they tried. Pointcast allowed you to subscribe to a limited range of 'Premium' content providers, a synonym for useless offline content like 'weather' 'sports' and 'finance' which no-one got any value from because it was everywhere : In the morning newspapers, on the front page of every portal, and not specialised at all to my interest.

I worked for Microsoft/nineMSN in the mid-90's in which personalisation meant having a 'start' page in which you could select your star signs, city you lived in (for the weather), set-up a stock watchlist, and choose general channels of content (sports, news, finance, sports etc) Not much pre-RSS had changed at Yahoo, MSN etc and to this day you can get a daily astrology report, stock update and weather report at the start page of most portals once you are registered.

In the early 2000's other parallel trends of information and spam overload were occurring : Meta-News services, such as Deja-News - bought by Google, Yahoo News, and eventually Topix, as well as free classifieds services such as Craigslist began to become popular. In the early 2000's blogging also started its hyper-growth through services such as Movable Type and Blogger, in which people could set-up their own page on the Internet without knowing HTML and link to, plus comment on stories of the day.

Before long there was tens of millions of blogs, thousands of news services, a bevy of search engines, and a need for a way for people to keep up to date with all these websites, links, news-updates and god knows what. Using ones memory or the bookmark feature in Internet Explorer (as Netscape had been bought by AOL who did nothing with it - even though ironically their engineer working on MyNetscape in 1999 developed RDF - the first version of what we know as RSS) was not very useful in trying to remember the name of the news source, blog, auction or classified listing. Not many people would visit more than 5-10 sites regularly, largely because they lacked the tools to find and store relevant sites.

At the same time, search engine and email spam, was reaching a huge crescendo. Upstarts such as Newsgator and Bloglines, quickly followed by Yahoo, came along and provided a simple solution for this : RSS; Allow people to subscribe to minute by minute updates to any changes on a site, and view the headline, plus some to all of the content of the page through a desktop application or web based browser. Before long Yahoo News was the number 1 news site ahead of CNN and traditional media was wondering how to get onto the RSS and meta-scraping web services 2.0 ship. In fact, some media companies such as NYTimes have dismissed such dogma and thrived in the RSS world.



The next chapter in the book has been equally fascinating with a range of new services being offered which all offer RSS as as core delivery mechanisms. These include :

1. Wikis (Jotspot, Social Text) - Online websites for project management that dont require HTML experience, and as soon as someone has updated a file within the project team, the RSS reader for each team member is automatically updated.

2. Meta-Classifieds Service (Simply Hired, WorkZoo, Oodle) - These services search all the major classifieds site in a vertical (eg Workzoo) or across all classifieds verticals by city (Oodle) and continually update results into your RSS folder) SimplyHired also has advanced features such as when you are searching all job sites, you can also check through your linkedin profile if you know anyone working at that company.

3. RSS Companies powering Media RSS Solutions : Leaders such as Newsgator are wholesaling to media companies RSS solutions they can repackage to their customers to deliver their content through RSS. Companies like the New York Times, Denver Post, The Guardian Online in UK and Wall Street Journal are all companies with advanced RSS plans.

4. RSS advertising being powered by companies such as Feedburner that provide the 'RSS feed' for over 60,000 websites, is still in early stages, as new technologies and metrics for delivering successful RSS advertising are trialled.

5. Website tagging in which consumers tag websites and stories/links with a self-defined category (eg tag this story 'crap' rss' 'media' 'australia' 'benbarren' 'wanker') These tags can then be viewed by other people and subscribed to through RSS. The net result has been high quality listings based on categories which the users define, without search engine spam, updated in real time. Hello Google :)

6. Venture Capital adds fuel to the fire : Early signs of rapid market consolidation with Bloglines being bought by AskJeeves (who were then bought by Interactive Corp) as well as Newsgator buying Feeddemon, and key leaders in the space such as Newsgator, Feedburner, del.icio.us and Feedster - all raising substantial VC to enable their rapid consolidation (while at the same time Yahoo and Google have been on M+A spending sprees buying 2.0 companies such as flickr, blo.gs, dialpad, dodgeball and many others planned to come) Not to mention podcasting (which also uses the RSS technology) being offered by Apple in their I-Tunes store - which sells 1.2m songs a day : thats another whole post as is the rumoured RSS heavy Google competitor to Itunes - plus a free classifieds service and PayPal banking system : Hello all banks and media companies ;)

7 Enterprise RSS growing, with Newsgator's VP in this space stating that the last year has proven RSS to be "both powerful and versatile, enabling such diverse enterprise functions as corporate communications, sales lead tracking, customer support, brand monitoring, competitive intelligence, project management, HR due diligence, and knowledge management." From speaking to clients every day he sees demand for :

- External public feeds for brand monitoring and competitive awareness
- External premium content from providers like Factiva, Lexis-Nexis, and Thomson Dialog
- Internal and hosted enterprise applications



Within the RSS space, there is also much debate about the role of advertising, free feeds vs subscription, the correct pathway to personalisation, whether an RSS reader should be desktop or web-based, and what the role of blogs and media companies is, in this 'Web 2.0' space.

I can only talk from personal experience, but RSS has made my Internet experience far superior : I now subscribe to specialist writers in the areas I am interested in (Venture Capital, Internet Media, Search, Podcasting, Flat-Bar Bike Riding, LA Sleaze) and read approximately 150 sites 2-3 times a day, with special focus on my favourite 20 sites) I download 5-10 podcasts a day through RSS and listen to them on my Ipod Shuffle when riding my bike, or catching a train.

American RSS companies will be coming to Australia very very soon. Further local RSS technologists, fresh from computer science degrees @ uni, who consider Nirvana a 'historically significant' band have no such neurosis or paranoia about RSS, meta-search technologies and new programming languages such as Ajax, which enable applications like Google's Gmail to closely replicate the benefits of a desktop application without the disadvantages (not being able to log-in thru different devices)

New metaphors for media consumption and software applications, driven by RSS and related technical siblings, will hopefully enable us to lose some of the old business silos we used to define 'newspapers', 'websites', 'search engines' and 'classifieds' - Welcome to the new Remix Culture, as it is called by lawyers, end users and analysts alike. What these services are exactly to be called, I'm not sure, but I know they'll be del.icio.us.

Batman Begins

big brother grrls
Originally uploaded by benbarren.

Jossip reports that "Katie Holmes may have fallen for it, but Tom Cruise’s sci-fi seduction technique scared the bejeezus out of Scarlett Johansson, a source close to the actress says. Weeks before he began wooing his brainwashed bride-to-be, Cruise made repeated phone calls to the 19-year-old starlet—who was then set to co-star with him in Mission Impossible III—imploring her to meet him at the Scientology Celebrity Center in L.A.

In the aftermath, Scarlett bailed on M:I3 due to "scheduling conflicts." But poor Katie Holmes, who was picked fifth after Jessica Alba (24), Kate Bosworth (22) and Lindsay Lohan (18)."

For Katie's current film (a step up from those 'amateur, topless film days') : Batman Begins, listen to this intelligent interview of Chris Nolan, the Director (Insomnia, Memento). The movie stealing scene of the movie is supposedly when Christian Bale (American Psycho) playing Bruce Wayne/Batman, arrives in the Lambo Murcielago Roadster - the first time this car has been seen on the Big Screen - How's that for product placement !