Party Like It's 2003
I turned 32 yesterday by ripping a bad version of 50 Cents' Get Rich or Die Trying the night before, and then had a quadrella of conversations with a convergent telco corporate strategist (8am), 2.0 money man (10am), "the" editor of financial regard (12pm), and Australia's would be #1 blogger, if Darren Rowse wasn't so committed to digital cameras and helping bloggers :)
My day then shifted to watching V for Vendetta on a train (4:50pm from Caulfield), where once in Frankston I jacked into an open wireless network and spoke to Crackbery Modelux 8700 about a Life Less Ordinary at 5:53pm. By 7:30pm I was cooking 4 of the biggest T-Bone Steaks from Balnarring Butcher medium rare.
The irony was when organising these meetings I thought my birthday was on Thursday, so I'd planned all business for Wednesday so I could have an RDO like Thursday on the Mornington Peninsula and not worry about all the non-economic value creating tasks and touchy-feely things that are required to build an A+ 2.0 Business (that also meets classical artistic and creative principles not confined to technology.)
12 years into working in the "Internet" industry, it's still lacking its own identity, culture-wise : It's recognised that in Hollywood there are no rules, and fame and cash is the game, and success is temporary. LA has no memory. East Coast Media though, is having it tough - with TV having to deal with new channels, but daily newspapers are having it hardest, with Craig taking classifieds, 2-5% less newspapers being sold each year and private equity being the latest nirvana. The internet industry still doesnt know what it is, a bit like advertising, where much of the workforce is transient.
My 8am, 10am, 12pm, 2pm, 4:50pm conversations typify the convergent culture the internet industry has typified since Malone started doing Information Superhighway Trials in 1993, when I was a Politics/Marketing double major writing a thesis that "multi-media communication would transform political structures".
So my 8am is with a long time ex-Producer, come Design Manager friend, who has become a Corporate Strategist. We first worked together in 1997 when we were both put on the 20th floor of the Como South Yarra to launch Microsoft's Sidewalk.com project.
The 10am has 3 keywords "Australia", "Web 2.0", "Venture Capital". I'm chatting to an ex-lawyer, turned 1.0 Digital Intermediary Expert in Vertical Markets, who has now morphed into running the largest, and only, Aussie 2.0 fund focused on all things RSS, XHTML, H264, OPML, ID3, MP4 and CSS.
12pm is respected Technology Blogger and Journalist, turned Section Editor for all Things Virtual Finance downunder. Word.
2pm, I've done my 'verbal' work, grab a shower (startups arent 9 to 5) and now I'm meeting with the Educational Pide Piper who probably isn't aware the faddish Facebook valuations going around and that google have also just announced they are raising $2B. Most interesting was that #2 told me his number 1 had said my flickr stream was repressed aggression at women, equivalent to what happens in Muslim community. Irony, my life.
That's the preamble. The steak was perfect. Not the punchline : If blogs are like time capsules to be forever googled by the the google of the day, Aussie 2.0 playaz need to know how to party like it's 2003. Nothing online was built in Australia of significance since 1999 and many of the Usual Suspects that are back, (who have alot to add), but need to start/understand/have covered the bottom up nature of Web 2.0
Anyone looking to make money from Web 2.0 in Australia, should eat the dog food as FMCG marketers say. Thy should get a blog, join flickr, upload a video to youtube and publish it to their blog. Fred Wilson's blog and that of his firm : Union Square Ventures, who invested in delicious and indeed.com among others are the best example of personal and corporate VC blogs. Then search for yourself on technorati and subscribe to it as an RSS feed.
If Rene Rivkin was here, he'd be charging for Web 2.0 Advice like this in an e-newsletter - Which he'd then daytrade in the opposite direction of his advice (and then get busted for a $500 profit but kill himself for the rest of his life indiscretions) But this isn't about trading in public companies. It's about creating something from nothing at a local level, in lieu of the unstoppable onslaught of amateur content and syndicatable, mashable, new technology formats.
Tony Faure the founder of Yahoo Australia (together with fellow 2Webb'er Alan Jones now doing Bluepulse) used to say about advertisers wanting to do TV Ads online or rich media "You can't go beyond the banner, if you haven't gone to the banner." Exactly the same chicken and the egg problem applies in Australian to the building, funding, implementation and growth of new 2.0 businesses. There is no point doing a post YouTube.com play, if your target market don't have a blog. That's why Australia, with no major media/startup website since 1999, is at best stuck back in 2003, maybe earlier.
So what happened 2002/3 outside Australia ? Well really basic stuff : Blog software made available on the web; Evan Williams, from rural America, setup Blogger.com as a side project to building a more complex content management system; Flickr was setup as a photo-sharing community as a side project to the NeverEnding multi-player game. Dave Winer's Userland/Manilla can also not be forgotten here, not to mention RSS, the post RDF spec.
Suddenly internet users were able to use webbased applications to create content without knowing HTML. There was an explosion of content, but no way to find content you liked or authors you 'got'. The content creation begat the need for search and discovery - Hence the blog and recency search solutions of feedster, technorati and also value added feed and syndication services like feedburner.com and RSS Reader/Platform plays like Bloglines, Newsgator and of course MyYahoo - the portal company who got and gets RSS.
We're now in 2003/4 where consumers start using these new services/their open APIs, plugins, to upload their photos to flickr and then blog them : Sometimes going straight from their Treo SmartPhone to blogger or wordpress, even flickr. Mashups kicked in at this stage, and microchunking became a MBA verb, and jokes were made about companies like YouTube, vSocial and GoFish re being the Flickr of Video.
While flickr should have been the youtube of video, the business had got to breakeven, and their founders were exhausted, GEMAYA (google, ebay, microsoft, amazon, Yahoo, AOL/Time) started picking off the horizontal teams and tech R+D plays, as well as vertical applications within all this new kewl user generated blogs, photos, voip and so on. Yahoo bought del.icio.us. Google bought dodgeball. ebay paid billions for skype :)
Which brings me back to Australia. Australia's entrepreneurs, investors and stealth teams needs to build/integrate/localise the core platforms for content creation, searching and discovering user content, subscription to it, tagging by the user so they can find it again, and be able to share it with their friends. This applies to the full range of content types and file formats : Web Links (ala del.icio.us) RSS Subscriptions (ala Newsgator.com) Images (flickr.com) Video (youtube.com) Podcasts (thepodcastnetwork.com) and I'm sure someone will do Torrents (just not Yahoo7)
The above platforms is where the most user uptake and economic value will be created for Australian 2.0 Investors between 2006-7. Just as Wordpress.org, Blogspot, LiveJournal, SixApart, MySpace and MSN Spaces have allowed tens of millions of people to have a voice, so do Australians need to be given the most basic privilege : A free/low cost, easy to sign up to and use account(s) that allows them to write about their lives, upload photos in a reverse chronological manner :) From there, they will start wanting to add videos, social bookmarking and other more sophisticated features. And they'll need to search and discover this content, tag and subscribe to it, and share it with friends.
These core engines and platforms will be sliced and diced, verticalised and packaged up to the different audiences - whether they be 14-24 geny's, 24-39 genx's, and forever young boomers. Most of the early adoption will be by under 40's for 2006. Serious uptake will be younger again. It's pretty simply really. OK, onto the 33rd year.
Listening to : TripleJ's Kanye West MixTape (Real/Win)
Marcus: My voice sounds different.
Charlene: It's better. It's got more pain in it.
My day then shifted to watching V for Vendetta on a train (4:50pm from Caulfield), where once in Frankston I jacked into an open wireless network and spoke to Crackbery Modelux 8700 about a Life Less Ordinary at 5:53pm. By 7:30pm I was cooking 4 of the biggest T-Bone Steaks from Balnarring Butcher medium rare.
The irony was when organising these meetings I thought my birthday was on Thursday, so I'd planned all business for Wednesday so I could have an RDO like Thursday on the Mornington Peninsula and not worry about all the non-economic value creating tasks and touchy-feely things that are required to build an A+ 2.0 Business (that also meets classical artistic and creative principles not confined to technology.)
12 years into working in the "Internet" industry, it's still lacking its own identity, culture-wise : It's recognised that in Hollywood there are no rules, and fame and cash is the game, and success is temporary. LA has no memory. East Coast Media though, is having it tough - with TV having to deal with new channels, but daily newspapers are having it hardest, with Craig taking classifieds, 2-5% less newspapers being sold each year and private equity being the latest nirvana. The internet industry still doesnt know what it is, a bit like advertising, where much of the workforce is transient.
My 8am, 10am, 12pm, 2pm, 4:50pm conversations typify the convergent culture the internet industry has typified since Malone started doing Information Superhighway Trials in 1993, when I was a Politics/Marketing double major writing a thesis that "multi-media communication would transform political structures".
So my 8am is with a long time ex-Producer, come Design Manager friend, who has become a Corporate Strategist. We first worked together in 1997 when we were both put on the 20th floor of the Como South Yarra to launch Microsoft's Sidewalk.com project.
The 10am has 3 keywords "Australia", "Web 2.0", "Venture Capital". I'm chatting to an ex-lawyer, turned 1.0 Digital Intermediary Expert in Vertical Markets, who has now morphed into running the largest, and only, Aussie 2.0 fund focused on all things RSS, XHTML, H264, OPML, ID3, MP4 and CSS.
12pm is respected Technology Blogger and Journalist, turned Section Editor for all Things Virtual Finance downunder. Word.
2pm, I've done my 'verbal' work, grab a shower (startups arent 9 to 5) and now I'm meeting with the Educational Pide Piper who probably isn't aware the faddish Facebook valuations going around and that google have also just announced they are raising $2B. Most interesting was that #2 told me his number 1 had said my flickr stream was repressed aggression at women, equivalent to what happens in Muslim community. Irony, my life.
That's the preamble. The steak was perfect. Not the punchline : If blogs are like time capsules to be forever googled by the the google of the day, Aussie 2.0 playaz need to know how to party like it's 2003. Nothing online was built in Australia of significance since 1999 and many of the Usual Suspects that are back, (who have alot to add), but need to start/understand/have covered the bottom up nature of Web 2.0
Anyone looking to make money from Web 2.0 in Australia, should eat the dog food as FMCG marketers say. Thy should get a blog, join flickr, upload a video to youtube and publish it to their blog. Fred Wilson's blog and that of his firm : Union Square Ventures, who invested in delicious and indeed.com among others are the best example of personal and corporate VC blogs. Then search for yourself on technorati and subscribe to it as an RSS feed.
If Rene Rivkin was here, he'd be charging for Web 2.0 Advice like this in an e-newsletter - Which he'd then daytrade in the opposite direction of his advice (and then get busted for a $500 profit but kill himself for the rest of his life indiscretions) But this isn't about trading in public companies. It's about creating something from nothing at a local level, in lieu of the unstoppable onslaught of amateur content and syndicatable, mashable, new technology formats.
Tony Faure the founder of Yahoo Australia (together with fellow 2Webb'er Alan Jones now doing Bluepulse) used to say about advertisers wanting to do TV Ads online or rich media "You can't go beyond the banner, if you haven't gone to the banner." Exactly the same chicken and the egg problem applies in Australian to the building, funding, implementation and growth of new 2.0 businesses. There is no point doing a post YouTube.com play, if your target market don't have a blog. That's why Australia, with no major media/startup website since 1999, is at best stuck back in 2003, maybe earlier.
So what happened 2002/3 outside Australia ? Well really basic stuff : Blog software made available on the web; Evan Williams, from rural America, setup Blogger.com as a side project to building a more complex content management system; Flickr was setup as a photo-sharing community as a side project to the NeverEnding multi-player game. Dave Winer's Userland/Manilla can also not be forgotten here, not to mention RSS, the post RDF spec.
Suddenly internet users were able to use webbased applications to create content without knowing HTML. There was an explosion of content, but no way to find content you liked or authors you 'got'. The content creation begat the need for search and discovery - Hence the blog and recency search solutions of feedster, technorati and also value added feed and syndication services like feedburner.com and RSS Reader/Platform plays like Bloglines, Newsgator and of course MyYahoo - the portal company who got and gets RSS.
We're now in 2003/4 where consumers start using these new services/their open APIs, plugins, to upload their photos to flickr and then blog them : Sometimes going straight from their Treo SmartPhone to blogger or wordpress, even flickr. Mashups kicked in at this stage, and microchunking became a MBA verb, and jokes were made about companies like YouTube, vSocial and GoFish re being the Flickr of Video.
While flickr should have been the youtube of video, the business had got to breakeven, and their founders were exhausted, GEMAYA (google, ebay, microsoft, amazon, Yahoo, AOL/Time) started picking off the horizontal teams and tech R+D plays, as well as vertical applications within all this new kewl user generated blogs, photos, voip and so on. Yahoo bought del.icio.us. Google bought dodgeball. ebay paid billions for skype :)
Which brings me back to Australia. Australia's entrepreneurs, investors and stealth teams needs to build/integrate/localise the core platforms for content creation, searching and discovering user content, subscription to it, tagging by the user so they can find it again, and be able to share it with their friends. This applies to the full range of content types and file formats : Web Links (ala del.icio.us) RSS Subscriptions (ala Newsgator.com) Images (flickr.com) Video (youtube.com) Podcasts (thepodcastnetwork.com) and I'm sure someone will do Torrents (just not Yahoo7)
The above platforms is where the most user uptake and economic value will be created for Australian 2.0 Investors between 2006-7. Just as Wordpress.org, Blogspot, LiveJournal, SixApart, MySpace and MSN Spaces have allowed tens of millions of people to have a voice, so do Australians need to be given the most basic privilege : A free/low cost, easy to sign up to and use account(s) that allows them to write about their lives, upload photos in a reverse chronological manner :) From there, they will start wanting to add videos, social bookmarking and other more sophisticated features. And they'll need to search and discover this content, tag and subscribe to it, and share it with friends.
These core engines and platforms will be sliced and diced, verticalised and packaged up to the different audiences - whether they be 14-24 geny's, 24-39 genx's, and forever young boomers. Most of the early adoption will be by under 40's for 2006. Serious uptake will be younger again. It's pretty simply really. OK, onto the 33rd year.
Listening to : TripleJ's Kanye West MixTape (Real/Win)
Marcus: My voice sounds different.
Charlene: It's better. It's got more pain in it.
posted by redbarren at 1:13 PM
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