Why Australia Doesnt Need Another Google

So this week, when taking a call from a 2.0 Money Man, I got asked the question I had been practising the answer to since 1983 or near enough : "How do you compete against Technorati ?" (either launching in Australia, or Australians using technorati.com)

The question I've got the most from people with secure incomes in the technology field, who are used to no major new websites being built here and just accept google is omnipotent and they themselves cant change the world, is "Why wouldnt consumers just use google, technorati, flickr, youtube, delicious, digg, podshow, pointcast.com ?"

I'll use a million examples of media (TV, newspapers, online) that are a combination of local and global. I might throw in the retail perspective : That most consumer transactions are done close to the home, and so on. More recently I prefer to not say much at all. Why help educate ? :))

Sitting here on the first coldish Friday night on the Peninsula for months, the real answer to how gnoos.com.au (please add your aussie blog if you havent't - thankyou for reading this public announcement) and any other local service we are involved with, will not be some subdomain of marginalised content, is by having a kick ass bunch of all the Aussies that are saying fn kewl stuff on the net, and making it very easy and fast to search and find great, new stuff, that helps start answer some of the questions you had when you decided not to rely solely on g-evil. g-noos. g-evil. g-noos. Do you see my subliminal Jedi Mind Trick controls here. You want it. You know you do :))

A RANDOM FRIDAY NIGHT READING AUSSIE BLOGS

Andrew Delin, StickyNotes, is deciding whether to pay ten times more to his local photos shop or give the business to Harvey Norman. You cant read this on a global search engine :) "Now, Harvey Norman will print 8" x 6" digital prints for $0.99c each, which is a good deal. But not much use to me because I couldn't get either of my media to work in their system. So I went down the street to James Place Cameras, a local business. I asked about printing at 8"x6" and the young man said, "oh yes we do those, they're $9.95 each". I gulped and checked the price with him -- yep, 9 dollars and 95 cents each. I said that was a lot of money to which he replied somewhat defensively, "It costs a lot to print them you know".

Podcasting may one day kill the radio star, even if the radio star is podcasting who is killed by the radio star. So DMG Radio the global player, has setup local shop here trying to mix talkback with cockrock and classics. It aint working something shocking, and even those willing to give it a go are offering advice to the robotic algorithms. Bring back real DJ's, like Lester Biggs in Almost Famous. I want to hear The Specials followed by KRS1, then Tom Waits and Erykah Badu. Paint the Tiger Carve the Swan on Nova 91 : "I mean, come on. You needs to smoke shit-loads of drugs to forget the songs that played in the last three hours. And it wasn’t just one or two, but more like all of them. Are the programmers so lazy they only program half a night worth of music, and just play it all twice?" - I did a google search for "nova91" and got some ebay results, global spam and then the radio station's site itself. I dont want the site's url (again) I want to read if its any good and they wont tell me that on their site, or ebay !

TripleJ are one radio station, through lack of commercial agenda, and thus getting kick ass podcast traffic. Their blogging is just as well written and Maya on Mondays hip hop show is, well, mmm, a 10. TripleJ Blog : "On occasion, a summers night brings a sweet breeze and I find myself opening my urban windows and playing Pearl Jam’s Ten… for me the quintessential pubescent summer album that never fails to elicit a tingle in my toes and a contented grin of coastal holidays past." Given Australia's season is the exact opposite to America, our ingrained cultural memory "coastal holidays past" means a local collection of voices in whatever media or form, will always strike through more powerfully. Their winter. Our summer.

Talk of an Australian A-List for blogs is totally redundant, because The Spin Starts Here is by far the best. Their deconstruction of Neighbours, will when Web 2.0 collapses, stand the test of time with the best Rolf Harris tracks. Seriously they rock. And do they get comments. "Her dad says ‘sure why not’, then he and Janelle make out. Wheel-of-Bree protests, so Janelle growl/barks at Kim and then runs to the bedroom. Ew? Before Kim and his semi can jump off the couch and follow Janelle, Wheel-of-Bree basically hands him a condom so he won’t impregnate Janelle. He cottons on, and runs to the pub. Fucking pussy, why doesn’t he just give Janelle a facial instead? You know she’s dirty-dirty." I aint getting no Neighbours love on Technorati eh, minus some English blogs talking about meeting Harold at the Elephant and Wheelbarrow in St Kilda near where the real criminals used to live.

And dont forget the One Million Australians on MySpace. Even if Kylie's current mood is melancholy, she wants to get outside and do something, with someone, close. Not bloody 24 hours away. "Where the bloody hell are you ?" says the banned ad. "Who fkn cares" says me. Kick it Kylie : "I will go for bike rides in my skirt, I will go fishing and NOT take a book, I will go on the flying fox when we go to the park, I will go to the gym and lift weights even at the risk of looking like Arnie (EW!) and if you fall off a bridge into the river and hit your head, I will jump right in after you, shoes and all. If you ask me to, I will go."

Mercedes Royce on LiveJournal is busting it even harder than her MySpace peers downunder : "saw spod last night. it was good except. no one danced. and he kept his pants on. quite tame. im used to sydney gigs with flowers and sparklers. no trousers and having people remove their pants too and geting to go the grope on tronixxxxx. come on adelaide. disco down fuckers. me and ruth did shoulder shimmy. i think thats as bad ass as it got. still hes cool he wore the white suit. i cannot not be madly in love with him. oh la la. i still want to give him all my stds. and have him function my privates." Gotta love the vicarious living. Dont expect global search engines to mine the dark genx geny web feeds for the always online-social networkers on this c(o)ntinent.

Words and Things on Blogspot, is just as funny in a middle class (this time harmless) repressed Australian vegemite family way : "When I was in primary school, my brother and I occasionally went to visit friends of ours who lived in a nudist commune. When I related this recollection to my mother recently, she frowned, and said that it wasn't a nudist commune, just a commune where a lot of people didn't wear any clothes. This distinction didn't make much sense to me, but I think she meant that the commune wasn't based on ideals that included naturism - it just happened to include quite a few naturists." Google actually doesnt have many nudist search results with clothes on, so we might concede a point there. gnoos will be spam/porn free whatever that line is. ("you know it when you click it")

While the Hawksworth Family over in Adelaide have their own comedy involving renting Wheelchairs, and its not for some post YouTube/MySpace/Online Jackass streaming experiment : "What a delight she is thinking of me like that! Anyway in she comes pushing this monstrosity and into the room..... The look on my face must have given it away! What The.....!? I dont need a wheelchair, and I certainly dont need one where a large crowd of "blokes" will be on Saturday, I can heroically get around on my crutches thanks very much!"

There are at least 60 Food Bloggers in Australia, that are growing daily, and each write about their own meals, experiences, interests and downright obsessive passion about food. A splinter group is getting into Veggieblogging. Concrete Cafe in Pyrmont, reviewed in Veggie Friendly using a trusty Wordpress Theme : "I tried the grilled haloumi salad with asparagus, rocket, green beans, avocado and macadamia nuts with a summer lemon and oil dressing - so did 80% of the other female customers. The flavours were fresh and well set off by the lemon, although there was a touch too much oil for my liking." Google's best on this topic was something from a government website about nutritional food. Relevant, but you know what Google ? Boring, your name is not on the door. You are not coming in.

Delicate Genius Blog is Chicken meets Viet meets Tofu, this is deep weird foodo blogging not yet registered in Googleland : "Last night we went out to a Vietnamese restaurant in Newtown. It was a vegetarian restaurant but served meals such as chicken satay and basil chilli chicken. How? You Ask? Well, everything is made from tofu and has chicken (or beef) flavouring. Bizarre eating satay chicken that looks tastes and feels like chicken but is not chicken."

If you arent Veggie and aint on the harbour, how's this for a bit of unstructured, structured blogging for any of my hReviews friends out there. (even the Fitzroy hCalendar posse word) From the Silent Speaking Blog, which has got the groove and minimalism thang "I remember sitting in some old, long-forgotten pub in South Melbourne. There were no customers. The barman was drooping. This jazz band turned up to play, its musicians as old and creaky as the pub's wooden floorboards. I remember thinking sarcastically to myself, 'great, some garish trad-jazz will really brighten up my day.' Well, that old jazz band rocked my jocks off like few bands ever have. Man were they good. I like unexpected surprises." Very Jazz.

And after Naomi Robson's week with the Supergrass Coke/Mokbel fiasco, how kewl that an Aussie blogger (BowlingBall) has found that video we wanted : "I've finally found it! The recording of Naomi Robson's famed 7 'fucks' in 34 seconds extravaganza! Amazing." Google brought back a 'relevant' link to seven.com.au (not yahoo7 hehe) and technorati gave us the mokbel/supergrass but neither delivered the video, the most recent (and best) post. The devil is in the detail in all media of course.

Aussie Blogging's not all tweens and vids though, Kayoz is narrating her pregnancy, now in the second trimester : "But, my body is pushing on - it and the baby. A few days ago I was relishing the second trimester and wishing it would last for longer. Then Monday and Tuesday my pubic symphasis problem really started to play up, and now I have some lower back ache as well (related, I'm sure - it's right in the sacro-illiac area). And I'm starting to get more tired again - I've been feeling pretty energised for the past few weeks. Still, there are compensations - less than 8 weeks to go till maternity leave kicks in. Yippee!!!" Damn first hand writing of real life experiences in real time rocks. I wont even waste my time searching for 'second trimester' on any search engine, as they will never bring back a relevant result with 28 million sites like technorati has or the tens of billions google does. (it will be equally hard for us with 50,000 :)

I'm not sure Kayoz has got out and got a XBox 360 yet, but there is a kewl downunder blog, which shows the right level of corporate, fan, and users obsessed about every detail, down to the controller and dropping out of uni but being an expert in XBOX360 : "Today was notable for several reasons aside from dropping a dull and asine university course; My 360 had its first crash, and my wireless controller ran out of batteries. Certainly not a memorable or noteworthy day on the list of Gamerscore achievements I agree. It got me thinking MS really ought to include such hardware notables for the 360: 50 points for your first console-stopping crash, 100 for a disc-ruining scratch, and maybe even 1000 consolation points if your console is DOA or kicks the shiny white bucket in the first month." Given Australia had a different time release for this product, we should not even have to use search engines which have users watching movies or buying/playing with hardware that isnt even released here yet. If the powers that be want us to be in a coccoon, then fine, just dont expect us to use your UMD.

And of course us Aussies want to talk about footy now we have 5 days of Round One Matches while the Grand Prix is also on. They're blogging West Coasts' Win at the Soaring : "I mentioned it Wednesday, Dean Cox is a freak and he dominated whenever he was on the ground last night. He was possibly our most influential player in the Grand Final (see here) and was again last night (26 poss, 8 marks, 24 hitouts, 2 goals). Very impressive. Smoky for the brownlow perhaps?" Others are joking about John or Jack Elliot and Eddie from Everywhere to Nowhere McGuire. Punk and Blanket writing about what noone else in the world (or even Sydney cares about :) : "Our first recording is of our friend Jack Elliot whom we 'discovered' singing in Florentino Bistro the night after the Melbourne Cup last Spring Racing Carnival. After lunching at Jack's penthouse in Carlton, we knew that he'd be wonderful to work with as he is a very keen singer who charmed us through all 3 courses. It would not be an understatement to say that Jack is an extremely confident man - even his lewd comments seemed 'right', so as soon as we decided to launch the record label we called Jack straight away."

Ukulele is happy she isn't kissing John Howard : "Please take a moment and be thankful that you are not Libby Lenton". A Voice of Dissent, which Google had a huge warning before visiting goes one step further : "A Indonesia newspaper has depicted Prime Minister Howard and Alexander Downer as two fornicating male dogs. The depiction of two male dogs also suggests homosexuality with Downer being on the receiving end and Howard in the mounted position."

Lucy Tartan may have figured out the raison d'etre of blogging : "I held my breath, heart beating, and peered through the neighbor's garden. And I saw it - I saw by what I was being hunted. Even now my pulse races as I recollect that moment. Hands shaking, I raised the digital camera." (If you want to go to this post, do not read further, it involves BLOG POST SPOILER : A cat is involved. Why are cats so popular in female blogging in Australia ? There seems to be far more blogs on a per female capita and per post ratio versus the militant BlogHer O/S cohorts)

When you read the first paragraph from Catherine Oneal - Philosophic Dreamer - you cant help but know how badly it's going to end and feel sorry : "A close friend of mine met a chap a couple of years ago. A nice boy, from a foreign country. They had met in Australia where he was studying at post-graduate level at a prestigious Melbourne university in order to obtain permanent residency. He had been given some dodgy advice by some dodgy migration agent that obtaining post-graduate qualifications in Australia was a sure fire way of gaining permanent residency here. This wasn’t strictly true, therefore my ever-helpful friend sourced some legitimate migration advice for her beau (although not betrothed at the time) and he was advised to leave Australia (seven months after his initial arrival and not before popping “The Question” to my friend) to return to his country of birth, where he would remain for the next 15 months whilst making an off-shore visa application with the Department of Immigration." Read the rest if you want to see why no-one should be passive in their life. Or active in their own pillage by others. (its ok to pillage yourself just not to encourage others to do it to u)

MelbourneHumanFemale, a totally kewl blog, has a similar but funny story and touches on SMS Suicide Messages, which is a growth market I havent yet covered or been asked by a client/prospect to analyse. "A casual friend (ie, we’re not BFFs), broke up with her long, long, long term partner (she’d been going out with him for around 7 years). She sent an SMS to everyone telling them that they had broken up, but want to remain friends. Considering how it was worded, it was a pretty classy move, which meant people who don’t often see her (like me) wouldn’t put their foot in it and ask after him next time we hung out. I thought it was good of her to do that. (But you know I couldn’t, because it’d end up a melodramatic semi-suicide note. And an SMS suicide note? Far too modern for my tastes)."

And where else do you get Beat (the streetpress magazine), Dave Graney and the idea of a Beatles Free Day, all in the first sentence, but from Toolybird : "Young Dave Graney is interviewed in Beat this week and puts forward a marvellous idea of a Beatles-free day. Most sensible thing I've heard in ages, but perhaps we can extend it for a week, or longer. Boarding the bus steps would be more pleasurable secure with the confidence that, at least for that 24 hours, I would not have to endure Ob-La-Di-Ob-La-Da or All You Need is Love on the bus radio. Of course, these are probably not the worst offenders, Yellow Submarine is up there, Norwegian Wood and the dreaded eternal fade out of Hey Jude (which as a child I thought was about my sister Judy, but to be fair I was three and also thought she was Nana Mouskouri. I also thought my sister-in-law Lyn was Cher). So think about it, contact your local members of Government, together we can make this work."

Finally, Andrew @ Under the Rotunda, mentions the published by B+T for a short period of time on their website, which is probably a hoax, but may not be as well, that Mitchell and Partners has been bought by Sensis. (2nd time these 2 dots have been connected this week, strange) Which would make no sense for a media seller to buy a media buyer in typical corporate strategy. All they have to do next then is buy the advertisers and they can own the full marketing channel - From manufacturing to advertising to media. Not to mention competing with Omnicon and STW. The text went thus which I'm sure the Corporate Comms guys will have to contend with Monday Morning (finding it anything but a April Fools Day joke if it is) :"The man who would never sell…sells! Perhaps hoping everyone would be at the pub by now, Mitchell & Partners just sent out the following release announcing that Sensis has completed the acquisition of 100% of Australia’s largest media buying agency. The deal will see Sensis take full ownership of Mitchell & Partners from 30 April 2006. The final acquisition
price is yet to be disclosed."

Oh yeah and did I mention this from the Hitwise.com blog : "The Hitwise Blogs and Personal websites category increased by 178.4% week ending March 18, 2006, compared to the same week last year." Now I know you'll say that's coming off a small base... But the above isn't even near to 1% of the Aussie Blog Audience. Not near. Anyway, it's 12:29am, Friday night over... time to go out.. joking ;) Time to podcatch the latest podcasts...

Web 2.0 = "No warehouses full of inventory"

sienna rayban deal
Originally uploaded by benbarren.

Web 2.0 is sooo pre-Web 3.0. Slate : "A "Web 2.0 play" is a bid to make money by funding a bring-your-own-content site. It's a long-shot but low-risk investment that could become the next Google. Or at least the next thing Google buys. No warehouses full of inventory, no sprawling staff, no NASA-grade supply chain management systems. Dodgeball and Digg are good examples of popular sites started on a shoestring. Google snapped up Dodgeball last year; Digg's imminent acquisition is a foregone conclusion among valley wags. Newsweek quotes a Yahoo! exec on why they bought Flickr: "With less than 10 people on the payroll, they had millions of users generating content. That's a neat trick."

Party Like It's 2003

first klass
Originally uploaded by benbarren.

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.

5.5 Billion Facebook Pageviews = $2B Cash

pussycat scarlett
Originally uploaded by benbarren.

All you need is a couple data points here to start a rumour which gets BusinessWeek coverage : Google's $100B+ valuation, and the site which tweens sick of MySpace go to which is 7th most popular in the world with 5.5b page views. Bad time to start a company, though the social networking behemoths have not yet targeted non US markets, which creates windows for serial entrepreneurs or ambitious University agitators. Also, remember that Facebook did a VC round a year or so ago that was also rumoured at a $100M+ valuation - so I guess their investors want a typical VC return of 20 times. BW : "The owners of the privately held company have turned down a $750 million offer and hope to fetch as much as $2 billion in a sale."

Keith + Girl Read Out Podshow Contract

bubble 2.0 tshirt
Originally uploaded by benbarren.

Keith and Chemda finally get their hands on the Podshow contract. Economics children, caveat emptor. Keith said he couldnt sleep during the day because it felt like XMAS. Listen here.

"Get some of this" says Kate Moss to Folksonomist

gaunt moss
Originally uploaded by benbarren.

While Pete Doherty is doing acoustic sets for Mike Tyson in divey london bars (wish i was kidding) Kate Moss has decided to do a PHd in Folksonomy, as she is annoyed that everyone thinks tagging equals taxonomy. Errr derrrr. Kate, through her agent, linked to by John Batelle, @Resource Shelf : "Tagging uses user-generated keywords while a taxonomy has structure (often hierarchical) and is often, but not always, well organized."

At the same time as the press briefing for Kate's PHd announcement, there were sightings of her alter-ego with the Brit Pack 1.0 : "Kate, who spent a month in rehab last year to quit cocaine, started her binge on Thursday evening and didn't call it a day until 3pm yesterday. She kicked off the session with Davinia Taylor at 6pm and things hotted up an hour later when Stella McCartney pitched up at Kate's place in Primrose Hill, London."

While back at the press conference, metadata was the topic : "I'll add that searching for material on YouTube can be a big challenge. Why? Tags and poor metadata."

We all know you have to get the party started so Jude and Sadie were happy to oblige, with a bit of Jack White cameo'ing : "Mum-of-one Kate then hooked up with divorced couple Sadie Frost and Jude Law. "Sadie and Jude took great care not to be snapped together," our mole reveals. "Afterwards Jude couldn't hide his happiness when he convinced Jack to join them for a drink."

"Librarians also know that the quality of cataloging (aka metadata description) can vary from cataloger to cataloger but there are some conventions that one must or should follow."

Follow they did - "The gang waddled down to the Phoenix bar in Soho together and old pals Jude and Kate were laughing and joking to each other before they went in. Kate loosened up even more after a few bevvies to celebrate her return to her old hardpartying ways."

"Is the point of tagging to make information retrieval more precise for a large group of users? Why? Synonyms, pluralization, etc. Also, spam and gaming the system."

The real Kate came out half way into her 21 hour real life video tagisode : "When she came out of the bar she bawled at the waiting paparazzi: "Get some of this," launching into a stunning photoshoot pose. We're told: "Kate was in a really flirty mood and even admitted she got a kick out of teasing the snappers." She and Sadie then headed straight to a party at the Islington home of outrageous artist Jake Chapman."

"Look at the most popular tags. They are blog blogging blogs. What's the difference between each one? Tech and technology are two more popular tags. Again, what's the difference? You get the idea."

It's Fun Time to be a Newspaper

ferrari vodafone
Originally uploaded by benbarren.

Great summary of a speech by Guardian's Editor "Newspapers in the age of blogs", not sure why I'm reading this stuff at 633am :) Mbites, care of the Jarvis - "We are the conduit and we tell you what's important. Occasionally the little people would write a letter to the editor. We print a few, graciously. This is the paper I inherited in 1995," said Rusbridger."

Caterina : "We were very small and very poor"

caterina newsweek
Originally uploaded by benbarren.

Caterina has subliminally issued a denial to Duncan Riley the Alan Bond of 2WEB (she is not the love child of Dave Winer as he alleged nor on Class A), through a Newsweek article, in which she says "We were very small and very poor," says Fake, "so we built a lot of features that were deliberately viral." Duncan does not want to hear about the once small and very poor. The sky's the limit for today's entrepreneur, and it's a very bad time to start a business. Stay in your jobs. You know you love them. Why see if there is anything out there. There isn't :)

"Please God One More Bubble TShirt" Podcast

cunt mirror
Originally uploaded by cybele malinowski.

The 2WEB crew is busting it again on a Sunday and for the first half we rock it back and forth on Caterina from Flickr's instant blog classic track about "It is a bad time to start a business" (The Bay Area Remix) The discussion devolves into Vista and we end up in Mumbai with Alan Jones recounting when Yahooligans began their Asia Pac empire building and the use of a sleeping bag. I also learnt $75-$1000 buys you a MySpace rip-off from Scriptlance.com. If you havent got $75 try $14.99 from Cafepress "Please God Just One More Bubble TShirt" circa early 2005. Listen Here if you are Culturally Bankrupt.

How Many Startup Shares do You Get ?

f430 dash plaque
Originally uploaded by benbarren.

The Blogger formely known as VC Kawasaki from Karate Kid III, oops that was Miyagi, has this interesting tidbit on Stock Options in a funded startup, which is always interesting (esp outside of Silicon Valley where these benchmarks are much more commonly understood and enforced as Critical Ingredients of Success) So here's what Miyagi says :

* Senior engineer: .3 - .7%
* Mid-level engineer: .2 - .4%
* Product manager: .2 - .3%
* Architect, i.e., the “main (wo)man,” : 1 - 1.5%
* Vice presidents: 1.5 - 3%
* CEO, “adult supervision” brought in replace founder: 5 - 10%

I'm just wondering if these people need to be "accredited" in some way. Now I just need an Australian accountant to implement :(

The Blog Rank Revenge of the (M/Aussie) List

paris et al
Originally uploaded by benbarren.

Funny how certain posts grab your eye when you are working on a similar problem yourself for a different application. OK well, Im not actually working on it directly, as in doing the coding, I'm the business ideas man who asks his engineers to do the impossible, or as they would say, "the stoopid". OK well they dont really say that. Truth is so abitrary. Where "M"-List bloggers are mentioned just insert "Aussie" and that is my interest. Not in Paris.

Darwinian Web initial post on Revenge of the M-List set the scene : "I think there is also a more gradual phenomenon that I call the revenge of the M-list. When a new area of interest develops, such as what we are now seeing with OPML reading lists, a group of mutually linking bloggers emerges. If one of these bloggers is an A-lister, then the majority of the links point to his or her posts on the subject. If, on the other hand, the inter-linkers are all middle ranked bloggers, let's call them M-listers, they tend to link to each other fairly liberally. As new people become interested in the subject, they find these clusters of posts (memetracking sites do a great job of revealing M-list clusters), and also link to many of the blogs in the cluster, since there is no one recognizable A-lister to link to exclusively."

Darwinian Web's most recent post on Blog Rank updates us on his M-List Progress : "My basic goal is to determine whether bloggers tend to link mostly to others with a similar rank (Crosslinking), or to those with higher (Uplinking) or lower (Downlinking) rank. To do this I will first extract the set of bloggers listed at one time on Tech Memeorandum and use them as my sample. Let's call them the target list of bloggers, or target bloggers for short. I can use the Technorati API to determine the rank of each target blogger, and then split them into 3 groups, with a rank of less than 1,000 signifying membership in the A-list, between 1,000 and 10,000 being the M-list, and the remainder being the Z-list..

The tricky part is determining the rank of the blogs that the target bloggers link to. I can autodiscover the target bloggers' RSS feeds and extract the links from their posts, but Technorati doesn't give a rank for just a post URL. It needs to know the URL of a blog's home page. So what I have to do is autodiscover the RSS feeds of blogs the target bloggers link to, and then look in those RSS feeds to find the home page URL, which can then be used to determine the rank on Technorati. At that point I can count the number of uplinks, downlinks, and crosslinks made by each target blogger. This data can then be analysed..."

Paula Abdul to Start Microformats Idol

no i said
Originally uploaded by benbarren.

People are making their predictions for 2006-7 for adoption of MicroFormats, and I especially like these two from Joshua Allen @ NetCrucible :

# Most uses of lightweight metadata, such as geotagging, ratings and reviews, calendaring, etc. will switch to using microformats.org approach.

# On the indexing side, the services like Google, Yahoo, EBay, Craigslist, etc. who crawl and index all of this data; will continue to exert some influence. However, they will eventually be forced to recognize and crawl microformats, and none of them will be big enough to create a more dominant standard.

Alex Barnett also says it simply and accurately when he says "New microformat-based business will blossom over the next two years."

Jeff Jarvis Likes Norgs

Veerle in hWear
Originally uploaded by factoryjoe.

Jeff Jarvis in the Philly Hood has live-blogged their unconference of newspapers meets bloggers. Very interesting especially an idea on a coop called "Norg" (News Organisation) Norg means something else downunder, I wont ponder at risk I doth offend. The BuzzMachine re What can Norg be ? - "A filter…. credibility… interactivity… tangibility (i.e. print, free, to reach people not online)…. multiplatform…. media literacy (not just consumption but creation)…. it has a voice… it gives voice to the public…. relevant… compelling…. agenda-setting…. empowering…. face-to-face… distributed…. continuous…. 24-hour… smarter at promotion…. ethical… economically viable…. cover government… investigative…. diverse…. raise revenue… share revenue with the edge…. support journalism legally… adaptive…. innovative… risk-taking…. resiliant…. able to try and fail and try again…"

Disney 4m Downloads + Gervais ItunesBling

6 speakers
Originally uploaded by benbarren.

Itunes for video and music 'pay per download' is to studios/networks what Adsense is to small and online businesses. Ilounge : "Disney CEO Bob Iger said Disney-owned television content has surpassed 4 million downloads on the iTunes Music Store since videos were added in October 2005. Disney content includes shows from ABC, the Disney Channel and ESPN/ABC Sports."

Oh and can Google put a "blog search" radio button on google.com - We all know you are a portal, so stop making us type in long subdomains such as blogsearch.google.com : And while you are there - filter the results from google.com and blogsearch.google.com. I say this as I was looking again for link for Ricky Gervais podcasts being paid for by the mass market en masse at $1.95ea. I miss pay per Karl. Care of goog/odeo blog/marketwatch : "The latest episode [of Ricky Gervais Show] ranks as the 11th most popular album in the iTunes Music Store, ahead of music releases by Nickleback and All-American Rejects. In the audio books category, Gervais holds down the top 5 slots, ahead of 'The DaVinci Code.'

Caterina Says It's a Bad Time to Start Your 2.0 Co

Bill Gates talking with Michael Arrington of TechCrunch
Originally uploaded by scobleizer.

I nodded at about every point Caterina makes about why its a bad time to start a company in the Valley. In Australia, its not quite that bad, but Im glad I've got one years head start because alot of heads are popping up, hoping for McDonalds-like drive-in timings on their flip, when a real Chocolate Souffle takes longer to bake and slice. My favourite Caterina-isms :

"Everybody else is starting a company. It's crazy." - This is the classic economic cycle where you dont want to be following the herd.

"Talent is scarce again. Hell, I want to find someone to write a little bit of PHP.." - We really need someone to do some little PHP and design 'implementation' work and it's totally hard again in Melbourne too. There are 232 PHP jobs advertised on seek.com.au alone.

"You can't operate in obscurity anymore." - Thankfully I'm on the Mornington Peninsula, where I decide what to work on which creates the most opportunity. There is no SXSW, Mix, Etech, Lockergnome, Web 2.0 Conference or Unconference here.

And my favourite Caterina-ism : "Web 2.0 isn't all that. Hello?. I don't think there's a rising tide lifting all boats here. I don't think Web 2.0 is the magic bullet some people seem to think it is either. It ain't the features, it's that AND the business. Tagging was a great feature, no doubt. But Flickr was at break even -- about to tip into the black -- when we were acquired."

Update : Of course Fred Wilson says what everyone should realise : "If you have a truly great idea, have incredible passion for it, and you've got a wide enough opening to run through, then you might as well go for it." (just dont be surprised when a taxi driver knows more about your segment of business as you arrive at LAX, as happened to me in 1999 when I was doing a efinancialservices play :) Check 2web podcast tonight aussie time on this.

hList my Ipod with Video

DSC04618
Originally uploaded by steveobd.

I'm really digging this early stage wave of classifieds plays and initiatives. All with quite different technical product approaches; Vast.com indexing billions of classifieds listings from dark web databases in cars, jobs and dating; Edgeio going folksonomic (category) broader (infinite) through tens of millions of blogs with RSS feeds, and then there is hListing : The Structured Blogging spec, which has people like Craig Donato from oodle as a co-author (and Tantek's prints over everything) hListings are pretty simple by definition :

"hListing is about an item and what you want to do with it".. It is a "microformat for sharing, searching, and syndicating the information that helps match up buyers and sellers. This proposal follows the common practices of trading sites such as Craigslist, eBay and newspaper classifieds." Also "As in hReview, the concept of a “universal object identifier” is also out-of-scope for this effort. Unlike some of the “product feed” formats under [listing-examples], we avoided specifying any taxonomy for identifying or categorizing listings in favor of tags."

Technically it consists of :
o version. optional. text.
o listing action. one or more tags, suggested set: sell | rent | trade | meet | announce | offer | wanted | event | service
o lister. required. hCard | (fn || email || url || tel).
o dtlisted. optional. ISO8601 absolute date time.
o dtexpired. optional. ISO8601 absolute date time.
o price. optional. text. [should include a floating-point number with optional ISO currency codes]
o item info. optional. (fn || url || photo || geo || adr) | hCard (for person or business).
o summary. optional. text.
o description. required. text with optional valid XHTML markup.
o item tags. optional. keywords or phrases describing the item being offered, using rel-tag
o permalink. optional.

"Creating a listing requires adding transaction metadata":
o Type of transaction sought: whether the lister has or wants an item (sale or rent), a service, an opening, or a personal introduction.
o Dates of listing and expiry. Once taken, listings may be reposted with a modified dtexpired.
o Price has been called out specifically as an independent text field. It can include some terms & conditions.

Love it. We'll be definitely deploying some of this krunk downunder. (note : I still dont have my Black Ipod with Video from Retravision on order thru voucher - maybe I'll be able to get the new one) Ping me classified obsessed to start moving this downunder and globally !

Jason Calcanis and Jennifer Aniston To Star in Movie

lady in red
Originally uploaded by benbarren.

Jason, as the spinmeister, who now has control of the AOL-Timewarner ship, has ala Bourne Identity been using operatives to traffick misinformation re taking over Netscape as part of becoming the next Ted Turner at AOL. Luckily, Jason has much bigger plans "grass is always greener" but not in the Online Division of formerly 1.0 Virginia Empire, nor to be the next 2.0 Mountain View Charity Playboy (web 3.0 is sooo yesterday) - All I can say from my (nameless) sources (they dont have names because they um well, they arent human like Gattaca) will be starring, writing, producing and directing Jennifer Aniston's next "tell all" film, in which Angelina Jolie has forbid any sex scenes with younger talent for (character) Brad Pitt (who Jason will be playing) Im not sure if Jolie's new role includes rules about Mrs Robinson-esque Jane Fonda. What are Ted's shareholding in AOL again ? The JC Blog Top Dog : "Magazine editors, VCs, and movie stars want to be bloggers, and Internet entrepreneurs want to make movies. The grass is always greener I guess."

My Lego Enzo Looks Buggy Against the Carrera GT

enzo lego
Originally uploaded by benbarren.

For anyone trying to design products for mass and early market, symbolised by use of Firefox and IE respectively, and you are trying to be "all that" even in a minimalistic way through use of Ajax, CSS and XHTML, all can be schweet till your mates in dead end corporate jobs, happily ping u an email saying "Your design just um doesnt work in IE". As in totally non-useable vs non-kewl. My mom uses IE and Im assuming it still has 50% + market share - even if I dont know anyone but her who uses it. Damn you Microsoft, do what Kevin Burton says - License Firefox under GPL. Some great quotes from a very incisive look at Web 2.0 Design Bugs :

"For example, the idea behind separating XHTML from CSS is to separate the semantic logic of your page’s hierarchy from the visual style. This effect is kind of lost if all you are marking up your xhtml pages with are hundreds of divs with cryptic names such as “div1″, “div2″ and so on."

"All too often I find that in this current boom of whizzy, flashy online web applications, certain browsers get shut out for no apparent reason. Now, I can understand this to an extent, but when it is a big corporation or a start-up with venture capital funding behind it, there really isn’t any excuse to be shutting out perfectly capable browsers such as Safari. Writely and Riya are two recent examples of web applications that simply say “oh sorry, you’re using Safari! Bye”."

"When your site works in internet explorer without you trying.. Hah! Like this ever happens...Problems with IE are usually due to its slightly amusing interpretation of floated elements, and the way IE handles the box model. It just takes patience to make IE happy."

"Nowadays, with the widespread use of AJAX, there should be no need for me to submit a form, then come to a page that says “hey, you’ve filled this in wrong! sorry mate, START AGAIN”. Asynchronous calls to databases were made for this kind of thing."

Kate Moss is Not an Accredited Investor

morning kate
Originally uploaded by benbarren.

According to Brad Feld, investors like Kate (unaccredited investors) are "your garden variety mess." I've learnt by study, observation and mistaken assumptions there is a major difference between the Billion Dollar Home Run Startup, that burns through Tier A venture capital ($1m-$25m) as it attempts The Big American Dream, and a Corner Store small to medium sized early stage, innovative 'local' business, that has some early stage financing needs (eg $10k-$200k) till it reaches breakeven (usually with 12-18 months) and beyond.

"This" 2.0 time there seems to be more of the finance and build it yourself, gain market position, and see if you can hold on till GEMAYA come along and lighten your code load, and reverse the red in your bank account. Entrepreneurs, as one eyed, passionate and obsessed as they are, need to take a step back from there business and know which one they are. Which one they want to be. And decide their shareholder pathway accordingly. From what Jeff Clavier and Brad Feld are saying, there is no as Michael Porter said "being stuck in the middle". The scary part with conversation that Billion Dollar Startups need "accredited investors" is how the heck are you supposed to get going at Point Zero of a new business, when its just a raw, uncultivated concept, which the (probably employed) entrepreneur to be, cannot shake or stop thinking about, and thinks 'maybe, just maybe' this could be a goer. (dreams of quitting job, being their own person, finally doing it right)

At the start of the road which every entrepreneur says they wouldnt take again if they knew what it was going to entail (ok they would :) one starts working at the idea at night, on weekend, and soon it takes over everything, maybe even work hours. At which point a decision needs to be made. If it hasnt been made from external forces. (how many businesses are started after a long corporate stint for instance with an idealistic "I can do it better" Jerry Maguire moment) So the entrpreneur to be, after annoying wife/husband, friends, the family accountant (who thinks it's a bad idea) says "I'm going to write a business plan" and I'll go speak to Bob about getting some money for this." (right after deciding to draw down some equity on the family house to co-fund) So off to Bob we go, who previous XMAS' has intimated he'd fund any business idea we had, and wouldnt it be great to do a business together (he's getting bored with his flying lessons)

The Problem : "Friends and Family" are the Founding Investors in nearly all small businesses and Billion Dollar Home Runs. So what I dont' understand with the current discussion (past getting your legals in order, and ensuring the right shareholder structures at different stages are upheld), how the heck does one fund a business at point zero without Friends and Family who are often 'unaccredited investors'.

Entrepreneurs wanting to be the next Google, or company acquired by, compared to say just another millionaire with a nice little earning corner store online, better send the below links to their lawyer : But watch out, if you send it to your lawyer friend, they also might not be accredited.

Jeff Clavier : "Not complying with this rule, which means – yes – turning money down, will come back and haunt you down the road when it is time to further finance or sell your company."

Brad Feld : "What happens on an acquisition? Regardless if the placement was done correctly to the unaccredited investors, an acquisition of the company could pose big problems. Take the case where a private company acquires the company for stock. Handling the unaccredited investors can be extremely difficult. The unaccredited investors need a purchase representative to trade their stock for the acquiring company stock, or the stock needs to be registered or subject to fairness hearings. Alternatively, the buyer will insist that they don’t want unaccredited investors holding stock in their company, in which case the seller needs to come up with cash to buy out the unaccredited investors. We’ve seen cases where the buyer completely refused to deal with the unaccredited investors and the accredited investors on the seller’s side had to invest new cash in the company to buy out the unaccredited investors. Public company acquisitions can present similar problems if the stock being issued in the acquisition is not registered. Basically, your garden variety mess."

Google Acquired 1.25 Companies a Month in 2005

yellow f430
Originally uploaded by redbarren.

Ive seen the Ferrari F430 and I waaaant it bad. So much more aggressive than the 360, although the 430 front isnt yet perfect - while the back is, with Enzo like cut-off lights. Mad. I'd even let my bankers considering selling my soul to G-Evil, who Internet Stock Blog have some interesting M+A Tidbits from their 10-K filing : "The company noted that 15 acquisitions were made during 2005. The total purchase price for these companies was $130.5 million. In addition, Google paid $400,000 for an undisclosed patent last year. Several other acquisitions have already been made in 2006, including dMarc (for $102 million, with about $1.2 billion in payments through 2008 if certain goals are met), Writely, and @Last Software"

Where the Bloody Hell are You Network Effect ?

lara bingle
Originally uploaded by benbarren.

There's a 2WEB discussion about the value of a business being in the eye of the paying beholder. There is of course the very rare Skypelike Co's who savage the cost structure of mega-huge industries (which in itself is a very calculated economic strategy), and thus have high value to a buyer who can increase the amount and speed by which others lose customers and profit ! Similarly a player like edgeio will target classifieds because of the hugh economic value around the listings of jobs, cars, property, dating and 'commercial search' in general.

Many horizontal plays (esp for new geeky web free software) will however strongly "bet" on the 'network effect' (eg launch an ajax wordprocessor without ads hoping to grab share in the "wordprocessing" market) - This network effect (it is argued) is the secret sauce of a consumer play, where like flickr, it's the place to go to "be". Fred Wilson of course nails the two step equation, but unfortunately like filmmaking its very hard to say what ingredients are needed that makes one business a success over another. It's a combination of timing, people, technology, execution, focus and uniqueness, but it cant be J'Lo bottled.

The sustainability and long term value of such a business increases dramatically once the site actually launches, and gets significant user traction. I've worked or seen closely alot of sites launch and nothing. No users, even after substantial marketing - on a concept that had worked before. (in different geo-markets) It aint easy. But if you can get organic uptake, like the first weekend box office of a film, you can tell with a website within a few weeks, if it should be put down (isnt done enough), or whether major surgery is needed (not enough surgery usually done ala boring redesign is NOT surgery) If you are lucky you may have a growth problem which only more servers can solve !!!!

But once a business has this "user traction" it should then be aiming at converting this into attractive metrics such as revenue, revenue growth, and attractive gross profit margins, once capital and one-off expenses are taken out (that Herman Miller chair or new 30" PowerMac Screen) Google's real economic value is in Adsense and the lack of viable industry alternative to date. (companies like adbrite are doing so well for exactly the same reason)

I for one will never be betting my future on eyeballs :) as keen as I am to monetize them. There is nothing a buyer likes more than to think all the hard work and dollars have been sunk and they are getting a business that is about to become a overflowing cash box. For that, they will always pay a premium !

Fred Wilson : "Give your service away for free, possibly ad supported but maybe not, acquire a lot of customers very efficiently through word of mouth, referral networks, organic search marketing, etc, then offer premium priced value added services or an enhanced version of your service to your customer base."

"The best examples of this business model are when the customer implicitly understands why the paid service has to cost money. More storage costs for photos or virtual storage are good examples. Termination costs on other carriers networks in the Skype model are another. When it is just additional features that don't carry an incremental cost to offer, it may be harder to convert free users to paid users. But if your free service is loved and you do a good job articulating the value that comes with the paid service, you can convert to paying users with good results."

33 Times Earnings = Your 2.0 Business Value

NewCo Value
Originally uploaded by benbarren.

Anyone who experienced pain or 9-5 boredom in 2002-4 (it seems so long ago now) should (can) apply the Calacanis' earnings-ism to their 2.0 startup. We do. If you have the team, technology, eyeballs, sector market leadership, and rapidly growing revenue, the 'income insurance' for your 2.0 biz, is of course earnings. I havent looked recently but I know that Internet companies acquired over the past few years (if you take out the Skypes and Flickrs) you can get 35-40 times earnings. If it's more production, consulting, client orientated you might get 10-20 times earnings (vs 5-10 times for a typical offline ad agency on a low multiple) The average earnings multiple of these public, large cap, high revenue base, low growth companies, if you take the loss making ones out, is 33 times earnings (i havent taken into account size of profits just calculated an average multiple from InternetStock Blog article on this topic) I know im building a business with targeted earnings in mind within 2 years because then the value of the business is indisputable (it also funds survival, expansion and lifestyle) : Versus an eyeballs/ad only play there needs to be amazing technology or a vast scale of sites, ads, page views, users etc. Valuation is always an interesting conversation once you move past companies that buy teams/technology/eyeballs and are less interested in the financials of the business (of course neither is right or wrong etc) So I'll work on 33 times. Today anyway.

2WEB or not 2WEB Jason Calacanis

Tantek's SXSW Microformats
Originally uploaded by benbarren.

We had a bit of a yarn pre JC Blogging Top Dog now AOL Playa Netscape in Da House Bling Bling, but ended up getting stuck talking about boring Telstra and Microsoft monopolies. We promise not to next time guys. Large cap is boring weknowwit. We'll have some playaz, local and global, on next time kids. Later. Click here to listen to some 2WEB in da house #3.

Tantek's SXSW Microformats

Tantek's SXSW Microformats
Originally uploaded by benbarren.

One of the reasons I switched to Macs at start of 2005 is I never wanted to see or use powerpoint again. I must have written 1000 presentations (cuttoff point being they took at least a full day of work, and all I got wasnt a lousy tshirt.) So I would have loved to have seen Tanteks.ppt in person (@SXSW where im totally going next year) I particularly like this slide, and I dont really want to pump it up too much, because I think there's gold in that there black background. hDis, luv it ! Even Bill Gates at Mix06 is getting it : "We need microformats and to get people to agree on them. It is going to bootstrap exchanging data on the Web…

…we need them for things like contact cards, events, directions…"

Please Add Your Aussie Blog to gnoos.com.au

add blog to gnoos
Originally uploaded by benbarren.

Well it's not much to show for one year's (blogging) oops work. But gnoos.com.au, our first consumer product has a page up asking Aussie Bloggers to enter their blog URL or RSS. Now we have most of you, but a few more couldn't hurt, and you are popping up every day. You can always check http://del.icio.us/benbarren/gnoos for the latest on us too. The countdown to our launch is now under one month.

Dave Winer's Fictional Life Optioned by Fox Searchlight

770 designers
Originally uploaded by benbarren.

If you wait long enough, a full rotation of the moon will occur, and I think it rox that SuprGuru Winer is looking to fiction as a post-blog outlet. (one of my favourite suck.com writers joey anuff is a producer for VH1 now) All Dave would need to do is tell his perspective on his story, call it fiction, get a traditional publisher and beautiful. Cashola. Dave's Story shouldnt be released as a blook. Nor should it be sold on Amazon. Or paperbook (too mass market) Just a beautiful hardback book, priced at $89.95. And it should tell all, and reveal some of the master secrets. (there may be a secret code hidden to dave's private 'dont call it a blog' blog.) Heck, $90 would be alot cheaper and open than Mix06 or some of these Web 2.0 conferences. I'd buy it. And if the protagonist was young, 25 yrs old and banging hot hollywood babes in LA, well I guess I'd suspend disbelief for a moment and read dat too (blame the studios for the rewrite), although, The Ladies (and every piece of fiction needs a love story) seem to luvvvvvv Mr Winer. The hardback would be the prelude of course. We'd need to option the film, and Dave could get Fox Searchlight to make the film, which would also be kewl, because he'd be the first Web 2.0 player to be commercialised through their film division, not interactive. Ironically, we could then watch his fictional life film on Direct TV Satellite Broadband for $3-$4 according to Rupert. No visit to the HD-cinema which would piss off Cuban. Will Dave go to the Montblac though to write the fictional piece or will he stick to the 23" Steve Jobs widescreen ;) ? (Will Dave do IM ?)

From Scripting.com, no more at end of year, maybe 'dont call it a combeack' : "Me, I'm thinking fiction might be fun. I'm thinking about dialog, and how a novel is a continuum, and a bunch of short stories hanging off a tree, and a few diversions to keep the reader on his or her toes. I'm thinking about the craft of writing in ways I've never done before."

Note : this post has not been fact checked, edited and may in fact be fictional.

The Lead : George Clooney or Heath Ledger
Love Interest : Scarlett Johansson
Adam Curry : William Dafoe
Enter your Own Suggestions.

Moderation + Email in Local Community Online

warhol suburbia
Originally uploaded by benbarren.

Jeremy Zawodny from Yahoo has some very interesting learnings about Freecycle (a local community service Jeremy uses) and how to manage the growth of a real world local community online : "I think there are many lessons in Freecycle for those trying to build services used by "normal people" in local communities. The first is simplicity. A mailing list is the simplest thing that could possibly work. No web site that hosts photos of offered goods, no bidding process, etc. It's simply email."

"Moderation is also important. That is, giving someone the flexibility and control necessary to exercise their own judgment and enforcing rules and customs that can't be baked into the software. In this case it comes in the form of a group moderator who can edit, revise, approve, or reject messages crossing the list. The result is that there's no spam, self-promotion, or commercial interests devaluing the list." Jessica was just saying the same thing.

Business of Business + Business of Raising Capital

lambo gallardo hamann
Originally uploaded by benbarren.

I did my Masters of Business in Entrepreneurship and Venture Capital, and one of the key 'brain implants' I was left with was a startup business has 2 businesses, which need to be managed in a well compartmentalised way throughout the organisation :

1. The Business of Business : Hitting monthly sales targets, delivering on two week agile tech-build cycles, getting up a teaser site today !

2. The Business of Raising Capital : This is getting in new investors, and keeping existing ones happy, and judo-like, trying to use their size and connections to advantage. (and getting them their "Board Pack" one week before the meeting, which if monthly sux)

The company I was second employee at which raised $50M+ US during 1999-2001, had most of the top staff working on the second part of the business : "The Business of Raising Capital". Because we were a startup, the board meetings were monthly, not quarterly. So a bit like an editor of a magazine, you had a 2 week window of increasing frenzy before the meeting, then "1-2 weeks off" because you had to prepare papers to send out as mentioned before. These were also the days when nice food is ordered in and operational staff generally feel disillusioned. If you are what you eat, staff get none of the catered food, minus some awful leftovers at 4pm, which the Exec PA to the CEO makes them feel really priviliged to eat ): (sometimes this food is still in staff kitchen the next morning by which time the pesto lined foccacios are stinkbombs)

The funniest part (ok its not actually funny) with board meetings is how they impact upon "The Business" - Esp the CTO, Tech Leads, and Senior Engineers. Its not much fun for mid-level Sales Exec's either who get pressured to close any pending "discussions" which might be padding a Sales Pipeline.xls. Increasingly desperate CEOs, COO's, and 'direct reports' to The Boss, start asking crazy questions to the tech guys like "How much time do you think it would take to customise our software for Customer X ?" (a feature which has probably already been promised and maybe included in projections moving forward)

Anyway, I'm reflecting because after the 2WEB#2 podcast last night, combined with some discussions today, and moving the business forward from a passion/hobby/feature into a serious business (as planned), it is always an interesting transition (but much more so when its you in the driving seat) This time my approach to everything, taken from Marc Cuban is : "Do everything right, once". So at the moment I'm getting right into the detail of how to structure the 'Corporate Level' of our business : From who do you want as shareholders, what are the commercial terms to that, what in reality do you expect of them and what do you think at a minimum they will deliver. And what do they want ;) ?

As always though, finding the right people, with the right fit, with a clear understanding (not implicit assumptions) about what they will do is key.

Tidbit : I also remember board days, and have seen this since elsewhere, is the day when the slick cars turn up and double park if need be. SL 55 AMGs, Lambo Gallardos, 996 Turbos, Boxster S with Ruff mods - usually en masse. Who said Web 2.0 is any different to Web 1.0 ? (minus the lack of large capital raisings and IPOs)

From RedEye VC who I'm really enjoying reading : "Planning for a successful board meeting is not easy – it takes a lot of time to effectively provide insight into the company’s priorities, goals, performance, and challenges. And time is a scarce resource at any startup. When I was CEO of Half.com, I had a wonderful board of directors – they offered real strategic input and guidance. However, I believe that half of the value of a Board of Directors meeting comes in advance of the meeting. The time I spent with my management team preparing for the board meeting was invaluable. It insured we were all on the same page. It provided an unque opportunity for the management team to step outside of the daily operational (aka firefighting) mode and think strategically. Looking back, some of the most important decisions we made resulted from conversations while we were preparing for our board meeting, rather than in the meeting itself. Our monthly board meeting provided a firm benchmark to measure our progress by – and also served as an invaluable “motivator” to ensure that we achieved the expectations that were set at the last meeting."

2WEB 1 Hit Wonders Try 4 2nd Podcast

casting couch
Originally uploaded by benbarren.

You know what they say about the second album for one hit wonders ? Well the second album aint always the best. The third should rock though. The main test was that we could get 4-6 people into a skype call and podcast it. Listen here. We did, except anytime Marty Wells talked about his Tangler technology, his legal team jacked into his wireless hub and ensured he wasnt heard. Alan Jones went MIA in skype land. I was accused of being a media whore because no one else had any news. There was also no agenda (thats what Cam prefers - but i think we'll have one next time), and sometimes we werent sure who questions were directed to. Oh well. Come to think of it, 2WEB podcasts are like a startup, so its a perfect warm up for the week at 9pm on a Sunday. And fact is we've done it two weeks in a row at the same time, so thats gotta count for something. The Third should be a ripper. Maybe we'll get a Seinfeld laugh track. If you want some swearing from me at the start of Number 2, which was related to a pre-convo "dialogue", click here.

The Parents Support Group for Kids in MySpace

scarlett
Originally uploaded by simondodson.

If Scarlett wasnt blueballing every director and ageing male talent in Hollywood, she would be a MySpace princess. Fred Wilson, the del.icio.us VC who grew up in an Army Family and developed a love of economics and 60's-70's music (rumour is he will be starting a music label now he has a sponsor for his top 50) Either way any parent that in 2005 does a weekly music podcast with his kids (Josh is a lead singer/guitar player in a group) must rank amongst the hippest 2.0 Parents. Fred summarises his position from the East Coast Parents Support Group for Kids in MySpace : "And I am embracing it; for me, for my kids, and for the rest of my life." Now the I'm not sure the discounted cashflows will go onto infinity or the rest of our lives, but I agree with Fred when he says "Personalizing words and spaces and communities. We are at the dawn of the age of personalized media. The web has given the world a place where the audience is the publisher and what we are witnessing (and hopefully participating in) is the personalization of media. It will manifest itself in many strange and wonderful ways." Part of being a teenager now happens virtually, that's all. And parents will always be worried that their kids are just roaming around the streets, which they are. Support Group Details Here.