Brainjams.org organizes "unconferences" I talked to Chris Heuer from Brainjams.org about the very interesting work he's doing with organizing "unconferences." I didn't know what a barcamp was before today (an admission that drew gasps from some of the hipper Gnomedex attendees) but it's a cool concept. A barcamp is basically a conference that's organized on the fly. Everyone has to contribute but no one gets to run the event. Kind of a physical blogosphere, really.

The concept reminds me a little of birds-of-a-feather sessions that have been part of user conferences for many years. People basically suggest topics on a white board and then self-organize the discussion. Barcamps are longer - typically one or two days - and more intense. There's also a post-event conversation that continues online that BOF sessions rarely have. It's very Web 2.0.

Brainjams is about to organize a multi-city barcamp tour. If they come to town, I'm definitely going to try it.

Categories: blog_culture, social_media, Gnomedex  ¶ 6:10 PM 0 Comments

  Edwards meets the geeks Sen. John Edwards was the keynote speaker at Gnomedex in Seattle today and he gets my vote just for being here today. Gnomedex is a hard-core geek audience, very passionate about social media but with a bit of the smugness that unfortunately characterizes serious techies.

Edwards handled himself superbly, in my view. While his talk didn't break any new ground (what political speech ever does?), he made it clear that the ideal of engaging with an audience through conversations rather than lectures was critical to the evolution of the political process.

"The changes that you are creating have the potential to literally change our democracy and get people engaged in a more serious way than they ever have before," he said. "Instead of having leaders speak at people, there’s the potential for a meaningful dialog that just hasn’t existed before."

Edwards' OneAmerica Committee is using blogs and podcasts to communicate with constituencies and gather input. Prompted to install a vlogger on his campaign bus to write about the day-to-day activities of the campaign, he called the suggestion a "great idea." The only time he flinched is when someone suggested his campaign start a wiki. The glazed look in the senator's eyes showed that he had no idea what the questioner was talking about. But who can blame him?

On an issue near and dear to the audience, Edwards made it clear he comes down squarely in favor of net neutrality. "We need net neutrality," he said. "I’m a very strong supporter of it."

I thought his most interesting observation was on the tendency of politicians to fall into obfuscation and vagueness. "It’s very hard to do if you’re in an environment where there are reporters asking you questions," he said. "It’s a very fast and intense situation and you have to think quickly. It’s hard in that environment to just be normal. I try to retrain myself to speak honestly in that situation but it's hard even for me."

He gave the impression that as a candidate, though, he'll try not to mince words. "If the Democratic party is going to lead this country, we’ve got to show a little backbone," he said. "Why can’t our party say we are for universal health care? Instead, we say we’re going to try to make health care more affordable. Those are weasel words that politicians use when they don’t want to say something."

Someone near me criticized Edwards for talking too much and listening too little, but I was just impressed that he was here at all. I tried to imagine George W. voluntarily engaging with an audience of serious geeks and I just can't see it. It would be horribly embarrassing for him. Edwards may not speak the language, but he understands the importance of the conversation. That, in itself, sets him apart from his opponents.

Categories: influence, Gnomedex  ¶ 5:16 PM 1 Comments

  Going global Technorati has an interesting chart in its "State of the Blogosphere" report. The percentage of posts in English has declined dramatically in the last year, from 44% to 31% of overall posts. This isn't because the English-speaking population is falling but because the blogosphere is rapidly going global. A larger percentage of blog activity is in Japanese than in English.

Also, the number one blog on the Technorati 100 list is now a Chinese blog written by Xu Jing Lei.


Categories: blog_culture, research  ¶ 10:50 AM 0 Comments

  Shameless self-promotion Christina Kerley has an interview with me on her CK's Blog marketing site. It was fun working on this. It gave me a chance to organize some thoughts and Christina is a delight to work with. She's going to have a bunch of future interviews with bloggers and other social media players in coming months, so add CK's Blog to your RSS feed!

Categories: social media, marketing  ¶ 10:21 AM 0 Comments

  Boston Globe Merges Print, Online Editorial Media Post says the The Boston Globe is merging its print and online editorial groups in a move that "is believed to be...at the behest of Times Co. senior executives who are dissatisfied with the overall performance of the Times Co.'s New England operations, which are the worst-performing of the Times Co.'s regional divisions. In a May revenue report from the Times Co., its New England operation posted an 8 percent drop in ad revenue compared to the same month in 2005."

The consumer Internet has been around for 12 years. It seems surprising that it took a progressive paper like the Globe so long to make such a seemingly obvious shift.  ¶ 10:23 AM 0 Comments

  Warren Buffett to give away his fortune Fortune magazine reports today that Warren Buffett is giving away most of his fortune to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Last week I posted an extended blog entry about Bill Gates and remarked that, "Bill Gates intends to spend the next 30 years giving away $50 billion. I have no doubt that he will bring his remarkable critical thinking and intelligence to the process and that the world will be a better place for his philanthropy."

It's nice to see that a respected investor like Warren Buffett agrees! :-)  ¶ 1:52 PM 0 Comments

  Blockbuster cluelessness Christina Kerley has an interview with Mike Kaltschnee, the blogger who writes HackingNetflix that's well worth reading if you're a marketer. It will give you some great insight into how clueless some marketers can be and I am referring to the marketers at Blockbuster.

HackingNetflix is a great example of an enthusiast site. Kaltschnee started it because he's a movie buff and he was really excited by the DVD-by-mail business and Netflix's in particular. In the process of writing about his passion, he's become one of the leading influencers in that market. He now writes about all the DVD-by-mail firms, not just Netflix. And he's got 3,000 - 7,000 readers a day.

HackingNetflix covers everything from bugs on the Netflix site to rumors about competitors and new products to new promotional materials to information about Netflix' stock price. He told Kerley that that about half the stories he posts come from readers and comments.

So here's what floored me about the interview. Mike Kaltschnee has probably got his ear closer to the ground than anyone in the planet on the DVD-by-mail industry. And Blockbuster won't work with him!

Can you believe that? Here's Blockbuster, whose stock is trading at an all-time low and who has filed antitrust claims against Netflix, refusing to interact with an independent source who can most help them understand their biggest competitor, not to mention the rest of the market. And they won't even acknowledge his existence.

It's hard to chalk this up to arrogance on Blockbuster's part because the company doesn't have much be arrogant about. It has to be cluelessness. Someone in Blockbuster's PR organization needs a dope slap. Or a pink slip.

Netflix, by the way, loves the site and has been all over it, Kaltschnee said.

Blockbuster is missing a huge opportunity by not working with HackingNetflix. If you're a marketer, there's probably a Mike Kaltschnee in your market. That person is a resource to you, not an annoyance or an eneny.

----------------------------------------------
Update 6/26/06

Here's an update to this commentary.

I e-mailed Blockbuster's PR department about Mike Kaltschnee's comments and received a prompt reply. Blockbuster's responses are in bold. Specific addresses have been changed for confidentiality purposes.

1. Is Blockbuster media relations aware of the site HackingNetflix? Yes

2. Are you planning to engage with the author of this site or are youchoosing not to pay attention to it for now? To our knowledge, we have never been contacted by this site. We respond to reporters on a regular basis and are available 24/7 at 21X-85X-X190, or online at xxxx@blockbuster.com

3. Does Blockbuster's media relations have a policy on communicating withbloggers as part of your media plan? If so, may I know what the policy is,please? We are communicating to the media on a regular basis. There is no policy one way or the other re: bloggers.

4. Do you have any comment on Mr. Kaltshnee's statement that "I triedseveral times to reach Blockbuster, and finally had one exchange with the PRpeople, but subsequent e-mails went unanswered." We encourage Mr.Kaltshnee to contact us at 21X-85X-X190 or at xxxx@blockbuster.com.  ¶ 7:09 AM 6 Comments

  Measures of influence I'm starting to write my book, The New Influencers, and I'll occasionally post notes and chapters for your perusal and comment. This is for a chapter on measuring influence:

Nielsen BuzzMetrics monitors 30 million blogs yielding 500,000 to 1 million posts a day. The service provides marketers with insight into what’s being discussed in the blogosphere, as well as what’s being said about their products. Links are the best indication of a blog’s influence, says Natalie Glance, Ph.D, a senior research scientist. “Readership is a good proxy for influence,” she says. “The more readers a person has, the greater their reach and the more likely they are to influence somebody in mainstream media and reach beyond the blogosphere.”

Nielsen mainly looks at links. It crawls the blogosphere daily for new posts and harvests links to other blogs. Proprietary technology separates blog posts from, say, newspaper articles, and filter out disruptions like spam blogs and link farms.

Not all links are treated the same. Blogroll links, for example, aren’t counted because they’re persistent and most bloggers don’t scour their blogrolls every day. The correlation between links and readership is elusive but measurable. To establish the relationship, Nielsen BuzzMetrics found sites that list traffic meters and then correlated link activity to those sites. The truth: the more active links a site has, the more traffic it gets.

While links are important indicators of influence, they can be situational, Glance says. Entertainment and celebrity sites, for example, don’t generate much cross-linking activity, while tech sites are notable for having a copious number of links. That’s where comments are figured into the equation. Sites that don’t generate many links often spark a lot of comment activity. Gadget blogs have a lot of both.

Influence in different markets is, therefore, different. Link counts are relative to the overall link activity in a market. In other words, a site that doesn’t generate links or comments may still be influential if its competitors don’t either. That also factors into the BuzzMetrics equation.

Glance acknowledges that influence measurement in the blogosphere is still primitive, and Nielsen BuzzMetrics, like other measurement firms, is refining its craft. One idea is to categorize blogs by topic and measure their metrics against each other on the assumption that overall activity is relative to the topic being discussed. Another is to weight different blogs differently, so that a link from an A-list blog is assigned more importance than one from a lesser-known outlet. Mainstream media is also not currently figured into the equation.. The service can measures links from blogs to newspaper articles, but not the reverse.

Two things are clear, Glance says. One is that the blogosphere be a very different place without mainstream media. “There’s more linking to mainstream media in the blogosphere than there is to other blogs,” Glance says. Mainstream media is the principal source of information upon which bloggers comment. Another truism is that blogs about sex, movie stars and Parris Hilton get a disproportionate amount of traffic. “The most popular stories in the blogosphere aren’t necessarily the most important ones,” she says.

Nielsen BuzzMetrics' BlogPulse is an excellent window on the blogosphere with a lot of interesting metrics and search tools. If you’re a Technorati fan, check it out because you will find new and interesting tools there.  ¶ 5:35 PM 0 Comments

  Bill Gates moves on I had the good fortune to interview Bill Gates four or five times during my years in the computer press. I was even fortunate enough to spend two days and nights at his summer home, along with a small group of journalists. I got to know him well enough that he greeted me by name in subsequent years. While I have never been close to Bill Gates, I developed enough of an acquaintance and followed his career closely enough to develop a perspective on how he works.

It was no surprise this past week to learn that Gates is relinquishing his role in the active management of Microsoft and turning his attention to philanthropy. He remains chairman, but turns over the Chief Software Architect role to Ray Ozzie - one of the few people who has the intellect and technical vision to match Gates’ - and Steve Ballmer, who has been running the company day-to-day for the last six years. Gates has been withdrawing from an active role in Microsoft since 2000, when he gave up the CEO role. But he has also stated publicly in the past that he intended at some point to turn his attention to giving away the huge fortune he amassed.

I suspect there was some logic to his decision to leave now. He has run Microsoft for 30 years. At age 50, he may see himself as having about 30 productive years left and so, halfway through his adult life, he’s turned from creating wealth to distributing it. He leaves the day-to-day role with class and dignity, which also comes as no surprise. For all the terrible things that have been said about Bill Gates over the years, he is a class act.

I have always resisted the temptation to oversimplify my opinion of Microsoft. I have written many editorials and opinions about the company over the years, probably about half positive and half negative. It is a complex company run by a complex man. It has done many great things and some not-so-great things. To characterize Microsoft as simply good or bad is unfair to the company and to Gates. This is a company that exemplifies what's good and bad about the industry in which it operates.

Gates undoubtedly has one of the finest business minds of the twentieth century. He pulled off what I regard as the greatest business coup of my lifetime, upsetting and nearly ruining IBM in the process of stealing its market away. Some people would say that Gates was deceptive in end-running IBM in 1991, but I think it’s more a matter of the people at IBM at the time being too out-of-touch to see what was happening. Gates saw his opportunity and he went for it. He understood the dynamics of the computer industry as few people did. He knew that a company with a 40% market share in operating systems could very quickly go to 90% share. His success at turning the tables on IBM – whose dominance of the industry prior to 1990 was almost total - is a story that people will be talking about 100 years from now.

Microsoft has always been a study in contrasts. It is a company that is capable of great arrogance but also surprising humility. Unlike many arrogant companies, it keeps plugging away at tasks and markets until it figures out how to do something right. It is not afraid of falling back and starting over. It takes a long-term view of many of its initiatives, which is remarkable given the constant pressure from investors for a quick return. Yet it has managed to reward investors with a run of almost 20 years of steadily increasing profits, a great achievement. Gates’ Microsoft was so profitable, in fact, that it eventually had to give back billions of dollars to shareholders because it simply had run out of ways to invest the money. Can you think of any other company that has done that?

Critics will argue that much of that money was made on the back of a monopoly and they’re right. However, that monopoly was built, by and large, because Gates' Microsoft convinced a whole lot of people to pay money for Windows. Microsoft didn’t buy its way to the top; it produced a product that a lot of people wanted. Windows may not have been the most technically elegant product in its class, but it was the one people chose.

It’s true that Microsoft did engage in some unethical and illegal practices in pressuring its business partners to adopt Windows. However, I think Windows would have been a big winner either way. The company simply didn’t know where to stop, and that is one of its character flaws. Microsoft has never been satisfied with just winning; it needs to stomp its rivals into jelly. Under Steve Ballmer, that attitude seems to have mellowed somewhat, but the reality is that Microsoft has to live with a legacy of having shown its opponents no mercy. It will take years to change that image, if Microsoft even wants to change it.

Microsoft has drawn much criticism for not being a nicer company. But again, I think Bill Gates understood the past and was determined not to repeat it. The history of the computer industry is littered with nice guys who couldn’t compete. Ken Olsen, An Wang and Edson DeCastro were all nice people. And look what happened to DEC, Wang and Data General.

I suspect it's difficult for Gates to leave Microsoft right now. The company is facing its most significant challenges in a decade. The natural inclination of a leader is to stay and fight, but Gates has made the decision to walk away and leave the fight to others. He's sticking to his plan. That takes guts, and I think Gates deserves credit for that.

Bill Gates has never been a media darling. He doesn’t speak in sound bites and his thoughts and sentence structure can be maddeningly random at times. He also does something that interviewers hate: he challenges the question. I have come away several times from a Gates interview thinking I was an idiot to have ever posed certain questions in the first place. He is brilliant at applying logic to a thought process to make it sound like the choice is intuitively obvious. And he's usually right.

I have rarely asked Bill Gates questions about things outside of his role at Microsoft, but about 10 years ago I did ask him about the money. I think he was worth about $10 billion at the time.

Why, I asked, was he so focused on making more money? He already had far more than he could ever spend. Shouldn't he start giving it away? He responded that his time was best spent increasing the value of Microsoft stock because the higher the price of that stock climbed, the more money he would have to give away. That answer made eminent sense to me at the time and it has become more meaningful as the years have passed. Today, he’s worth five times as much much as when I asked that question.

Bill Gates intends to spend the next 30 years giving away $50 billion. I have no doubt that he will bring his remarkable critical thinking and intelligence to the process and that the world will be a better place for his philanthropy.

Below is a photo of Gates and group of journalists (I'm third from the left, in back; Gates and Ballmer are fifth and third from the right, respectively) from a meeting at his vacation home in 1996.

  ¶ 11:19 PM 0 Comments

  Half of marketers have paid for editorial coverage, survey says A survey by PRWeek and Manning Selvage & Lee found that nearly 50% of marketing executives say they have paid for an editorial placement in print or online.

It’s interesting to see how the media has played this story. BtoB Magazine scolded the editors, declaring that the survey indicates editorial credibility as ''in tatters.'' MediaBuyerPlanner played it down the middle, pointing out that most consumers don’t believe what they read, anyway. The top guy at Manning Selvage & Lee blamed both sides, pointing out that marketers should never pay for placement, but publishers shouldn’t offer it, either.

My own take is that the survey results are more damning for marketers than for the journalism profession. The fact that half of the top marketers surveyed had actually gone and paid for editorial coverage indicates an overall low ethical standard among that group. Of course, maybe I shouldn’t be surprised. I can’t tell you how many times, in my years of editorial and business management, I’ve heard marketers threaten to pull sponsorships unless they got ink or stage time. I generally chalk this up to naiveté, but maybe there’s more of an entitlement culture there than I wanted to believe.

The survey has one major flaw. It doesn’t specify a timeframe. It simply asks if the executive has ever paid for the media placement. So a purchased article 20 years ago is the same as one from last week. It would be more interesting to see the same survey repeated every year or two so that a trend could be observed.

The survey also apparently didn’t go into detail about where these editorial placements were purchased. The reality is that some small trade journals and local newspapers have accepted paid placements for many years. But as far as this research is concerned, The New York Times is the same as the Podunk Advertiser.

I’m not minimizing the the fact that there’s a problem here. I have clearly noticed more of an entitlement attitude among marketers in recent years, and the reason they act that way is because it works. There was a time when the American Society Of Magazine Editors guidelines were closely observed by most journals. Now, I routinely see ''advertorials'' in very reputable publications that are almost indistinguishable from editorial content. The publishers and marketers are winning the war with the editors and we will all be losers for that.  ¶ 7:49 AM 3 Comments

  Blogger survey is live If you blog or podcast, please take the survey I just posted. I plan to use the information as a chapter in my book, The New Influencers. Thanks to everyone who contributed advice on the questions and please tell your friends and colleagues to come take the survey, too!

And thanks to the folks at WebSurveyor for giving me a free trial on this project. The survey tool is very rich and very easy to use. And the reporting interface is fantastic.

Thanks, also, to Dana McCurley for her advice and expertise in editing and posting the survey.  ¶ 11:36 AM 2 Comments

  Coming back from paradise
I haven't blogged for a week because I've been in Hawaii with my girlfriend and my son, celebrating his graduation from high school. This place certainly lives up to its reputation as the prettiest state. Maui is unreal. The highlight for me was the Hana Highway, a 60-mile stretch of heaven that winds down Maui's eastern coast and yields some of the most incredible scenery I've ever seen.
It was like 150 Kodak Moments in one five-hour stretch.

If you ever go (and I sincerely hope you do), give yourself a treat and continue on the Hana Highway past the usual turn-back point in Hana. If you follow the highway to Kipahu'u, you'll be rewarded with the best scenery of the drive, culminating in a spectacular 95-foot waterfall by the side of the road that literally took my breath away.

The highlight of the drive had to be swimming in a vernal pool at the base of a 40-foot waterfall. I have dreamed of doing that for many years and my dream was finally realized. It was simply an incredible experience.  ¶ 3:43 PM 0 Comments

  A movie you must see If someone had told me two weeks ago that I would find a movie narrated entirely by Al Gore to be one of the most moving and compelling films I’ve ever seen, I would have thought they were crazy. But having just seen An Inconvenient Truth, an independent film just released into limited distribution, I can testify that this is, indeed, the case.

I wouldn’t say that I was previously a skeptic on global warming, but I have been inclined to listen to the doubters who argue that evidence of worldwide temperature increases are more a function of natural climactic cycles then of human intervention. This film has changed my mind completely. And it does that because it makes its case with a relentless deluge of scientific and evidentiary data that leaves your head spinning. We understand, going into a film like this, that the filmmakers have an agenda. However, there is a big difference between the cogent case presented by a film like Inconvenient Truth and the ideology-driven polemics by filmmakers like Michael Moore (whose work I also enjoy).

Because I write about the media, I will cite one of the scores of statistics presented by this film as being particularly thought-provoking. Gore cites a research study that evaluated the perspective of published articles about global warming in academic journals over a period of several years. The research found that none of the articles fundamentally questioned the premise that the world is getting warmer as a result of human activity. In contrast, a similar study conducted over articles in consumer publications found that about half questioned whether global warming was more theory than fact.

This statistic, alone, highlights the effectiveness of lobbyists and corporate spinmeisters at challenging scientific wisdom. It is a somewhat depressing example of how beholden the mainstream media is to marketing messages. It also shows how impotent the academic community is at getting its messages out in the face of well-funded business competition.

Perhaps there is a persuasive counter-argument to the points put forth in An Inconvenient Truth. Whether or not there are, you owe it to yourself to see this film as soon as possible. While it may not change your view on the global warming issue, it will certainly provoke thought and discussion. BTW, take your kids.  ¶ 6:50 PM 2 Comments