Being Genuine Is the Best Disclosure Of Them All

Even with the purest of intentions, people have bias, which can rise from an infinite number of sources, be they financial, personal, emotional, career-oriented, or any other. The topic of bias and disclosure flares up often in the increasingly complicated world of blogging and journalism, and as many of us both participate and cover the world in which we work, new rules are being adapted, usually with some push back by those for whom the existing set of rules worked well. In 2009, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) tried to step in and provide guidelines for bloggers with conflicts, asking those who received compensation for their efforts to disclose it. But even if you assume they intend to eliminate bias, they're not even close to answering for all potential bias cases. Not even my gimmicky and fun set of disclosure icons, put together at the end of 2009, can correctly anticipate every situation.

With this weekend's flareup over TechCrunch founder (and AOL employee) Mike Arrington's CrunchFund making headlines again, more lines are being drawn in the sand about what is appropriate for a man of Mike's position to do. His employees have explained they operate independently of his activities. His employer says the rules are different for his organization. His critics have called him names and penned him as having crossed the line. But this topic isn't a new one. It's just got an intriguing name behind it, someone that many of us watch, who draws attention good and bad, depending on your view, thanks to his being visible and arguably, on top, in his field.

More than three years ago (In August 2008), I wrote that "If you look hard enough, conflicts of interest are everywhere." The first topic I brought up back then was if bloggers should cover companies they invest in, and at the time, I said "Investors in a company usually know it very well, especially if it's an early-stage situation, where they will know it better than the general public. It's no secret they'll likely be more positive on the company, but if they're fair and disclose the relationship, you may learn a great deal." In this post, I also said "disclosure is needed" if bloggers joined boards, took day-job positions with a company, or participated in starting or buying a company. It's always good, at least for me, to have the body of work to point to when issues like this come up, as they do regularly. At the end of 2008, again discussing bias, I said, regarding my own preferences, "Even though I like these products, these people, and their ideas, the idea is to continue to be trusted. What liking a product doesn't do is force me to make up things that they don't do, or gloss over clear issues."

It's not my place, as a mere tech blogger and Silicon Valley marketeer, to assess the appropriateness of Mike's new fund. I am not involved, had zero knowledge of it in advance, and don't believe I am impacted by its existence. The story is interesting, and that's it. But the tumult over the discussion is really all about detecting bias and trying to divine one's intent out of their writing - to see if their words can be less trusted due to their outside interests. And that's the crux. Being genuine, transparent and truthful, despite any perceived bias, will always win. Being honest and direct and overdisclosing to the point of amusement, is always better than having to disclose after the fact.

Maybe I should disclose to you that despite never having worked for Mike (we're still talking about Mike Arrington), and having minimal contact over the years, I have never had a bad experience with him. Every experience has been good, be it in person face to face, be it in conversations on the phone, by email, or even Twitter DMs and Facebook messages. The last time I saw Mike was at a swanky Los Altos gathering where we talked briefly. He shook my hand (not something he likes to do) and said it was good to see me. We even talked a bit about Seattle and how he's writing less at TechCrunch. Mike previously invited me to TechCrunch headquarters in Palo Alto (when they were located there) and even gave me the scoop (by a few days) that he had hired MG Siegler away from VentureBeat. You might even try really hard and say that I am biased in favor of TechCrunch because I've previously worked for a company that was covered by the site (when I was working at my6sense), that TechCrunch covered my joining Google, and maybe it's in my best interests to be nice to Mike and the TechCrunch family if I ever want products I am associated with in the future to be viewed nicely. But this points out how hard it is to really determine what's in the author's head. You can't tell me why it is that I wrote something when I did, and you can't know what prompted me to do it.

Enough about Mike. He's a great firestarter for topics though, right?

At the end of last week, there was a quick story on Mashable that listed a few tips on how you could score your next job using social media. It's a pretty typical story for the site - a list style post that has a small number of things you can do to improve your life using the Internet. In the post, the author referenced my joining Google by saying, "take a tip from Louis Gray, whose demonstrated love and dedication for Google+ got him hired as a product evangelist."

With all due respect to the author, whom I don't know, his fast summary was balderdash. I didn't ever say in my post that my love and dedication for Google+ was the reason I was offered a job with Google and he didn't ask. It should be noted I underwent the same hiring process as any other candidate looking to join Google. The same 10+ interviews you have read about, and the interview process started months ago - before Google+ existed. The way I found out Google+ launched was by way of a tweet from Matt Cutts. I didn't get any early look at the product, and didn't get tipped as to when it was launching. The process for my being hired into the social team at the company was well under way before Google+ launched, and I would like to think that reasons I was hired were more tied to my body of work and job history than any excitement about the project itself. (I also haven't cleared this post with Google PR or anyone at Google, and don't plan on making that a habit)

That leads to another level of bias to discuss. After Google approached me late this Spring about possibly joining the company, I was cautious in terms of what I would say about their products or planning. I was cautious not in the perspective of making sure not to say anything that would talk them out of hiring, but in fact, the reverse. I made sure to be just as fair as I always have been, calling out issues that made sense, and praising where it made sense, so that if I were hired or not hired, readers of the blogs would not see any change in my approach. For example, in the months after our discussions began, I said it would take several days to move my music library to Google music and continued to praise Spotify. I even said in mid-July, after more than a half dozen interviews, that I thought Google+ should leverage smart algorithms to personalize the content. I also railed against people pointing their own domains to Google+ instead of their own content, saying "I am hesitant to endorse forwarding your identity to a third party domain you do not control."

But where could I have disclosed "I am currently in the interviewing process at Google"? I couldn't, of course.

Similarly, in the past, I could not disclose if a company I was working with was seeking a venture capital round, an acquisition, a partnership or any number of things where the guarantee of non-disclosure, by agreement, trumped the request for disclosure here. What's more important than seeing if you need every single potential source of bias listed out on the page, as I often do, is if the author has established a record of being truthful, genuine and open to their biases. My posts here and elsewhere are biased, and the number of potential biases that impacts my choices of what I use and what I write about is legion.

Maybe Mark Zuckerberg was really on to something when one of the hallmark statuses available to Facebookers was that of "It's complicated." Life is complicated. It becomes more complicated based on who you know, what you do, who you interact with, what value they provide you, what they say to you and all who impact you and so on. I am confident that even though I am working hard to impact a great project at a visible company, my body of work stands for itself and I stand for something. Bias is complicated and the best way to classify bias is if you can find a direct link to an action that delivers another action which would not have happened without the first. You can try all day to divine the intent of the source, but you can't read their mind. Them being genuine first and always clears it all up.

Is The Web's Focus on "Now" Losing How to Find "When"?

Our attention spans are getting shorter. While being constantly interrupted or distracted by new toys, new sites, new things, new messages, new people, and new ideas, we're delivering a stream of consciousness into a void which quickly gobbles it up and waits for more. Scads of sites are helping us find out what is trending in real time, and deliver us the "now". What's hot now. What's peaking now. What's being said now. But the focus on the cutting edge of time, combined with reduced capability to search our history is making finding what happened "when" a lot harder.

Consider for a moment some simple questions that pertain to the social Web, blogging and lifestreaming - and our lack of great tools to discover the answers. I'll start with some real examples.

1. What was the first blog to cover the service backtype.com? 

2. When was the first time Denton Gentry left a comment on my blog?

3. When was the first time Robert Scoble mentioned the word Twitter in his blog?

4. Who mentioned FriendFeed on Twitter first? MG Siegler or me?

I use these specific questions with real people to help consider questions that may pop up from time to time. Substitute your own curiosities.

There are a few places we've trained ourselves to look for such answers, namely Google Web Search (and its competitors like Bing), Google Blog Search (and IceRocket, my favorite), and Twitter Search. For individual blogs, we have to hope they have integrated blog search tools, such as that from Lijit, or Google's Custom Search Engine (CSE), a subset of results from one domain. But each of these has some weaknesses.

First, Twitter Search. Two years ago, when I was a more grumpy person, I targeted the search engine for being quite broken, only going a few days deep and failing in more specific searches. The archive hasn't been built to go deep in the last two years, and the accelerated volume of posts isn't helping the issue.

Second, Google Blog Search. You can search by date, and even set custom ranges, but the archive of blogs is both incomplete, but overly full of low-quality content. So finding out a question like the first blog to mention BackType requires you to visit their own blog and hope they mentioned it, or to just know they were funded through Y! Combinator, and thus, got started with TechCrunch, back in August of 2008. Peeking at Crunchbase helps too in this regard. Icerocket offers search by date, but I didn't find any results in August of 2008, so that's a miss.

The Web has collectively accepted these sites inability to accurately deliver on archive search, with an expectation that questions such as this are only done by a small few.

For the second question, one I posed to Denton last night out of curiosity, I would have to hope one of two things - that Denton had used Disqus.com with my blog and that I could somehow see all of his comments on my domain through Disqus. But looking at his profile there only shows how many comments he's made on my blog, and that's not clickable. If Disqus has the data, it's not easy to find. In fact, the only way we arrived at the answer is that I'm enough of an information hoarder to have every comment he's ever made tucked away in my email and was able to search locally on my laptop to find his July 2008 comment on a guest post by Jesse Stay. He finally posted on an entry from me in August of that same year.

So what about Mr. Scoble mentioning Twitter? I tapped Google Blog Search, went to Advanced search, entered scobleizer.com as the domain and the keyword of Twitter and chose 2007 as the year. The results nicely omitted his URL as part of the query - so that had no value. I searched his own site, using Lijit, but there is no sort by date. One of the first results included mention of an earthquake on Twitter in 2007, but knowing Robert, there's no way that's the first mention. Just can't find it.

As for who mentioned FriendFeed on Twitter.com first, MG or me? That's something of a trick question. We already know Twitter search won't find it - nor will its realtime search partners Google or Bing. But I can guarantee that MG mentioned it first because I didn't even join Twitter until early 2008, several months after I had been using FriendFeed. By that point, MG was very active on Twitter and had no doubt mentioned FriendFeed several times. But this all requires knowledge outside of the search engines.

Wikipedia and Quora and Crunchbase are all human-powered knowledge bases that are being built to answer questions such as these that capture more than the "right now". That we have access to things like Google and Bing and Icerocket that find answers to so many things is fantastic. There are even archival sites like MemoLane (which is beautifully done) to capture your history, but the when is becoming a footnote in history. Will the big engines let the flow of social media and blogs outrun the ability to capture it?

EdgeTheory: The Battle for Real-Time Reporting, Curation

The issue of real-time news reporting and curation is becoming increasingly visible and important as news breaks on blogs, Twitter, Facebook and other social media properties. Tonight, Chris Saad and I talked about how the mainstream media can adapt to involve content curation in addition to their content creation, and how it still makes sense to have some investigative reporting in addition to real-time reactions.

The discussion weaved from curation tools like Cascaad and my6sense to the recent news of Teens In Tech Networks CEO Daniel Brusilovsky leaving TechCrunch, and how the news was interpreted.

Original Post Here: ET Conversations

Listen in below:


Disclosures: my6sense is a client of Paladin Advisors Group, where I am Managing Editor of New Media. In addition, I am an advisor to Teens In Tech Networks.

My 2009 Tech Predictions: Mixed, But Nailed Real-Time

Another yearly tradition here on louisgray.com. Following on to last year's 10 Predictions for 2009 In the World of Tech (and its 2008 predecessor), it makes sense to review how we fared. Recall my 2008 predictions were a complete mess. Unlike some other bloggers, who opt to pick non-controversial items and guess at obvious developments, I like to have fun each year and stretch. That's why I'll never go ten for ten. Besides, that's no fun.

As of Christmas Day 2009, here are how those ten predictions in the world of tech stand:

1) The Real-Time Web Will Become Critical for News and Information Discovery

Right. Critical is a subjective word, but real-time ended up being the word of the year in 2009. It was in real-time that the world shared their reactions to the Obama inauguration, and shared feedback to the Iranian elections. It was in real-time that we saw the aircraft land in the Hudson River, with a picture posted to TwitPic alongside. While it is true that Twitter and other real-time mechanisms lack the fact-checking and robustness of more traditional media, there were many many cases that had CNN and others following real-time's lead. Real-time later became such a big deal it was integrated into Google Search and Bing, so this was a clear win.

2) Businesses Will Be Expected to Be On Social Media If They Have Web Sites

Right. In 2009, the majority of businesses woke up to social media. While there are no doubt many holdouts, and even a bigger number doing a poor job, 2009 was the year that companies realized you could get business done on Facebook, Twitter and other networks. There is still much work to be done, but with tens of thousands of self-proclaimed social media experts out there, and some real help, others will make the leap.

3) Apple Will Introduce A Succession Plan for Steve Jobs as CEO

Wrong. And it's too bad! While Steve Jobs was out due to liver surgery, his position was well covered by Tim Cook, Apple's COO. Cook did such a great job running the company during his absence, the company's stock is at all-time highs, and its cash hoard is multiples greater than it was at the beginning of the year, even during a global recession. It could be assumed that had Steve Jobs passed away in 2009, Cook would have maintained control - and it would make sense that Apple have an internal plan for how Steve would fade to the limelight.

That said, I would still love it even more if Steve Jobs were proven immortal.

4) TechCrunch Will Acquire VentureBeat or Silicon Alley Insider

Wrong. In 2009, TechCrunch instead acquired only one writer, MG Siegler, from VentureBeat, and MG has gone on to be one of the most recognizable faces for the site. In parallel, Silicon Alley Insider went to more of a copy and paste model, and carries many of TechCrunch's articles in excerpt form, making the whole thing more confusing. But TechCrunch didn't find any need to acquire either site and continues in its highly visible position.

5) Android Will Have Less than 20% the Sales of iPhone in 2009

Right. (Unless somebody can prove differently) Despite a surge in Android news and new handset introductions in the latter half of the year, including new models from HTC and Motorola, Apple's iPhone still outsold Android in a big way through the year. Though figures are difficult to get for the newest models, and the trend shows Android gaining in market share, it does not appear that their combination managed to pass 20% of the volume of iPhones in the year. 2010 will no doubt be a different story.

6) A Major Alternative to FeedBurner Will Emerge As the Service Stagnates

Right and Wrong. FeedBurner finally got its act together with Google this year, adopting Pubsubhubbub, and rebranding under the corporate name. In parallel, FeedBlitz launched a serious competitor to FeedBurner which could replace the service outright. It hasn't been a "major" alternative, but absolutely works if you prefer it.

7) FriendFeed and Twitter Will Both Be Independent Through 2009

Wrong. FriendFeed's sale to Facebook took many of its hard-core users by surprise, and its no doubt that many are still reeling, unsure what will happen to the popular aggregator and social network. That I linked FriendFeed and Twitter together in my prediction is unfortunate, as Twitter not only remained independent, but flourished, raising more than $100 million, and ensuring profitability, by some reports, thanks to deals with Google and Microsoft. The company's $1 billion valuation makes it a difficult target for acquisition indeed by any potential suitors.

8) Companies Will Continue Budget and Staff Cuts Through the Third Quarter of 2009

Right. While recent months have seen isolated good news, especially in some parts of Silicon Valley, for the most part, companies have kept their belts tight, and unemployment remains high. While the dramatic job cutting that took place from late 2008 to mid 2009 has slowed, the recovery is not yet in perfect view.

9) An Extremist Group Will Manage to Take Down or Deface the White House Web Site

Wrong. Luckily, I was wrong about this. I don't believe that some groups out there would like to make this happen, but thus far, the White House Web Site has made it through the year unscathed. Of course, that's more than we can say for our good friends at Twitter, who just a week ago were defaced by an Iranian Cyber group.

10) eTrade, Digg, StumbleUpon, Skype and Yahoo! Will All Be Sold.

Wrong. (But A Little Right) Again, I failed by linking all these companies at once. eTrade and Digg stayed independent, and Yahoo! managed to keep its name despite giving up on search to Microsoft. Skype was sold, and StumbleUpon similarly was sold, back to its private investors. In my prediction last year, I said, "eBay will want to ditch its non-core assets like StumbleUpon and Skype" and yes, that happened, but we did not see the list of companies change hands as I had expected.

My 2008 predictions, made in late 2007, saw a massive 1 1/2 answers correct out of 10. Contrasted with that year, I did a little better in this calendar year, especially when it came to the expectations around the economy, real-time, and social media. But I still scored below 50%, with 4 1/2 right. We'll see how I do for 2010 when that post rolls around.

For All the Gloom Around RSS, Readers Continue to Climb

Skimming many of the leading technology outlets, you would think RSS had given up its ghost, making way for new services, like Twitter. Just this week, ReadWriteWeb claimed the RSS reader market was in "disarray" and continued a "decline". This came after a summer in which TechCrunch IT's Steve Gillmor declared RSS dead and suggested that it "rest in peace" and others ditched RSS for microblogging lists. With the world watching Twitter's top names and their Suggested User List-boosted following counts cross well into seven digits, data from FeedBurner and other sources shows RSS counts climbing - in some cases dramatically - for nearly all blogs, and a number of them also sport reader counts in the millions. While the independent market for RSS readers may be in bad shape, having ceded ground to Google Reader, RSS as a utility is actually growing. It's not going down, not by a long shot.

Prior to ReadWriteWeb's alarmist article, back in August, I arrived at similar conclusions, when I said "stand-alone feed readers are collapsing", highlighting the fact that Google Reader, and followers on FriendFeed, dominated my personal statistics.

That Google Reader and iGoogle have reached a dominant position in the market does by no means indicate the technology's death, but instead its maturity - something that, beyond aggregate reader counts, does not take in to account the fact that RSS is the mechanism for getting data between sites practically everywhere, even if it is not called out as such.

In January of 2008, I highlighted the debut of a new service called Rating Burner, which aims to display the most subscribed to blogs that utilize FeedBurner. The site shows not only a leaderboard, but also the change in subscriber data from day to day.

Data from Rating Burner shows green, positive growth across the board for feeds. And while total counts can always be debated as to their accuracy, sites including TechCrunch (with 4 million subscribers), the YouTube blog (with 2.4 million), Smashing Apps (with 1.5 million) and Simply Recipes (1.5 million) are into seven digits. This parallels the top Twitter accounts, who crest in the 4 million range, crowned by screen celebs Ashton Kutcher, Britney Spears and Ellen Degeneres.

Yes, statistics are statistics. The high numbers for these well-known personalities is suspect, thanks to their inclusion on Twitter's Suggested User List, and it is also expected that some top blogs here are bundled and not read every day - adding to their counts. Also true is the fact that not every blog uses FeedBurner, and thus cannot be tracked as well. Many sites point instead to a raw XML file, keeping control. That said, regardless of the data's perfection, the growth in 2009 for RSS subscribers cannot be questioned.

Using BlogPerfume's Feed Analysis tool, I took many top blogs and plugged in their statistics, to see how they grew in 2009. Running their query for the last 12 months provided 11 months worth of data. (Not perfect, but good enough)

For the charts below, I used three data points to show blogs' subscriber trends:

• January 22, 2009
• June 22, 2009
• December 22, 2009

(Yes, the gap between January and June is 5 months, and the gap between June and December is 6, but you get the idea.)

To run the numbers yourself, simply plug in any FeedBurner enabled feed. (Examples: TechCrunch, Mashable, louisgray.com and I Can Has Cheezburger)


ProBlogger Nearly Double Subscribers in 2009 to ~140k



LOLCats Added 100,000 Readers to 200k+



TechCrunch Doubled from 2 million to 4 million



My Own Stats, Aided by FriendFeed, Quintupled



ReadWriteWeb added 40k from June (Jan. data flawed)



Google's Mac Blog Added 30k Subs to Top 70k.



Mashable Added Almost 150k Subs to Near 350k.

Also - keep in mind that my own personal numbers are inflated thanks to FriendFeed, but most non-personal blogs are not.

So what is the point? The point is that while some services (read: Twitter and Facebook) may be getting many people's attention, and while it is also true that Google Reader has the lion's share of the RSS reader market, the current discussion around RSS being less useful, or less important, than in years past, is flawed, period.

Lest this early adopter sound too much like a curmudgeon, just because something is newer does not automatically make it better, nor does it mean that there will be a rapid mass exodus from the previous technology. Just like Twitter can drive good traffic to a Web site, so too can RSS. Just like Twitter can pass along top content, so too can RSS. Just like top followed accounts can get million-plus audiences, so too can RSS. And both are growing in terms of connections, with no reversal in sight. Both are tools to be used well, and both are being used more than ever. The only "disarray" is in the current thinking.

Growing Grumblings on Tech News Don't Address Incentives

If you are the subject of the news, people will judge your actions and how you react to being in the spotlight. If you are the distributor of the news, how you message that news, and how accurately you report that news, will also be dissected. On the Web, especially in our sliver of Silicon Valley, where real time is becoming the standard, analysis of said news is itself happening in real time. From many corners, often from the more technically-oriented folks on the Web, I am seeing discussion around the tech news industry's alleged failings, inaccuracies, and usefulness (or lack thereof). While some of the feedback no doubt has merit, it too comes in simplified form, without offering potential solutions, taking into account how the creators and publishers of this tech news blogosphere are incentivized and rewarded.

On Sunday, Mike Arrington of TechCrunch, as he often does, started a discussion around what he termed "fast food content", saying that "hand crafted content is dead", summarizing a piece that lamented sites which steal content without attribution, and more darkly, sites that employ people to rewrite others' content, without adding anything new or doing "real reporting", the kind one learns in journalism class, or is required to do when working for a "dead tree" newspaper or magazine.

Given Mike's focus, running one of the more widely read tech news sites on the Web, his concerns lie around those who borrow much of his and his writers' content and publish it as their own. But I have also given a lot of thought, especially of late, to the vast number of tech news sites and blogs that are out there covering the same stories, and are jostling amongst each other to beat their competition by a few minutes - opting not to win on quality, but instead, on time. In this case, it's often not another tech blog's news that is being borrowed, but official announcements from companies.

One of the easiest things for tech blogs to do is repeat updates from the official blogs of interesting companies, add a few internal links to previous coverage they have done on that topic, add a paragraph or two of analysis, and hit the post button. I've no doubt done it myself over the last few years, even with this self-awareness, but you can see the process unfold practically every day. Watch for phrases like "According to a post on the official Twitter blog..." or "In an update on Google's blog this morning"... as many of the better-known sites all post their own interpretations of the news that came from the top.

This, in my opinion, is the very definition of the "fast food news" Mike is talking about, and time spent both producing it and consuming it could be put to better use - as in these cases, links could serve just as well as full articles.

I am by no means an ombudsman for tech media and the tech news consumer. I am but one person who takes in a lot of content, and produces a little on my own. But I see a few other areas where the tech news engine is falling short for news consumers, news makers and the news authors themselves.

I believe "fast food news" also can refer to the mass hysteria over making sure every site posts the news that a major browser or a major operating system has issued a point release, or when a popular site has an outage, that the incident becomes front page news for every blog. At some point, given the vast multitude of interesting tech stories, individuals and companies out there, one must take a deep breath and realize that being the 10th site to report that Twitter got hacked last night didn't really add a lot of value to readers.

In fact, when Twitter did get hacked Thursday night, Mike (again) had a solid post that added information, and, as he gained more knowledge of the incident, he updated the same post multiple times throughout the night. Because he was the first to the scene, with real data, his post had meat, while many, many others that followed were just echoes of the obvious.

So why is this happening? There are a few reasons:

First, the advertising model that forces many sites to drive page views and social interactions, through Digg, StumbleUpon, and Twitter retweets, is turning many tech news sites into post mills, staffed largely by inexpensive writers and freelancers. Instead of deep analysis posts that require interviews, backgrounds, and research, these sites are instead home to excerpts from YouTube, polls, user surveys, and whatever happens to be trending on Twitter that day. Quality is exchanged for quantity.

Second, many of these sites operate under the guise that they are the only site their readers see. Just because one major tech site covered a story 30 minutes before doesn't mean they should assume their readers already know. That is why if you do subscribe to many technology blogs, as I do, you can expect the vast majority of them to report the same story around the same time - instead of choosing a specific focus that can set them apart from the competition.

Third, thanks to competition and personal interactions, not every site likes the others. Years of infighting and annoyances, thanks to individual posts, personalities, or business priorities means that some sites really dislike each other. They won't link to one another. They will ban the competition from their user conferences, and when they aren't taking potshots, they will act like the other doesn't exist. Thus, if the competition "breaks" a story, the other will post it anyway, or try to find a wrinkle that makes their own version of events "improved" or invalidating the other.

Fourth, the rise of aggregation sites makes piling on to the news something that is rewarded. If all competitive blogs have covered a major story, many others will follow suit, be it to get into "discussion" on Techmeme, to see TrackBacks on the originating posts, or to come up when the popular terms are searched for on Twitter, Google and other engines.

In essence, the incentives, for the most part, do not tilt in favor of writing unique stories or doing the required research necessary to get a full story, to get quotes from a source, or find data points that back up analysis.

That's why you see people like Alex Payne (of Twitter) complain, saying "Rarely does technology journalism produce informed, correct, relevant, and readable content. This is a sorry and damaging state of affairs." in his rant from March (Towards Better Technology Journalism), and why Marco Ament, the lead developer of Tumblr and Instapaper creator, this week, wrote: "Over the last few years, I have unsubscribed from nearly every tech-news feed. I have never regretted the decision afterward, and I haven’t missed anything important. Tech news needs help. Badly. It’s truly terrible."

Keep in mind that it's not unexpected for the more technical among us to dislike the way their works are interpreted. Engineering distrusting marketing is practically a requirement and a religion. But we know they are somewhat right. As much as we can complain about the public relations industry as a whole, many flaks often find that their offers for reporters to speak with the CEO or an official representative of the company go without interest, either due to time issues or a lacking skill set. It's always a lot easier just to ask for the press release ahead of time, and an embargo date.

In an ideal world, those who are acting as our news filters would take the extra time necessary to ferret out news before its time, would ask those making the news the questions they didn't want to answer, would understand competitive landscapes, and wouldn't worry about getting a post up in a few minutes to hit a quantity threshold, without it first passing a quality threshold.

Lest we think Alex and Marco are the lone cries for help, you can see other comments this week from The Angry Drunk, and from Google's DeWitt Clinton, who posted to Twitter, "Don't worry. Save some time. Your story doesn't need a shred of truth to it. It will be retweeted just the same." in response not to a tech blog story, but a mainstream media piece that had missed the mark. (He later, in contrast, praised Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb for solid reporting)

Content producers need to make choices in terms of what it is they cover, and where their field of expertise lies. If not breaking the news, or having access to the technology elite, there are many other ways to make your voice heard, through analysis and personal use cases, as well as the option to find new stories. Content consumers too have the choice as to where they get their news. I would hope that those people who are being spoon fed repeats of others' original reporting, or are waiting, jaws agape, for recaps of company blog posts, recognize what it is they are really missing.

Given the low cost structure needed to create content, it doesn't look like there is going to be a painful consolidation any time soon. In the meantime, the system is set up to reward those who publish quickly and pile on - for extra effort doesn't bring home the page views. There are going to be pockets of the Web that harbor original ideas, a focus on quality and data, and there are going to be other places where copying, scraping, and shortcuts are going to rule the day. I know what I hope to be. The question is, can we do our part, as publishers and consumers, to somehow reward those that do things right?

The Tablet Business Is Clearly Not Easy Business

We are nearing the end of 2009, and the world of tablet PCs is just as fuzzy as it was at the beginning of this year. Despite continued rumormongering and finger waving about guesses on what Cupertino has planned, Apple's long-anticipated tablet remains unseen and more discussion has been devoted to its reported slips than has been made about its potential specifications. Meanwhile, as you no doubt saw, Michael Arrington of TechCrunch made the abrupt announcement this morning that the CrunchPad project had been put to rest before it was able to debut - the victim of relationships gone awry between client and vendor. While the two examples are significantly different, they both demonstrate how hard it has been for companies big or small to make headway into this space.

Despite seeing only the earliest of prototypes, and not ever seeing the product run myself, I was bullish on the CrunchPad's potential for a few reasons. The first was due to its promised low cost, starting at $299, and later said to be closer to $400. The second was the recognition that computing is moving away from the folders and desktop metaphor, and more to a Web-centric cloud (as discussed with Apple vs. Google), with applications running on Web services instead of CPUs. Third, I wanted the opportunity not to avoid Apple, but to support a new challenger - as I saw a respected peer and occasional acquaintance try to take the leap from creating content to creating hardware.

As I mentioned in a pair of posts in July, I said I was leaning to choose CrunchPad over Apple, and guessed Mike could be as much known for the success of the device as he has been for the success of his blog network, if it were to take off. Now, barring a complete reversal, it looks like not only can't I get my hands on a CrunchPad, but we won't get to see Mike and his team fight the operational and sales challenges common in any hardware firm.

These challenges look to be exacerbated when you add the word "tablet" - either due to the challenging engineering demands on cramming so much utility in a slim technology device, reducing costs, or in finding the right market. Even if I find the concept of a tablet intriguing, I am still wondering where I would put a laptop down, and pick up a tablet, or when I would holster the iPhone and pick the tablet up. It occupies an uncomfortable middle ground which hasn't yet been solved, in mass, by manufacturers keen on penetrating the space. Even Google's Chrome OS, which looks like a clear candidate for such a project, looks to be focused on NetBooks, which are not quite tablets and not quite laptops. Once you divide up the potential market, it's one full of slivers, without much pie.

Unlike others who are calling the CrunchPad vaporware, I am not. I see no good coming from seeing this product never reach the market. Even if it were to have shipped and not found dramatic traction, it would have had a chance, and given customers choice.

CrunchPad or Apple Tablet? Why I’m Leaning CrunchPad…

Something odd must be in Silicon Valley’s drinking water these days. Not only did I tell you two months ago that I didn’t care what operating system you used, and not only am I typing this on the work-issued Dell laptop, but when thinking about the potential release of Apple’s long-rumored iTouch tablet, I’m not yet saving up my greenbacks and lining up at my nearest Apple Store. In fact, despite the almost equal lack of information, I just might be more likely to buy a CrunchPad, despite its not having Steve Jobs’ official seal of approval.

First of all, in order to purchase a tablet PC (or tablet Mac), I would need to find a use case for it. At times, in fact, the entire tablet market at times seems more of a solution in pursuit of a problem. With my iPhone being such an amazing device, getting me my phone calls, e-mail and mobile Web on the go, and my laptop running all my needed apps, making room for a third “in between” device seems a bit over the top.

That Apple has finally turned the corner on getting its tablet out the door, having met the demanding eye of Jobs, is very interesting. I can see benefits of going with an Apple machine immediately of having the standard Apple look and feel, industrial design, and synchronization of my data, including with the iPhone and iTunes. That’s all good stuff. But I also believe that it would be more expensive than the CrunchPad, which is rumored to be about $200-$300 less per unit, and the early concepts making it look like a giant iPod Touch make it seem as fragile as a china plate. If you thought you got scratches on your iPhone now, or you thought there was an uproar when the G4 Cube got cracks, just wait until your iTouch Grande gets split like a windshield nailed with a rock on the freeway.

So what of the CrunchPad? First of all, its industrial design mockups are equal to, if not better, than the ones I have seen allegedly from Apple so far. The CrunchPad also promises to be lower cost, and forces a new paradigm of being 100% a Web device. Yes, that sounds odd, to praise a machine for effectively limiting what I can do with it. But through those limitations, it makes us think differently (like Apple did) about how we use our electronics gadgets and consume the Web. And it has a side benefit of being from somebody I consider a peer, who is stepping outside of his comfort zone and taking a risk.

Betting on the CrunchPad is a bet for the small upstart challenger, in the same way that betting on Apple once was against Microsoft. And the CrunchPad doesn’t look like it’s going to shatter on impact.

If it’s very simple to use, I could see this low-cost Web-only device (or at least its third version) quite possibly being the first computer for my twins, who may not ever need the suites from Adobe and Microsoft like I have my entire computer-using tenure. A bet on the CrunchPad rewards the idea that bloggers can grow from simply reporting on the news to making the news. Yes, I recognize that Mike Arrington and TechCrunch are already among the most well-known blog networks out there, and have to be considered a success on their own as is, not suffering for dollars, but can you imagine bumping into the guy at a meetup in the Valley, holding the tablet from Apple when his CrunchPad offers the same specs for half the price?

While much has yet to be revealed about both devices, we just might be on the verge of seeing a market-changing event, where there are multiple serious alternatives both arriving at the same time, ostensibly for different buyers. It is quite possible that even if the CrunchPad is a superior, less expensive device, that Apple’s marketing could eat it alive. It’s also quite possible that both could fall short of expectations, or that by choosing one or the other, I could be left with a short-termed albatross. But if I can find a great reason to get a tablet, and both deliver to the specs I’ve seen today, we’re going to be saving a few hundred bucks and buying a CrunchPad. Let my iPhone be my phone and my Mac be my real computer experience, but for this new space, I’m looking for something really new.

Venture Capitalists, But In Text Form

On Monday night, during a blogger briefing, I struck up a conversation with Dave McClure (he being the Master of 500 Hats) around the process of blogging, and participating in those social networks where we have put our energy. And during this exchange I said something that I have long held as a driver for me, but hadn't yet quite articulated in this way - that as a blogger and technology enthusiast, be it for hardware gadgets, software or Web services, I sometimes take on the role of a venture capitalist, investing not my own money, as I have little, but instead, my focus, my words, and my time.

Venture capitalists are wooed constantly by companies looking to get off the ground, or to gain a push to the next level, be it greater visibility, higher market share, or profitability. And the VCs have to make a choice. Not having unlimited funds, they need to determine which companies, markets and individuals can get access to those dollars. The VCs, based on their own expertise, their analysis of the products' future, the potential market and the products' uniqueness, invest a percentage of their available portfolio, and then push to help make those investments a success - often helping to connect the founders with partners, customers, or providing guidance through board positions and personnel.

Similarly, whether as bloggers, social media participants or technology acquirers, we too are bombarded with choices. With limited funds ourselves, and limited hours in each day, and limited opportunity for attention, we have to make choices as to which products we will buy, which social networks we will embrace, and which companies' services we will use or cover. And while many bloggers aim to be as impartial as possible, keeping a journalistic line to avoid 'favorites', we all have a bias. And some of us wear our hearts on our sleeve, clearly choosing this route, as I told Dave, of being "venture capitalists in text form".

On Monday, Dave and I talked about the array of social networks vying for our time, and he told me that he had once tried to evenly split his time between a handful, but eventually focused on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. While not shutting off his data flow to other networks, he simply stopped using them, picking up his chips and moving elsewhere. Meanwhile, in my role more as an angel investor (in text form) than a late-stage investor, I am more willing to make more aggressive investments in a wider array of smaller services just getting off the ground. And I will make those investments of my time, not always because I think they are going to be the most popular products of all time, but because I see they have the potential to be the best - even if I know that this potential means my bet is of higher risk, for my chosen solutions have a higher chance of closing and washing my investment away.

If you have read this blog for long, you will know that there are some services I really believe in - ones that I have selected based on their merits, and ones that I choose to invest my own time in to use personally, and to cover often. And should they 'pop' and become successful, leaving my little realm and moving on to the larger stages, like we saw with Socialmedian and TweetDeck last year, I won't get rewarded monetarily in any way, but am rewarded to know that I had some impact, and that I saw a real return on the investment to see people and products I invested time in have their success come to fruition. It's likely the same reason that Mike Arrington, at TechCrunch's 4th birthday party, which I attended, highlighted the fact that many in the room had gone on to make a lot of money since debuting on his blog, more than he focused on his own success. Even if he didn't gain monetarily directly from their success, as a VC (in text form), he had a member of the family graduate.

Not every investment will be a winner. Some of the products I've really liked (on paper anyway) have already closed. Some have flatlined or not gained the momentum I had hoped they would. But just like in the world of VCs, it only takes a few home runs to make the whole thing profitable. I'll keep writing and you watch where I invest my time and my words.

FriendFeed Plans Features to Stem Conversation Flare-Ups

After a testy exchange with Leo Laporte during a taping of the Gillmor Gang last month, Mike Arrington of TechCrunch saw a boom of negative reactions across the Web, from pointed YouTube mashups, comments on TechCrunch, and a flurry of conversations on FriendFeed, where the live conversation for the Gillmor Gang was scheduled to take place. In the aftermath of the blow-up, Arrington closed his FriendFeed account, later blaming what he called "mobs" for having congregated and piling on. During a panel today at TechCrunch's real-time CrunchUp, Mike talked with FriendFeed co-founder Bret Taylor and Robert Scoble about the situation, and Bret promised changes were being worked on at the service, which would help stem future flare-ups from happening.

While Arrington aggressively tried to position FriendFeed as encouraging mob mentality, Bret touched on an interesting point that helped explain the scenario. Essentially, most conversations are decentralized across social networks. But on FriendFeed, conversations are centralized. While not threaded, all of the site's users have the ability to make comments on any open public conversation - meaning those people with extremely popular accounts can have a high amount of comments, and as comments come in, these items are pushed to the top, making them visible again.

Bret said that new tweaks are going to soon come available on FriendFeed that would enable users to stop comments on particular entries, or on the person's entire feed itself. This means that if Arrington were to re-enable his account, as he said he would do today, he could opt to mute threads that got out of control, or simply post his feed and make it unavailable for interaction. Interestingly, Bret said that the conversations on those accounts that had either a small amount of followers or a large amount were of the lowest quality.

Scoble, the most-popular person on FriendFeed, who had trouble getting his audio into the conference from London, actually agreed with some of Mike's assertions, saying "there is a mob mentality, and we caused it". He added. "We brought a huge crowd... and people are going to get in the bleacher seats and throw rotten tomatoes every once in a while."

Bret did not give a timeline for the new features, but if FriendFeed's speed of feature improvements thus far is any indication, they won't be too far away.

You can also see a timeline of this panel here: Mike Arrington, Bret Taylor and Robert Scoble starting the "Online Mobs" discussion.

Arrington Betting Big On the CrunchPad Mobile Device

While many things have been written and said about TechCrunch's Michael Arrington since he debuted his technology blog network four years ago, he is without a doubt a risk taker. The pending launch of the eagerly awaited CrunchPad device could possibly do more to define his legacy than almost any other challenge he has taken on. Not content to having one of the most visible and influential technology sites on the Web, Arrington looks to be charging head-first into an extremely competitive field of consumer electronics, an area that will cost considerable investment of both time and money. If the CrunchPad is a success, the way we consume the Internet on the go could be forever changed. And if it is not, the device will join the ranks of many that have charged up the hill before it and fallen short.

Arrington's trait of a risk taker is one that has helped make him very successful, pushing his blog to near mainstream acceptance, competing against publications with history marked in centuries. And now, the story of the CrunchPad, so far, is one of his trying to develop a product that was a solution to a problem no consumer electronics hardware developer has yet done well - introducing a device whose sole purpose is to help browse the Web on the go. No hard drive. No phone calls. No keyboard. As he told the New York Times yesterday, the device's focus will help it avoid the slowness of other netbooks that are often impacted by other applications. And he doesn't see the device being eclipsed by the long-rumored tablet that Apple may or may not ever introduce.


An Early Prototype Image of the CrunchPad (via TechCrunch.com)
Early photos and short video clips of CrunchPad prototypes have not only made the device look real, but extremely inviting. On my first visit to TechCrunch's new headquarters in Palo Alto in April (See: Super Geek Spotted at TechCrunch HQ On a Segway), I saw the CrunchPad being worked on, but at Mike's request, did not take pictures of it or blog about it myself. As he was host, I obliged, of course.

But my interaction with the CrunchPad prototype was strictly visual. I didn't pick it up. I didn't turn it on. And I certainly didn't get to compare it to my laptop or my iPhone to see how it fared. And therein lies the real question of whether the CrunchPad has a home in my fast-growing gadget pile. I love the idea, but wonder just when would I need to have a CrunchPad along with me, either instead of the laptop or instead of the iPhone. The MacBook Pro is clearly my workhorse, and the iPhone is great for browsing quick clips on the go. The CrunchPad, a 3rd device, sits in between - a great looking device that I might pick up when I don't need to use any Office applications, but to instead just take in the Web.

The pricing of the CrunchPad, at a rumored $300, is about the same for an iPod or iPhone, and at the low end for some of today's underfeatured, ugly, netbooks. $300 is an aggressive price point that would make it practically impossible for me to make good excuses not to buy one, even if just to hit those "in between" scenarios where my laptop or iPhone would not fit the bill.

Coverage of the CrunchPad's continued development states that news will arrive by the beginning of August, and that the tablet will soon be available for purchase, giving Mike back the hours he would otherwise be spending blogging, as he looks to turn over day to day management of the product.

Today's Real-Time Web Makes Blogging and RSS Seem "Too Slow"

Thursday evening, I had the opportunity to attend one of the semi-regular open houses held at FriendFeed headquarters in Mountain View. (See pictures from Brian Solis, who also attended) While on other occasions, I may have taken the chance to pick the brains of the small team, yesterday I ended up spending the bulk of the time talking to others in the industry, including Edelman's Steve Rubel and TechCrunch IT's Steve Gillmor on what they thought the future of communication, information discovery and blogging would be, amidst the dramatic expansion of microblogging and real-time updates and alerts. And while we all had our own viewpoints on the future of RSS, we agreed that what has been status quo for the last five to ten years is changing underneath us, moving toward a world that is faster, driven as much by what will be our preset queries and searches, rather than through subscriptions and static pages.

Gillmor famously argued earlier this month that RSS should "rest in peace". Gillmor's summary started off by saying, "It’s time to get completely off RSS and switch to Twitter. RSS just doesn’t cut it anymore," and continuing onward, making a case that the immediacy of Twitter made it the source for news discovery, not tools like Google Reader, which I use to find all the data from my sources on a daily basis. As he told Steve Rubel and me yesterday evening, the post "went global" faster than anything he had ever written before, and judging by the more than 500 comments received on TechCrunch, as well as the many follow-on pieces I've seen, it stirred up a great deal of controversy - which is to be expected when making such a black and white claim.

Meanwhile, Steve Rubel, author of MicroPersuasion, who has been blogging on that site since early 2004, said that to him, blogging seemed "slow", when contrasted with the lightning fast communications seen from tools like FriendFeed and Twitter. He made the analogy that when you take the time to compose a blog post and you launch it over the wall, that readers have to look it over and make a choice as to whether they will respond, or if they will simply hit 'J' in their RSS reader and move along. In contrast, he said sending a note to Twitter was like introducing ants in someone's house, making them immediately take action.

Gillmor's unique writing style no doubt stemmed much of the confusion around his "Rest in Peace, RSS" story, which I fundamentally disagreed with the first time around and ignored. But in yesterday's discussion, it became more clear what he was trying to propose - not so much a full-fledged abandonment of RSS readers for Twitter, but instead, pushing for a reader-like tool that would follow microblogging services, decode shortened URLs on the fly, and then deliver the option to read full text of a piece.

In essence, rather than waiting the 20 to 60 minutes it can sometimes take RSS to propagate, thanks to latency from FeedBurner, for the most part, Gillmor's approach would take seconds - where a blog publisher or news distributor could post an update to Twitter or FriendFeed and have the same type of result, only a lot faster. This comes at a time when Gillmor and others are saying that referrals to blog posts are decreasing from RSS readers and increasing from microblogging sites, as readers do their link discovery outside of the reader.

Although Gillmor said we should just "switch to Twitter", he isn't even waiting for Twitter to bring back his much-beloved 'Track' to monitor keywords. Instead, he expects that FriendFeed will more quickly arrive at a tool that delivers realtime alerts to e-mail or instant messaging tools than Twitter - which makes sense as the aggregator has already set up e-mail and IM tools for lists and has delivered saved searches, two of the three components needed to make 'Track' a reality - and not just across Twitter, but across the more than 50 social sites FriendFeed supports.

As Gillmor told us both, he sees posts from louisgray.com "immediately" when I add them to FriendFeed, even if it takes much more time for them to enter Google Reader. And yes, that's because I, as a publisher, follow a specific process when posting, to author it and immediately afterward send it to Twitter and then pull it into FriendFeed, all before I manually ping FeedBurner. It's a conscious decision on my part, but one that helps his case.

RSS is not dead. Far from it. We're all using RSS every day, powering our Web portals, and helping to distribute blog and news content everywhere. But if it is about getting things discovered most quickly, and getting a response from readers very quickly, there's a reason you see people looking elsewhere, just like there's a reason I use a tool that pulls comments from FriendFeed into louisgray.com on my blog posts. I know some people will get to my content somewhere else faster. And if an enterprising software developer, like Nick Bradbury, can make a tool that turns links on Twitter into the same type of tool we see in RSS readers, maybe we'll be onto something new.

Topsy's Social Search Will Benefit Big Blogs, Influential Tweeters

Combining the world of search and the world of microblogging, including Twitter, is a popular thing to do these days. With Twitter Search having its hiccups, entrants like Twazzup, OneRiot and TweetMeme have all joined the game of trying to find the best content on Twitter, or finding the most influential users. In the last few days, Topsy, which bills itself as a "new kind of search engine" powered by the social Web, has gotten a good amount of visibility, especially due in part to an aggressive recommendation from Michael Arrington at TechCrunch - who is a big fan.

Topsy is interesting in that rather than finding the best result due to external hyperlinks or having "one right answer", as Google and most other search engines do, Topsy instead relies largely on the number of times a URL is shared (or tweeted) around that specific keyword.

For example, while searching Apple on Google sends you to Apple.com, Searching for Apple on Topsy instead sends you to watch Apple's TV Ads for the "Get a Mac" campaign. You can guess that when the new ads debut, they are frequently sent around Twitter, pushing that link to #1.

Similarly, Topsy is influenced by recency, which explains why a similar search for Microsoft has articles on their Bing search product competing with Google rather than the vanilla Microsoft homepage you would get with Google.

But, as with Google, not all things are equal in the world of microblogging. If you have an account with hundreds of thousands of followers, thanks to a position on the site's Suggested Users List, you will no doubt have much more influence on how many times items are retweeted, and therefore, a much higher impact on Topsy. That means then that accounts like TechCrunch and Mashable, who are in the SUL, are highly featured, and other competitors, like VentureBeat and ReadWriteWeb, do not fare as well.

The impact of a big account can be seen both on individuals and topics.

Stories on TechCrunch.com are #1 on Topsy when searching for individuals like Eric Schmidt, Dave Sifry and Reid Hoffman, each a leader in tech, covered by the network. In parallel, Mashable holds the #1 overall position for individuals including Mark Zuckerberg., while ReadWriteWeb finishes #1 for Paul Buchheit.


Top Topsy Results for Eric Schmidt


Top Topsy Results for Mark Zuckerberg


Top Topsy Results for Reid Hoffman


Top Topsy Results for Dave Sifry
Essentially, Topsy is the delivery of "authority-based search" that Loic Le Meur was asking for at the end of 2008, but done so in a way that doesn't explicitly say so.


Top Topsy Results for Tesla Motors
On topics, you can see TechCrunch holds the top position on Topsy for Tesla Motors, as well as the #1 position for LinkedIn, #2 for Socialmedian and Google News as well as #3 for FriendFeed, with Mashable finishing #4 on that search. In each case the coverage of the company trumps the company's site or official comments.


Top Topsy Results for Apple's iPhone
In turn, Mashable holds the #1 Topsy result for iPhone, and the #3 spot for MySpace.

That's not to say there is anything inherently "wrong" with these results, but they are definitely different, and if Topsy should take off, the influence of larger blog networks and the Suggested User List on Twitter will expand further. Should search results lead you to the one true answer that delivers you a bland corporate page, or should they instead lead you to social news impacted by a large community?

Super Geek Spotted at TechCrunch HQ On a Segway

With today being a day off from the office, I had scheduled to meet up with Daniel Brusilovsky of Teens In Tech for a breakfast meeting in Palo Alto. Despite his 16 year tenure on this planet, I'd heard great things about his aggressiveness and entrepreneurial spirit, and was looking forward to finally connecting.

Not knowing if he would recognize me, I donned a self-promotional louisgray.com shirt, putting fashion aside for the moment.

But as fate would have it, while awaiting Daniel's arrival, I bumped into Michael Arrington of TechCrunch in Palo Alto, who was finishing breakfast at the place Daniel and I had scheduled. Arrington kindly offered us both an invite to see the uber-blog's new office, just a few blocks away, which we accepted.

Unbeknownst to us, the casual invite turned into meet and greet mania. In addition to Arrington's team, including Jason Kincaid, Sarah Lacy, Henry Work, Asad Akbar and CEO Heather Harde, both Robert Scoble and Jason Calacanis stopped by - making the room high on geeks, even if low on furniture (they're still building it out).

As the team is low on furniture, there's plenty of open space - perfect for the new Segway, which arrived this morning. After Daniel managed to break its kickstand in about five minutes, Arrington let me take it for a spin. Surprisingly, it was very easy to run - so if you don't mind seeing what a geek looks like while being geeky at a geek haven... there you go.



Oh... and any rumors that I was there on official business are false. But feel free to spread them.

Web Two Dot Oh DotCom Dot Cloud Colon Slash Slash

This afternoon I had the opportunity to attend a session presented by TechCrunch, hosted by Steve Gillmor, around cloud computing, featuring some of the Valley's thought leaders, from many of the biggest names in all of tech, ranging from Salesforce.com to Rackspace, Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, Sun, Ning, FriendFeed, Facebook, Amazon.com and a small handful of startups. Each of the participants discussed how their product leveraged the cloud, what it was about this new approach to harvesting data storage and computing that made their products execute the way they do, and how they approached new problems of bandwidth, capacity, licensing, security and scale.

The event, essentially a two parter, with early-stage start-ups presenting for five minutes apiece in front of an expert panel for the first half, and a roundtable of technology elite for the second half, saw a healthy dosage of skepticism mixed in with what was largely a genuine desire for these companies to try and deliver higher-quality services for their users by taking advantage of new protocols.

With everybody saying the word "cloud" to represent customer data or computing being stored independently of local physical disk or blade servers, the word itself grew to be mocked. One 'expert' said cloud was the new "dotcom". Another compared the cloud to rabbits as they kept multiplying, and a third called the cloud "Kool-Aid". With the move of terminology over the last decade from "Dotcom" to "Web 2.0" to "Cloud", you can see why people would be necessarily wary of jumping on the newest movement with two feet.

All names aside, there is as much fact as there was fad in the cloud. The cloud's benefits are clear as data can be stored independent of physical disks, and doesn't require dedicated storage and server administration. Code developers want anytime access to infinite bandwidth and storage, and consumers want instant response times. As the panel debated the genesis of enterprise apps absorbing consumer application features, it was clear that each was facing challenges impossible just a decade ago, and the cloud's availability changed everything.

Paul Buchheit of FriendFeed referred to the Internet as just one big computer, and said that instead of shipping software in a big cardboard box with floppies to introduce version 3.0, you could just ship new code three times a day. Mike Schroepfer of Facebook talked about how his team could handle 1 billion status messages of 100 characters each on a different level of storage than the 1 billion images, each a few megabytes apiece. And Marc Benioff of Salesforce.com won the prize for the best quote of the day, saying, "As an industry, we are always overestimating what we can do in a year and underestimating what we can do in a decade."

Benioff's quote is no doubt true. The next engineering team I meet that hits the initial proposed date with all the requested features is the first one I will meet. But a decade ago, we wouldn't have expected to stream full-length feature films without buffering, or do many of the things we do online, always having been limited by location, bandwidth, memory, storage, or even operating systems. Now, the operating system is even less a part of the discussion. While the panel was held at Microsoft's Silicon Valley office, practically all presentations were done on Apple Macintosh, and featured FireFox, not Internet Explorer. Now, consumers and businesspeople expect to get all their applications and data from anywhere on any device. It was enough that Benioff even left his laptop behind on a trip to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in favor of his BlackBerry Bold.

It is happening. Not too long ago, yet another meme went around the Web on what the Internet looked like in 1996 - a blink of an eye when you think about it. In 1996, I was hosting a personal home page, using WebStar, on my Apple Macintosh Performa 631 CD, with all of 8 megabytes of RAM. Now, my blog is hosted on the cloud. The images themselves are on the cloud. My participation in social networks like Facebook and FriendFeed... is done on the cloud. And I'm taking my iPhone everywhere. I used to despise the term cloud, and used to rail against it with my colleagues at 3Cube back in 1998 to 2000, but it looks like I lost that battle. Good thing all of us as consumers are winning.

Watch for the Telephone Game in Your Short Attention Span World

One of the recurring themes on this blog has been how to handle a seeming overflow of information. We've discussed creating a social media consumption workflow. I addressed a new concept I called continuous parallel attention. I said how you handle the information overload Is up to you and later said there is no social media overload and cautioned bloggers to relax, because nobody is keeping score. But we still see problems crop up when a story gets passed from person to person and details get lost. It's the modern equivalent of the popular "Telephone" game we all played as kids, where the last phrase was never close to how it started.

Take a look at an example from this weekend, after Erick Schonfeld of TechCrunch wrote a piece saying FriendFeed had seen site growth that reached almost 1 million visitors in December of 2008.

Seems straight forward enough. The data came from Comscore, which shows a higher growth rate for FriendFeed than do other services, including Quantcast and Compete.com. Compete reports 700,000 visitors or so to FriendFeed in December, by the way.

But then, Robert Scoble, a good friend, good blogger, and fellow FriendFeed user relayed the story a little differently, saying that the report said FriendFeed had surpassed a million user accounts.

Using that as the baseline, Robert stated the 26,000 or so subscribers to his feed represented one of every 39 users. (See the FriendFeed thread here) But that only exacerbated the flub. Having used the site myself for quite some time, I'd be shocked if there were more than a million registered accounts, and FFHolic estimates the number to be closer to 200,000 total accounts, one fifth of a million. This of course makes Robert's penetration even higher, as that means one of every eight users follows him, but that's not the major issue.

If you're FriendFeed, and you know your actual user count, you can't exactly issue a correction saying that you "only" have a quarter million users. And if they did announce such data, which they don't, it might seem to be a letdown now that the higher, incorrect number has been released.

The service is now becoming a destination site as users share links on Twitter, their blogs, Facebook and elsewhere, so it's no surprise that the unique visitor count is higher than the number of users. After all, if I visit from home and on my wife's laptop and the office, doesn't that count as three unique visitors?

This is but one example, and I know practically all of us have made the mistake of reading stories too quickly, or coming to conclusions and extrapolations based on only partial data. For example, Stowe Boyd wrote a great piece tonight saying I was "Wrong About Twitter Funding", but he had only seen one of the two posts, which had taken point/counterpoint positions. That's not a victim of the telephone game, but he is a busy guy, like the rest of us, and no doubt overlooked one of the items.

When we're reacting to other items, or relaying them, we should be careful that we're not making new stories based on data that's not true. We're all going fast, and maybe reading a ton of RSS feeds, seeing thousands of Twitter updates, and rushing in an effort to post quickly. But there's something to be said for watching for the telephone game.

There's No Way Twitter Is Worth $250 Million Today

See Also: Twitter Is Worth A Lot More Than $250 Million

In the Web 2.0 space, it would be extremely difficult to find a more-successful, faster-growing service than Twitter, who has carved out a significant niche for itself in the microupdates space, as people from around the world tell you what they're doing, right now, even if you didn't ask. The service has an estimated 6 million active users, and recently surpassed the 1 billion "Tweet" mark, if you count all updates. But the company hasn't yet made a buck in traditional revenues. (Although I can't claim to be privy to their books, and they just might have recognized something somewhere) Word comes this weekend, via TechCrunch and others, that Twitter is embarking on a new funding round that could see the company valued at $250 million. And while I already made the case that Twitter will get its funding, and could end up being worth a lot more than that number in short order, it is pretty easy to also poke holes in that analysis.

Quite simply, now is a very difficult time to attain a high valuation. Venture funding is dropping dramatically, and positive exits for companies are rare. Practically nobody is talking about going public, so to make money, you would have to do it the old fashioned way, through profits. And Twitter has grown its user base rapidly, but has done so on the backs of users who are used to getting something for nothing. We've already seen users revolt when Magpie launched with the possibility of inserting ads in one's tweets, and you could expect to see the user base shudder when being asked to shoulder any of the revenue themselves - so you can practically forget about monthly fees. Given that scenario, site ads and ads inserted in third party applications, like TweetDeck, would have to be one option, but an unattractive one, as the ad market itself is tailing downward.

Additionally, what Twitter does is incredibly basic. It's sole functionality is one that it is easily replicated. You can provide status updates on Facebook, on GMail, on FriendFeed, and the whole process rolls back to AOL instant Messenger, when you would set an "Away" status to say you were "At Lunch" or "In a Meeting". So that's not hard.

A recent post by Paul Buchheit of FriendFeed, called Communicating with Code, showcased a prototype offering of FriendFeed that borrowed heavily from the look and feel of Twitter. Given FriendFeed updates include those from Twitter, and then build on with additional services, it can be considered a superset, while Twitter is simply one service of many. So the barrier to entry to compete with Twitter is not that hard, leaving the company's major assets as the community and its developers.

But communities are incredibly fickle. None of Twitter's six million users were using the service five years ago, and maybe, five years from now, they will be doing something else. If people use Twitter for conversation, they can replace that with e-mail, with IM, with FriendFeed, Facebook or other social destinations. I've talked about the five stages of being an early adopter before. One of the final stages is when you grow tired of an environment, and leave, begging your followers to come along. It happens with news groups. It happens with e-mail lists, and it just might happen with social networking tools, including Facebook, FriendFeed, Twitter and others.

Today, Twitter is among the hottest, fastest-growing brands out there. But no matter how you multiply its current revenue to try and guess at a market capitalization, the answer is still zero. At a time when real brick and mortar businesses are seeing their own valuations decimated, how can a virtual company with a free user base and a low barrier to competition expect to be valued so richly? Whoever does invest should exercise extreme caution.

Twitter Is Worth A Lot More Than $250 Million

See Also: There's No Way Twitter Is Worth $250 Million Today

Michael Arrington of TechCrunch led the weekend news cycle Saturday evening after revealing Twitter is in the middle of a funding round that could see the still pre-revenue company valued a cool quarter-billion dollars. Not only do I believe the company will end up getting the money they are looking for, but whatever investors choose to pony up could eventually be seen as having gotten a bargain - because Twitter, with the increased investment, looks prepared to 'double down' and become a must-use utility in our increasingly realtime, increasingly connected, digital world.

Despite the company's many failings, be it with uptime, developer relations, or seemingly blaming its most active users for aggressive activity, Twitter has, over the space of 24 months, cemented itself in a position where it is a critical part of the way we share information, communicate with others, and in times of news and change, can learn from the firehose of tweets from all corners of the world.

Twitter's rise to prominence has been largely in part due to its simplicity. It does two things - let you send short updates to followers, and let you see updates from those you follow. The addition of many third party services, including the since-acquired search capabilities, and scads of desktop or Web tools, have only served to let people consume and distribute the data as they wish, as Tweets can be issued automatically from mobile phones broadcasting location info, sent from blogs using RSS, or from a host of updating services, including Ping.fm and FriendFeed.

Twitter, amid pressure from users and developers to add the ability to display photos and video, to extend the number of characters to beyond 140, to add threaded comments, and to find a business model - any business model - has simply continued doing what it does, even as competition has faltered. Pownce shut down altogether. Jaiku disappeared into the Google black hole. And FriendFeed dances to its own drummer, acting as a great complement for Twitter even as people occasionally say it could knock Twitter off its pedestal. Facebook's status updates are probably the closest thing to being a head to head fighter to Twitter out there today, and many simply pull their updates from Twitter to the social network, as I do.

Twitter will find a business model. It will very likely include some form of advertising, even in a tough economy for ads. It may also charge for premium options to users, and might find a way to break into the enterprise, eliminating the need for Yammer and other copies. And investing in Twitter today means you're buying into a company that already is #1, by a long shot, in its self-built market, before it has truly hit the mainstream, and among the Web 2.0 set, Twitter is the closest to do so - being featured frequently on CNN and used by prominent figures, including the new president's team as part of his social Web strategy.

And don't be fooled into thinking Twitter is just for consumers. Savvy business users are recognizing that Twitter is a vital audience to be communicated to and to listen to, for product mentions, feedback and competitive updates. Twitter is part of the noise, and you can either embrace it, or ignore it, to your own peril.

How can Twitter be worth 1/4 billion today without any revenue? Take a look at the market capitalizations of Web companies today, even after the stock market blowout. Yahoo! is worth nearly $16 billion. Google is worth more than $100 billion. And in traditional media, even the very damaged New York Times is worth more than $800 million at its current price. As I have mentioned many times on this blog, I find Twitter's search capability to be even more important than that of Google for breaking news. Given the company's incredible momentum, and inability to get knocked off its pedestal, we would be foolish to think Twitter can't continue to grow and increase its user base and offerings, and be worth more than $1 billion in very short order.

If I had cash sitting around to put into Twitter and they came knocking on my door, I would ask plenty of questions, but at the end of the day, I would be investing. This will be a deal to watch for sure.