AllThingsDigital

I’m heading to the AllThingsDigital conference starting in Carlsbad, CA, Tuesday evening, with the headliners being all the principles in the MicroHooBook saga. You can see the speakers list here. They don’t reveal the conference schedule until kick-off, so may Carl Icahn will also be there…

Stay tuned for news from Carlsbad…

Blogsplosion: Techcrunch, the WaPost and credibility

When Techcrunch announced last week it’s partnership deal to appear on the Washington Post website (see here) my first reaction was to fire off some emails to journalist colleagues and post a blog here on questions this raised for me about the relationship between blogs, even a blogger as influential as Michael Arrington, and mainstream news media.

My issue mainly was how the WaPo, which, whatever one thinks about its editorial line, has a deserved reputation for disciplined and credible reporting, could hook up with a blog that has a track record of running poorly sourced items that prove unfounded (see this on a report Jerry Yang would soon be ousted at Yahoo! or a similar piece on Ballmer getting offed at Microsoft).

Don’t get me wrong, I think these stories are the exception on Techcrunch, which is one of the most useful blogs around and is part of my hourly reading. But I take their “scoops” with a grain of salt. I don’t do the same with the Washington Post.

Today Arrington was full-on into one of his notorious spats with a competitor, in this instance Wired, over one of its writers’ expressed astonishment over the TechCrunch/WaPo tie-up — but on another issue: Arrington’s habit of writing about companies he has invested in. See here for the Wired piece, and here for Arrington’s reply and this for the take from Kara Swisher (who frequently calls Arrington out on misguided ‘scoops’).

I’m still pondering all these things (as a recovering journalist with some 30 years of baggage in mainstream news media I’m hesitant to trust my instincts on these matters — which is why I didn’t write anything last week). But there is clearly food for thought in this and I’ll be watching the converation with interest in the coming days.

Twittering an earthquake

This still needs to be followed up, but I have some real questions about just how much real ‘crowdsourcing’ was going on on Twitter today about the big China earthquake. To me, crowdsourcing implies people on the ground providing eyewitness accounts of an event. From what I could find on Tweetscan (which admittedly is struggling to keep up with the traffic today, so my search was limited) the posts were nearly all either commentary or people (notably the tireless.sleepless @Scoble) simply passing on reporting by news organizations. I saw a couple of posts from people in China twitting that they were unaffected by the quake, but that was it.

While even this re-reporting could be an important service if it gets news to people who would not otherwise come across it — an endeavor which is at the heart of our own start-up. But that’s different than actually enriching the reporting with first-person accounts. And it’s not clear just how many people would be touched by the twittering on a single topic in any case.

Rory Cellan-Jones of the BBC wrote a blog post wondering whether the Twittering on the quake was “the moment when Twitter comes of age as a platform which can bring faster coverage of a major news event than traditional media, while allowing participants and onlookers to share their experiences”. http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/technology/2008/05/twitter_and_the_china_earthqua.html.

I’m not yet convinced, but will keep following it all.

UPDATE: According to a timeline provided by tweetip on tumblr (and tweeted by Scoble), 10 of first 11 posts on the earthquake were from people who felt it and tweeted their first reaction. THAT is interesting.

Mathew Ingram’s take: http://www.mathewingram.com/work/2008/05/12/twitter-the-first-draft-of-history/

UPDATE AGAIN: A good viewpoint from RWW on the issue, unfortunately in response to a poor choice of words by a friend

Mother’s Day

A tribute to my courageous partner who is none too happy about spending a Mother’s Day while I’m on the opposite coast. The small ones aren’t thrilled either. It’s been going on for 10 months now, traveling ‘home’ for just 4 days each two weeks, with the rest of the time living in a two-room SF flat and spending all my time on the start-up (well, almost all my time – I did see Iron Man yesterday).

On the other hand, it does help concentrate one’s attention on the business at hand without the distractions of family. The problem is, I LIKE the distractions of family most of the time. So Happy Mother’s Day.

The separation also brings out strengths we each didn’t know we had, or had stopped exercising. My partner has marvelously tackled the responsibilities of running a household which had largely fallen to me during our many years living overseas in places dictated by my profession. And her relationship with our somewhat complicated adolescent son has grown deeper and more mature in the simpler him-and-her context left when the third point of the triangle is greyed out.  Our daughter, 9, is the least happy camper, and I can only hope to make it all up to her later.

For me, I’ve finally found some quiet times to read and think about things other than ‘work’. And even start writing a blog…….

Well, then

Well, then.

An even 6-month absence from the blogosphere, if twittering and tumblr don’t count. The blog’s name is not for nothing, after all. It takes a lot of energy to stumble one’s way through the world of Silicon Valley start-ups and when a day is over, there’s hardly the energy or the coherent thought to put down on screen.

That having been said, these six months haven’t exactly been uneventful — including a crash course introduction to some of the luminaries on Sandhill Rd, and an equally quick lesson in why that was REALLY not the path to take at this point.

Still, watching Tim Draper rule a meeting without running it and rubbing up against some seriously bright people at places like Mayfield, Opus, BV Capital and others, was a humbling experience. Being in the presence of our own angel investors, on the other hand, was empowering. Nice to see I wasn’t the only one dumbstruck to be in conversations where figures in the hundreds of millions of dollars are bandied about and you’re thinking ‘Oh, shit, what have we gotten ourselves into?” We never actually made a pitch to them, so, unfortunately, I’ll likely never know what numbers that high actually do mean.

Feet more or less firmly back on Earth, we have since turned our attention to stealthily developing some, hopefully interesting, Web 2.0/3.0 news products at our little company. Like many Web 2.0 bubble children, our dreams of going the B2C route and monetizing great apps with Facebook-size audiences (OK, make that Slide-size audiences) have long since evaporated. Hell, even Slide isn’t making much money with their multimillion user base.

So it looks like we’re headed back to B2B. A shame in some ways, no chance for the thrill of watching those user numbers climb and waking up each morning wondering if just maybe your latest app finally went viral overnight.  But it’s a business we know well, one we’ve been up to our necks in for a couple of decades in other circumstances and, as our new biz dev consultant assures us, there are some ‘quick wins’ awaiting us. If true, that should lower some of the heat our angels have been showering on us of late.

Comes with a price, though. She (the consultant) has also spotted the wounded calf in our herd and it’s just a matter of time (and not much of that) until we’ll have to commit the first firing of our 10-month company life. Not looking forward to that day. Not at all.

no worries

Yes, no worries about my not posting for a while, since no one’s listening. But we’ve been busy all the same, getting ready to alpha and beta test our first app, this one for Facebook (why not?), but with an eye to the many other platforms opening up and which are hungry for interesting widgets (hello makamaka…).

We’re also preparing to start live blogging the start-up, following the excellent lead of folks like Loic Lemeur and Path 101, though far more timidly. It’s not easy baring your soul without baring too much else. A delicate balance that we’re still working on.

Meanwhile the world speeds ahead with a change-a-second as the behemouths do battle over the social networking space. All good for the likes of us since it opens up endless possibilities to reach giant communities it would have taken years to build ourselves (and then some).

Now, we just have to engage all these folks with our brazen take on the news….

Web 2.0 summit

Two-thirds of the way through the O’Reilly-Battelle summit in SF and I’ve come to a couple of conclusions:
1 – 99.9% of the 1,200 or so other people here know so much more than I do about everything internet
2 – there is a LOT of money in the Grand Ballroom of the Palace Hotel during this get together, between the salaries of the industry gorillas and the appetites of the attending VCs. No one talking bubble in this crowd, all true believers (at least publicly)
3 – John Battelle is a very amusing and knowledgeable guy. Jealousy be tamed….

start-up

I am starting this blog, with trepidation, because I find myself in the unusual, and somewhat unnatural, position of becoming an internet entrepreneur — out of the blue — at the ripe young age of 55.

Six months ago, I barely knew what a blog was, much less how or why to write one. Today, set up in a small one bedroom apartment in San Francisco’s Polk Gulch, 2,419 miles (according to my quickly rising Mileage Plus counter) from my brave spouse and two youngest children on the East Coast, blogging has become an integral part of the new reality. Time for me to jump in, it seems.

A bit of background – more to come later as our little project unfolds — I spent 25 years abroad working as a journalist for a major international news organization. Occasionally doing exotic things in exotic places, often doing the mundane, though rarely in mundane places. For reasons both sensible and possibly misplaced, I was asked by my employer early this year to join a very talented colleague in launching a start-up in San Francisco to explore new ways of bringing the “news” online. With a generous though limited ‘cash burn’ allowance, we arrived in the Bay Area in August with a virtual blank check to use our organization’s vast global resources to carry out that task.

Ten weeks later, we’ve accomplished much with the help of a team that now numbers nine souls. And all remains to be done.

The O’Reilly-Battelle show began yesterday and we’re still not ready to unveil our plans. It is a lot of listening, rather than talking, for us. But, at the same time, we’re busy preparing some undercover adventures that will hopefully lead to unimagined success. Or at least not total embarrassment.

More later.