Quote of the day

Terry Heaton:

Every time I read an article in one of the trades that refers to the need for a “sustainable ecosystem” for advertising online, I shake my head and say, “Who says there will ever be one?”

What the phrase really means is “when will the Web sit still long enough for us to create a lasting system that we can exploit?”

At what point do these folks begin to realize that the people formerly known as the audience really ARE in charge?

Silicon Valley Slosher

I threw a party for Bay Area tech and media notables earlier this week, sponsored by Latitude, the UK’s most successful search engine marketing company. We had a great time at the British Bankers’ Club in Menlo Park, an old building which once housed a bank, then city hall, a police department, jail, and public library. Now it’s as close to a British pub as one will find in Silicon Valley.

The party was described by one attendee as “the best kind of mixer, where there was no such thing as a usual suspect, just lots of fascinating individuals making fizzy connections”. Partiers came from Google, Yahoo, Newsgator, Qik, Ustream, PBWiki, Triggit, powerhouse VC firm Canaan Partners and a variety of other notables in the tech and media space. Even the elusive founder of Techmeme, Gabe Rivera, graced us with his presence for a few hours. (Many thanks to the industry’s favourite tabloid, Valleywag, for telling their readers about the event, too!)

Watch this space for details of my next gathering…

“Information wants to be syndicated”

Excellent post from my pal Jeff Nolan on what happened when Bloomberg decided that they did not want to let customers follow their news via syndication:

Interesting things happen to information when it becomes digital; your intentions as a publisher about how it should not be used often don’t work out like you planned. I really like Bloomberg news but I’m not going to hover over their site all day just to catch the latest updates, and apparently someone else didn’t like that approach…

It turns out that Google News does syndicate Bloomberg headlines with a link back to the source article. Using Twitterfeed, someone who shall remain nameless (and it wasn’t me, really) pumped the RSS feed for Google News through Yahoo Pipes to extract the Bloomberg headlines and then fed them into Twitter. The result is Bloombergbiz. Pure awesomeness.

For as much as Bloomberg’s remit is the latest in business, they have some funny ideas about what makes for good business. It’s great to see their customers showing them the way.

Jeff Nolan explains it all

Yesterday in Silicon Valley, I had a great lunch with one of the most respected venture capital guys on the planet, Jeff Nolan. (I have never heard anyone speak of Jeff without less than effusive praise, something I cannot say about any other VC round these parts!) After years as an innovator in the enterprise software business, as CEO of Teqlo and exec with SAP, Jeff last year joined RSS market leader Newsgator as a vice president. His Venture Chronicles blog is one of the most closely read in the Valley.

With his deep knowledge and experience in so many areas of the web, I should have predicted that my “swift Q&A” with Jeff would only make me want to ask him more and more questions. In the end, our on-camera conversation ran 15 minutes, which went by all too quickly for me!

Click here to see Jeff talk about search technology, social networking, recommendations, local search, Yahoo and Microsoft, whether this is finally “the year of mobile”, what the iPhone means for the future of the web, whether eBay will offload Skype in the next fortnight, and where he’d put his VC dollars on the web right now. (You will probably get the best audio experience by listening to this one on your headphones; the volume can be controlled at the lower right corner of the video frame.)

What the money follows

If you want to read some solid thinking about where business and our world are both going, as influenced by the internet, I’d recommend reading “Better Than Free” by Wired co-founder Kevin Kelly.

Success in the free-copy world is not derived from the skills of distribution since the Great Copy Machine in the Sky takes care of that. Nor are legal skills surrounding Intellectual Property and Copyright very useful anymore. Nor are the skills of hoarding and scarcity. Rather, these new eight generatives demand an understanding of how abundance breeds a sharing mindset, how generosity is a business model, how vital it has become to cultivate and nurture qualities that can’t be replicated with a click of the mouse.

In short, the money in this networked economy does not follow the path of the copies. Rather it follows the path of attention, and attention has its own circuits.

Skybus learns about live streaming video

This is a good example of just one emerging technology that should strike fear in the hearts of companies that aren’t doing a very good job meeting their customers’ needs: live streaming mobile video.

A couple of weeks ago, I was flying out of Stewart Airport in upstate New York. Our flight was delayed due to inclement weather, which was absolutely out of the control of the airline, Skybus. What was in Skybus’s control was the handling of the delay. They did a lamentable job, as detailed by the video I filmed at the airport with my mobile phone.

It’s a simple principle of communicating with customers: Tell them what you know, when you know it. By not doing this, Skybus failed to manage expectations and made several customers swear never to use their airline again.

What I found most interesting was how the woman in charge on the ground for Skybus, who is visible in the background of my video, reacted when she saw and heard me making it. No sooner had I stopped filming than she reached for her microphone and made an announcement – the first of the evening, well after our plane should have departed – about the delay. After that, she was profuse in her apologies and repeated to me several times that Skybus was wrong not to have kept passengers informed. It was good of her to acknowledge this, but not such a big help to the customers who had to scramble to make alternative pick-up, driving, and hotel arrangements because Skybus failed to let them know there was a delay. (In the end, our flight landed three hours late, and some people were unable to book hotel rooms on such short notice. Luckily, I was only a $60 cab ride from a friend’s house.)

I did not tell her that the video I’d made had streamed live to the internet as I was filming it, and that her apologies would not lead me to take it offline. The technology is a relatively new one, not in the hands of many people just yet, but in 18 months or fewer…Watch out. The balance of power to customers may have not shifted completely, but technologies like this – and the networks of people who use and propogate them – are chipping away, whether businesses like Skybus realize it or not.

About those links on the right

What better place to serve up a list of the thinkers and do-ers who have most influenced me than on a site dedicated to my work? That’s the purpose of the blogroll in the right-hand sidebar.

Those are some of the people and organizations whose writings and actions have helped to form my outlook as a dynamist, as a free marketeer, and as a believer in the emergent benefits of technology, networks, and all of life. They all encourage me to expect, wide-eyed and with an equally open mind, the unexpected. They remind me to find the value and opportunity in the present, with an eager and enthusiastic look to the future. I highly recommend giving yourself the treat of checking them out.

The brochure site I swore I’d never have

Business has always come my way via word-of-mouth and personal recommendation. I’m fortunate to have a rich network of contacts and associates who have been exceedingly generous in connecting me with new and varied work opportunities.

Several years ago, I did publicize my services in a more traditional way. The result was that I was swamped with inquiries from individuals and organizations which may or may not have had the budget to pay my day rate. The opportunity cost of sorting through these inquiries was significant.

Since then, I have been lucky enough to have work flow to me the old-fashioned way: personal references. But it is still good to have an online presence which encapsulates what I do for companies.

That is the intention of this space. It will not be updated all that frequently, though new events and testimonials will appear as I am cleared to publicize them. In the meantime, please leave a comment if you have any questions, or contact me via the details here. Thanks for stopping by!