Brij’s One More Idea

Mommy blogging and in general female blogging is one of  the fastest growing blog category.  Maggie Shiels is covering this phenomena on BBC:

In 12 months the BlogHer network has mushroomed from 180 bloggers to 2,200.

According to comScore Media Metrix, community based women's websites are now tied with political sites as the fastest growing category online.

"Today, women are not only the most powerful consumers in the world, we're also the power users of Web 2.0 and social media technologies," said Lisa Stone, BlogHer co-founder.

That willingness to harness the web has resulted in a community of 36 million women who write and read blogs, said Ms Garrubbo. And that gave them clout among advertisers.

Female blogging is a powerful force and something we are following as a parent. You take important public discussion forums and you will find that it's still a male dominated society.

Blogging, being an extremely low barrier to publishing platform, allows everyday stories to grow and develop online communities around them.  Especially for females bloggers community plays big role.  Discussions around family and kids generate online bonding, which I have seen growing into offline (face to face) interactions.

I was amazed when I saw this project where close to 50 women got together online to celebrate baby shower.  They were pretty much from all over the world - US, UK, Switzerland, Pakistan, India and Middle East.

They used every day tools, without getting bogged down too much into geeky stuff. Idea was to get the job done. I was told they used blogs, email, Google Groups, Google Calendar, virtual gifts, Photoshop, audio/video tools, and  puzzle sites to get the job done.

I think we are going to see female blogging evolve into a powerful political and economic force. Smart money is already aligning around this.

This picture captures everything:

It hard to qualify initial Twitter Tweets related to serious topics as 'news'. Like for example this very first tweet announcing SoCal earthquake was made by Nicholas Hawkins. (Though there is bit of confusion on who actually broke the news).

holy shit earthquake in so cal

Now if you were reading this from public timeline on Twitter, you can potentially come up with two reactions. Laugh it off by saying this guy's apartment got hit by truck or take it seriously by thinking may be he is genuine and it's a first indicator of something serious.

Either case we don't have a quick way of verifying unless lot of people quickly retweet or validate via different sources. In the world of sub-minute information distribution, peer level validation is critical for random bits to be taken as news.

I think this sub-minute game is what makes Twitter interesting. And puts Google (and Reuters) in the legacy category (as far distribution velocity of news is concerned).

Rush to hit on SEND button is not unique to micro-blogging or for that matter blogging. We are witnessing video-game like rumor/excitement characteristic between introductory breaking news tweet (or blog post) and eventual validation tweet (or blog post).  What happens between these two phases is pretty much a citizen journalism equivalent of a roller coaster ride.

Time dimension is becoming increasingly important. We are in the sub-minute domain. Check out these two screens which compares how Twitter and Google covered LA earthquake news -

This is from Google News. I took both images with couple of seconds difference.

This using Twitter search (Summize)

Twitter has more chatter and gets better CPC (without the C off course). But you get the idea.

VentureBeat's blog post is 'first' on Techmeme. Not sure all this matters in the long run but just observing how news (and views) spread in early stage is fascinating.

News is followed by page view grab, and page view grab is followed by smart ad placements. That's where I think companies like MediaMath will play interesting role.

In any case Twitter beats Google on the sub-minute game.

Google has introduced Knol. At a high level this is a great initiative.  I hope this eventually becomes a better avenue for authority discovery and a repository for trusted content.

On the other hand.

Google is big,  they are making tons of money and crushing new companies faster than any other company out there. So let's bitch about it

Wikipedia is by far the most prominent result page on Google search engine. Google is sending traffic to Wikipedia in millions and nobody is making money in the process. Knol is a hedge against Wikipedia. Who knows what will happen to Wikipedia in 5 or 10 years? What if Yahoo starts offering voluntary top level Wikipedia link on every search result page. What if. Strange things have happened in the past. Oracle and IBM are biggest Linux supporters out there. Who thought that will happen one day. So Google has to keep Wikipedia on the content leash, if not link leash.

Google gives 75% to 80% of ad revenue to Adsense partners. That's a big leak when compared with 100% revenue they make on their own properties like search and gmail. If they can aggregate valuable content on their own property then they can keep lot of high margin revenue. Who knows better than Google what kind of content goes for higher bid on AdWords.

If you think, between Knol and YouTube, Google is not a content company then you probably think we are not in recession either.  Google became content company when on some blogs Google Adsense ad units started exceeding actual content.

So get used to the idea of creating, managing, and publishing content without ever leaving Google properties.

One good thing out of Knol is that Google search quality will dramatically improve. Internally in Google, this project is owned by search quality team. It's a wonderful way to get high quality, trusted content and in a verified structure (both explicit and implicit authority). They will use meta data tied with this content to address duplicate content issue, fighting spam etc.

Google is smart about perception management and appropriate to their target audience, they kept logo subdued and are avoiding Google name. Google brand name is not too directly associated with Knol. Plan is to sneak in geek friendly interface which can grow over time into a powerful reference knowledge repository. 

Interestingly current version is not linked with main search engine. Almost as a joke they have this text:

 
In another example of how mobile-app-can-wreak-havoc-with-your-business-model, check the usage statistics of Facebook For iPhone.

There are 243,482 daily active users representing 45% of total. These are high numbers. It's fair to say that 243,482 iPhone owners are now using Facebook for their social networking experience.

Now compare the use % for applications which are higher on the leader board -

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High active user number for iPhone application has serious implications for several Facebook developers. Especially Social Media, Lookery . These distributed ad platforms need to come up with a model similar to PinchMedia.

Now iPhone users are affluent (or maybe crazy!), spend more time online, and fall into compelling demographics. Ideal for ad targeting. Challenge lies in developing a new ad serving model which can exist within the constraints of App Store. Eventually acceptable format will show up but in the meantime iPhone will further damage monetizability of social networks.

Also every  user access Facebook from iPhone means one less ad impression on Facebook.com. In Facebook case ad is served by Microsoft. We can generalize this reduction in ad impression across all mobile social network apps.  That cool and  'clean interface' constraint of iPhone app is a natural ad blocker.

Keep an eye on 'active user' count for mobile social networking apps.  It's a leading indicator of how disruptive mobile apps will be.

So I get this question from my friend: 'Brij, what's up with blogging slogging?'

This friend got hit by news will find you trap and found this I-quit-blogging announcement by Jason Calacanis unnerving.

There have been rumblings of sorts on where this whole blogging slogging is going. Today also on Techmeme I saw two posts analyzing this same topic from two different, and apparently honest, angles.  David Risley rightly thinks we are in a change phase and little bit of 'community humility' will go a long way in bringing back the fun:

Yes, it is changing. A super saturated niche like tech blogging is evolving into a conversation that takes place as much on social media like FriendFeed and Twitter as it does on the blog. Not all blogging niches are like that, but tech is particularly saturated as a niche. The guys who end up being leaders in today’s tech blogging are the people who offer real value on all of their communication lines (blog + social media outlets) and who are personable and actively interact with others. Any tech blogger who is looking at it as a competition or who worry incessantly about the so-called "a-list" is just not going to do really well.

If you can’t change with the community, then I guess it might be easier to bow out and start blogging about something else.

 Loren Feldman has a very revealing take on overall  technology world. Emperor has no clothes but he is more right than lot of people out there.

Now my answer to my friend was rather boring. I told him blogging phenomena is evolutionary, some A-listers now need to work on their family, some are just burned out, adsense economy is a welfare economy and you can't pay your bill with it etc etc.

Short answer was that people will continue to need car (blog), they may or may not like going for Hummer or Porsche (star blogs).

Though I wasn't very pleased with my answer, felt I should have been deep and used some difficult to understand words! Later on I managed to dig up this conversation between Bart Simpson and his high-IQ sister Lisa. I think this conversation captures the dilemma faced by these rebellious blogger Barts.

I have taken liberty with emphasis and link. Enjoy -

As if we are watching movie in slow motion.

Last couple of days I saw lot of bloggers turning sour on the state of Silicon Valley (by extension start-up ecosystem). Lot of this is credited to muddy macro picture. Yesterday's rare gasp by GOOG made some people go home early as well.

Om Malik has great analysis on why everybody should be worried now. Related to that is the Vallewag report on funding challenges faced by widget makers. Big hitter VC Kleiner Perkins is sending a big signal by pretty much leaving Web 2.0 market.

Now this is all cyclical and we will come out fine as overall economy shakes off current crisis. There is no denying the fact that lot of business models have added layers of froth and they need to trim down fast.

Ad revenue based online services, mobile applications, social media start-ups (and SaaS to some extent) will go through long slog before they are meaningful to mainstream consumers (and investors)? Deals are not happening fast enough and that has clogged the pipeline. It will take some time to clear up.

Also companies in Bay Area need to go global very fast. Google is now making majority of it's revenue from outside US (52% based on yesterday's call). There is only so much small company can do sitting here. They need to venture out and strike up partnerships and sign distribution contracts.

Markets are cyclical. Remember that.

[Photo courtesy Forklift]

Never owned Honda cars but always liked their Mr Opportunity campaign. Especially the knocking sound. That knocking sound is getting louder and louder for the Mobile Web.

For any idea to be fully 'invented' it first has to move to Silicon Valley. We finally passed that test for Mobile computing.

After languishing in Nokia and Motorola WAP'ish interface for many years,  Mobile web is finally becoming a reality.  iPhone (and the accompanying baggage of GPS, App Store, SDK, iTunes etc) present once in a decade opportunity to reprogram lot of existing use cases. There is a play here, that's why Kleiner Perkins started $100 million fund. I hope it gets allocated to address broader Mobile Web market. Tim Oreilly echoes that there is a strong startup mindshare working in favor of iPhone.

How to play in this new mobile web is still a challenge. Market is moving fast, time window to declare victory is longer than what contemporary funding circus allows. All that Facebook F8 hype ended up helping top 10 or 20 applications. Rest of the 30,000 odd applications became glorified focus group studies. How to plan scarce development resources so that your iPhone app doesn't end up as a focus group experiment? More questions than answers right?

I think many trends are converging and they present higher abstraction play opportunity. Mobille Web, Voice Web, Smartphone SDKs, etc are evolved enough that they can be addressed from single development environment.
Key is to find horizontal services in this emerging category. Clear visibility into revenue model won't hurt either.

Brendan Smialowski, at NYTimes, has a very interesting photo of Fed chairman Bernanke:

Does this mean Fed Chairman is caught in the bureaucratic mess?