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 -
BART: Lis, everyone in town is acting like me. So why does it suck?
LISA: It's simple, Bart: you've been defined yourself as a rebel, and in the absence of a repressive milieu your societal nature's been co-opted.
BART: I see.
LISA: Ever since that self-help guy came to town, you've lost your identity. You've fallen through the cracks of our quick-fix, one-hour photo, instant oatmeal society.
BART: What's the answer?
LISA: Well, this is your chance to develop a new and better identity. May I suggest .. good natured doormat?'
BART: Sounds good, sis. Just tell me what to do.
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Gas pump adventure continues. With gallon costing close to $4.60 in California, this everyday pain is now ready to generate serious comedy (and political campaigns as well).
I received this email (see below) from ConsumerWatchDog.org organization urging me to send complaints to local congressmen. Which I am not sure I will do.
Email campaign is a good move to get citizens involved in the issues but urging elected representative to act for some short term fix is not something we need. What we need is a good long term strategy around changes in consumption model, investments in alternative forms of energy, incentives for people to own less number of vehicles and incentives for using public transport. While congress needs to go tough on tax rebates, and getting oil companies to pay their part, ordinary citizens cannot continue drunken sailor consumption pattern.
While reading this campaign I noticed interesting Google ads for oil related keywords. Some of these ads are funny and some are plain old hustle. Should Google allow this kind of ad - "Run your car on water"? To his credit this fellow succeeded in outbidding VW and ABCNews!
| Send Your Gasoline Bill To Congress!
 I'm sending my maddening gasoline bill to Washington and inviting you to do the same. Elected representatives don't pull into the corner gas station and pay from their own pockets. They need to know what it's doing to you.
I had my own harsh moment this week at the gas station, pumping $4.60 gasoline: My 50 mpg Prius now costs more to run than my old 15 mpg sedan did in 2002, when gasoline sold around here for as little as $1.13 a gallon. My salary sure hasn't kept up.
Click on the Send Your Free Message button below to tell the president, your Senator and your Representative in Congress what gasoline is costing you and what it's doing to your budget. Just fill in the short form (cost of your last fill-up, where you bought it and what gasoline is costing you each month) and send it. Then forward this message to your friends.
Gasoline prices are hitting record highs every day ($4.075 nationally today, and $4.607 in California, per AAA) Oil company profits are out of sight, as you can tell from looking at our "Oil Profits Monster" database. Yet Congress hasn't even acted to regulate out-of-control oil trading markets. Or to put oversight on refineries that restrict their gasoline and diesel production to keep the retail price high.
Thanks so much for helping us get the message to Congress: If they don’t feel their own pain at the pump, we have to tell them about ours.
Consumer Watchdog is a nonprofit, nonpartisan consumer protection organization. Your contributions are tax-deductible
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There is no ideal profile. Entrepreneurs can be gregarious or taciturn, analytical or intuitive, cautious or daring - Amar Bhide
Never met him personally but I have been following Sridhar Vembu’s companies for quite some time. First time in 2003, during my first startup project (AssuredWeb). Back then I was amazed by the business model of delivering network management products. Component factory model combined with easy to buy, low price convenience. He build cash generating machine with that model. There were many other product/companies AdventNet was directly/indirectly involved with. vTiger, Zoho and some database management company I am forgetting the name. I am sure there will be many more.
Thing I like about this story is that smart, scalable and successful businesses can be build without spilling testosterone out of your ears. Key difference (and this is a very big one) comes from having the right temperament to hang in there for the long haul.
Flip-it-and-keynote-it is a recent invention otherwise startup road is long and lonely. Intellectual freedom is a big plus of the job. I doubt Sridhar Vembu will sell out soon.
Venture Hack has best advice on fund raising tactics and in particular I believe there is a big message in this insight -
You can’t clear the market in series
More so when we are faced with the combinatorial explosion of startup ideas.
Entrepreneurs essentially work for the market. Markets have opportunity cost which cannot always be measured in monetary terms.
Lot of my recent decisions were driven by highlighting the importance of opportunity cost. We have consciously moved away from our comfort zone and now placing all our bets in the high return( also high risk) initiatives.
Don Tapscott in Wikinomics:
Forget about static, immovable products. If your customers are going to treat products as platforms anyways, then you may as well get ahead of the game. Make your products modular, reconfigurable, and editable. Set the context for customer innovation and collaboration. Provide venues. Build user-friendly customer tool kits. Supply the raw materials that customers need to add value to your product. Make it easy to remix and share. We call this designing for prosumption.
This essentially means adding a new checklist in the product feature roadmap - hackability of your product. How hackable is your web2.0 project?
Update: On a similar note, here is Biz Stone of Twitter fame -The API has been arguably the most important ..thing we’ve done with Twitter.
Full interview here. API part -
Biz Stone: Well, it depends on what business model we
decide to pursue. We’re still very much weighing our options there, but
there are definitely leading contender business models that we have
mapped out where the API plays a significant role in generating just
more traffic to our system. It puts us in an enviable position.So, the
API becomes not only crucial for us on a creativity level and something
that we can offer to the developers so that they can build their own
applications and experiences, but it also becomes a way for us to grow
and a way for us to potentially - depending on what business model we
choose - do well there, business-wise. No matter what, we’re going to
be considering the API. We’re going to be considering what folks are
doing with it going forward so that it becomes part of what we are and
what we do.
Internet is all about numbers. Number of nodes connected, number of folks connecting to it, connectivity speed, number of applications, number of browsing hours and number of communication events going across it and many other related numbers.
All those numbers are growing and will increase dramatically as China and India gains broadband penetration. Population matters and That’s where internet is still very very interesting and smart companies like Google are fully aware of that. Google made good investments there and takes that market very seriously.
Recent discussions around Mark Cuban’s attention grabbing assertion was meant (I think) to emphasize slow progress in a specific area of high quality content distribution. He obviously sees huge opportunity in that space but like any other entrepreneur he can’t single handedly grow the market by lifting the infrastructure layer. He has to wait and that’s frustrating. I read Mark Cuban’s interview on Pho mailing list and found that to be a very accurate description of problem affecting niche segment.
Internet is interesting in new geographies. Look for new participation and then think about how their participation will create opportunities for new applications. For example by next decade, difference between Hollywood and Bollywood will be less important as destinations like YouTube will become destination of choice for entertainment creation, distribution and consumption.
To me if I can do “add me as friend” or “poke me” in mandarin and get a response back in English, probably that day I will feel that internet is boring. That day is many years away and will require quantum jump in language and cultural computing technologies.
Here is one crazy idea for Mark. Go to India and buy ICL and cut a similar deal with equivalent sports franchise in China. Buy them, bring those teams to US, run a promotional mashup with baseball, run content over your network. Basically import Cricket, export Baseball and do it over the internet. Get into the emerging market eyeball business. Get the distribution power and then promote your content to billions of viewers there.
That funny idea aside, I think internet is just waiting to get into our cultural and social space. I am not counting on this to be boring.
Bumped into this interesting description on MIT conference page
Take one part venture capital firm and one part American Idol; mix them together and get You Be the VC. You Be the VC is a groundbreaking competition showcasing top entrepreneurs from around the globe. Leveraging crowd-sourcing methodologies and expert advisors, the companies develop and advance, with the audience deciding which three will get funded. Will the next Google be born or the next Steve Jobs arise?
I am more interested in seeing who will be Simon Cowell equivalent here.
Inside Facebook has the scoop on TripAdvisor acquiring Where I’ve Been for a whopping $3 million.
Having followed all the hoopla around F8 right from the begining I can say this is a beginning of a new type of startup building. Call it Startup-dgets (along the lines of widgets and pronounced like startup-jets). Speed of start to exit is amazingly fast.
I have been taking notes on how application writers go about doing the development, feedback, funding, support etc and my take is that Facebook application development methodology is something entirely new. This is like taking extreme programming and dumping it along the sides of TQM, Waterfall and Corba etc. They are doing expedited extreme, if that makes any sense at all.
Some of these app writers were hand-holding user right from day one and developing/evolving by talking to them over Facebook group. Very very capital efficient.
This model is not going away anytime soon and will be formalized in specific market niches.
Justin Smith has a breaking news about Facebook acquiring Parakey:
Just received word from Facebook that the company has made its first acquisition: Parakey, a startup founded by Blake Ross and Joe Hewitt, co-founders of Mozilla Firefox. Ross and Hewitt will join Facebook immediately to work on the Facebook Platform.
I have been following Joe Hewitt, specially his work on Firebug and lately on iUI. Both are outstanding projects. Facebook is getting solid talent with this acquisition. Both founders of Parakey are smart dudes.
Still can’t believe why Google allowed Parakey to slip. From whatever I have heard of Parakey, it fits right into the sweet space of Desktop and Internet synchonization. Google Gears is an early attempt in that direction.
Facebook seems to be focused more on being a social-network-of-record for all application developers.
With F8 they came out with smart cloud based platform. Combining Parakey with existing toolbar (which is fairly advanced as far as toolbars go) they have a pretty interesting desktop strategy. One can only imagine how they plan to integrate the two.
If that’s what their ultimate vision is then I wouldn’t be surprised if they followup this acquisition with some more. They need mobile platform as well. By getting Hewitt, they managed to get a guy who is at the forefront of iPhone hacking. Won’t be surprised if F8 gets iPhone compatibility soon.
Great timing as Google gets busy with congress and realizes that too much hiring not only hurts quarterly results but can also result in culture dilution.
