tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-181559052024-03-14T05:49:17.291+11:00TinfingerAustralian entrepreneur with <a href="http://www.fanfooty.com.au">FanFooty</a> (alive) and <a href="http://www.tinfinger.com">Tinfinger</a> (dead) on his CV. Working on new projects, podcasting weekly at the <a href="http://www.coachesbox.com.au">Coaches Box</a>, and trying not to let <a href="http://www.twitter.com/m0nty">microblogging</a> take over this blog.Paul Montgomeryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18345309776406933213noreply@blogger.comBlogger302125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18155905.post-16016674351570956922016-05-25T14:20:00.002+10:002016-05-25T14:20:27.446+10:00Journalism's just another word for nothing left to lose<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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The slow sinking and senescence of the Australian mainstream media continues apace, with Fairfax farewelling another lifeboat filled with grizzled old veterans over the last week or two (<a href="https://twitter.com/henriettacook/status/729878404246339584">above</a>). When they have let Leaping Larry L go, you know they're cutting muscle not fat, or maybe by now it's bone.<br />
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Filed my last Sat. column for The Age. Budget cuts got me. Applied for 1st supermarket shelf-stacker job. Finally finding vocational niche</div>
— Leaping Larry L (@LeapingLarryL) <a href="https://twitter.com/LeapingLarryL/status/733483334949437442">May 20, 2016</a></blockquote>
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Something I used to bang on about in this blog (when I was posting regularly) was how these ex-MSM journos now have a <a href="http://tinfinger.blogspot.com.au/2012/12/journalism-will-die-long-live-journalism.html">golden opportunity to reinvent themselves</a> by starting up new Web sites, rescuing their careers in journalism by applying a bit of entrepreneurial spirit. It is an indictment on the sort of people employed by Fairfax and News that so few of them have explored this challenge, notwithstanding how difficult it would be. It doesn't take much to launch a blog these days. Maybe the main problem has been that they didn't want to bite the slowly withering hand that used to feed them, but as the blood drains out of the corpse of Fairfax in particular, that should seem less and less of a deterrent.<br />
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Ah, it's all very well for me to say these things, but what business model would work in this crappy economy, what models can use, what examples can I give of strategies that have worked? Much of Australian industry is a copy of what has been tried overseas, particularly in America, and online journalism is no different. The moderate but nonetheless steady success of <a href="http://www.alluremedia.com.au/">Allure Media</a> is testament to how taking foreign templates and repurposing them for Australia is a relatively low-risk method to create a local business from scratch.<br />
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In sports journalism, however, there has been precious little of this, and I don't quite know why. Back Page Lead rose and fell using a more generic and ultimately unsatisfying formula, with Charles Happell trying to do what I was exhorting others to do but never managing to align the business towards generating enough traffic and revenue to stay afloat. The Roar continues on but seems from the outside to have settled into a groove not unlike Crikey, where it will remain viable but is long past the point of being able to break out to garner mass audiences (I guess you could pigeonhole my sites with that observation too).<br />
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If one or a group of these ex-MSM journos were to try an Allure-style mode of attack without actually paying for the brand of overseas examples of successful sites, which would be the most likely candidate? (Yes, the above is just preamble for this list.)<br />
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<b><a href="http://bleacherreport.com/">Bleacher Report</a></b><br />
<b>What it is: </b>Sportscenter in blog form, focusing on game video highlights, match preview/reports, breaking news in short form and content that is trending on social media, plus some multimedia features using animation. Mobile app focuses on TeamStream curated news links and image slideshows. No liveblog match coverage (links to other sites).<br />
<b>How it works:</b> Their early success came from <a href="http://www.sfweekly.com/sanfrancisco/top-5-ways-bleacher-report-rules-the-world/Content?oid=2186585">shockingly exploitative clickbait</a> and low-to-unpaid work, incentivising budding journos to boost page views by lowering standards they may not have started with in the first place. This would be anathema to most ex-MSM journos, especially those who have just escaped Fairfax and News whose online vehicles have been just as guilty of publishing clickbait crap in recent times. BR's focus on quantitative analytics over qualitative subjective assessment - the Moneyball-esque theory of editorial direction via spreadsheet - would also be deeply unfamiliar to those whose careers were groomed in traditional newsrooms. Their pivot to quality post-acquisition by Turner is irrelevant to this discussion.<br />
<b>Verdict:</b> The Roar took half of this model - the financial part of building a pathway for unpaid amateurs to become professionals which meant a heap of cheap content - without also enforcing a ruthless editorial focus on increasing traffic. BR are top of the dunghill in the US no matter how many people bag their quality, and you can't argue with numbers in business. It would be a rare bird indeed who had the guts to implement all of this template. I certainly couldn't stomach it, personally, and if I can't then prominent, established journos who have a reputation to protect probably won't either.<br />
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<b><a href="http://www.sbnation.com/">SB Nation</a></b><br />
<b>What it is:</b> <a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/briansolomon/2012/12/06/meet-the-digital-upstart-that-thinks-millions-of-rowdy-fans-are-the-future-of-the-web/#621f114418b7">A federation of 300+ team-specific blogs</a> staffed by paid writers with backgrounds ranging from amateur (mostly) to semi-pro to former MSM pro (rarely). A content core of reviews and reports plus highlights, as with all such sites, but more feature-focused. Includes UGC contributions called Fanshots. No slideshows, but some video highlights. No liveblog match coverage apart from straight scoreboards.<br />
<b>How it works:</b> Linked by a shared CMS called Chorus with cloned structures and a consistent design across the network. Innovated its own method of linking articles on the same event by grouping them in Storystreams, leading to increased stickiness. Sells the vast majority of its advertising inventory direct at premium rates<br />
<b>Verdict:</b> The team-specific model has already been tried and failed here: BigFooty had a lash several years ago, and there are long-running single-team blogs like <a href="http://www.1eyedeel.com/">1Eyed Eel</a>, but their attempts to expand into a network many years ago also came to nowt. Part of the problem is that teams in US sports are almost all in one-team towns, or two at most in massive markets big enough to justify them. Major Australian sporting teams, apart from maybe the Brisbane Broncos and Lions, are competing in the same geographical area as one or as many as nine other teams of varying sizes. It's hard to make the economics of a North Melbourne or Cronulla team blog work. The Chorus advantage is probably less important in 2016 where any decent Wordpress theme can produce the same effect with a bit of customisation - I have done it myself with <a href="http://themeforest.net/item/gameday-wordpress-sports-media-theme/3777874">Gameday</a> on FanFooty et al. Melbourne startup <a href="http://cognitives.io/">Cognitives.io</a> has built a Chorus-like platform for <a href="http://www.fansunite.com.au/">FansUnite</a> but I don't see any startups using it; not that it's not a killer app (I've seen it in action), it's just that it's bloody hard yakka to get someone interested in paying for blogging software these days. Finally, The Roar do an excellent job at direct sales but it's an even harder row to hoe, especially in Australia with its smaller market. For the purposes of a startup, though, no one has really given this basic model a decent shake in this country, and there may be more scope for it once the MSM organs shrivel and the likes of AFL Media take over primary reportage, leaving a hole for unofficial openly biased commentary.<br />
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<b><a href="http://www.rantsports.com/">RantSports</a></b><br />
<b>What it is:</b> A federation of 150+ team-specific blogs staffed by paid writers with backgrounds ranging... hey wait a minute, <a href="http://adexchanger.com/publishers/rant-wants-to-raise-more-money-to-take-on-vox-buzzfeed/">this is an SB Nation clone</a>! But it also expanded horizontally into lifestyle categories, which is more of a VICE thing to do (or Vox Media, of course). The difference with SB Nation is that it is more focused on social, to the point where they include tweets and vines as lead stories. Rant doesn't focus on straight previews and reports, sticking to a more opinion-based model (thus "Rant") supplanted with viral video and tweets. As with all of these sites, Rant started focused on desktops and are only slowly figuring out how to deal with the consumer shift to mobile. No live coverage.<br />
<b>How it works:</b> Growth in the early days was straight out bought from Outbrain and Taboola, sources which are notorious for bringing low-value readers and not producing repeat visits. Rant worked with those companies to refine their techniques for converting those clicks into organic traffic (i.e. repeat visits that cost you nothing because they come directly). Like BR, they have gradually tried to pivot away from cheese and towards fine wine, but they have always been undervalued by the market due to their lingering cheesy aromas, which meant that when <a href="http://www.gurufocus.com/news/410680/billionaire-robert-sillermans-plan-for-draftday-fantasy-sports">billionaire media mogul Robert Sillerman bought them recently</a> he paid a lot less per user than he would have had to for a lot of Rant's competitors. Nevertheless, Rant's investors and founders secured an excellent exit.<br />
<b>Verdict:</b> No, I'd never heard of them either before researching this blog post. If you're an old school journo looking at all of these models and shaking your head at the unscrupulous methodology to manufacture gold out of scraps and garbage, Rant would be more unpalatable than most. Has all the drawbacks of SB Nation and none of the job satisfaction that a true journo craves - unless all you care about is bottom lines.<br />
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<a href="http://deadspin.com/"><b>Deadspin</b></a><br />
<b>What it is:</b> At its best <a href="http://www.adweek.com/news/technology/deadspin-oral-history-146794">an independent voice holding sports to account</a>, at its worst a dirtbag snark blog posting pics of drunk athletes. Or both at the same time. Focused on opinions and human interest features, with a contrary attitude as befits its membership of the Gawker network. Its comment sections, as with all Gawker sites which use its proprietary methodology for promoting quality, is sometimes better than the articles. No live coverage.<br />
<b>How it works:</b> Day to day it may not be the most compelling read, but every now and then they will break a story through investigative journalism work that will blow up way beyond normal levels of virality. These periodic boosts have lifted the baseline daily traffic over time.<br />
<b>Verdict:</b> I won't spend much time dissecting Deadspin's business model because no self-respecting ex-MSM journo would touch it with a 40-foot barge pole. They wouldn't be let in to the Quills or welcomed at regular journo bar haunts, because part of the model is attacking the MSM outlets and embarrassing prominent media personalities with thinly-sourced gossip. Australia's libel laws would probably put paid to this concept locally, not to mention our more carebear kind of community. You'd have to have the skin of a rhino to try this in Australia, ad good luck to you if you do.<br />
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<a href="http://fansided.com/"><b>FanSided</b></a><br />
<b>What it is</b>: Another SB Nation clone at its core (albeit launching at around the same time so it's more great minds thinking alike), <a href="http://www.sporttechie.com/2013/12/02/fansided-an-oral-history-of-the-next-big-sports-media-network/">growing from a single Kansas City Chiefs blog</a> in 2011, but like Rant it has since expanded into horizontal lifestyle areas to broaden its targeted demographic appeal towards young men. Based on opinions from unaccredited amateurs, which has led them to turn their unofficial outsider reputation into a status symbol of independence, taking the fans' side in every debate.<br />
<b>How it works:</b> You may be wondering how this is different to several aforementioned sites, and fair enough, but their story highlights another aspect of sports blog startups that it's crucial to get right: partnerships with larger sites. There are a few other blogs I haven't included in this list due to their relationships with larger sites in the early days being too close to call them a truly independent startup: <a href="http://www.thepostgame.com/">ThePostGame</a> with Yahoo!, for example, and <a href="http://scout.com/">Scout</a> with Fox Sports. FanSided has never taken funding of any kind, and this meant it couldn't sink VC dollars into buying traffic from a network like Rant did with Outbrain and Taboola. Perhaps out of necessity, the founding team of two brothers dabbled with partnerships with Fox Sports, CBS and NFL.com to try to kickstart their traffic inflow, before settling on a successful 2013 deal with Sports Illustrated which <a href="http://www.si.com/more-sports/2015/05/26/time-inc-sports-illustrated-fansided">led two years later to an acquisition</a>. This is a strategy that it will be tempting for ex-MSM journos to explore, especially with the company they recently left. It is a tried and tested entrepreneurial formula for escapees from a big company to strike out for new territory only to be peacefully subsumed back into the mothership a few years later, having effectively acted as the team leaders of an outsourced R&D skunkworks for the BigCo by taking almost all of the risk (apart from a little inoculatory seed capital injection). I don't have experience in how to make such things work but it's not a surefire strategy, as can be seen by <a href="http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/the-flight-of-fantasy-sports-as-gambling-joins-in-20150418-1mnt6m.html">the Moneyball/Fairfax affiliation</a> which mysteriously petered out several months ago after a blaze of publicity. Securing financial or practical support for a startup with no reputation is a massive pain in the arse no matter where you get it, so ex-MSM journos should leave no stone unturned, even if they left their previous employer in some degree of dudgeon.<br />
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I have many more thoughts on this subject swirling around my head at the moment, so maybe I'll put them in a follow-up blog post some time soon.Paul Montgomeryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18345309776406933213noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18155905.post-36134046149726862212014-03-05T15:37:00.000+11:002014-03-05T15:37:15.327+11:00Burnout and the sole trader<div class="tr_bq">
I am spending most of my blogging time at my new poliblog <a href="http://loadeddogma.blogspot.com.au/">Loaded Dogma</a>, as well as the exhumed <a href="http://www.fanfooty.com.au/blog/">FanFooty blog</a>, but <a href="http://delimiter.com.au/2014/03/04/hitting-pause-button-delimiter-2-0/#comment-637540">this comment</a> I made on Renai LeMay's Delimiter blog entry on him shuttering his paywalled Delimiter 2.0 project is suitable for reproduction here:</div>
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Renai, I’m sorry to hear that you have had to press the pause button. </blockquote>
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As a person in a somewhat similar position to you in a slightly different field, I can sympathise with the constant battle with burnout. You have ideas for new things and want to try them out, but there’s only one of you. As your life accretes commitments and relationships, it seems like there’s never enough hours in the day to get to everything you want to do. You launch things and then can’t do them justice because other events intervene. Burnout is the greatest foe of the sole trader. </blockquote>
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The solution which would seem obvious to those looking in from the outside would be to hire people to grow the business so it’s not just reliant on you. This is harder to do than it sounds, though. Bringing someone else in to inhabit the cocoon-like home that your business has become is emotionally difficult. I have had problems with it because I don’t want to exploit young employees and burn them out on my watch, because I had the experience of getting burned out working on someone else’s publication when I was that age - not sure if you’ve gone through the same process. Nevertheless, expansion through payroll is probably the right thing to do. I am only following my own advice on this very slowly, mind you. </blockquote>
<blockquote>
One of the early lessons I learned in my business is that you have to be constantly looking out for the trap of making the entire business about you and your knowledge base, such that it wouldn’t operate without you. Apart from the dangerous burnout factor, letting yourself fall into this hole means that you can’t sell your business and get out. Reducing it to repeatable processes that can be done by any competent journo who is parachuted in by a prospective buyer is the path to an eventual exit. I’m not there yet, and I’m guessing you’re not either, but IMO that’s the goal we should all strive for.</blockquote>
I brought in <a href="https://www.google.com.au/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&ved=0CCgQFjAA&url=https%3A%2F%2Ftwitter.com%2Fb_gogos&ei=6qcWU428JY7DkQW33YHwAg&usg=AFQjCNHcCEPN-XlgyIKb1ANpAoLe1YsDxQ&sig2=ogYzazoa-li6DcLAcfQQGw&bvm=bv.62286460,d.dGI">Ben Gogos </a>last year to help me out with the FanFooty liveblogging, which has been an excellent move from my perspective, and he is helping to recruit more bloggers to round out the stable so that I can concentrate on other things. My life has become more complicated over the last year with a wife, two mortgages and our first baby due in July with another one planned soon after, so it was necessary to step back from the weekly grind. The Mr Football project is currently down the pecking order, as is the BigDoor gamification platform which I have implemented on FanFooty but not done enough with.<br />
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Like Renai, I'd love there to be at least three of me so I could get to all I want to do. Don't even talk to me about my dreams of doing an Australian HuffPo, or an Australian SBNation - heck, anything Vox Media related. Well, on that last one maybe I'll explore some new realms this year. I'm just glad I'm not in the sort of <a href="http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/sports/cricket/series-tournament/india-in-new-zealand-2014/top-stories/How-can-facts-be-anybodys-property/articleshow/29971424.cms">trouble that Cricinfo and Cricbuzz are in</a>.Paul Montgomeryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18345309776406933213noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18155905.post-70072057130473492562013-06-18T17:36:00.000+10:002013-06-18T17:36:09.770+10:00Aggregator opportunities agglomerating dust and rustAfter a long period of neglecting <a href="https://twitter.com/gaberivera">Gabe Rivera</a>'s creations, I have recently returned to <a href="http://memeorandum.com/">Memeorandum</a>, as part of my current part-time obsession with politics and economics blogs. There is a certain vigour and urgency about economics blogs in particular these days, due to the disconnect between many economists and the policies of those who are in charge of the levers. <a href="http://techmeme.com/">Techmeme</a> doesn't interest me, and hasn't done since Silicon Valley gave up on game-changing consumer-facing innovation many years ago in favour of focusing on built-to-flip outsourced R&D for whales like Facebook and Google - which of course isn't Gabe's fault. Aggregators are only as strong as the sites they aggregate.<br />
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As the long, inexorable decline of Fairfax and (to a lesser extent) News Ltd comes to a head, with the demise of their newspapers possibly only months away, I find myself wondering what opportunities exist for aggregation startups once the concept of a front page moves beyond the static dead tree version, once and for all. Gabe's model is still the best, I think: target the insiders, make it about prestige, obscure the algorithm, and keep 'em hungry.<br />
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His model has evolved over the years to the point where he now has six human editors to supplement the robot rhythms, and is <a href="http://techmeme.com/jobs">looking for more</a>. News is much more often found through social media or superstar blogger links these days than through ersatz front pages, of course, but I still think there is a place for semi-automated aggregators where there isn't a connection with the linkers. This is because there is still value in crowds, especially crowds of professionals, not just the immediate social network. Gatekeepers who do a good job of prioritising news sources are valuable in their own right, especially in the Techmeme model where users still believe there is a strong element of meritocracy to the classifications.<br />
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Professional gatekeepers also make the blogosphere better. Applying rules in the algorithm to reward length and originality over "quote unquote <a href="http://acronyms.thefreedictionary.com/Read+the+Whole+Thing">RTWT</a>", supplanted by the judgment of human editors to promote stories which provide fresh perspectives, trains bloggers to write the sort of stories that readers actually want to read. This creates a virtuous circle where bloggers work harder to impress the aggregator, but end up impressing the readers as a byproduct, leading to readers relying on the aggregator to deliver them the better stories, meaning the bloggers have to work harder to get on the aggregator. This is what Google PageRank is supposed to be about, and it is still a good system if policed to avoid abuses by content farms.<br />
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If there is a market niche yet to be filled, actually, it is an aggregator which makes this "nudge" effect explicit, in that it applies a series of robot- and/or human-generated judgements to individual stories with user-exposed editorialisation. This happens already of course, in that the placement and ordering of stories is a series of judgments on the worthiness of stories. I'm talking here about going beyond the low-added-value listing of stories linking to a primary story, and instead giving readers some easy visual indication about how closely the stories adhere to the topic of the cluster (i.e. avoiding the contentless "pundit roundup" or "today's links" article), how early in the story the link appears (i.e. avoiding the gratuitous end link in an article mostly about something else), whether the story adds any substantive analysis (i.e. avoiding the lazy "here's what someone else said" summary article), and whether the story agrees or disagrees with the premise of the original story (i.e. to promote stories that rebut the primary story, as has happened recently on Memeorandum with several misreported PRISM-related stories). These visual indications could be established through colour, icons, text, or just placement through further clustering.<br />
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One of the major ways I think Gabe is still streeting the competition is that he keeps his business structure simple - he owns it all AFAIK, and at least has 100% control - and he keeps his burn rate low. This means he is under little pressure to splash ads in the faces of his users, unlike Facebook or Twitter whose sponsored posts are way more intrusive these days than Techmeme or the others. People still tell me another social network will supplant Facebook eventually, and if there is then excessive advertising is why they will fail.<br />
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Aggregation, if not the Techmeme brand itself, is extensible to the post-newspaper world, even in (or because of?) these overcast times of the Great Recession. You don't necessarily have to do everything that Gabe did if you want to succeed, but you'd have to have a damn good reason to do something different. Gabe, in his wisdom, has left a vast amount of vertical and horizontal sectors open to competitors. What would it take for someone to take up the cudgel and get stuck in?Paul Montgomeryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18345309776406933213noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18155905.post-83620914126710918862012-12-24T16:05:00.001+11:002012-12-24T16:05:50.369+11:00Larry Pickering & Michael Smith: Woodward & Bernstein, or Burke & Wills?I don't tend to get many comments on this blog, but <a href="http://tinfinger.blogspot.com.au/2012/12/journalism-will-die-long-live-journalism.html">my last entry</a> a couple of days ago got an interesting one from Andrew Elder. I follow Andrew's <a href="http://andrewelder.blogspot.com/">Politically homeless</a> blog, which seemingly has as its raison d'etre the cataloguing of all the reasons why Tony Abbott will fail to become Prime Minister, and how the mainstream media has been getting that narrative completely wrong for years now. His editorial line on that blog is a classic Sir Humphrey style "courageous" stance, and I can't help but admire his chutzpah in the face of what has, at times, been almost insurmountable evidence that Abbott would be our next PM. (I am also a strong left-winger who supports Gillard, BTW.) Thus his comment moves me to respond at length to justify my argument in my last post.<br />
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I have spent a fair bit of time over the last two years reading and commenting on political blogs. I had an idea that it might be a good business concept to launch a political blog. I found out quickly that that was a terrible idea, because there was no money in it. The subsequent closing of Larvatus Prodeo has left a void on the left side of the poliblog space, which was the subject of my last post. In that time, there has been a gradual but unmistakable connection made between mainstream right-wing journalism and the poliblogs on the right. The Australian newspaper, most notably, has begun littering its pages with references to <a href="http://catallaxyfiles.com/">Catallaxy Files</a>, <a href="http://bunyipitude.blogspot.com/">Professor Bunyip</a>, and other members of the hive of scum and villainy that is the wingnut blog brigade. This culminated during 2012 with the AWU scandal, which was engineered in large degree by <a href="http://pickeringpost.com/">Larry Pickering</a> and <a href="http://www.michaelsmithnews.com/">Michael Smith</a>. Their reports percolated back up through the Australian and eventually made their way to the ABC and Fairfax, such that by the end of the recent parliamentary session it was the Opposition Leader himself who was prosecuting the case based on evidence first aired on these supposedly disreputable outcast outlets.<br />
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I praised Pickering and Smith as having "new noise and energy", which Andrew replied "consisted merely of being noticed by the MSM". But that's kind of the point. Worthy but unseen journalism is not worth much. If independent journalism is going to be important after the fall of Fairfax, it must be viewed by the public in large numbers, not hidden away behind paywalls for the rich minority. The right has seen the light, and it has now established an ecosystem to carry the nutrients from the fertilised fungi that is a Pickering or Smith post all the way up through the food chain to a national audience. The right also have created a bully pulpit to cower the "centrist" media into following their agenda, so that while the Australian itself is not widely read, it has colonised other media to run their editorial lines.<br />
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Where are the vehicles for Margo Kingston, or even Andrew himself, to carry their messages to the average Aussie in language they can understand? No, The Drum doesn't count, and neither does The Conversation. That's the echo chamber. Margo can post all she likes at New Matilda, and I don't wish to be unkind, but her stuff merits a larger audience than NM and her Twitter followers.<br />
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My praise, such as it is, is for the fact that the right have got themselves organised. The left are being far too passive. You may say that journalism should not be debased like that, with everyone taking sides like it's a schoolyard fight. Welcome to the future, it's here and the Fairfax dynasty aren't going to save you! This is what happens when the old self-funded institutions of journalism die. The survivors are subsidised by millionaires, or live via other means like Pickering and Smith. So far, no mass medium journalism publication has arisen from Australian new media, because the economics don't work and the professionals haven't taken it seriously. Yet.<br />
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Ex-MSM journos would need to reskill if they are to be the founders of whatever it is that is going to come next, to replace the role Fairfax has played. Andrew is right in those points. While I wouldn't go so far as to say the online journalism scene in Australia is terra nullius, though, there is a big hole in the middle of its continent, and the only incursions so far have been made are restricted to the coastline. There is so much more potential yet to be realised. Pickering and Smith are like some of those hopeless early explorers, doomed to perish in the desert due to poor planning, lack of support and antediluvian notions of competence. We remember ostensible disasters like Burke and Wills today though, because they blazed the trail that others followed with far more success. Who will follow in their muck-flaked footsteps to bring civilisation to the scrub?Paul Montgomeryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18345309776406933213noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18155905.post-9891176195942465112012-12-21T00:03:00.000+11:002012-12-21T00:11:20.294+11:00Journalism will die. Long live journalism?2012 has been a bad year for journalism in Australia. The mainstream kind of journalism has undergone thousands of job losses, announced by News Ltd and Fairfax most notably but by no means restricted to them. It is harder for new graduates to find any work as journalists, and hundreds of grizzled veterans look up and find very little in the way of paid work as journalists in prospect. There is hope, but more of that later.
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<br />
The Finkelstein inquiry has been and gone, blithely ignoring the obvious reality of the inevitable destruction of the basis of journalism's funding structure. As a document of the current state of the media industry in Australia with its Pollyanna attitude towards the future of journalism, it was exposed as a hopeless joke mere months later when two of its major targets slashed their staff numbers and announced drastic measures to stave off corporate death. If anyone is looking towards regulation or other government instrument to save journalism, look elsewhere.<br />
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It is no longer controversial to point out that not only is the ABC not motivated by the profit motive, neither is News Ltd. The new corporate structure of News and Fox, where all the safely profitable broadcast media properties are stuffed into the public listed Fox entity, and the poorly performing newspapers relegated to the News basket save for the Foxtel cash cow, means that Foxtel effectively underwrites the losses at the newspapers, and will probably do so in perpetuity. Journalism has always had to rely on a tangentially related revenue source to fund it, and the Murdochs have found a way to fund their global journalism vehicles by strapping them to the back of the Foxtel juggernaut. And Foxtel's major property is the AFL, and the AFL is increasingly focused around fantasy football. So Dream Team is saving the Wall Street Journal! Well, maybe that's a bit cheeky. Helping to save. :)<br />
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Anyway, back to the point. The non-mainstream kind of journalism has also not had a good year. I suppose it's a win of sorts that the likes of New Matilda, King's Tribune and Crikey are still going, albeit that they don't seem to be expanding much. The demise of Larvatus Prodeo shows up the fragility of such worthy efforts. The Global Mail is iterating, painfully, but it hasn't been kicking many goals lately, beyond Ellen Fanning's excellent series on electricity industry goldplating. As startup founders are wont to do, Graeme Wood looks like he's on the verge of restarting TGM from scratch.<br />
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Most of the new noise and energy, however, came from much less reputable blogs, like those of Larry Pickering and Michael Smith. The chaos of the American political system is encroaching ever further on our own, egged on by operatives from both sides, and it is influencing the kind of journalism that is practiced both inside and outside the mainstream. Little of this advances the causes of objectivity or sensibility.<br />
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What will happen in 2013? The most important thing, for me, is that a lot of journalists with a lot of experience will suddenly be out of work. They will need a new job, and many of them still have a lot to say. Many of them will have fat payouts from their former employers for their many years of service. This smacks of opportunity.<br />
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What I would like to see is groups of these newly retrenched journos take up the cudgel and found journalism startups. The Global Mail example shows that it is entirely possible for ex-mainstream journos to be completely unsuited to the rigours and pressures of startup life, but surely there are some entrepreneurial types among the sacked lizard swarm who could live off their redundancy packages for long enough to bootstrap a new Web vehicle for their talents.<br />
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If there are any such journos out there, my main piece of advice would be: do not be afraid to feed of the carcass of the mothers which just spurned them. Treat the industry as a zero-sum game - or better, as a walking corpse. Assume that Fairfax is going to die. Act as if you won't have AAP feeds forever. Figure out what comes after the fall, and how you can be part of the new media economy. Don't feel sorry for your mates still working at the places you're putting the sword to. They will join you if you succeed. Someone's going to do it, it might as well be you.<br />
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This is what worked for the Business Spectator mob. They attacked the Financial Review like a band of cutthroats sailing the Spanish Main, plundering and pillaging. They worked the freemium marketing angle through Alan Kohler's ABC involvements. They got their exit, they reached the startup Holy Grail. Whoever has the skill and chutzpah to follow their lead could be the next winner.<br />
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Ah, but you might say, what else is there to attack? The Spectator crew had a nice, fat target in the Fin, but there aren't too many profitable sections left in the Fairfax or News stables. My advice would be to look to other media platforms, specifically TV. Draw your sights on Seven, Nine and Ten. Target Foxtel and Telstra. Lord knows they're busy attacking each other, they won't see you coming. Look at when, how and from whom they make their money, and try to steal their eyeballs.<br />
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How will all this rampant capitalist thought benefit pure journalism, you cry? What about investigative journalism, who will break the big stories? That's the problem with the Global Mail experience: it's folly to pretend that the commercial imperative doesn't matter to journalism. The commercial imperative draws you closer to your audience. Of course there has to be a wall between advertising and editorial, but the two sides are both trying to connect with consumers of their content. Journos at the Global Mail were guilty of the sin of creating a job which fulfilled all their needs, not necessarily the needs of the audience. I'm sure that's not what Graeme intended, but the lack of urgency which his obligation-free funding encouraged has led to the evident problems. Journalism startups are just like any other startup, they will fail if they are not instantly responsive to user feedback. So there won't be any journalism - investigative, pure, or otherwise - if there is a disconnect between journalist and audience.<br />
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2013 is the year where I would hope to see half a dozen other Alan Kohlers emerge at the head of other jackal startups, scampering across the savannah, scavenging the scraps from the pungent masses of rotting flesh where their former employers used to be. Now is the time when the ideas for these startups should be brainstormed, if not already. Good luck.<br />
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Note: <a href="http://www.crikey.com.au/2012/12/19/where-are-they-now-losses-at-news-fairfax-are-prs-gain/">early signs</a> are not, sadly, hopeful.Paul Montgomeryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18345309776406933213noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18155905.post-77944914797628074162012-01-04T23:52:00.003+11:002012-01-05T00:39:08.140+11:00Seven year niche2011 has been and gone, and it's been almost a year since I've blogged here. Time for a bit of an update.<br /><br />I didn't get <a href="http://tinfinger.blogspot.com/2011/01/facebook-games-ccgs-board-games-and-mr.html">Mr Football</a> finished in time for the start of last football season, and truth be told I may struggle to get it fully up and running as a Facebook app in time for the 2012 season. As I expected, I was not mentally able to keep myself working on it once football season had started. The offseason has been far more productive on that score, albeit that I am behind schedule on where I wanted to be.<br /><br />I'm kicking myself that I only thought of the idea for Mr Football after Christmas in 2011, as I wasted the last three months of 2010 moping around, thinking my business was going to flatten off as Dream Team and Supercoach registrations had also flattened off. Despite fantasy registrations again showing zero change in 2011, FanFooty surged on regardless at the same exact growth rate in real terms as the year before, making it a full 100% increase in revenue and traffic in 2011 over 2009. This pleasant surprise has made my life a lot easier.<br /><br />I can foresee many more opportunities now than I could back in Q4 2010. I am now confident that FanFooty's growth is not tied to fantasy registrations, so I see no reason why it shouldn't continue to grow as it has done, if I keep pouring the same amout of energy into it. If it doesn't, well, it's big enough now to keep me going. Mr Football is coming along nicely, if slowly, and I think it's going to be a solid product with the elusive (in a Facebook context) quality of staying power. <br /><br />News of (possibly) forthcoming fantasy sports television program <a href="http://dreamteamtalk.com/2011/09/27/support-the-fan-show/">The Fan Show</a> is very promising, and I hope to help out Warnie and the lads where I can to make it a success. <br /><br />I will also be getting back into "serious" blogging in 2012, at a new location.<br /><br />Nevertheless, there are still significant challenges facing me and the business. I'm still not part of the official AFL family, even after seven years of building the site up to be top 500 in Australian traffic in winter months. This is an ongoing regret to me. There are things I would like to do from inside the tent that I am unable to do. I don't know if a rapprochement is ever going to be possible given the politics of the situation. I'd like to think so. <br /><br />I'd also like to expand the business on the production side beyond just me, particularly this year when Saturdays are going to be so hectic. I don't know how workable that is going to be, as it involves accountants and payroll and all those extraneous complications I have been avoiding for years. <br /><br />The mobile side of FF has also been sorely neglected, in the sense that I still don't have an app for iPhone or Android. Based on trend data, more than half of traffic to FF will come from mobile devices this year, which is quite astounding really. Do I even need an app? Of course I do. But what will it do to my revenue model? I am a believer in ad-less apps as I don't think ads on mobiles work, which means I would give up a significant amount of ad impressions. Can the revenue from the app outweigh that? I don't know. This dilemma is part of why I have been de-prioritising the app behind Mr Football, I suppose, as the whole issue is full of doubt to me.<br /><br />I'm not a worrier, as such, but I have been feeling a bit lately as if I am sick of things always hanging and never seemingly being done with, of there always being a huge barrow in front of me that I have to lug ever onwards. Finishing off Mr Football would help that feeling immensely, of course. But then I'd want to expand that code to other sports. The process of creation never ends. That's part of being an entrepreneur, though! So I'm being silly. I know. Gnomes aren't going to visit in the night and finish my cobbling for me. I do hope I don't have this feeling forever, though.<br /><br />Overall, I have very little to complain about, notwithstanding the above. I am completely in control of my destiny and financially beholden to no one, which is where every entrepreneur wants to be. Deadlines are ruffling my hair and making that familiar whooshing sound as they go by. I trudge on. Soon, hopefully, I will once again experience that sweet emotion I am working towards: the warm feeling in the pit of my belly called satisfaction. :)Paul Montgomeryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18345309776406933213noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18155905.post-70220719121859255712011-01-25T14:58:00.005+11:002011-01-25T16:41:30.538+11:00Facebook games, CCGs, board games and Mr FootballToday I announced the <a href="http://www.fanfooty.com.au/mrfootball/demo1.php">first public demo code</a> for my new project tentatively titled Mr Football, which is an Australian football management simulation game which is intended to launch across Web, Facebook, iPhone/iPad and other mobile platforms throughout the year. It's just me building it on my own, folks, so it's not going to be speedy. The reason I'm blogging about it here on my largely neglected Tinfinger blog is that (a) I like to post feature-length dissertations for historical purposes on this blog, and (b) in researching Mr Football's ruleset and technical structure, I had a lot of thoughts which I would like to get down in pixels while it's all swirling in my head.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_04numGx66bY/TT5iJMI6ZYI/AAAAAAAAADU/szQ-M-dRfQ0/s1600/mrfootball1.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 200px; height: 281px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_04numGx66bY/TT5iJMI6ZYI/AAAAAAAAADU/szQ-M-dRfQ0/s320/mrfootball1.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5565994099493463426" /></a>First, a bit of an explanation as to the influences behind making this game. FanFooty, while it is an excellent site of which I am very proud, does not consume all of my time, especially in the offseason. I am thus left at my leisure in the sunny months, whereby my idle mind turns to thoughts of new projects. I got hooked on some Facebook games this summer, two of which are significant influences on Mr Football: Atomic Moguls' whitelabel game for CBSSports.com called <a href="http://apps.facebook.com/franchise-football/en/football/simulation/index">Franchise Football</a>, and EA Sports' <a href="http://apps.facebook.com/maddennflsuperstars/">Madden NFL Superstars</a>. Both of these games launched in 2010, with at current count Madden <a href="http://www.appdata.com/apps/facebook/138575656172984-madden-nfl-superstars">holding steady</a> making good use of its official NFL licence at 1.8 million monthly active users and Franchise Football <a href="http://www.appdata.com/apps/facebook/138368046186693-cbssports-com-franchise-football">trending downwards</a> at a mere 68,000 without licence or player images.<br /><br />Both of these games are, like many of the insanely popular games from Zynga and its clones like Farmville and Cityville which are <a href="http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/6244/cityville_explained_part_1.php">introduced in this GamaSutra series</a>, based on collectible card games (CCGs). You click, click, click and then click some more until you get enough of the in-game currency to buy a virtual item. Rinse and repeat until you collect them all... ah, but when you have the full set, they bring out more stuff for you to collect. The items are intrinsically worthless, having only the virtue of scarcity (to start with) and social investment. There is no strategy to success apart from faithful repetition, unless you have real life cash to speed the process up.<br /><br />The analogy with card collecting is made even more stark in Madden NFL Superstars because instead of choosing the players you want on your team, you have to buy randomly seeded virtual card packs and hope that your favourites fall your way eventually, just like collecting real sports cards. Both of these games are highly limited in scope, which is I think why Franchise Football is falling away to nothing and Madden is levelling out in popularity - although that may be seasonal as the NFL draws to its January close.<br /><br />The main structural problem with these games is that they are linear, not cyclical. There's a progression to collecting the best items, then after that it's a dead end of boredom watching your perfect set of numbers tick over like cells in a spreadsheet. There's no "management" game there at all: no tactics, no choices, just maximising totals. The game makers have to keep creating new items to maintain interest, Zynga-style. That's all very well when you are Zynga working your own intellectual property, and can think up endless new items to throw at players (though I'd argue even that has its limit). In sports games based on the real leagues, however, you can't make up new players.<br /><br />Given that the CCG market itself went through a revolution more than a decade ago with the advent of Magic: The Gathering, which combined the collection formula with legitimate gameplay mechanics, I am surprised that Facebook game developers have chosen to stick with the old paradigm. It seems to me to be a no-brainer to adapt successful M:TG tropes, which themselves rely on the ancient technique of rock-paper-scissors to add contrast and factionalism to gameplaying. In short, M:TG cards come in five colours which corresponded to five different types of card types which enable varied playstyles, some of which are better or worse at defeating others in a rochambeau manner. If MT:G's current owners Wizards of the Coast had their shit together, they might have dominated Facebook by now, at least among their nerd demographic.<br /><br />Thinking about all of these things led me to go back to an old favourite game of mine: Blood Bowl, <a href="http://tinfinger.blogspot.com/2005/10/marx-on-ceiling-or-zen-of-ding.html">which I have blogged about before</a> on these pages (five years ago, really??). Go read that post for background, but in short, Blood Bowl is a board game based on American gridiron football with some intricate and well balanced league rules for creating and maintaining franchises over time with rules for building and developing many different kinds of teams with a lot of replayability. The game was embraced and extended by the site FUMBBL.com (which is still going strong) into an online gaming community juggernaut with myriad complexities unforeseen by the game's creator. As in the first paragraph of that old post, I felt that this along with the aforementioned elements were training me to brainstorm something better, using bits of the old plus my own creativity.<br /><br />This has led to the carpet in my apartment getting a bit ratty lately, as when I am thinking hard I tend to pace, and there's not much room to wander at my place. Over the course of the last three weeks or so, I have dreamt up and am now coding my response to all these inputs, in the form of a game which I hope will bypass the flaws of previous efforts. Like Blood Bowl, every random element is resolved via structured dice rolls, although in this case I am taking advantage of the whole thing being computer-based to roll far more dice than a real life board game player would be able to withstand without getting RSI - something I learned from the Civilization video game series, which is effectively the world's most complex board game.<br /><br />Unlike Franchise Football and Madden, in Mr Football players are developed, have a good run and then age and retire. Also, you can't just buy the best players with money, you have to pick them in randomised drafts when they are young and undeveloped. In fact, Mr Football has no currency for buying items or players whatsoever at this stage. This subverts the collection mechanic at a fundamental level, and means that teams will rise and fall in cycles as good players come and go through your list. Trying to fight the cyclical nature of sport and instead build an lasting dynasty will be the core dynamic of Mr Football.<br /><br />You may ask: if there's no items to buy in microtransactions, and Facebook apps are notoriously hard to monetise through advertising, where's the beef? I didn't say there would be nothing to buy. If the core gameplay is sound, then I am hoping that players will pay money to expand their ability to play. This will mean having regular pay-to-play tournaments, divisions, leagues and special events. FUMBBL has developed a number of good ideas for this sort of thing, so I'm standing on the shoulders of giants here.<br /><br />That's not to say that I think I have thought everything out already. Players of other games complain about various game mechanics that encourage cheesiness and gamesmanship by coaches to gain advantage. At FUMBBL it's "cherrypicking", where coaches are able to beat up on lesser opponents to pad their win stats and avoid injuries. In Franchise Football it's "sandbagging", where teams load up on draft picks of good players in lower divisions despite their teams being good enough to advance, thus making things harder for teams that do want to progress. Fans of Madden have started to emulate the Zynga hardcore users by employing third party scripts to abuse the gifting system. They can now spam 40 gifts at a time to other players on Facebook and accept 40 back per day en masse with a single click. It's madness, really! <br /><br />In this vein of minmaxing, I fully expect the real AFL bugbear of "tanking" to rear its ugly head in Mr Football. Under the current draft rules, coaches will play to lose for dozens of games on end despite having a good squad, just so they can get better draft picks to go on a dynastic run in the future with a crop of great players drafted in successive seasons. I'm not sure how to combat this... though to be frank, neither is the AFL. Unlike Andrew Demetriou, though, I don't have the luxury of putting my head in the sand about such a crucial issue of competitiveness and fairness. f I get it wrong, the game will suck and ultimately fail.<br /><br />That's all to come in the future, though. At the moment I'm still enjoying myself immensely, in the early stages of architecting what I hope will be a very good product. It's a lot of fun to make, hopefully it will be a lot of fun to play. :)Paul Montgomeryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18345309776406933213noreply@blogger.com12tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18155905.post-87991430381268049572010-07-28T04:54:00.005+10:002010-07-28T15:44:57.801+10:00A template for an Australian HuffPoThe thought of an Australian <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com">Huffington Post</a> is one that has occupied the minds of those greater than I ever since HuffPo laid down the template for a professional group blog that would become so huge as to rival newspapers for size of audience and breadth of coverage.<br /><br />I've been thinking about how to deliver this concept in the Australian market for a number of years now. On various occasions, I have tried to interest others with complementary skill sets in the local Web community to start this venture with me, Voltron style. Building an MTUB supergroup seems to be in the too hard basket for now, and I'm busy with <a href="http://www.fanfooty.com.au">FanFooty</a> for the moment, so I think it's safe to publicise my thoughts on this without fear of giving up precious defendable IP.<br /><br />The first and most important thing to note about building a HuffPo for the local market is that the model will have to be significantly different to the original, if only because Australia doesn't have nearly the same economies of scale that publishing in America does. With a population 15 times that of Australia, American publishers can afford to appeal to relatively narrow niches and make traffic targets up in volume. Crucially, American news blogs can also afford to have a relatively low number of pages per visit due to their high number of unique browsers. Local blogs like News Ltd's <a href="http://www.thepunch.com.au">The Punch</a>, Fairfax's <a href="http://www.nationaltimes.com.au">National Times</a>, Text Media's <a href="http://www.crikey.com.au">Crikey</a> and <a href="http://newmatilda.com">New Matilda</a> (deceased) survive (or not) on a handful of page views per user. This is unacceptable, given our lack of critical mass of users in the target market for such publications. Thus the site must be built around generating repeat visits, user loyalty, and interactivity to keep them engaged.<br /><br />I'm assuming here that anyone who wants to build such a site is not going to have anything beyond basic seed funding, with maybe a bit of angel money. Such person/s would probably have experience in both the journalism industry and also be a part of the local Twitterati. These two factors would mean that the vexed question of how to generate content early doors from limited financial resources would lead to reliance on one or both of these constituencies, without payment. This was the case for BackPageLead, <a href="http://www.backpagelead.com.au/our-team">for instance</a>, whose contributor list was built from the old journo contacts of ex-journos Ashley Browne and Charles Happell. The Punch's contributors are mostly News Ltd hacks slumming it online, politicians and other spruikers pushing a line, with David Penberthy recruiting the occasional Twitterati superstar like Bronwen Clune to spice things up now and then. Crikey's attempts at blogging beyond their core politics beat (and their paywall) have been abortive, to say the least.<br /><br />The HuffPo model has always been <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michelle-haimoff/the-world-of-free-and-the_b_225533.html">not to pay contributors anything</a>, even now when the enterprise earns millions of dollars in advertising revenue per year. They have been able to do this because there is a large number of urban intellectuals in the US who get shut out of the opinion columns of mainstream newspapers like the New York Times but still want to have their voices heard, regardless of remuneration. This has lead to accusations that <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michelle-haimoff/how-the-huffington-post-c_b_231719.html">HuffPo is a mouthpiece for celebrities and the rich</a>.<br /><br />In my opinion, this lack of ability and/or inclination to pay contributors in the Australian context leads to an unsatisfactory result for all concerned. The spruikers are participating for their own selfish reasons, so they aren't interested in building your business, only pushing their own barrows. Their disconnect with the audience, at whom they are barking their message, leads to a lack of comments and a lack of follow on page views. Readers have something to bitch about in the short term, but ultimately it hurts their engagement with the brand. Slumming MSM journos also have their own agendas, be they political or professional, and they are not trained to produce that subtle blend of srs bsns and troll that constitutes quality comment-generating linkbait in an online environment. More to the point, they seem unwilling to learn such skills, with their heads still mired in newspaper country.<br /><br />No, the only way to develop such talent is to pay them, I reckon, so that you have complete editorial control over their development as specialist bloggers. At the very least, if you want to maintain the HuffPo model for scaling content outside your core of paid bloggers, that's fine, but you have to set the tone for the rest of the site by instructing those bloggers to blog the way you want the publication to go. These are probably not going to be MSM journos who are retrained, because it would require abandoning the habits of a lifetime, not to mention actively attacking the basic tenets of newspapers if not their business models. They are probably not going to be recruited from the upper echelons of the Twitterati either, as I have found from my (admittedly feeble) efforts. <br /><br />There's a chicken and egg situation here: how to make money in the short term to pay these bloggers? News Ltd and Fairfax have the money, but they're not going to give it to the likes of Penbo to spend on actual bloggers, because they have a hard enough time justifying paying all the old journalists on their books as it is. The Punch and the NT are milksops of the online community, emasculated by their parent companies so that their only possible goal is to block a real HuffPo clone from destroying their hosts. Crikey doesn't have the money either, limited as it is by its newsletter income and unable to bootstrap the content outside its paywall to sufficient levels of traffic to garner significant advertising revenue.<br /><br />All of these factors lead me to believe that a successful HuffPo clone in Australia has to start outside the strict HuffPo model of journalistic-style blog content. The Punch has come the closest in its ongoing liveblogging of Question Time, but it's still way behind the one I think has the only chance to work in the Australian context. This technique is stolen shamelessly from my own experiences at FanFooty, so feel free to denigrate it on that basis, but it's what I know and I think it could work outside the sports ghetto.<br /><br />The key is to liveblog as much as you can. Liveblogging, when done right in a technical sense, is arguably the greatest page view generator you could have on a blog. This means developing your own code to run your liveblogging pages. Specifically, chuck that CoverItLive crap, or any other Flash-based solution, straight to the shizenhausen. Flash chat is unwieldy, ugly, unmanageable and, most importantly, restricts your repeat page view count to make it almost counter-productive to liveblog in the first place. You must invest in creating an AJAX solution with autogenerated page refreshes to drive up ad impressions. I can not stress this point enough. This includes video- or audio-based liveblogging through sites like Ustream or justin.tv, where you can still have an auto-refreshing text chat in a frame with the live Flash app in another frame (for an example, see the <a href="http://www.fanfooty.com.au/video">live audio podcast page</a> I built for the weekly Coaches Box podcast).<br /><br />For those thinking that this is a rather evil little trick to inflate page views that would hurt advertiser ROI, I would argue that if you get people watching the same page with its dynamically updated AJAX liveblogging content for five or ten minutes and continuing to watch that page after it refreshes, doesn't your site deserve the CPM from that extra page view? In the absence of any other method to reward the extra stickiness and time-on-site that comes from AJAX content, the page refresh is the best way to ensure publishers get value for such high levels of engagement.<br /><br />Right, with that out of the way, what do you liveblog? The simple answer is: any experience that people can share in that moment. Most usually, this will mean live events that people are aware of through other media, like television or the radio. Of course, you're not going to liveblog AFL because FanFooty's got that market covered ( :P ) but sports are an obvious target for what is called <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-screen_solutions">two-screen solutions</a>. Perhaps more crucially, there is a massive opportunity to liveblog primetime TV shows. Back when Big Brother was in its hey day, Southern Star Endemol did an excellent job creating tie-in Web content to the show, but ever since then there has been not much at all to distinguish the local TV industry's online efforts. Q&A integrates with Twitter somewhat by publishing highlights of tweets including the #qanda hashtag, but much more could be done along these lines, especially with highly structured shows. Game shows like Masterchef, Spicks & Specks and Good News Week are low hanging fruit waiting to be picked. Panel discussion shows such as The 7PM Project, Q&A and Insight are ripe for liveblogging for those frustrated couch jockeys who want to participate in the debate. Even drama shows like Sea Patrol and Underbelly are suited for liveblogging, though you'd probably have to restrict that to local productions for fear of trolls spoiling the endings to shows that have already aired overseas.<br /><br />Beyond TV-based liveblogging, there are some news events that demand their own liveblogging, which may include other media but are not reliant on it. Weather events like bushfires, earthquakes, heat waves and hailstorms are perfect for liveblogging, especially ones that happen out of the blue. Currently, there is no one Web site in Australia that people go to for instant information when something like that occurs, which to me speaks of a market opportunity for someone who can build a system that can react in real time to sudden news flashes like that. The history of news blogs on the Web is littered with publications who made their names on covering live events and garnered whole new swathes of new fans by providing information they weren't getting in old media. The key here is that the liveblogging screen must include all possible relevant information, linking where appropriate and keeping users on your own site where possible. Thus you can probably get away with hosting weather charts and alerts sourced from the BOM, but you won't be able to post live video of a prime ministerial resignation speech from Sky News or ABC News 24 - though a quickly typed transcription would be fantastic.<br /><br />There are several points to make here about liveblogging. Twitter and Facebook integration can only take you so far. There is the right way to do it - Melbourne's own Duncan Riley managed to increase his page views per user on Inquisitr from something around 1.5 to 4 or 5 now after integrating Facebook commenting earlier this year - and there is the wrong way to do it, as in the AFL's integration of Twitter hashtag commenting in its live Flash app. The primary concern should be that all of your social media efforts should be geared to increasing visits and page views back at your own site. You're not in the business of growing Twitter or Facebook, you're leeching off their users. Don't be ashamed of that.<br /><br />For users to want to come to your site to join in the chat, the mere fact of sharing the experience of whatever it is that you're liveblogging is not going to be enough to get traffic up to sustainable levels. You have to provide information that you won't get anywhere else, or at least not as easily. For FanFooty, the live stats are augmented by news snippets on each player written by me in real time as I watch games on TV or listen on radio, including injuries, matchups and form vignettes. For liveblogging a show like Masterchef, even though you wouldn't be an official partner with access to content before it airs, listing the ingredients of each dish as they are being prepared on screen would be a valuable resource. Online bios of guests on chat shows, abstracts of and links to news stories being discussed on panel shows, even thumbnail screenshots taken from live TV feeds of what the onscreen personalities are wearing... it's all up for inclusion in your liveblog as auxiliary content to add to the experience of watching or listening live.<br /><br />In addition to your employees liveblogging all this content, they have to become experienced community managers, with particular emphasis on moderation of the chat on live blogs. Some liveblog subjects will appeal to a more mature crowd who will only require a soft touch, but I can tell you from my experiences moderating chats populated by rowdy teenage boys that a live chat on the Internet can get very willing if there is not a firm grasp by the publisher on what is and isn't allowed to be said. This does not necessarily mean having to approve every line of chat before it is submitted, as often happens in CoverItLive. Apart from anything else, this is unworkable when your site scales as you would hope that it would do. A simple swear filter and a frequent use of the ban stick is sufficient to set the tone of the chat, in my experience, and all but an easily squashed minority will follow the leader and act appropriately.<br /><br />All of this content is well worth reusing to further drive up page views. Logs of your inhouse-sourced liveblogged material and edited highlights of the audience chat can be excellent traffic generators. Reaching out further to the Twitter and Facebook crowds can be very productive, such as republishing all of the #qanda zingers that didn't make it past the ABC censors to the live TV scroll. <br /><br />Free content contribution is the core of the HuffPo model, but that doesn't mean that you have to source that content entirely through the old newspaper model of editors sifting through freelance submissions, as HuffPo still does. That technique is still useful for certain types of content, of course, but opening your site up to live, (somewhat) unfiltered participation from non-professionals who are enjoying themselves on your site is an invaluable way of generating both content and page views at the same time. In the Australian industry, hamstrung as it is by a small population and a tiny pool of skilled bloggers, I would argue it is mandatory to look outside the basic structure to make the business work in local conditions.Paul Montgomeryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18345309776406933213noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18155905.post-37722678639947193312010-07-20T20:50:00.006+10:002010-07-20T21:20:42.008+10:00IT lizards feast on the filter fishA number of technology media outlets in Australia have just finished running a poll on the mandatory Internet filtering issue, as the latest in a series of examples of what I would call "journalistic activism". The list of titles comprises the Sydney Morning Herald, News.com.au, APC, PC Authority, PC User, PC World, GoodGearGuide, Gizmodo, Life Hacker, Delimiter, Atomic, ITNews, ITWire, Metaversejournal, OCAU, Australian Sex Party and Kogan.com.au. Whirlpool and the CNET/ZDNet stable of sites ran their own polls with similar results. The main poll, run through PollDaddy, went as follows.<br /><br /><blockquote>Would you vote for a political party that supports the internet filter?<br /><br />Yes: 809 votes, 2%<br />No: 37,228 votes, 97%<br />Don't care: 390 votes, 1% <br /><br />Total votes: 38,427</blockquote><br />As a former tech journo (a.k.a. "lizard") myself, I am sceptical about the modern phenomenon of journalists putting aside their professional objectivity and actively campaigning against the filter, as with this poll and Gizmodo's <a href="http://www.gizmodo.com.au/tags/fight-the-filter/">Fight the Filter</a> stunt. This is not because I am pro-filter, far from it. My political leanings are far to the left of the journo mainstream, and I am disgusted by the prospect of a filter.<br /><br />I am old enough to remember at least two separate cycles of the mandatory Internet filtering issue through the federal houses, both of which eventually failed on technical grounds. My view is that it's a complete non-issue in the wider scheme of things, much like how boat people are only 2% of illegal immigrants yet they get 100% of the coverage. I have always trusted in the technology to fail time and time again. All the lobbying in the world is useless compared to the disapproval of people like Mike Malone and Simon Hackett, who have personally put the kibosh on this policy before and will do so again.<br /><br />Thus, all this breathless wall-to-wall converage of utterances of whichever minister has been tasked with winning over right-wing minor parties in the Senate this time - Richard Alston courting Brian Harradine, Steven Conroy sucking up to Steve Fielding, et al - looks to me like so much hot air. Journos can make a name for themselves by yelling about the issue because it's an easy page view grabber, plus they gain instant brownie points with the strong libertarian faction in the IT audience. However, the more journos report on this issue, the more Alston/Conroy love it, as they can walk into Harradine/Fielding's office and point to Something Being Done about the conservative bugbear issue. After the government has squeezed as many Senate votes as possible out of their inexperienced patsy parliamentarian, the ISPs finally deliver a damning technical report and the minister can throw his hands up in mock shock and console the poor Senator about how it Just Wasn't Possible.<br /><br />The whole thing is completely cynical, exploiting those who don't know their history and are doomed to repeat it. Sir Humphrey would be proud. It's the sort of issue that I would expect seasoned journos to see through very quickly, yet many continue to fight the good fight, in some cases taking up the bayonets themselves. If you, as a journo, want to treat opinion pieces as an opportunity to air your personal views, that's your right if the editor allows it, but I think that's a waste of the reader's time and should be kept to blogs or Twitter if aired at all. Opinion pieces are an opportunity to take a longer view, delve behind the bare facts that you report elsewhere, and try to identify bigger trends and deeper truths. Again, just my opinion.<br /><br />The government is safe in the knowledge that the filter will never be a big election issue in the mainstream media, because political journos don't think IT issues are relevant to voters - with strong justification, IMO. Journos can blog until you're blue in the face on Giz or elsewhere but they would be lucky to hear a single question on the subject in the televised election debates. The only people who care enough about it to get passionate are two aspects of the far right: the religious fundamentalists and the libertarians. If the libertarians elected federal Senators with the balance of power I'm sure Conroy would be sucking up to them, but they don't so they can be ignored. <br /><br />As has already been seen in the first days of the official election campaign, the economy and dog whistle issues dominate the debate. Those of us who have lived through enough elections to have seen it happen before can only groan at the cynicism of the entire fishing expedition.<br /><br />Note: the above is a fixup of my contribution to a discussion on a private mailing list.Paul Montgomeryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18345309776406933213noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18155905.post-14209400580260868362010-05-24T03:50:00.003+10:002010-05-24T04:43:53.673+10:00Cannibalise your bootstrapsI am planning to launch a version of FanFooty for the iPhone this week, after testing it in the weekend just gone. No, this is not just a puff piece for my site, I have actually got some mildly interesting thoughts to lay out, despite that rather boring first line.<br /><br />I have always treated mobile Internet with the greatest of suspicion. Back when the Earth was young and dinosaurs roamed the fetid swamps of Elsternwick, I was a technology journalist during the first boom, and I heard chapter and verse about how the mobile Web was coming, just around the corner, wait and see. Very quickly, I developed an extremely jaundiced view over whether there was any future at all in mobile browsing, given how interminably sluggish the Australian industry is, and how shockingly backwards our competition environment is in telecoms. I remained right all the way through that first boom, and I had nothing to challenge my view until the advent of the iPhone.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_04numGx66bY/S_lzXYHg6HI/AAAAAAAAADA/FOCUlYquuW4/s1600/65b61263d9ca84544d3e36c21962a40e.png"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 214px; height: 320px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_04numGx66bY/S_lzXYHg6HI/AAAAAAAAADA/FOCUlYquuW4/s320/65b61263d9ca84544d3e36c21962a40e.png" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5474533667493701746" /></a>Even the iPhone started relatively slowly in Australia, but 2010 is the year it has really taken off. iPhone ownership has jumped from 7% penetration to 15% in a year, I am told, and FanFooty's numbers show a similar jump from 5% to 15% year-on-year to April 2010 from the previous April.<br /><br />I was talking on a forum somewhere last week about current threats to FanFooty, and the major one I could come up with in a standard SWOT analysis was the iPhone. It's a gamechanger. It also represents an opportunity for an application like FF, which is designed to be ultra-low bandwidth and maximum availability for high traffic spikes. One of the design criticisms of FF has always been that it looked "clunky" but my spartan aesthetic appears to work like a charm on the iPhone, where extraneous graphics, excessive page weight and long load times are a much bigger issue than on the mainstream of today's broadband-saturated Web.<br /><br />Monetisation is my major issue. I have no experience with mobile advertising, so I am wary of committing to a new partner when my current one is going so well at the moment. Apparently AdMob, which has just been eaten by the Big G, is the main game so it would be an old partner I guess. My first inclination is to offer an ad-free version and charge users an annual fee directly through the iPhone App Store. I have already done the sums about how much money I make per user per year from advertising, and will adjust the iPhone app price to suit. That does lock out Nokia, Blackberry, Android and other mobile users though, which adds up to another 5% of the whole. I guess a separate ad-supported mobile version is the next step. Three versions of the one site, it's starting to get a bit unwieldy! Then there's the iPad coming over the hill...<br /><br />Intertwined with this issue is exactly how mobile usage fits into the overall Web consumption habits of the average punter. Will mobile usage replace or complement desktop Web usage? Is it just the case that mobile will only replace desktop when users are out of the house, or will they work their thumbs over sitting on the couch fiddling with their JesusPhone even when a PC is in the next room? How does the iPad work into that dynamic, is its usage pattern more mobile-like or more PC-like, or something else entirely? How much does each of the three cannibalise usage of the other? These are all important questions to site operators like me, because - ironically - we now actually have to turf to defend, namely the "traditional" Web usage environment where publishers get more screen real estate to show more ads to the user. I can hear the newspaper owners' crocodile tears from here!<br /><br />Last time I looked at the Web advertising industry in depth, the trend seemed to be with bigger display ad formats and shovelware TVCs in video pop-ups. I have benefited from the latter on FF, though I have refrained from the former as I think it's a sign of desperation from the agencies. Users are now flocking to mobiles where the opportunities for advertising are reduced in size and scope, which could be more than just a casual correlation if my gut feeling is right. I need to do some research into what the response by the publishing and advertising industries has been to the mobile explosion. How much revenue for content on the iPhone comes via app sales and how much via advertising and marketing? Is the iPhone a catalyst for a solid shift in monetisation away from advertising and towards user-pays models? Or is it another case of the whole being lesser than the sum of the parts in the older medium?<br /><br />This is the world we are living in as of 2010. Apple has complicated the Web development environment just like the old browser wars, lengthening the dev cycle and calling into question the economics of the Web publishing industry. I would appreciate comments from people who are more experienced in this field than I, as it appears I have a lot of reading to do.Paul Montgomeryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18345309776406933213noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18155905.post-28763724291040579082010-01-11T02:08:00.003+11:002010-01-13T18:19:10.694+11:00What gets me up in the morning?I used <a href="http://tinfinger.blogspot.com/2010/01/year-my-startup-broke-in-good-way.html">my last post</a> to look back on the first five years of FanFooty, and while it was cathartic to get the minutiae of history down all at once, there are a few more things I would like to say about my experiences.<br /><br />I was asked on Twitter by Leslie Nassar about whether the first post was hard to write, and I had to admit that no, it wasn't. I am a feature writer from way back so my posts tend to be essay-length, and they tend to well up from my subconscious like so much molten lava, so that when they erupt it's more of a relief from pressure than a chore. Thus, I pondered afterward, I probably didn't give enough of myself in the telling. After five years there are bound to be things that are difficult to say, but should be said anyway.<br /><br />I was asked a question the other day, by a fellow traveler down this long road of starting a startup. Why are we doing this? Why do we go on? Why do we get up in the morning? Why do we keep doing this to ourselves? Why?<br /><br />The reason I have been giving in public when asked something like this has been that I wanted to test myself. I had been covering Internet startups during the first boom, meeting a lot of entrepreneurs, and I had the (hubricious) thought that I was just as good as these guys (or the rare girl), and I wanted to see if I could really hack it in this field. This caused me to join AusBONE, which ended up not being successful. I didn't have the sales skills at that time to really understand how to do cold calls, which was my primary role. Even if I had done much better, though, events overtook me and everyone else in the industry when the bubble burst and it didn't end up mattering.<br /><br />Fast forward to 2004 and I finally got on the entrepreneur horse - for real this time as a founder, not just as an employee of someone else's startup. Part of it was desperation, as my other work prospects weren't appealing. The old desire to prove myself was still there. I have always been interested in expanding the boundaries of my skill set, as I am a firm believer in continuous education. It had been high school since I had last done any programming work, and PHP was easy enough for me to pick up without too much bridging work needed between my old BASIC knowledge.<br /><br />That is the frontbrain explanation, which is usually all that is said in articles like this. Let me delve a little into the hindbrain. A large part of my motivation for doing what I do is anger. There, I said it. There are parts of my life that generate anger for me specifically, like the way I am treated by some people, or the deficiencies and weaknesses in my own character that continue to limit my potential. I am angry at certain individuals, and for some of them I know my anger is irrational, but that only increases the effect because I add anger at myself for being so damn childish. Sometimes the anger does turn in on itself, and I become unproductive. I'm not saying it's healthy in any way. However, when I can untangle the chains of anger and stop them whipping me, they can pull me with great strength in some sort of forward direction.<br /><br />That is not to say that every entrepreneur is angry, or should act out of anger. Startup founders usually have strong egos or, if you don't like overtly Freudian language, a strong sense of self. To consider yourself worthy to be a founder in the first place usually means you have a diverse range of skills and a set of accomplishments you can look back on with pride, so the position self-selects for people who have credible confidence in themselves. I know some founders who act mostly out of love... for themselves, for their families (sometimes as an extension of themselves), for causes. Acting out of a positive affirmation of your own abilities is a perfectly healthy way for founders to operate. If you choose to label this as egotistical or narcissistic, that's your concern. Founders who can use their knowledge of their own mind to strengthen their resolve to act to benefit themselves have a better chance than most to succeed.<br /><br />Getting down to work as a founder, when you don't have a boss sitting over your shoulder or a fortnightly paycheck that is on the line, sometimes requires using both of the above motivating factors. At other times, it feels to me like you have to actually ignore your own emotions. This is particularly true for those who hack code a lot, as losing yourself in thousands of lines of computer language is an intellectual exercise.<br /><br />What gets me up in the morning? A sense of purpose. Sure, I don't have a partner or a family to support (or who support me). Would I like to be in that situation? Sure. Those in relationships can subsume their own personality into a gestalt entity, and gain strength from the whole. Plus, you know, chicks are soft and all. Nevertheless, I believe that is a separate thing from the distinctive emotional underpinning of why you continue to work at a start-up... as opposed to turning your brain off, donning a suit and taking a salary in a cubicle. Being a founder means that you have a strong sense of self, independent of familial roots, and part of your personality is tied up in being a founder. To deny that part of you, even if crazy shit is going on in other parts of your life, is to deny an essential part of yourself. No matter if you run on love, commitment, hope or anger, you must keep running, if for no one else's sake but your own. No one can survive on denial.Paul Montgomeryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18345309776406933213noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18155905.post-5307274950879214832010-01-03T13:16:00.004+11:002010-01-03T17:06:10.170+11:00The Year My Startup Broke (in a good way)December 2009 marked five years of operation for FanFooty, my Australian fantasy football site. I guess after five years you can't call it a start-up any more, it's just a business. Time is as good as any to look for backward and forward, now that I have reached what I consider to be a tipping point.<br /><br />Back in December of 2004, my new housemate Tai Tran came to me and said that if I had an idea for a business to start, then he'd be interested in doing it together. Tai was about my age, had a professional background in corporate development, and was a likable bloke. He had the coding chops and I had the writing ability, and we both had proven track records in our fields. It seemed like a workable pairing.<br /><br />I was introduced to the fantasy sports concept by some American friends of mine and got hooked. Looking around the Australian scene, I could see that it was sorely underdeveloped compared to the American and even the English industries. Even at that stage it was a billion-dollar business in the US involving 1 in 12 Americans, with ESPN, Yahoo, Sportsline.com and a host of others competing for big dollars; plus every major newspaper in the UK had a fantasy EPL game, with prizes well into six figure pound ranges. At the time here, there was only the AFL Dream Team competition with less than 50,000 players, and a handful of amateur efforts with virtually no patronage, but the upcoming year of 2005 was when DT numbers exploded to over 130,000 and the graph has been jumping every year since. It was the right time to start the business.<br /><br />As with countless other startups in a myriad industries, our feeble plan as to what our business would look like and how it would make its money did not survive engagement with reality. My original thought was that the Australian industry had developed too far along English lines, focused around mass-entry salary cap competitions, and there was a perfect opportunity to expand into the American-style private draft leagues for small groups of 8-16 friends, and we would be at the forefront of it. The first thing we found was how difficult it was to build a private draft fantasy football application. I was learning PHP from scratch, not having had any programming education since high school (though I taught myself BASIC on my old Commodore 128D), but I had the business logic all in my head so it became rather time-consuming to explain how the application worked to Tai, who had no knowledge of or interest in sport, so that he could go away and write the code.<br /><br />Nevertheless, we got the code done with Tai learning as much about AJAX techniques for the very tricky live drafting component as I did about PHP for the less difficult pages, and we had a workable application. Then came the dose of reality. We had very few customers. With no venture capital behind us to fund any sort of marketing budget, all I could do was hit the message boards to talk it up. That wasn't enough. That part of the business has been a waste of time, to put it bluntly. Five years later and no one, including VirtualSports as the official provider of its version called Premium Dream Team, has made much of a fist of the US-style private draft form of the game. The market opportunity still exists.<br /><br />Back in FanFooty's debut AFL season of 2005, it didn't take me long to figure out a second possible revenue stream: live fantasy scoring. The official Dream Team site wasn't offering it at the time, but it seemed like a no-brainer for me as I was used to Sportsline and the other American fantasy providers who all provided live scoring. The feature was moderately popular in the first year, with site traffic reaching the dizzy heights of 20,000 page views in a couple of weeks and even swamping our meagre server resources by the start of May. In those first few months I created more and more pages from a combination of my own inspiration and feedback from users, setting up some of the fundamental features of the site which still drive traffic to this day. Even with Google AdSense, nevertheless, the revenue was barely covering the site hosting expenses.<br /><br />It was 2006 - the first year of the Herald Sun Super Coach competition - when the site developed serious growing pains, and they hit very hard. At this stage we were still hosted on a shared server but we ended up shutting down the entire box for hours at a time during games on a weekend, due to a combination of a quadrupling of raw demand plus some loose code. It got bad enough that I decided I had to institute paid memberships to slow the torrent of users. That ended up being another big mistake. Barely 80 lots of $5/$10 later, I backed down. There was no other choice, Tai and I had to figure out how to build a more scaleable system or we wouldn't have a viable business. In the mean time, the site was developing an unwanted reputation for being unreachable on weekends and dropping connectivity at the drop of a hat, with "is fanfooty down?" an all too common refrain on the message boards. We were just too popular.<br /><br />Thus it was that we started developing the techniques that have made FanFooty different to most other sites. It's not something that you can see - indeed, FanFooty's design aesthetic is rather minimalist, even old-fashioned in some respects. Over time, we did some benchmarks and watched the health or otherwise of the live scoring section of the site under different traffic conditions. We eventually decided to abandon the LAMP stack entirely. Our new architecture involved a second server running lighttpd instead of Apache, with no database or scripting languages installed. This allowed maximum scalability for a small subset of pages that was driving the vast majority of our page views. Purist pro programmer friends scoffed at the client-heavy AJAX scripting, but it worked for us with our limited server resource budget.<br /><br />By this stage Tai and I were both gaining confidence in our abilities, and were enjoying the learning process of discovering new bits of code to use as weapons in the neverending war against our own ignorance. That's not to say that all was clean sailing. I got very angry at times during server downtimes, and I am ashamed to say that I took some of it out on poor Tai. For his part, Tai did some very good work but I was the one providing just about all of the creativity on the project, which caused further tensions. In addition, my sleeping schedule was occasionally moving around the clock, so that for weeks at a time our waking times weren't intersecting all that often.<br /><br />Nevertheless, 2007 was a good year on many fronts. I was a big fan of the Hitwise model of startups, insomuch as you have a cash cow business and a home run business operating side by side: the former funding the latter, and the latter eventually being the one that takes you over the top. For our purposes, FanFooty was the cash cow and Tinfinger was the home run. Much of 2007 was spent in developing Tinfinger, a "human omnibus" with elements of Wikipedia, TechMeme and Squidoo/Mahalo, plus a social networking app bolted on the side. FanFooty grew in traffic by 640% year-on-year, so it was by no means being neglected, and many more important features were created this year, including the FanFooty blog and the Coaches Box podcast. Tinfinger was where most of our energy was directed, and it was here that the cracks in the partnership between myself and Tai finally opened up. Tai has many fine qualities, but he doesn't possess the spark of originality of thought that I was looking for as part of a good founder's skill set. That's not to say that a founder necessarily needs to be particularly original to create a successful business. I, however, needed someone who was prepared to invest a little more brainpower and take the pressure off me to formulate every little bit of our strategy.<br /><br />I don't mean to denigrate Tai by saying the above, either, so let me talk a bit about how good it was to have him as a co-founder, and how invaluable he was at the darkest times. There were periods where I needed a friend more than I needed a business partner, and he was there to listen to me as I sloooowly opened up. Similarly for him, he went through some terrible personal stuff around that time and (I hope) I was able to contribute in some small way to his recovery. Often our mood swings would complement each other so that one would be able to share his energy to encourage the other when they were down.<br /><br />2007 was also a good year for advertising, and with growth to above half a million page impressions per week, advertisers were starting to take notice. Through AdSense we started getting targeted campaigns from major advertisers like Pepsi, Schick and Gillette, which added up to our first year of profit, albeit still nowhere near enough to pay both of us living expenses.<br /><br />2008 was quite the opposite. Tinfinger launched in January and, unlike FanFooty, we couldn't rely on the large amount of pent-up demand that greeted us back in early 05. The ego-arbitrage space was already well populated by companies larger, smarter and more experienced than us. The division of labour between myself and Tai became more pronounced, as my programming skills rivalled and in some areas surpassed his. After a fair few shouting matches and other unpleasantness, I knocked it on the head in May and negotiated an agreement whereby he would continue to be paid a percentage of FanFooty profits but we would drop Tinfinger. The split wasn't what either of us wanted, which indicated that it was fair at the least. <br /><br />In addition, we had made another big mistake that year in changing advertising providers, going from AdSense to local firm 3dinteractive (part of ASX-listed Q Ltd). I don't wish to disparage 3di either, suffice it to say that nothing good whatsoever came out of that relationship. Our traffic doubled off a very healthy base, going from half a million to one million page views per week, but we had very little to show for it at the end of the season, having earned precisely zero dollars out of the April-through-July period (for reasons I won't go into). By the time we got back onto AdSense the major advertisers' campaigns had deserted us, and we were lucky to break even across the year.<br /><br />The start of 2009 looked like being even more disastrous as the AdSense numbers fell into the toilet in January as the GFC hit, but two fortunate events occurred. First, we were headhunted by Platform 9, an ad agency division of ninemsn whose primary focus is on video ads, but also operates a system much like AdSense for remnant display inventory for Australian advertisers. Their numbers took a little while to come on but they have been very pleasing, with the video element providing an invaluable auxiliary revenue stream. Second, we were rather lucky to get our first direct sponsorship deal, with Betfair. Every major football media property aligned itself with one of the betting providers in 2009 after the relaxation of legislation which previously preventing them from advertising. The combination of these two events made 2009 a much more comfortable year in terms of revenue, especially since traffic doubled yet again to average two million page impressions per week.<br /><br />By this time Tai was doing virtually no work on FanFooty, as per our agreement, but this had been the case for two or three years previous anyway. However, he came to me late in the season to talk about dissolving our previous agreement and freeing both of us up for the future. For this, I can only thank Tai for his maturity and understanding. He has a lovely girl who makes a great partner for him now, and he is over most of the problems that beset him during the worst of our times at the Geelong house, some of which were due to our business.<br /><br />I have since moved to Brunswick and have settled down into a new lifestyle. I can look forward to a future where I have complete control over all aspects of my life and business, and Tai can do the same with the projects he has in development. I don't agree with those people who look back on a five-year span like this and say something like, "I wouldn't have done anything differently." That's silly. Of course I made mistakes, and I hurt people, and I let people down at times, not least of all myself. I would like to have avoided the decisions I made that wasted some of the precious and limited time I have on this earth to make something of myself.<br /><br />Nevertheless, I can't change anything now, and I can at least live with what has happened. Not that many people ask me for advice, but if they did, I would tell them to get themselves a time machine, go back five years and start a business. It takes five years to get to the point where you know what you're doing and where you're going. <br /><br />I am happy to have survived that process, where many of my contemporaries have not. I started at around the same time as the likes of Cameron Reilly, Bronwen Clune, Ben Barren and Duncan Riley, all of whom I like greatly and admire for their best qualities. All but Ben were married when they started, and now none of them are. None of them are still working the same startup as when they started. Web 2.0 has been and gone, and it has left many of my friends with not much at all to show for it despite years of hard yakka. <br /><br />At this point my old technology journalist mates from my previous life might snigger behind their hands, but most of the jobs that they were in five or ten years ago have disappeared too, into the ether or perhaps only half-replaced by itinerant freelance table scraps. Worthy efforts like Hydrapinion and iTWire are not introducing new journos into the industry from what I can see, and aren't ambitious enough to start generating new jobs.<br /><br />From the above, some of you might think I have been exceedingly lucky to even get this far, despite the business still not earning enough to give me a decent wage. That is probably true. I have put a lot of hard work into FanFooty over the years, though, and I think I deserve it. I have only survived in part because I am not married or even in a relationship. Only now do I feel it would be fair to subject a girl to my lifestyle. Most would still look down their nose at my lack of financial stability. On that front, things are looking a little more lively in 2010 than at any recent time, so there's a lot to look forward to.<br /><br />I realise this blog post got a bit long and rambling, so for that I apologise. I might follow up with some further thoughts later in the week. Thanks for reading this far, I'm off to the parents' place for a weekly roast dinner. Some things never change. :)Paul Montgomeryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18345309776406933213noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18155905.post-10134890178454825682009-07-01T16:29:00.002+10:002009-07-01T17:58:03.971+10:00Poor old Johnny Hartigan begin againVia <a href="http://www.inquisitr.com/27842/australian-news-corp-chief-attacks-google-bloggers/">the Inquisitr</a> and <a href="http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/we_will_survive/">Andrew Bolt's blog</a> comes the transcript of local News Corp boos John Hartigan's Canutian address to the endless waves of the blogosphere crashing over his sandcastle business.<br /><br />As Duncan points out in the Inq piece, it's now a tired old cliche for journalists to attack the blogosphere for being unprofessional, as if that's the cause of the problem, when the actual issue is the gutting of advertising revenues from the classified rivers of gold. I almost fell asleep writing that, it's such a hoary chestnut of an argument. So old that journos fall into it like a pair of old slippers.<br /><br />Hartigan is running the new Murdoch line of browbeating the public into paying for journalism, which goes against centuries of tradition.<br /><br /><blockquote>I believe people will pay for content if it is:<br />- Original...<br />- Exclusive...<br />- Has the authority<br />- and is relevant to our audiences </blockquote><br /><br />Let's look at these four criteria, especially in the context of successful paywall-funded local online enterprises such as Crikey and the various share trading newsletters. Originality is a given, no arguments there. Exclusivity of content is not so important, in my view. In some ways, putting a paywall around content makes it inherently exclusive of those who don't pay. Does a Crikey or a Marcus Padley need to have scoops from a Hillary Bray insider type to sell subscriptions? Not necessarily, though it helps to build the brand. Authority is also overblown, I think. To me, that word is redolent of an elite class sermonising to faithful devotees, a model that just doesn't work in a media environment where the hoi polloi have as much publishing power online as do the journalists. If you set yourself up as the authority on something, how do you deal with a reader who corrects you in the comments on a story? You're just setting yourself up for a fall. A more successful approach is to collaborate with the readership to get the story right, to be accessible. Finally, the word "relevant" also smacks to me of a lack of connection with the audience. Why not use language that indicates you are listening to your readers directly, instead of paying consultants to find out for you? <br /><br />Hartigan makes a big song and dance about the integration of digital and print functions in the newsroom. I don't know how truthful that is, but it can't be worse than the poisonous atmosphere between Fairfax Digital and the rump of the old guard at their paper premises. News must look like sweetness and light in comparison.<br /><br />Hartigan goes on later in the speech to list what News is going to do online to halt the rot:<br /><br /><blockquote>tools that allow you to conduct transactions with our advertisers<br /><br />The old parish pump reporting on local news will be reinvented as hyperlocal coverage of real time events such as<br />- Where to find the cheapest petrol<br />- How to avoid roadworks and traffic jams and<br />- The best retail offers available in your suburb that day <br /><br />I see coverage of politics, courts and crime changing dramatically - with less of the adversarial conflict we report now to coverage that gives readers more insight about the issues. <br /><br />I see changes in the news mix – less of the negative stuff and more content that inspires, surprises and delights readers, more humour, more escapism. <br /><br />- give them what they need to make decisions<br />- and equip them to act on those decisions</blockquote><br /><br />Very little of this describes actual journalism. As with much of a typical newspaper already these days, it's just public relations and marketing dressed in journalism's still-bloodied hide. The last snippet in particular screams out to me that News is determined to build a new river of gold - or at least pewter - out of cost-per-action and/or affiliate "content", so that instead of relying on classifieds for steady cashflow they will build their revenue streams on the likes of Ben Barren-built truelocal.com.au, which isn't journalism at all. The line between editorial and advertising in such brochureware is shaky at best in print but is functionally non-existent in an online context.<br /><br />For the last decade or two, newspapers have been stealing shamelessly from the formats of periodical magazines, particularly "lifestyle" mags. Not coincidentally, many of the mags that the News tabloids are aping are owned by ACP, continuing on the battles in days of yore between Murdoch and Packer media properties long past Kerry's death.<br /><br />It appears to me from the last section of that speech, despite Hartigan's early bluster, that the News Ltd approach is going to continue to be to leave the majority of the serious journalism to the broadsheets, radio and ABC/SBS, with The Australian used less as an instrument of democratic journalistic principles and more of an attack dog to support the editorial staff's rabid political leanings. The Herald-Sun and Daily Telegraph are going to look more and more like bits of ACP magazines stitched together. The front and back pages are going to get more and more shrill in their shouting for eyeballs.Paul Montgomeryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18345309776406933213noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18155905.post-3614962556331870492009-03-23T18:02:00.003+11:002009-03-23T18:37:35.243+11:00Post 2.0 Web advertising: make it up in volumeFor those wondering what I have been doing in the long periods between posts on this blog, I have been spending just about all my time on <a href="http://www.fanfooty.com.au">FanFooty</a>, my original startup which is now over four years old and finally looking like making a go of it. Traffic is projected at about 2 million page impressions per week for the upcoming AFL season, so I have a lot of ad inventory to fill. <br /><br />I recently switched ad providers from Google AdSense to Platform 9, a division of ninemsn which runs a video ad platform and an auction-based display ad serving system as well. At the start of this year, as many Web publishers will know, CPMs (cost per thousand page impressions, i.e. the amount of money I make from ads per thousand times a page is viewed) went into the toilet in a huge amount of sectors. The Australian sport sector was no different. I look back at my 2007 CPMs and can only feel depressed about the numbers from all the providers I have tried in 2009.<br /><br />Of course, the simple economics of supply and demand have dictated much of the collapse of CPMs for Web publishers. Supply of ad inventory has increased markedly in recent times, particularly by social media sites who have destroyed entire sectors by flooding them with low quality inventory. Demand has also dried up, as can be evidenced by looking at my own numbers, which were decimated (under the now-archaic meaning of dropping to 10% of their previous levels) at the turn of the year as new quarterly budgets came into effect with far fewer bids for major keywords.<br /><br />Today was a big day for FanFooty because we turned on our first ad campaign from Betfair, which is our first major direct advertisement sale. It seems every large or small football-related media site in Australia has developed a partnership with one of the new breed of gambling providers, and we are no different. <br /><br />I was looking at Duncan Riley's site <a href="http://www.inquisitr.com/">The Inquisitr</a> today, and couldn't help but feel as if I have been missing out. The Inq had seven ad units on its story pages: three from Google, one from Technorati Media and three that pointed to other servers I didn't recognise. Meanwhile, I have been stuck at FanFooty with the AdSense-encouraged three-unit policy since the site was established. Am I the idiot for not getting with the new program? This is what I was thinking: the obvious solution for publishers who are getting crappier CPMs per ad unit is to spam the units as much as the page will allow, and maybe more. The page looks less classy, and readability suffers, but is that what "pros" like Duncan have realised long before deadshits like me?<br /><br />I'm not sure I want to be like the Fairfaxes of this world. I have blogged here before about their ridiculously high ad rates, though I suspect they haven't got anywhere near their listed CPMs for a while now. The <a href="http://www.realfooty.com.au">RealFooty</a> home page has seven ad units also, albeit two of them being tiny ones for BigPond, and their story pages have fully 12 units, including three for their own gambling partner, plus a Google box and two other text link ad boxes. Meanwhile, News Ltd's <a href="http://www.superfooty.com.au">Superfooty</a> home page has five units, all huge, and just four on its story pages, also including one Google unit.<br /><br />My instinct has always been primarily as a journalist, whereby I have left room for three standard ads on each page and hoped that the ad agencies could deliver enough CPM that I didn't have to worry about it. In these recessionary times, that is probably not enough, and I should be thinking more like a publisher, not an editor. Do I have to hit the corporate carpets and sell sponsorships myself? Would the dinky little units here and there get in the way of the user experience? Would FanFooty cease to be something the fans enjoy if there were a dozen freakin' ad units on every blog entry? <br /><br />I believe strongly in the distasteful effect of "kipple", the crap that tends to accumulate on a Web site as it ossifies. I do not want to put 12 ads on a page on FanFooty. Any more than three or four starts my eyebrows twitching as I hear the words of Jakob Nielsen, not to mention Strunk & White. The new desperation of large publishing companies spamming their users with ads seems counter-productive in the long term.<br /><br />Then again, I do need to eat. :(Paul Montgomeryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18345309776406933213noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18155905.post-68185086609151944182009-01-08T00:25:00.006+11:002009-01-08T02:20:04.983+11:00Gabe Rivera, Superego 2.0I was watching the excellent Shrink Rap show the other day, the episode with <a href="http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=KfwHEEz4RyA">Stephen Fry</a> pouring out his life problems to Pamela Connolly. Like many overachievers, he has major father issues, primary among them being that his father has become the internalised voice of the cultural superego inside his head, telling Stephen that he's never good enough compared to great men of years past, and critiquing every second of his existence. Many of us can relate. Like Stephen, many of us are highly productive and well respected by our colleagues and friends, yet that little voice is always reminding us of our helpless inadequacy when faced with a seemingly impossible series of unfair objectives that are the fiendish creations of our unconscious minds.<br /><br />I feel like Gabe Rivera, creator of Techmeme, has become that voice inside the heads of many of the high profile technology bloggers of the day. Like Stephen with his forbidding father, these bloggers look to Gabe's site for emotional as well as intellectual approval. By extension this need reaches out to Gabe himself, now that he has <a href="http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/12/03/techmeme-gives-up-on-fully-automated-news/all-comments/#comment-2555374">admitted</a> that he has been keeping a hand on the algorithmic tiller since 2005.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_04numGx66bY/SWTAtsQGT6I/AAAAAAAAAC0/YcAkw6G3Q_g/s1600-h/web20_workgroup+copy.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 241px; height: 250px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_04numGx66bY/SWTAtsQGT6I/AAAAAAAAAC0/YcAkw6G3Q_g/s400/web20_workgroup+copy.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5288563753645133730" /></a>This Freudian effect has caused major angst lately with many of the so-called A-listers, for various reasons. My mate Duncan Riley has a longstanding feud, with Duncan accusing Gabe of being Mike Arrington's stooge so many times that I don't even need to link to any of them, and Gabe <a href="http://www.mathewingram.com/work/2008/10/15/im-shocked-to-find-rumors-going-on-here/#comment-3072514">accusing</a> Dunc of making up stories. Robert Scoble has started in on Gabe over the last month with a similarly spiteful <a href="http://scobleizer.com/2008/12/23/techfuga-makes-it-clear-techmeme-is-not-innovating">campaign</a> to convince him to recognise Scoble's shameless whoring of himself all over Friendfeed and Twitter in Techmeme's algorithms. Now Dave Winer has <a href="http://friendfeed.com/e/7a23a910-08cb-7a98-1ecc-db3e44ae15dc/Haven-t-gotten-a-piece-on-TechMeme-in-ages-even/">cussed out</a> Gabe for not allowing him the passing frisson of quasi-parental validation.<br /><br />In the late-and-not-lamented Tinfinger, I built a site which had a lot of Techmeme-like features, including a news aggregator which used a much less complex algorithm, so I feel I have some small amount of credibility to pass comments on these claims. Before I start, let me say that I like Gabe, and understand a lot of what he has been through, and what's more this blog seems to have a decent amount of memejuice on TM so I haven't gone through the frustration that these A-listers have been experiencing. Thus, please take my comments with the requisite grain of salt.<br /><br />I like Duncan a lot too, and I want his ventures to succeed, as Dunc well knows. I see similarities between Gabe and Dunc, actually. Both have done marvellous things with limited resources and a hell of a lot of smarts, but my personal opinion is that both have stunted their own potential through not pushing themselves to their own limits - Gabe by not extending his business after his initial breakthrough, and Duncan by staying inside the blogging ghetto and not testing himself with what I would (perhaps uncharitably) call a "true" startup. Duncan knows my feelings on this, and I've said the same to Gabe on multiple occasions. (Then again, that may be Stephen Fry's father talking.)<br /><br />In any case, Duncan's attacks may or may not have merit. From my knowledge of how algorithms work, I would find it perfectly believable that Gabe did not include any anti-Inquisitr code before Duncan's attacks started, nor consciously exclude Inq stories when he did meddle with the rankings. TechCrunch has authority in aggregators for a good reason, which is that everyone links to it and talks about their stories. The Inq started from zero, and building up links and chatter takes time and effort, which Duncan has put in for countless hours and will have to continue. Even if Arrington did activate his Hypno-Ray 2.0 and order Gabe to block Inq stories as petty revenge, in my opinion it does no good to kick against the system. The currency of this debate is authority, and even if Techmeme doesn't acknowledge the authority of your site, I think you can gain authority in non-numeric terms by being the Big Man and taking the high road. PageRank and clickthroughs are all very well, but respect and dignity of your peers and readers are also valuable commodities.<br /><br />Scoble's concerns are more complex. His view is that news is happening in increasing frequency on Twitter and FriendFeed, and the fact that Techmeme covers only blogs and the links between them is old hat. Scoble is being completely self-serving, but that's par for the course. He's a marketer, not a journalist. It's part of the job description, and he shouldn't be criticised for it. What about his point, though?<br /><br />My feeling is that Gabe is right not to pander to the Twitter/FriendFeed mafia. News may very well break on Twitter, but do people really want to open up their faux New York Times to see a headline news report that is only 140 characters long? Or, worse, a breaking issue which you have to comb through 50 one-sentence comments to comprehend? No, for the sort of service Techmeme is, it is correct to stay in the blog and news world, because if TM is to be the replacement for the newspaper frontispiece then each headline has to link to a true work of journalism. No, Robert, it's just not possible to commit a mainstream-consumable act of journalism in a single tweet or FriendFeed comment. Stories that are worth reading take longer than that to be told, and should be told in a longer form which allows a coherent narrative to be constructed - not necessarily by a professional journalist of course, but in a medium which allows for a fully-formed thought to be expressed, not just a whim skimmed off the top of the head. Sure, Techmeme might miss out by five minutes on the breathless pronouncement by Scoble or someone else of the latest Steve Jobs mystery illness, but that's a small price to pay for the quality of the product Gabe wants to put out for the masses.<br /><br />On Dave Winer's whinge... first, let me clear up a common complaint. Gabe has said on multiple times that news items may appear on Techmeme with no accompanying link item, but that doesn't mean there wasn't one that qualified the original to appear on TM - just that the linking site didn't have enough memejuice to appear itself. Items appearing sans linkage doesn't mean that they've been boosted for nefarious means. Gabe has repeated this arcane piece of algorithmic cruft often enough that I feel that accusations of this sort by A-listers now constitute deliberate obfuscation, as they should know better if they had been paying attention to previous scuffles.<br /><br />Dave kind of gets the superego effect, judging from later comments in the above-linked FriendFeed discussion, but his reaction is to want to kill part of his own brain. Needless to say, this is not psychically healthy. Building a new Techmeme is not a technically difficult thing to do. I did it, for the most part, and I'm no gun programmer. Half a dozen others did the same thing and got no traction. It is futile at this point, more than at any other time.<br /><br />After all of that, I have to admit that I don't visit Techmeme any more, and haven't done so consistently for a year or so. I don't find tech news to be relevant to my day, immersed as I am in the sporting niche. For those to whom it is relevant, I don't see that the site has changed all that much since it began. For better or worse, Gabe has made it quite clear that this is the Techmeme we're getting, and he's not prepared to do anything drastic at all to change a winning formula. His intransigence is frustrating for a lot of people, but that's just the way he is, so better to leave him alone and focus on yourselves.<br /><br />It is perhaps no coincidence that all this Freudian sturm und drang is caused by men fighting over the ownership of the cultural superego, something usually associated with the founding fathers of a society. Arrington is a founding father of Web 2.0, so Duncan is fighting The Man, literally. Scoble and Winer were their own sort of founding fathers in their time, though evidently they are sensitive about their influence waning. Gabe stands in the middle, with his hand ever so slightly guiding the Techmeme tiller, trying to sail to the other side of the teacup. Let us hope he does not succumb to what Sigmund used to call the "primal horde".Paul Montgomeryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18345309776406933213noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18155905.post-36730676755364048042008-12-26T18:37:00.003+11:002008-12-26T19:12:08.796+11:00The Long-Burning HackI was turned on today to the <a href="http://gigaom.com/2008/12/25/2009-year-of-the-hacker/">2009: Year of the Hacker</a> article by Kevin Kelleher on GigaOm by <a href="http://www.benbarren.com/?p=2753">one of Ben Barren's rants</a>, which itself riffs off <a href="http://www.longtail.com/the_long_tail/2008/10/what-recession.html">a Chris Anderson piece</a> for Wired Blogs, which references <a href="http://www.shirky.com/herecomeseverybody/2008/04/looking-for-the-mouse.html">a Clay Shirky speech</a>, and on and on in curlicues of hyperextension. <br /><br />The point is that the Time Of Doom Is Upon Us, meaning a bunch of bored techs with more time on their hands, and you know what they say about idle hands. Good movie, woke us up to the potential of poor old Heath Ledger.<br /><br />Anyway, my thoughts on the matter are coloured by my own experiences, being as they are ahead of the curve in that the recession came for me many years ago, hasn't let up, and has taught me how to burn slowly. All that I'll see of the next recession is lower petrol prices and less parties to wish I'd gone to (or maybe more?).<br /><br />Tinfinger has been and gone, now mouldering in some squatter's squalid outhouse. FanFooty, while a solid business, pays the hosting bill and no more in non-football months, thus money's too tight to mention, as the old song went. Various little lurks prop up the cashtrickle to something approaching a lifestream.<br /><br />The point! Yes, the point. My thoughts are that a certain type of hacker, who was only ever working at a startup or corporate for the paycheck, may end up joining the freeware community in the spirit of ESR and such like, but I think Mr Kelleher is poking his silver Supras down the wrong path. For such hackers, much of the motivation for any work they do of their own time may not be to pad their CVs, or to raise their standing in the biz... but to fuck with their former employers. Be that specifically the company that retrenched them, or some other zaibatsu which personifies all they hate about their formerly safe life, revenge is a dish best served like cooled ramen.<br /><br />Specifically, these spurned spawns of the spluttering economy will have intimate knowledge of just how vulnerable certain companies' revenue streams are, and will be able to come up with ways to use current and future technologies to divert these rivers of gold into others' pockets, even if not their own.<br /><br />Such labours of hate will not require venture capital backing. Many of them would be better off without it, leaving them free to bend the law to whatever nefarious purpose they feel necessary to undermine the multinationals whose revenue streams they are targeting.<br /><br />Most of these ventures will be net losses for the economy, too. Like Google advertising being an order of magnitude cheaper than advertising on mainstream media sites, these vengeful hackers won't care that they're destroying fattened cash cows whose teats the old companies have spent decades sucking. They will rejoice in turning billion-dollar industries into million-earners. Millionaire factories will be squashed into sectors where a handful of people can make a living at a time.<br /><br />Why will this happen? Because these people have been inside the old companies, and they hate how they work. They hate the bullshit hierarchies, the Peter Principle, the management gridlock. Geeks have always hated suits, and if there's a way they can control their pet industry to the extent that they can do away with whole swathes of suits, then all the better.<br /><br />What can the suits do to stop it? They can buy the geeks out early, maybe. That's if they don't wake up one morning to realise that like Russian black ice in a Gibson novel, the virus that the geek ex-employee has left inside the building has already expanded and turned the company into mush.Paul Montgomeryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18345309776406933213noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18155905.post-66412701684383943512008-11-28T15:49:00.005+11:002008-11-28T15:57:41.364+11:00Me at Google Sydney<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/91779052@N00/3063618186/"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 420px; height: 315px;" src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3070/3063618186_d7eaa2f74a.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a><br />Yesterday I spent the day at Google's Sydney office at Darling Park, the guest of the wonderful Mel Ann Chen. I was there to be interviewed by A Current Affair for a story about Google AdSense, with FanFooty being nominated by Google as one of their major publishers in the sport sector. (Just the one photo I'm afraid, they don't allow cameras inside the offices.)<br /><br />I have heard anecdotally that being featured positively on ACA does wondrous things for your traffic. Here's hoping!Paul Montgomeryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18345309776406933213noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18155905.post-78661453120808741592008-08-19T17:16:00.002+10:002008-08-19T17:47:40.087+10:00I can has new Web experienceI find myself skimming more and more through my NetVibes these days. Not that I'm losing interest in 2.0, far from it, but there doesn't seem to be a whole lot new happening. Maybe I just need to freshen up my blog mix. Nevertheless, TechCrunch delivered today with <a href="http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/08/18/engrishfunny-is-newest-site-in-lolcats-empire/">an interview with Ben Huh</a>, who is now making a living out of a rollup of sites that steal 4chan memes.<br /><br /><embed src="http://blip.tv/play/AcjUe4u8cA" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="480" height="390" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true"></embed> <br /><br />You can tell who the journo is in this interview... hint, it's not the dude asking the questions and getting major details wrong. Anyway, there were a couple of key things that I took away from this interview, the main one being that it's that truly Internet-native publishers treat the Internet as a medium all of its own. You can have your Gawker-style blog networks that try too hard to be like the New Yorker. You can have your Hulus which walk the tightrope between Hollywood and Guangdong without ever impressing either the studios or the pirates. Ben seems to get that there is an opportunity to create and/or buy unique media properties which advance the medium... and by the by, engender the kind of "cultural phenomenon" he talks about.<br /><br />I've had some experience with this myself with <a href="http://www.fanfooty.com.au">FanFooty</a>, which has evolved into a completely different direction that where I thought it was going. These days FanFooty is less like a publication and more like performance art. The live-blogging aspect, combined with live user chat and an intricate series of news update techniques complete with iconic flashes of starbursts, hearts, stars, garbage bins, guns and tombstones, has led to my participation during games being a required part of the process. Where I thought initially that the business was going to run itself after the programming work was done, now I can't visualise FanFooty being successful without someone there at the helm stamping their emotional authority over the user experience.<br /><br />That's one other aspect that I think Icanhascheezburger shares with FanFooty - the essential goodness of the community, which is a function of how the site has been constructed from the get go. Maybe I'm just turning into a maudlin old man, but I think it's sweet how, once the swearing trolls are banned, the genuine footy fans enjoy themselves so much in an environment where they know they're surrounded by like-minded friends. Much as cat lovers band together, sports fans can achieve a camaraderie and jocularity through online chat that makes the experience fun for not only the community, but also the founder. Many's the time I have found myself laughing along with things that the chat have said, and this is one of the most rewarding parts of running the site. It also warms the cockles of the heart when users thank you unexpectedly. :)<br /><br />Successful dealings with users are far more pleasing to the soul, in my opinion, which is why I'm still puzzled as to why so many entrepreneurs still focus on business-to-business as their main strategy... sure, you might earn more money that way if the cards fall right, but isn't the main reason you became an entrepreneur was that you hated corporate soullessness and you didn't want to have to kiss the arses of men in suits? Communicating directly with the public should be both the most important and the most soul-nourishing part of a Web start-up.Paul Montgomeryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18345309776406933213noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18155905.post-2843692212592346732008-06-22T19:47:00.003+10:002008-06-22T19:48:29.921+10:00The substantive bits from Steve Gillmor's TechCrunch articles <br /><br /> <br /><br /> <br /><br /> <br /><br /> <br /><br /> <br /><br /> <br /><br /> <br /><br /> <br /><br /> <br /><br /> <br /><br /> <br /><br /> <br /><br /> <br /><br /> <br /><br /> <br /><br /> <br /><br /> <br /><br /> <br /><br /> <br /><br /> <br /><br /> <br /><br /> <br /><br /> <br /><br /> <br /><br /> <br /><br /> <br /><br /> <br /><br /> <br /><br /> <br /><br /> <br /><br /> <br /><br /> <br /><br /> <br /><br /> <br /><br /> <br /><br /> <br /><br /> <br /><br /> Paul Montgomeryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18345309776406933213noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18155905.post-5509034455092944102008-05-31T23:12:00.002+10:002008-05-31T23:25:55.632+10:00Whozat cheeky lot?The logo of my recently shelved "people omnibus" startup Tinfinger, drawn by professional illustrator <a href="http://www.frenden.com">Ray Frenden</a> based on my concept:<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.tinfinger.com/images/logowide.gif"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://www.tinfinger.com/images/logowide.gif" border="0" alt="" /></a><br /><br />The logo of Whozat, people search engine startup based in California headed up by an Italian and an Argentine:<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.whozat.com/img/logo.gif"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://www.whozat.com/img/logo.gif" border="0" alt="" /></a><br /><br />Anyone see the similarity? Yes, the colouring on both sets of lettering is based on skin tones of people from around the world. I don't know how long ago Whozat thought up their logo, since the Wayback Machine is not cooperating, but I'm tipping theirs was done later than <a href="http://tinfinger.blogspot.com/2005/10/little-dip-into-tinfinger.html">October 2005</a> because their site lists their inception date as 2006.<br /><br />It's just not cricket.Paul Montgomeryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18345309776406933213noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18155905.post-71636229702839407182008-05-08T00:25:00.002+10:002008-05-08T01:25:02.739+10:00Some points on live videoI've been using a goodly number of live video services over the last month or two. They seem to have sprung up like topsy recently, evidently due to innovations made by Adobe with their <a href="http://www.studiodaily.com/main/minisites/flash8/f/mwhatsnew/8847.html">Flash Media Server 3</a> and ancillary products, not to mention <a href="http://www.webwire.com/ViewPressRel.asp?aId=36197">support by Akamai</a> et al. Those very few of you who remember my Table vs Jetski startup idea will know that I have some interest in this area, and I have a few thoughts about the nascent industry.<br /><br />I have used Stickam, Yahoo Live, LiveVideo.com, and even an Aussie site which was in painful alpha (someone remind me what the name of it was!) which was populated by lots of screaming Germans. I'm going to concentrate here on the services which allow multiple live video streams on screen at once, including the ability to join the conversation yourself. That knocks out places like Ustream and Seesmic, which are otherwise worthy of discussion but not in this post. <br /><br />I'm not auditioning for Duncan Riley's job at TechCrunch so this will be somewhat half-arsed. Lets' go with point form.<br /><br />- Flash has always remained a dark mystery to me, so I would love to know why some services decide to go with four of the smaller "viewer" windows, like LiveVideo and Yahoo Live, whereas Stickam goes with six. What's the upper limit, if any?<br /><br />- Any developers out there in this space should be following the <a href="http://www.keithandthegirl.com/forums/showthread.php?t=10023">Watch KATG Live</a> thread on the Keith & The Girl forums. There is some interesting stuff there about KATG's previous video streaming partner, PalTalk, and how paid-up subscribers of PalTalk have had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the Web-based client era, not just due to the financial investment they made in PalTalk accounts but also the technical limitations of the new delivery platform, i.e. Flash, and the move away from an intimate micro-community to a wide open free-for-all.<br /><br />- It strikes me that the interfaces to all of these applications could do with a dose of modularity. What if a user wants a 3x3 wall of 9 mini-screens? What if a user just wants to view the main screen and maximise the text chat window? What if a publisher wants to show their own video but only accept audio from the crowd, in a call-in environment? Maybe I'm spoiled by NetVibes. These things should be possible, surely? They would be pretty difficult in Flash, I bet, but it will come.<br /><br />- I suppose you have to recognise that Silverlight is coming round the mountain when she comes, but Flash is dominant in this area. Does it occur to anyone else that this is a tad weird? Why hasn't a startup taken this obvious opportunity to develop a competing solution? Have the days of new proprietary Web client apps gone forever? I remember the days when every week would see the announcement of some new "rich media" downloadable thingumabob for Netscape, complete with its own file format and brand new entry to a standards body. That doesn't seem to happen any more: Flash gets bundled with every browser and that's pretty much it. Good for Adobe, I guess.<br /><br />- Is there an industry here? I mean, one that allows profits? It hasn't immediately been smothered by the tough love of the RSS/podcasting crowd, which means that it hasn't been infected with the Californian hippy bullshit about it being "all about the community, man". However, is it going to be possible to sell TV-style interstitial commercials into live streaming video? Would the audience wear it? I suspect it has a better chance of happening than with audio podcasting, if only for cultural reasons. It would take a startup with a lot of connections to make it happen, nevertheless. One wonders if anyone other than Google could pull off a video advertising business.<br /><br />I am a firm believer in live events being an underexploited opportunity for Internet startups. It is what my only successful business so far has been based on. Live events, especially those that go for hours with constantly updating content, deliver a startup huge amounts of page views even if the audience isn't very broad. Live video should be the next huge thing on the Internet. I only hope some of the little guys can get on board before the GEMAYA giants gobble up all the gold.Paul Montgomeryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18345309776406933213noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18155905.post-3104247852751738892008-05-02T01:54:00.003+10:002008-05-02T03:05:16.366+10:00Steeeeee-rike oneI coffeed with <a href="http://benbarren.blogspot.com">Ben Barren</a> today in the comfy surrounds of Errol St - or perhaps it is more accurate to say that I became immersed in the Ben Barren Experience. More than anyone else in my travels meeting the best and brightest of the Australian Web 2.0 scene over the past four years, Ben embodies the entrepreneur in my mind: gregarious, inquisitive, disarming, irrepressible... a creative mind so rich with imagination that he can't stop talking for fear of the spigot in his brain drying up. It is exhilarating to talk shop with him.<br /><br />It struck me, as we swapped war stories of pitched PowerPoint battles across parched McCubbinite business landscapes, that it is a tragedy that the current Australian industry is not structured in such a way that people like Ben and myself, and others like us, can find an easy way to work together towards a common goal. Like the spinifex tussocks that my dad and I (mostly Dad!) used to have to attack year after year on our 20 acres outside Seymour in my childhood, Australian Web startup founders have to grow resilient and spiky to avoid getting consumed by the inexorable hunger of our oligopoly-dominated economy.<br /><br />Many of us strive individually, feebly watered in various tenuous hierarchies by money men, activated actuaries and impatient investors. While it is true that startup founders need money, founders also need a creative environment in which to flourish. Something Keith Malley of <a href="http://www.katg.com">Keith & The Girl</a> said the other day about relationships is pertinent, even in a business sense: when you start dreading the knock on the door by your partner [personal/business/whatever], then you should know that it's not working and you should get out.<br /><br />Thus we come to the subject of this post: my co-founder Tai Tran and I have decided to dissolve our partnership. This means no more Tinfinger, and it also means that I'll be the sole operator of FanFooty in future (handshake deal, a la <a href="http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/A_Double_Buggy_at_Lahey_Creek">Joe Wilson and the Galletly brothers</a>). Yes, Tinfinger has joined the deadpool, become epic fail, et cetera: write its obituary up for your blogs if you care to. I feel confident enough to confront that fact head on, unlike some recent ex-founders, because I can hold my head up high and say that I have already had one success with FanFooty, so a failure doesn't mean I'm worthless. <a href="http://tinfinger.blogspot.com/2008/02/time-for-aussie-20ers-to-hitwise-up.html">As I've said before</a>, I'm following the Hitwise template of the cash cow followed by the home run play. I guess I didn't hit a home run this time, but I hear they give you three strikes before you're out. ;)<br /><br />I should also say that I will be proud to have Tinfinger on my CV. It is a fine application in a technical sense: it works, there aren't any major bugs, and it had a rather high degree of difficulty to build. I learnt a lot in building it, and it contains a lot of elements that may prove useful in future efforts, like proprietary spidering scripts. It could even prove useful if someone bought the code off us (email me for inquiries/offers at m0nty dot au at gmail dot com) and put the elbow grease into it that we can't.<br /><br />I have to admit, though, that I got a number of assumptions on the business/marketing side of the project wrong. The first of these was that the virality of Wikipedia would just "happen" for us too. I'm sure both Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger would tell you that it requires a lot of work from a lot of people to become that viral, and we're just two guys in a house in Geelong. (I'll try not to use that excuse too much.) Our second mistake was that we entered a market in which, apart from the unstoppable juggernaut that is Wikipedia, we were competing with Squidoo, Spock and Mahalo, all of whom have major venture capital backing and roomfuls of employees. The industry, such as it was, evolved over the length of Tinfinger's development time into a fairly blatant Google SERPS spamming subculture, Frankensteined by more cash than we could shoot our popgun at. In particular, <a href="http://valleywag.com/376042/tipster-mahalo-revenues-are-around-9000-a-month#c5028778">this Valleywag comment</a> by Mahalo founder Jason Calacanis rang warning bells in my mind. Jason's back-of-napkin calculations meant that to keep up with his pace of bootstrapping, Tinfinger or any other small startup in this new ego-arbitrage space would have to be even more unscrupulous about middlemanning the barricades of constantly updated content that we didn't own.<br /><br />And we were just two blokes in Geelong. (Sorry.)<br /><br />So it's back onto FanFooty, and whatever else the future may hold. I don't really know what is next. I have a few crazy ideas at the back of my head, but they all require knowledge I don't have and resources I can't tap. I'll have to be satisfied with milking the cash cow for now, and looking for the next opportunity to step up to the plate and swing for the fences again. Hopefully next time I'll get a bigger piece of the ball.Paul Montgomeryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18345309776406933213noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18155905.post-40285961768596948042008-04-15T20:51:00.002+10:002008-04-15T21:32:36.885+10:00Just to say I blogged this monthLet's keep this short and snappy. I haven't got the personal bandwidth to compose the sort of 1000-word essay that my usual blogging style requires.<br /><br />I don't visit Techmeme any more, haven't for months and months. I get my news from NetVibes and Twitter. Haven't got the energy to keep up with the melodrama. Important memes have a way of percolating through.<br /><br />One of those is the mystic rediscovery that <a href="http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/04/14/not-a-misprint-aols-platform-a-is-the-top-advertising-network-by-reach/">AdSense isn't the Alpha and the Omega</a> (linked because of comment #5). Well, maybe it's the Alpha. The Omega, apparently, is <a href="http://www.calacanis.com/2008/03/24/are-ad-networks-for-loser-weak-publishers/">becoming your own advertising network</a>. We've at least got past the Alpha stage with FanFooty, having ditched AdSense in favour of a local agency which uses DoubleClick. Still part of the GOOG family, I guess. What would you call this stage... Mu? The cow analogy works, the eatin' is good.<br /><br />It's interesting that we were headhunted by this agency to replace another company in our space which just graduated to Omega status, leaving a big hole in their inventory. We're still just two blokes in a garage, operationally, while the Omega-bound competitor rents a North Melbourne hothouse with more than a dozen employees.<br /><br />Tai doesn't like me lifting the skirt like this, but I think no harm done. Now, how long before I blog next time?Paul Montgomeryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18345309776406933213noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18155905.post-62233590359070621142008-02-20T19:42:00.002+11:002008-02-20T20:33:40.394+11:00Twitter and IRC: meet the twainAs Richard Giles has <a href="http://richardgiles.net/2008/02/19/twitter-on-irc/">already blogged</a>, the Australian Twitterati have been gathering for the past little bit at the #twitter channel on the Freenode IRC network. This caused some interesting discussion on <a href="http://2webcrew.thepodcastnetwork.com/2008/02/20/2web-crew-for-wednesday-feb-20-2008/">today's edition of the 2Web Crew</a>, starring Richard himself.<br /><br />Like Richard, I can't see much conceptual difference between IRC and Twitter. Twitter has a 140 character limit, IRC has about a 410 character limit before it inserts linebreaks. Twitter has a gateway to SMS and IM, but there is no insurmountable technical hurdle for anyone who wanted to do either of those for IRC. Similarly, it would be trivial to write an IRC bot to convert links into tinyurl URLs. Twitter has canonical identity, but IRC bots can enforce unique nicks with password-protected logins.<br /><br />Then you come to the advantages IRC has over Twitter. Twitter is only now catching up on the idea of channels, and it's even stealing the # prefix from IRC. Most importantly, IRC has already encountered and solved the scaling problem many times over, with multiple servers all feeding the same chat space and netsplits handling server failovers.<br /><br />You could pretty much replicate Twitter in a distributed format by setting up a tightly-securified global network of IRC servers, writing some AJAX/Java/Flash/Silverlight/whatever to pump it through, and then putting a Web front end on it all. If architected correctly, the Web site wouldn't fall over nearly so much as Twitter because the bottleneck would be on the IRC end, which would naturally have many backups. Server outages would be handled as IRC netsplits, which would (hopefully) be invisible to the user. The whole thing could be handled without relational databases given some tricky work with flat text log files.<br /><br />Does anyone have the smarts these days to do that and make it work? Or would they rather roll their own db and architecture and not have to rely on a clunky 90s-era technology? IRC is like a library of reliable code, IMO. It would be foolish to not at least consider retrofitting it for a new application which is, at its heart, just a redeployment of the original IRC concept with a few more bells and whistles. I wonder if the Dave Winers of this world, who have been <a href="http://www.scripting.com/stories/2008/01/16/aDecentralizedTwitter.html">agitating for a distributed Twitter alternative</a>, are capable of delivering (or funding) this sort of system.Paul Montgomeryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18345309776406933213noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18155905.post-85310300110153283332008-02-14T17:37:00.004+11:002008-02-14T19:00:30.122+11:00Time for Aussie 2.0ers to Hitwise upBen Barren broke a blogging silence of three months today with <a href="http://benbarren.blogspot.com/2008/02/story-continues_1894.html">an uncharacteristically lucid mini-essay</a> detailing his thoughts going into the fourth year of Feedcorp, the business he started with consiglieri Michael Corleone but which is now headed by <a href="http://peteburley.wordpress.com/">Pete Burley</a>. Ben pledges to concentrate more on Gnoos, something which I have been urging him to do for some time now (perhaps too pushily?). Judging from the numbers he mentions obliquely in his post he seems to be doing okay with Feedcorp's hired goons strategy. <br /><br />The Australian corner of the industry is doing just fine. We're in our fourth year (first lines of code on 27 October 04) as is Feedcorp, and Cameron Reilly noted that <a href="http://gdayworld.thepodcastnetwork.com/2008/02/14/tpn-turns-three-today/">The Podcast Network officially turns 3 today</a> too. TPN is going gangbusters according to all reports. Norg Media is expanding to new cities, Scouta TV is doing deals, Tangler is growing with a new CEO as well, etc etc. We're already running at over 100% year-on-year growth on last year's stellar traffic figures for FanFooty, and with yesterday's launch of a $5,000 fantasy competition (using all our own money) called <a href="http://www.fanfooty.com.au/lethalteam.php">Lethal League</a> we should have an awesome 2008 where the growth of Tinfinger will be gravy, not our staple diet.<br /><br />Notwithstanding the recent bad news about Omnidrive, there doesn't seem to be a lot of negativity in the Australian Web 2.0 community. It's all systems go from my perspective. So is the gentle backhander that Ben delivers to his peers warranted?<br /><br /><blockquote>Knowing how hard it is to do (build a valuable company that creates more dividends individually than a job/freelancing etc or is acquired etc + being able to scale/keep your site up/pay bills/keep investors happy etc) I only feel empathy for the other Aussie startups trying to do it locally, but I wouldn't say I'm too optimistic on the likely 'home runs' with far too many consumer only/google ads/low cost plays, that are still pet projects not scaleable businesses.</blockquote><br />This is a longstanding, if cheerful, debate that I've had with Ben: me on the side of sacrificing short-term profitability to spend long hours of drudgery building your own IP, him on the side of getting some B2B moolah while the getting is good from dumbshit oligarchs who need Remora 2.0s to sandblast the barnacles off their rotting underbellies. At this stage I don't doubt his numbers would most likely trump anyone else's in pure turnover terms (save for Atlassian, but they shouldn't really count in this context as they're on another plane already).<br /><br />When it comes down to it, I don't see any approach as being "wrong" unless you fail, as it appears (from admittedly <a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/omnidrive_heading_for_deadpool.php">second-hand hearsay</a>) that Nik Cubrilovic has done, sadly. From the sounds of it Nik just ran out of money, which is a win in my book for the "low cost play". Some business concepts have a greater ceiling than others, but then again the higher the ceiling the greater the potential for a GEMAYA player to lay the smack down, as Google recently did to Topix (and maybe Gnoos as well?) by adding local search to Google News.<br /><br />I remember sitting down with Ben after a speech he gave last year and discussing the Hitwise model, which is to build a limited-growth business first and then use the solid cashflow to fund the slow-burning development of the "home run" concept. That is what Ben has done with Feedcorp, where his outsourcing work is the Sinewave equivalent and Gnoos is his Hitwise. In my case, FanFooty is the cash cow and Tinfinger is the home run, although FanFooty is obviously on a different level to Feedcorp in terms of revenue. I think this is the most likely strategy for successful Australian Web 2.0 ventures, because the first business not only gives you funding, but also the experience and confidence which are invaluable in making the second, harder concept work.<br /><br />I look forward to seeing what Ben does with Gnoos in 08, and after launching Lethal League yesterday I will now be getting back to Tinfinger. I've given myself and Tai until October to make a living out of it. Next one to run out of money is a rotten egg! ;)Paul Montgomeryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18345309776406933213noreply@blogger.com3