Tinfinger

Seven year niche

2012-01-04T23:52:00.003+11:00

2011 has been and gone, and it's been almost a year since I've blogged here. Time for a bit of an update.

I didn't get Mr Football 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.

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.

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.

News of (possibly) forthcoming fantasy sports television program The Fan Show is very promising, and I hope to help out Warnie and the lads where I can to make it a success.

I will also be getting back into "serious" blogging in 2012, at a new location.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. :)

Facebook games, CCGs, board games and Mr Football

2011-01-25T14:58:00.005+11:00

Today I announced the first public demo code 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.

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 Franchise Football, and EA Sports' Madden NFL Superstars. Both of these games launched in 2010, with at current count Madden holding steady making good use of its official NFL licence at 1.8 million monthly active users and Franchise Football trending downwards at a mere 68,000 without licence or player images.

Both of these games are, like many of the insanely popular games from Zynga and its clones like Farmville and Cityville which are introduced in this GamaSutra series, 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.

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.

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.

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.

Thinking about all of these things led me to go back to an old favourite game of mine: Blood Bowl, which I have blogged about before 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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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. :)

A template for an Australian HuffPo

2010-07-28T04:54:00.005+10:00

The thought of an Australian Huffington Post 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.

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 FanFooty for the moment, so I think it's safe to publicise my thoughts on this without fear of giving up precious defendable IP.

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 The Punch, Fairfax's National Times, Text Media's Crikey and New Matilda (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.

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, for instance, 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.

The HuffPo model has always been not to pay contributors anything, 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 HuffPo is a mouthpiece for celebrities and the rich.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 live audio podcast page I built for the weekly Coaches Box podcast).

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.

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 two-screen solutions. 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

IT lizards feast on the filter fish

2010-07-20T20:50:00.006+10:00

A 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.

Would you vote for a political party that supports the internet filter?

Yes: 809 votes, 2%
No: 37,228 votes, 97%
Don't care: 390 votes, 1%

Total votes: 38,427

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 Fight the Filter 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Note: the above is a fixup of my contribution to a discussion on a private mailing list.

Cannibalise your bootstraps

2010-05-24T03:50:00.003+10:00

I 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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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!

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?

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.

What gets me up in the morning?

2010-01-11T02:08:00.003+11:00

I used my last post 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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Year My Startup Broke (in a good way)

2010-01-03T13:16:00.004+11:00

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. :)

Poor old Johnny Hartigan begin again

2009-07-01T16:29:00.002+10:00

Via the Inquisitr and Andrew Bolt's blog 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.

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.

Hartigan is running the new Murdoch line of browbeating the public into paying for journalism, which goes against centuries of tradition.

I believe people will pay for content if it is:
- Original...
- Exclusive...
- Has the authority
- and is relevant to our audiences

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?

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.

Hartigan goes on later in the speech to list what News is going to do online to halt the rot:

tools that allow you to conduct transactions with our advertisers

The old parish pump reporting on local news will be reinvented as hyperlocal coverage of real time events such as
- Where to find the cheapest petrol
- How to avoid roadworks and traffic jams and
- The best retail offers available in your suburb that day

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.

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.

- give them what they need to make decisions
- and equip them to act on those decisions

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.

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.

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.

Post 2.0 Web advertising: make it up in volume

2009-03-23T18:02:00.003+11:00

For 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 FanFooty, 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.

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.

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.

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.

I was looking at Duncan Riley's site The Inquisitr 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?

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 RealFooty 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 Superfooty home page has five units, all huge, and just four on its story pages, also including one Google unit.

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?

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.

Then again, I do need to eat. :(

Gabe Rivera, Superego 2.0

2009-01-08T00:25:00.006+11:00

I was watching the excellent Shrink Rap show the other day, the episode with Stephen Fry 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.

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 admitted that he has been keeping a hand on the algorithmic tiller since 2005.

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 accusing Dunc of making up stories. Robert Scoble has started in on Gabe over the last month with a similarly spiteful campaign to convince him to recognise Scoble's shameless whoring of himself all over Friendfeed and Twitter in Techmeme's algorithms. Now Dave Winer has cussed out Gabe for not allowing him the passing frisson of quasi-parental validation.

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.

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.)

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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".

The Long-Burning Hack

2008-12-26T18:37:00.003+11:00

I was turned on today to the 2009: Year of the Hacker article by Kevin Kelleher on GigaOm by one of Ben Barren's rants, which itself riffs off a Chris Anderson piece for Wired Blogs, which references a Clay Shirky speech, and on and on in curlicues of hyperextension.

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.

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?).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Me at Google Sydney

2008-11-28T15:49:00.005+11:00

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.)

I have heard anecdotally that being featured positively on ACA does wondrous things for your traffic. Here's hoping!

I can has new Web experience

2008-08-19T17:16:00.002+10:00

I 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 an interview with Ben Huh, who is now making a living out of a rollup of sites that steal 4chan memes.

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.

I've had some experience with this myself with FanFooty, 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.

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. :)

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.

The substantive bits from Steve Gillmor's TechCrunch articles

2008-06-22T19:47:00.003+10:00

Whozat cheeky lot?

2008-05-31T23:12:00.002+10:00

The logo of my recently shelved "people omnibus" startup Tinfinger, drawn by professional illustrator Ray Frenden based on my concept:

The logo of Whozat, people search engine startup based in California headed up by an Italian and an Argentine:

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 October 2005 because their site lists their inception date as 2006.

It's just not cricket.

Some points on live video

2008-05-08T00:25:00.002+10:00

I'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 Flash Media Server 3 and ancillary products, not to mention support by Akamai 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.

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.

I'm not auditioning for Duncan Riley's job at TechCrunch so this will be somewhat half-arsed. Lets' go with point form.

- 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?

- Any developers out there in this space should be following the Watch KATG Live 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.

- 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.

- 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.

- 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.

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.

Steeeeee-rike one

2008-05-02T01:54:00.003+10:00

I coffeed with Ben Barren 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.

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.

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 Keith & The Girl 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.

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 Joe Wilson and the Galletly brothers). 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. As I've said before, 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. ;)

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.

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, this Valleywag comment 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.

And we were just two blokes in Geelong. (Sorry.)

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.

Just to say I blogged this month

2008-04-15T20:51:00.002+10:00

Let'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.

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.

One of those is the mystic rediscovery that AdSense isn't the Alpha and the Omega (linked because of comment #5). Well, maybe it's the Alpha. The Omega, apparently, is becoming your own advertising network. 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.

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.

Tai doesn't like me lifting the skirt like this, but I think no harm done. Now, how long before I blog next time?

Twitter and IRC: meet the twain

2008-02-20T19:42:00.002+11:00

As Richard Giles has already blogged, 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 today's edition of the 2Web Crew, starring Richard himself.

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.

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.

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.

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 agitating for a distributed Twitter alternative, are capable of delivering (or funding) this sort of system.

Time for Aussie 2.0ers to Hitwise up

2008-02-14T17:37:00.004+11:00

Ben Barren broke a blogging silence of three months today with an uncharacteristically lucid mini-essay detailing his thoughts going into the fourth year of Feedcorp, the business he started with consiglieri Michael Corleone but which is now headed by Pete Burley. 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.

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 The Podcast Network officially turns 3 today 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 Lethal League we should have an awesome 2008 where the growth of Tinfinger will be gravy, not our staple diet.

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?

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.

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).

When it comes down to it, I don't see any approach as being "wrong" unless you fail, as it appears (from admittedly second-hand hearsay) 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.

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.

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! ;)

All your browsers are belong to X-UA-Compatible

2008-01-24T09:06:00.000+11:00

An article this week on the Web design bible A List Apart lets us know the latest plans by Microsoft to embrace and extend the way HTML is rendered in Web browsers. Apparently in consultation with ALA boffins, Microsoft has agreed to implement a new meta declaration in the head section of HTML documents in their forthcoming Internet Explorer 8 release.

Using a simple meta declaration, we can specify the rendering engine we would like IE8 to use. For example, inserting this:
<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=8" />
into the head of a document would make IE8 render the page using the new standards mode. This syntax could be easily expanded to incorporate other browsers as well:
<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=8;FF=3;OtherUA=4" />

This is a great idea for developers, because they get to write once and then never have to edit their code again, no matter what new browsers are released. Never again will a new version of IE or Safari break their lovely site. Unfortunately, it sucks for users, mainly because participating browsers will have to bloat out to humungous sizes because they will have to include the rendering engines of all previous browser versions in order to be compatible with this new system. It also sucks for Mozilla, because part of their marketing message is that Firefox is the cleanest, smallest browser out on the market, and the inevitable bloat will blow that claim out if Firefox implements this system.

Microsoft caused this problem in the first place by not adhering to Web standards in previous versions of IE. Now they are trying to apply another band-aid over the suppurating wound, and they have enlisted a surprisingly self-serving ally in the ALA crowd. I would have thought ALA would be better than that. Developers should focus on developing standards-based code, minimising their use of browser hacks, and lobbying Microsoft to adhere to standards, not to cover their arses.

Flickr CC-BY attribution

2008-01-21T11:32:00.000+11:00

I have fixed a problem on Tinfinger relating to photos uploaded from Flickr which are marked as Creative Commons licensed requiring attribution. As per the Flickr community guidelines, Tinfinger now links to the photo page instead of the source URL. Thanks Stuart Hamilton for putting me on the straight and narrow!

Picks and shovels of the semantic Web want to be free

2008-01-20T07:25:00.000+11:00

A lot of people have been asking me over the past week or so, during the beta launch of Tinfinger, what it is about and why we are doing it at all. At the same time, I have been watching a few strands of conversation across the blogosphere which have crystallised my answer to that question. So here it is.

The first hint came with the news the day before we launched that MetaWeb raised US$42 million in Series B funding, making a total investment of US$57 million and causing some industry incredulity. MetaWeb's Freebase is doing something that I hope to do with Tinfinger: creating a freely available semantic Web database of all the world's information (although with Tinfinger we're sticking to the people vertical).

MetaWeb's business model for their flagship product Freebase, stated as somewhat of a vague afterthought in their FAQ, is to charge large corporate users for access to that database, which is licensed as CC-BY meaning that it's free to use with attribution back to the source. Using CC-BY is sensible for some uses - indeed, Tinfinger will do the same for its data and 150-word profile articles - but to me it seems strange for MetaWeb because the economics are all wrong. It makes perfect sense for Wikipedia to use CC-BY, because although they don't allow money to change hands for the production of any of their content, the currency they operate in is PageRank, and CC-BY is arguably the finest PageRank-building mechanism known to man. If you are wondering why Wikipedia is in the top 10 results for just about every search term in Google, look no further than the CC-BY license, because they get links back from every page on the Web which reprints Wikipedia content, of which there are legion. But what does PageRank mean for MetaWeb and Freebase? Freebase is not a destination site. They have not shown the slightest inclination to build landing pages. They display no knowledge of SEO techniques. CC-BY is useless to them.

It is an old cliche that the people who make money out of gold rushes are those selling the picks and shovels. MetaWeb is endeavouring to be the goldpanning equipment vendor for the semantic Web, which is a respectable goal. But how can you turn a dime if there is a place next door which is giving away dynamite for free? Let us be honest about the origins of Freebase, Tinfinger, Google Base, Twine, Spock et al. All such attempts to build the semantic Web have used as the core of their proprietary/licensed database the freely available (or at least freely scrapeable) databases such as dbpedia, ISBNdb, IMDb, IBDb, ITDb, BASE, Cricinfo, all the way to Project Gutenberg. It is my opinion that the economics of the database industry are such that, eventually, most of the important databases will be made available for free online. After a somewhat moribund period in the 90s, storage hardware has been undergoing some very rapid Moore's-Law-style advancements this decade and it will not be long before we have highly affordable solid state drives which are Internet-ready. Cost will not be an issue. It's probably not really an issue right now anyway, it's just a matter of the politics of shoveling huge data silos like SEC filings out from behind corporate paywalls.

To my mind, on one side you have MetaWeb, LexisNexis, EDGAR Online and the rest of the cabal who are relying on siphoning micropaid profits from licensing of data when the semantic Web takes off. On the other side, you have... the entire Internet. How can the semantic Web take off when Big Companies are standing in its way? The Internet finds a way around. In this case, it finds how to create its own semantic database, which might not be perfectly crafted or 100% reliable, but in the words of Rich Skrenta "the cheap rickety thing wins in the end".

You may still ask, "But isn't that what Wikipedia is for too?" Wikipedia is a fabulous resource for prose text, but in the area of tagging, MediaWiki was not really built from the ground up to handle it to the extent that a fully-fledged semantic Web application would require. Wikipedia's tag system is ad hoc, bootstrapped and too prone to user error.

This is where I hope Tinfinger can help. I didn't talk up our tagging features very much at launch because the tag data in our system now is mostly adapted from Wikipedia and thus not of the greatest quality - as was rightly pointed out already - but I think that's where the eventual power of Tinfinger will lie, once we implement the full system.

I think it's only fitting that a site such as Tinfinger which builds on top of public domain data sources contributes back to the public domain to the extent that economics allow. We will try to publish as much of our structured data as possible in ways that can help you with your own projects, the same way as Wikipedia allows you to add instant content to your Web pages. With attribution, of course. ;)

Geelong Advertiser story on Tinfinger

2008-01-19T08:57:00.000+11:00

Apparently their Web site dude is a TechCrunch reader and he alerted one of their journos to our existence. Who knew!

The picture was very nice, the Addy have some excellent photographers. It's quite a good article, considering I was a but rushed during the interview and didn't get all I wanted to say out of my mouth. I guess I underestimated the tech savvy of our local rag!

An open letter to Andrey Golub, Spock's #1 user

2008-01-17T15:04:00.000+11:00

Andrey Golub, an ~~Italian sysadmin~~ Belarusian business analyst who is apparently the #1 user contributor to Spock, saw fit to engage me in a comment on the TechCrunch story on the Tinfinger launch. I presume he wasn't put up to it by the Spock boys, so I won't go hard, but I feel I need to defend myself and Tinfinger.

to Paul Montgomery

1) a general question- why it wasn’t enough Wikipedia? the project with proven record as a Web Encyclopedia, at least for those known and famous… It wasn’t enough Wikipedia for the NORMAL people, so here has arrived Spock. but nobody had problems I believe with the celebrities’ stories on the Web :)

2) about Spock:
- why did you decide that Spock searches ONLY on Social Networks? (as from your response to “Jason and antje”)
I think it was clear for everyone that Spock checks Web 2.0 for the Web 2.0 people, and of course it looks at the normal Web for the non Web 2.0 people!
so:
a) as far as I know, wikipedia, the world’s largest DB about all known and famous people, have been already processed by Spock- that means Spock already has everyone listed on Wikipedia.

do you wanna say us Tinfinger will beat wikipedia first of all?

- you say this new Who’s Who can search the Blogs and so on- well, Spock can search everything that’s on the Web. If Google “knows something”- so also Spock will :)

do you wanna say us Tinfinger will beat Google after it beats Wikipedia?

hm… I have a doubt sincerely. About the mission first of all- it was probably enough Wikipedia for us + it was really needed to add the Web 2.0 part that has been done by Spock…

Well, good luck however!
Kind Regards,
Andrey Golub- find me on Spock
http://www.spock.com/Andrey-Golub

Okay Andrey, I sense that English is not your first language so I hope I understand your arguments correctly. I'll take your points in turn.

1. Why start Tinfinger when Wikipedia exists? You might as well ask why anyone would start any sort of publishing business. You might as well ask why start Spock when Google exists?! Just because there is a page about someone or something on Wikipedia doesn't mean it's the best possible page that anyone can write about that subject. In fact, many pages about people on Wikipedia are incomplete, inaccurate, stale or of poor general quality. I think it is possible to create an alternative which focuses more on quality, but still retains that openness for anyone to contribute. Plus, Wikipedia restricts itself to neutral encylopaedic articles, whereas Tinfinger will host many types of opinion articles, which makes the profile pages dynamic and worth visiting more than once over time.

2. I'm sure you know a lot more about Spock's systems than I do so I apologise for not acknowledging that Spock also has a general Web crawl. I read the other day that Spock has over 3 billion people data records. I didn't know that many people were on the Web... are there? ;)

2a. Okay, so Spock has incorporated Wikipedia data, as Tinfinger has. However, we have not and will not allow any Wikipedia articles to appear on our pages - we only used the names and some of the tags. I note that Spock includes the full Wikipedia articles about people on their relevant pages. That surprises me, because as I am sure the Spock boys know, that really kills a page's ranking in Google, because they mark PageRank down sharply for duplicated content. That leads me to believe that Spock doesn't care at all about ranking highly in Google - understandably so if the idea is to compete with Google - which leads to the question: how does Spock expect to grow traffic?

As for Tinfinger "beating" Wikipedia, yes, I would like for Tinfinger to eventually start beating Wikipedia in Google rankings for certain keywords, specifically names, and thus start beating them in traffic to those kinds of pages. It's a long-term goal of ours, but I think it's achievable if we concentrate on quality.

On Tinfinger beating Google: no. That's not our strategy at all, we say up front that we are not a search engine. Tinfinger is a human omnibus, a collection of articles from everywhere. People will find out about those articles through search engines like Google, and whatever comes after Google. We are a firm Google partner.

Finally, on the subject of the relative power of our search functions, I freely admit that our news and blog search is nowhere near as comprehensive and powerful as Spock's sounds like, from your words. However, neither is Techmeme's, and Gabe Rivera does alright with Techmeme. Our news and blog search powers 650 Techmeme-like headline pages, and that's all we need it for: a specialised product for a specialised use.

I wish you and the Spock boys luck in your efforts, Andrey. I appreciate your fervour in advancing the Spock bandwagon. I only hope that our users can become as passionate about Tinfinger.

Media coverage of Tinfinger beta launch

2008-01-15T04:54:00.000+11:00

First off, the ones I did interviews for:

TechCrunch: Tinfinger: A User Generated Who’s Who
iTWire: Putting the (Tin)finger on the famous
A podcast with myself, co-founder Tai Tran and Cameron Reilly: G’Day World #309 - Tinfinger

And the blogs which were kind enough to write about us:

India PR Blog: Looking for advocates for your campaigns; Tinfinger comes to the rescue
Phil Bradley: Tinfinger (a review, focusing on the tag content and how it doesn't look perfectly professional)
Geekets: TinFinger, el quien es quien de internet (in Spanish... hope it's positive!)
ceslava.com/blog: Tinfinger | La Wiki social de los famosos (Spanish)
Depth Reporting: Tinfinger famous people search
LagrangePoint - Brad Howarth: Aussie web 2.0: Tangler, Tinfinger and WasabiTV update
web2null: Tinfinger (German)
EKIVE: My Faves for Monday, January 14, 2008
Squash (Phil Sim): Tinfinger now in the wild
Socialmedia.jp: Tinfinger (Japanese)
Donatello Arts: Tinfinger (Portuguese)
KillerStartups - Tinfinger.com - Find Your Favorite Famous Person
Inspiratie 2.0: Tinfinger.com - op zoek naar beroemde personen (Dutch)
SassaFrassin: Who’s Who Goes Wiki
Simply Free 4 You: Another free resource, if you like Famous People
Beertjes: Thinfinger
Voofox Blog: 「公眾回憶」：最適合做成Web 2.0的皇牌素材？ (Japanese)

Tinfinger beta starts today

2008-01-15T03:54:00.000+11:00

Today marks the beta launch of Tinfinger, after two years of off and on development by myself and Tai Tran. It's a very exciting day, if a bit sleepy because we timed it for 9am Californian time, so it's 4am local time here in Geelong! The launch press release:

STARTS

Tinfinger changes the rules of Web creation

Human omnibus launches with user-debt strategy breaking new ground between Wikipedia and Squidoo/Mahalo/Knol

(Geelong, Australia, 15 January 2008) -- Fans of famous people will have a new place to share their fandom with today's beta launch of Tinfinger.com, a human omnibus. The site combines user-authored encyclopaedic profile pages of famous people with a news and blog search engine based around mentions of those peoples' names, which are aggregated into frequently-updated front pages for 650 categories. Tinfinger is intended by its two Australian co-founders, Paul Montgomery and Tai Tran, to become the primary resource for information about famous people on the Web.

"Tinfinger will be to the Who's Who what Wikipedia was to the Encyclopaedia Britannica," said Montgomery. "The Web is ready to move beyond the hyperlink as the only way to cluster and rank Web content, and we're going to try using names instead."

Tinfinger has not taken funding, which led Paul and Tai to devise a new business model: going into debt to its users. Contributions to Tinfinger will be paid for not with cash but with Google AdSense impressions (AIs), so that Google pays Tinfinger users for ads that Google puts on the Tinfinger site. It is expected that the rate of page production and AI payments will outstrip ad inventory at first as traffic to the site builds gradually, so that Tinfinger will start with a debt owed to its users, payable out of its future page views. More on the AI system below.

"This is an innovative business model built on necessity. We hope those who choose to participate develop a sense of ownership not only over their own contributions, but over Tinfinger as a partner in an ongoing contract," said Montgomery. "There are plenty of people out there who would like to meet other fans of their favourite people, and we hope to create a way for them to share their passions."

FEATURE BREAKDOWN

1. A database of famous people - famous meaning that they are mentioned in news or blogs related to a newsworthy issue - which classifies people both via a top-down category structure and a flat tag structure. Tags on Tinfinger will be expressible as RDF triples (subject-predicate-object, as opposed to subject-object). At beta launch time, existing people and their tags are not editable by users, but registered users can submit new people.

2. Profile pages about famous people, featuring articles and pictures submitted by users using WYSIWYG content authoring software. A collaboratively-authored profile article of around 150 words for each person, similar in function to a stub profile on Wikipedia, will be released by Tinfinger under the Creative Commons license. Each profile page can also include many other types of copyrighted single-author articles: biography, review, interview, encounter, comparison, praise, criticism, etc.

3. Clustered news aggregation with "front pages" for 650 categories, with a design familiar to readers of Google News, Topix or Techmeme. Tinfinger operates its own news and blog search engines, and snippets from these sources are collated into clusters based on mentions of each famous person's name. Tinfinger does not use links or semantic connections to cluster; just names, using a publicly available algorithm called tinscore. Higher-level category news pages include people from lower level categories, so that for instance the Africa category contains stories about people from all African countries, and the Internet category contains stories about people from Search Engines, Web 2.0, Web Advertising, Voice Over IP, Broadband and so on. Users can submit new sites, and the list of sites indexed for each category is available as an OPML reading list. The news and blog searches (as well as articles and pictures) each have their own RSS feeds and also can be published to other sites using a widget.

4. Social networking software from PeopleAggregator to enable user interaction and feedback. There are Tinfinger-controlled groups for each category, and users can create their own groups.

AI SYSTEM DETAILS

In the AI system, users will be rewarded for writing articles by their AdSense publisher IDs being put on Tinfinger pages. This is not a new thing by itself, but existing systems involve giving users a percentage of page impressions next to their articles. Tinfinger will debit the user's account with a fixed number of AIs for each article, which will then be gradually paid out of traffic on Tinfinger pages - not next to their articles, but from general site ad inventory. (The category headline and profile pages will be reserved for Tinfinger.) The starting rate for articles will be 10,000 AI. It is unknown what CPM rates that ads on Tinfinger pages will attract, but Tinfinger is aiming for at least US$1 CPM, implying a base payment per article of US$10. The AI figure each article actually earns will be highly changeable based on various quality and editorial factors, which are determined by Tinfinger based on published rules, and can also be boosted if Tinfinger places temporary "bounties" on articles about particular types of people. This approach will likely lead to a significant AI debt which Tinfinger will owe for many months. That will be part of our partnership with users.

FURTHER INFORMATION

- The co-founders and only employees are Paul Montgomery, a former technology journalist, and Tai Tran, a former corporate programmer. Both live in the Australian city of Geelong, which is 100km southwest of Melbourne. Paul blogs at http://tinfinger.blogspot.com and has blogged quietly about many Tinfinger features already.
- Development of Tinfinger began more than two years ago.
- Tinfinger has taken no funding, and is not currently in the market for funding. It will effectively be funded through debt owed to its users.
- To discourage spam, the social network portion and external links from profile pages will be labelled with nofollow.
- Tinfinger will consume OpenID logins.
- Database figures at launch: 404,000 people, 395,000 snippets, 2,700 pictures, 612,000 tags, 820 sites... 10 articles. Most people records were adapted from dbpedia and IMDb; most tags were from dbpedia. The people database is lumpy, with some categories containing very few people as yet.
- Tinfinger's mascot is a robot called Ned, who bears a worrying resemblance to Sidney Nolan paintings of the Australian bushranger Ned Kelly.
- The Tinfinger news algorithm, called tinscore, is detailed at http://tinfinger.blogspot.com/2005/12/tinscore-and-other-ways-to-clone.html

EXAMPLE PAGES

http://www.tinfinger.com/profile/Paul-Montgomery
http://www.tinfinger.com/headlines/Web-2.0
http://www.tinfinger.com/news/human/Britney-Spears
http://www.tinfinger.com/article/nation/Australia
http://www.tinfinger.com/picture/tag/Nobel-Prize
What to do at Tinfinger

ENDS

Links to media coverage
TechCrunch: Tinfinger: A User Generated Who’s Who

Tinfinger beta launch date

2008-01-03T01:07:00.000+11:00

AEDT: Tuesday 15 January, 4am.
US PST: Monday 14 January, 9am.

Stephen Conroy storms into censorship teacup

2007-12-31T19:23:00.000+11:00

If there was any question about whether the incoming Labor government in Australia - in the form of Stephen Conroy, the new minister for geeks - had any more clue about IT than the last lot, it has just been answered with the news of the latest Australian Internet censorship hoo-hah. Last time this issue was raised in .au several years ago there were demonstrations in the streets, much uproar, weeks of press coverage... and when we got a look at it in action once the bureaucrats had actually implemented it, we realised that it was pretty much like a DMCA takedown system but just for child porn, and everyone forgot about it as a bad joke.

The plan announced by Conroy goes further, according to the ABC, by involving Internet service providers in their plan to provide "clean" feeds at the ISP level. Notable by their absence from the announcement, however, was any appearances by representatives from the Australian ISP industry. To my mind, this makes this pretty much stillborn regardless of the substance of the proposals. If you haven't got the Internet Industry Association rep standing next to you when making such an announcement, you haven't got the support of the industry, and you're just pissing in the wind.

The IIA did release an interesting document just before Christmas, however, entitled New Rules for Restricting Access to 18+ Content and Commercial MA15+ Internet, Mobile or Fixed Phone. The ABC article is short on detail, but I wonder if today's falderol is just a public airing of this minor regulatory change. These changes were "developed following extensive consultation with carriage service providers, industry associations, content service providers from across a range of media, private individuals, privacy advocacy organisations, consumer organisations and regulatory bodies"... but by the previous Liberal government, not Conroy and the ALP, which would make it rather disingenuous of him!

If this is the content of the hot air being expelled today by Conroy, there are enough holes to suggest that this is going to be another damp squib, but there is also enough FUD for newspaper journalists who have dreams of transferring to the general news desk to big-note themselves by beating the story up into another maelstrom of uninformed, divisive rabble-rousing. I hope the Australian industry will be once bitten, twice shy.

An open letter to Marc Canter re OpenID

2007-12-27T21:38:00.000+11:00

Dear Marc Canter,

G'day mate... hey, wake up! Crikey, you fall asleep at the slightest chance. Okay, I want to ask you about OpenID: specifically why someone like me, who is building a Web site which incorporates a turnkey social networking app (which happens to be yours, but that's not the crux of it), should enable users to log in to my system using OpenID. I know you're one of the champions of OpenID, so perhaps you can address some issues I still haven't had answered to my satisfaction yet.

My concerns are more fully expressed on episode #2 of the On The Pod podcast with Duncan Riley, with the OpenID stuff starting about 13 minutes in and going for seven or eight minutes. I'll list the concerns raised in order:

Big social networks aren't leading adoption. Kevin Rose promised in February to allow OpenID logins by the end of the year... wassup? Chris Messina puts NetVibes, Last.fm, PBWiki, MyBlogLog, Technorati and Wikipedia on his shitlist for breaking similar promises. This was Duncan's point, but I'm not so fussed about it from my own POV. I don't mind being a bleeding edge user of open technologies... if I was worried about that I wouldn't be integrating PeepAgg! :) However, I'm sure it worries a lot of other people in my position, so I guess it's part of the problem.

If big networks do finally get on board, small networks could be swamped by their users. As I said in the podcast: why would I want Facebook users (or users from AOL, one of the few existing implementors) to come in to my system and ruin the community I have set up with my own network of Tinfinger-specific users, when I am not going to get any benefit from them from a customer relationship management point of view? Building a distinct community is one of the fundamental tasks of starting a new social network. If everyone who is on Tinfinger is also on Twitter, and uses the same login, isn't it fairly difficult to forge a new identity for the collective userbase?

It's hard to build a business around a database of users, as most publishers do traditionally, when you don't own a distinct user database. I come from a niche magazine publishing background, where a lot of effort is put into building and maintaining a highly targeted user base, periodically culled to protect quality of readership so that advertisers can be delivered the best audience of potential buyers for their products. I understand that this mode of thinking has to be modified somewhat for the online environment, but it works bloody well for magazines, so I would need to hear a compelling argument as to why it can't be redeployed in some form for Web sites, particularly ones targeting a specific niche. OpenID seems to me to undermine that whole business plan.

So, there it is Marc. I've given you a little prior warning on this one and you said you'd get back to me in a day or so. I look forward to your reply.

Cheers,
Monty.

Epic Knolz

2007-12-14T17:19:00.000+11:00

You don't need me to tell you what Google Knol is. Here's why it will fail, according to what we have been told about it so far.

It's Wikipedia minus organised human oversight... which means it's just Blogger with a MediaWiki theme. You don't see Blogger sites dominating SERPs - not any more, anyway.
If claiming a Knol page is first-in-best-dressed, on its official opening there will be a hugely distasteful DNS-style land grab, mostly won by spammers.
Knol processes which are likely to fail without firmly directed human oversight: metapages like categories; page ownership; copyright violations; verbal abuse; racial content; anything else normally handled by Wikipedia's ArbCom.
Udi Manber says "The key idea behind the knol project is to highlight authors." Wrong approach. Wikipedia is all about the editors, truth be told. If you remove editors and leave it up to the authors, the project lacks focus.
Squidoo and Mahalo welcome spammers and SEO agents because they work cheap, but try to keep them on short leashes. Knol will be just as accommodating to these enemies of quality, but it does not sound like Google will provide the whip hand necessary to keep their excesses in check.

As it stands, if Knol succeeds, it will hurt Google. They have not explained why it is necessary to recreate Wikipedia. Someone other than Udi Manber needs to give valid reasons as to why Knol is at all needed, and why it is not a blatant attack on existing knowledge aggregators.

Crazy Uncle Dave vs striking writers

2007-12-01T15:44:00.000+11:00

Dave Winer is obviously trolling in his piece today entitled The Hollywood writer's strike, but what the hell, it's a slow Saturday arvo and I don't feel like seeing Beowulf right now.

Dave takes the position that if he can make money without charging for his creative works, then no one should demand to be paid for being creative, at least where their content is delivered over the Internet. He claims that chances to make money off online content do not exist, which is completely ridiculous. One billion chances from Viacom's suit against YouTube alone, Dave. I see a lot of employers of striking writers on comScore's video traffic rankings. There must be money to be made there somewhere.

Dave invalidates his own argument by pointing to the fact that he got angry in the 90s about how as he claims, "creative work won't be directly paid for in the future". Let me see, what has changed since the mid-90s? Oh yes, back in the mid-90s Dave had created an intellectual asset (Frontier) and was still in the midst of trying to make it succeed. He felt the financial pressures of running a business, of paying wages, of setting himself up for the future. He is now independently wealthy from selling off his previous creative works, and is semi-retired. He has the luxury of treating his creative work as charity that he donates to the world. He no longer has to strive to succeed.

Dave, there are those of us who are not rich, who still have to work to earn a living. Please don't insult us by telling us that we should work for free, or accept anything less than an honest day's pay for an honest day's work.

The system is not going to "break", as Dave predicts. The system is capitalism, that's not going to get broken. Capitalism adapts. Capitalism wins. Individual workers lose when they don't stand up for their rights, which is why the writers' strike should be supported. Unless you're on the side of the executives.

Actually, I think I will go and see Beowulf. It is a fine example of technology and creativity being merged together, so that left-brain and right-brain types can work on the same project, and both get fairly compensated.

Journalists as database reporters

2007-11-17T02:09:00.001+11:00

An excellent article on Gannett today by Rich Gordon from the Readership Institute at Northwestern University. Gordon highlights the Indianapolis Star's attempts to go beyond the traditional role that Web sites play in mainstream media organisations, which is to say shoveling their journalism products out with little to no effort. The Star is forging Internet-native applications that are built less on simple prose and more on structured data. Most cuttingly, Gordon presents a hierarchy of what he calls "database journalism", culminating in level 5 where journalism which is developed in conjunction with databases, turning the raw facts into human stories.

It's no coincidence that Gannett, owner of the Star and many other regional American newspapers, is one of the purchasers of Topix.net, about which I have written often in the past. I don't know if it's a case of Gannett "getting it" and the Topix buy-out being a consequence of that, or whether the influence of Rich Skrenta, Chris Tolles and the Topix gang has percolated back through stuffy old-style institutions... probably a bit of both.

I have always been amazed, not having ever worked for a newspaper during my journalism career, at how pitifully little newspaper companies have made use of obvious strengths in their current operations which could have been used to dominate huge portions of the Web advertising pie. The "morgues" where the newspaper archives are kept are goldmines which their owners have seemed clueless about how to monetise. Put a search engine optimisation consultant in charge of the back issues of any major newspaper... well, that argument has been made over and over.

The point about how databases can be made to serve and advance journalism is not really new, either. Reports about polls, economic figures, sociological studies, sporting statistics, and many other kinds of databases fill the pages of newspapers already. The key difference in Gordon's analysis is Adrian Holovaty's motto of "everything that can be linked should be linked". It is as if most newspaper sites have a religious intolerance against linking within their stories, not to sully their professional prose with anything so tawdry and utilitarian. That attitude must change.

Crazy Uncle episode #389,235: CPC ads

2007-11-15T06:02:00.000+11:00

Why is it that memes in the tech blogosphere are so often structured around "A-List" Crazy Uncles saying stupid shit just to get a reaction, and right-minded people on less popular blogs having to set them straight? The latest is Steve Rubel, who has been particularly stupid lately, pitifully missing the mark again with a piece on why he thinks cost-per-click (CPC) ads are heading for a recession (which I refuse to link as it is nakedly manipulative linkbait) and people like Andrew Goodman at the excellent Traffick blog providing comprehensive rebuttals.

The craziest thing is that Rubel didn't even bring up the main possible reason why CPC ads will see a decline - which is that CPM ads (i.e. display ads which generate revenue for the publisher even if they are not clicked on) will increasingly dominate online ad inventories. That was certainly the case on my site FanFooty this year: for the majority of the year, 80-90% of the AdSense inventory on the site was bought out by advertisers with CPM display ad campaigns, culminating in a battle over the inventory in the second half of the year between Schick and Gillette.

I don't think it would be telling any secrets to say that the difference in earning potential between regular CPC text link ads and CPM display ads hovered for me between 1:5 and 1:30. Cost-per-action (CPA) ads are notoriously poor earners for publishers - you only have to look at Google's failing Referrals product to see that. As Andrew points out, it is folly to think that CPA is going to replace everything, because the three marketing tools each have their place and not every site will engineer its content towards being a simple affiliate marketer.

People have been saying for years that adoption of the Web as an advertising platform has lagged adoption of the Web by users, and as large advertisers shift their budgets online there will be a lot more display advertising to fill publisher inventories. Thankfully we have blogs like Traffick to disseminate useful analysis, quietly but effectively, without needlessly emotional rhetoric.

Metanarrative, Joe Morgan and Dave Winer

2007-11-05T03:04:00.000+11:00

Many of my past experiences and hobbies have assumed post-facto significance in my own mind as I work on the looming beta version of Tinfinger, informing my understanding of what it is to create "an Internet version of the Who's Who". One of these hobbies is my predilection for snark blogs, specifically snark blogs which are focused on attacking one person. They are mostly anonymous, or at least pseudonymous, for obvious reasons. Some of them have evolved to the point where they are an essential part of the celebrity of their target.

Arguably the best such snark blog on the Internet - I would love to see a full list - is Fire Joe Morgan, which is mostly concerned with the eponymous baseball Hall of Famer and current ESPN gamecaller. As the name of the blog suggests, the author, who rejoices in the nom de plume of Ken Fantastic, thinks very little of Joe Morgan's fitness to be paid a lot of money to commentate on baseball matches. The high points of the FJM blog each week of baseball season are Ken's reviews of what he calls JoeChats, which are live online chats he has with fans on the ESPN Web site. Ken rails against Joe's obvious peccadilloes of poor communication: his overuse of the word "consistent", his inability to spell "concentrate" with two Ns, his complete cowardice in taking any stance at all on many questions, and his weasel words to get out of saying anything remotely interesting or controversial. What is more remarkable is that the FJM blog has become popular enough that readers who agree with him about Joe's incompetence have infiltrated these JoeChats and feed Joe with obviously staged questions, replete with misspelt "concetrate" and as many mentions of "consistent" as possible, purely to show Joe up. Ken, of course, gleefully highlights his reader's sly digs, and it all adds to the frivolity. One has to think that some people at ESPN must know about FJM by now and must know that they're being played for fools, which makes one wonder whether the tech lads who run the JoeChats agree with Ken and his minions and are also in on the gag.

While this is all very funny, it is also interesting in what it says about how the Internet is being used. The critics of a media practitioner are invading the medium itself and making parody part of his actual performance. I'm no media studies expert with a handle on the jargon of philosophy, but it seems to me that in this case the metanarrative is merging with the narrative.

Another example of where the snark blogs are becoming vital to comprehension of a person's fame is Dave Winer. Eye on Winer is not the first anti-Winer snark outlet and it probably won't be the last, but it's increasingly starting to look like FJM in that you can't really read Scripting News without also reading the comments on EOW to understand what's really going on.

For example, the anonymous author of EOW linked to the comments on a previous item today which predicted two weeks ago how Dave would react to the recent Google OpenSocial API moves, correctly identifying that Dave would attack Google for every flimsy reason other than the real one, which is that he hates Google whenever they support Atom as a competitor to RSS (not to mention OpenSocial as an alternative to XML-RPC). Is Dave that transparent? If so, is that just a function of age in that like Morgan, Dave is just too set in his ways to realise when he's retreading old ground and displaying his mental quirks one too many times? Dave shows some knowledge of the snark blogs tracking him, so he must know that he is being mocked constantly for the same bugbears. Does that make him more or less worthy of mocking? Familiarity breeds contempt, they say, and perhaps one of the downsides to the constant media exposure that both Joe and Dave enjoy, albeit in different media environments, is that personality faults are magnified and repeated again and again.

The tones of FJM and EOW are very similar: incredulity that their targets are so consistent (pun intended) in their incompetence and/or gutlessness. As long as Joe and Dave keep using the Internet to communicate, they seem incapable of changing their ways, and there will always be snark blogs there to feed off them in a relationship that becomes more symbiotic over time.

PS: Steve Gillmor would be another highly appropriate target of such a snark blog, given how much he's rumoured to be culpable for the downfall of Podtech... but no one cares enough about him to start one. :)

The Pharyngula mutating genre meme

2007-10-17T14:32:00.000+10:00

I love blog memes, and Bruce Everitt over at The Thinkers' Podium just tagged me with a good one: the Pharyngula mutating genre meme. The rules are as follows:

There are a set of questions below that are all of the form, “The best [subgenre] [medium] in [genre] is…”. Copy the questions, and before answering them, you may modify them in a limited way, carrying out no more than two of these operations:
You can leave them exactly as is.

You can delete any one question.

You can mutate either the genre, medium, or subgenre of any one question. For instance, you could change “The best time travel novel in SF/Fantasy is…” to “The best time travel novel in Westerns is…”, or “The best time travel movie in SF/Fantasy is…”, or “The best romance novel in SF/Fantasy is…”.

You can add a completely new question of your choice to the end of the list, as long as it is still in the form “The best [subgenre] [medium] in [genre] is…”.

You must have at least one question in your set, or you’ve gone extinct, and you must be able to answer it yourself, or you’re not viable.

Then answer your possibly mutant set of questions. Please do include a link back to the blog you got them from, to simplify tracing the ancestry, and include these instructions.

Finally, pass it along to any number of your fellow bloggers. Remember, though, your success as a Darwinian replicator is going to be measured by the propagation of your variants, which is going to be a function of both the interest your well-honed questions generate and the number of successful attempts at reproducing them.

Okay, so here are my contributions:

1. The best time travel novel in magic realism is…

Armageddon: The Musical by Robert Rankin. Barry the Talking Sprout is the best time machine in fiction, and he constantly steals scenes with his buddy Elvis. By the by, I recently read The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde, and found it sorely lacking. It followed much the same formula as Rankin's oeuvre - magic realism, quirky loser characters, decidedly British backdrop, time travel - but contained very little humour. I could not help thinking by about page 20 that if The Eyre Affair had been a Rankin book there would have been half a dozen genuinely funny running gags by now, whereas all Fforde could inject was some boring literary allusions.

2. The best Continental-European movie in historical fiction is…

Astérix et Obélix contre César. I watched this movie in a theatre in Singapore in 1999 and highly enjoyed myself. Gerard Depardieu as Obelix, Roberto Benigni as a legionary, Laetitia Casta as eye candy, and a special effects budget large enough to do justice to the vision of Goscinny & Uderzo... what more do you want? Then again, I am one of the more hardcore Asterix fans you'll ever meet.

3. The best sexy song in industrial rock is…

She Wants Animals - Nine Inch Nails vs Ace Of Base as mashed up by DJ Tripp. A little naughty of me here, considering that NIN got mentioned two steps up the memechain, but I have liked this song a lot ever since I heard it as track 3 on Bootmixed, arguably the best mash-up compilation album ever. Tripp takes two songs with seemingly incompatible musical styles and makes them work, not least because he manages to combine the lyrics to form a very funny reversal to the intensity of Trent Reznor's intended effect. Instead of the song being about the uncontrollable urge of a manly man to copulate with his partner, it is transformed via the addition of the Ace of Base lyrics into a tale of a liberated woman who manipulates the neanderthal male into becoming an unwitting sperm donor.

I pass on the memetic seed to:

Bronwen Clune at Norg Media
Simon Sharwood at Stay Cool Dad
Phillip Malone at Mollyzine
Duncan Riley at duncanriley.com
John Johnston at jjprojects
Cait at scientaestubique
Phil Sim at Squash
Jeremy Johnsen at Johnsenclan
Leslie Nassar at mojourno
Karel Donk at Miraesoft
Marsh Davies at Verbal Chilli
Ray Frenden at frenden.com
Caryn Law at Hellchick
Barbara Kerr at Martin Scorsese Is Quite A Jovial Fellow

What can I say, I spread my seed far and wide. ;)

AdSense and the weak US dollar

2007-10-15T16:01:00.000+10:00

After much cajoling my me via Twitter and Second Life over the past month, Duncan Riley finally wrote on TechCrunch today about the effects of the devaluation of the US dollar on the tech startup sector. Duncan is a busy man so his post was understandably brief, focusing on the main winners and losers, but as with all good TC articles, the discussion in the comments fills in the holes of understanding of the breadth of the issue, including the impact on Canadian contractors, US freelancers and Indian outsourcers.

The issue is close to my heart because I run several sites which have Google AdSense advertisements as their primary (but not only) revenue source. Google pays its publishers in American dollars, which as the greenback deflates is losing people like me more and more money over time. On this year alone, as can be seen below, the US$ has dropped 9% against the A$, which translates directly into lost profits for my AdSense-reliant businesses. I can only imagine what the numbers must be like for heavy-duty AdSense publishers like Canadian Markus Frind.

It is basic economic theory that exporters are hurt by a dipping currency in their buyer's economy because their export products become less competitive on price compared to local suppliers. Rather than fleeing from AdSense to other products - given that no non-US alternative has gained any traction - I think the net effect of the falling US dollar will be to add to the encouragement for non-US-based startups to relocate to the US, so that they get full value for their money. Of course, depending on the part of the US you move to, the increased living costs are likely to eat up any savings, but of course there are other benefits to being near a startup hub, as Paul Graham told us so depressingly.

The economics of Web hosting (which I whinged about in May '06) have already mandated that non-American businesses host their data in the US. Add the depreciating Benjamin to the list of reasons why startup founders' physical forms will follow their ones and zeroes to Seppo Land.

SharedKnowing and alternative collaborative models

2007-10-04T10:30:00.000+10:00

Mailing lists these days seem like relics of a bygone era, suitable only for people who haven't moved on to the shiny 2.0 this or that. Nevertheless, I will be subscribing to and participating in the new SharedKnowing list, as announced by Larry Sanger of Citizendium (and formerly of Wikipedia). Larry's vision for the group is of "well-reasoned, polite discussion and announcements about the nature of online knowledge production communities". His wishlist of participants makes it sound like he wants to chew the fat over epistemology with latter-day Platos and Aristotles, but I suspect the list will be a lot less stuffy and academic that Larry makes it sound like. Hopefully a humble journalist-turned-programmer like me can find the answers to some of the burning questions still in my mind about how to structure the creation of knowledge on Tinfinger - knowledge in this case being the profiles of famous and semi-famous people, with which I want to push the boundaries of the semantic Web (but that's for another post).

One major question I want to explore is different structures of collaboration. The wiki model is only one possibility among many in how to make collaborative knowledge production work on a public Web site, in my opinion. Perhaps not surprisingly given my background as a journalist, I am a firm believer in knowledge producers having the option to be rewarded for their work. Creative Commons licensing is all very well for people who are rich in time and/or principles, but not everyone has the capability to be so giving of their valuable efforts without compensation. The WP/CZ model assumes that no one owns a document, or is the author, but they both have the editor/writer relationship which guides the evolution of an article towards compromise.

I would like to try out something different. Specifically, I have been thinking a lot about how to engineer a system which allows people to join groups who claim collaborative authorship over a document, and thus enjoy the ability to profit from publication of that document. These groups - or factions or crews or cliques or cells or what have you - would have to be so fluid as to allow them to be formed around a single document, or over hundreds of documents at once. It's not as if it's a new concept in a theoretical sense: it's pretty much how scientific journal articles are attributed, with most having unique lists of contributors, some including hundreds of names. Making that work in real time on a knowledge production Web site, however, would be a non-trivial technical feat of document authoring software - not to mention the complexities of ensuring accurate monetary compensation. Getting the politics right will also be tricky, which is where I hope the SharedKnowing list can help.

From Apache to lighttpd and back again

2007-09-24T01:13:00.000+10:00

Reading the fascinating insights from cdbaby.com's Derek Sivers on switching from PHP to Ruby and back to PHP has encouraged me to blog about something I've been thinking of blogging for a while now: our departure from Apache to lighttpd as web server of choice for FanFooty during the last three months and our very recent flight back to Apache.

Apache was pretty much a default for our sites to begin with, as the A part of LAMP. However, we have had increasing problems with FanFooty scaling up to meet the demands of huge numbers of concurrent users. By far FanFooty's most popular pages are the live match fantasy scoring pages - for example the one for the Geelong v Collingwood game this weekend - which after many battle-hardening iterations have been reduced down to a flat HTML page which through AJAX calls a single comma-delimited text file every 30 seconds. No PHP, no mySQL, just flat text files.

Even this pared-down architecture was showing distinct signs of overloading on our one solitary server halfway through the 2007 AFL season, with frequent crashing during peak load times. I don't know exactly how many concurrent users we had, but each match day we were getting accessed by 12,000 unique browsers over the course of the day, so I would estimate that load on each live match fantasy scoring page would have been many thousands of requests for the exact same file every 30 seconds... for a couple of hours straight.
Seen at right, our traffic graphs were the same for every game: a smooth ramp up during each game culminating in a big spike at the end of each game as fantasy coaches checked the final scores. Some days there would be at least one game on continuously for eight straight hours, with three or four spikes.

Something had to give. We examined the state of our server during those peak load times, and found that the main problem was that Apache was starting too many processes and running out of RAM. We tried doubling the RAM on our server, but that was an expensive process and not a long-term solution.

To cut a long story short: we heard of lighttpd, read some reviews, tested it, liked the concurrent user benchmarks we were getting on our box, tried it, and it worked a treat. The only teething problems came from having to rewrite Apache's .htaccess rules into lighttpd's mod_rewrite rules: regular expressions are tricky for a self-taught rube like me. Once it was up and running, all of our scaling problems went away, and in-game crashes almost disappeared.

I say almost, because lighttpd, for all of its speed and efficiency, has one glaring flaw: memory leaks. The hallmark of lighttpd is its low memory footprint compared to Apache, but to do that it has sacrificed a lot of Apache's management subroutines, one of the most important ones being how Apache handles the changeable rate of requests it handles over time. Through painful personal experience, I can say that lighttpd has serious problems with managing its memory footprint, in that it seems incapable of reducing its memory usage after a high load period. The lighttpd application seems to creep ever upwards in memory usage, ever so slightly over many hours, until it fills all available RAM and brings the server to a standstill. While the high load period is ongoing there is nothing better than lighttpd for handling thousands of concurrent users, especially for static content like text and picture files, but when the party's over lighttpd can't seem to shake off the hangover.

This is why we have switched back to Apache, now that the AFL football season is all but over. Having to manually restart the lighttpd application multiple times per day is a pain in the arse I don't want to have to deal with. I'm putting co-founder Tai on the task of building a remote monitoring application to run on our local boxes. We're even investigating the possibility of a "dual-boot" server, if you will, which would allow us to switch between Apache and lighttpd as traffic conditions dictate (EDIT: this link looks promising). We're trying to build Tinfinger with a similar reliance on flat text files (through a religious zeal for caching) so that when the TechCrunch traffic spikes hit then we'll be able to handle it with lighttpd.

I don't know that many Web applications would have similar traffic patterns and system architectures to FanFooty, but hopefully the above is helpful to someone who is in the position I was in three months ago and looks for guidance online about what to do in the face of massively spiky traffic problems.

Exclusive: Rich Skrenta's new startup Blekko

2007-09-19T02:22:00.000+10:00

Rich Skrenta, recently departed CEO of Topix, has been in the news in the last couple of days due to the 25th anniversary of the release of the Elk Cloner virus he wrote. An interesting little snippet at the end of the AP story is about his new project, which is described as "Blekko Inc., a month-old startup still working in stealth mode".

After contacting Rich via IM and grilling him using all my powers of investigative journalism and torture techniques, he finally admitted to me what Blekko was all about, and I can exclusively reveal it to the two or three of you who still subscribe to this feed.

Blekko is, in fact, a return to Skrenta's roots. The codebase is in its infancy... well, more like it's a couple of zygotes really. However, the intention is clear, the target has been set, and the infection vectors have been mapped.

Blekko is going to innovate strongly in the hot field of viral adoption. This will be helped greatly by the fact that the main Blekko product will, in fact, be a virus. But not just any sort of virus. It will be the first virus specifically designed to infect iPhones.

The name of the company gives the final clue as to what Blekko will do once it has infected iPhones, as a cursory googling will attest. Obviously Skrenta has had this planned for a decade or more, with the first seeds for the concept planted back in the days when telnet was still a new technology.

For those few of you who haven't guessed by now: yes, the Blekko virus will endlessly loop the Star Wars ASCII movie on iPhones it infects. All of the venture capital Skrenta has raised will go towards finishing this massive project, which after more than 10 years is still a long way from completion.

I wish Rich all the very best of luck in his endeavours, and look forward to seeing the looks of horror on the faces of those self-absorbed, over-cashed iPhone buyers as their beloved toys get bricked by Obi-Wan.

Exclusive screenshot of Blekko in action!

Update: explicit confirmation of this story has been provided by Rich Skrenta himself, as a quick look at blekko.com will demonstrate.

The search engine is dead, part II

2007-09-16T05:47:00.000+10:00

I have attacked Charles Knight before on this blog, but I am about to do so again. His Read/Write Web affiliate blog called Alt Search Engines recently published three articles trying to define the market from which he evidently wants to suck blood like a remora. What is a Search Engine? was the first effort, What is Not a Search Engine? was the second and the third, What is an “Alternative” Search Engine?, was the only one written by Knight himself.

In short, the whole exercise is a joke. The first two articles provide a somewhat serious look at how to define a search engine, but Knight pretty much admits with a straight face that he thinks a search engine is whatever is going to make him money. The clincher is that even though Quintura is specifically mentioned in the second article as not being worthy of being called a search engine because it does no webcrawling of its own, Knight still claims it is, and recently named it Search Engine Of The Month... and who is that advertising on the right of the page? Why, that looks like a Quintura ad! How could that have gotten there? Fancy that.

(screenshot modified according to the uncov school of aggression.)

The fact that such a blatantly self-promoting, ignorant shill can even survive means that the search engine industry is dead. His obvious pandering to potential advertisers and consultancy targets might be okay if he had any idea what he was talking about, but Knight admits openly that he treats the industry like he's a movie critic with zero credentials. Knight's ethos of interface over backend, style over substance, is the sort of thing that is giving the concept of the search engine a bad name. If you can code up a PHP front-end to someone else's crawl with pastel colours, rounded corners and tag clouds, Knight will call you a search engine.

Charles Knight is the Grim Reaper of the search engine dinner party, standing in the middle of the table and pointing his bony finger at eaters of the salmon mousse. Richard McManus, this joker makes your operation look amateurish. He is only getting worse and worse.

The search engine is dead, part I

2007-09-02T01:29:00.000+10:00

I have decided that Tinfinger is not a search engine. It never was one, really, even though before now I had displayed the bold claim in the site's tagline: "Human search engine". I have come to the conclusion that I was sadly misguided.

There is no search engine but Google. There is no use fighting it. That is, unless you are skilled in the very techniques which have made Google what it is, and not the sort of thing that gets you a stinging rebuke from the lads at uncov, as PeekYou did this week.

They don't even bother to parse the query! Spock can even get off their lazy ass and do that. Sure, with names it's never as simple as a call to split(), or, uh, in PHP shall we say explode(), but at least try. This embarrassing lack of parsing suggests that their search is backed by MySQL, and the queries look like this:

SELECT * FROM Table WHERE FirstName="$firstName" AND LastName="$lastName";
I can't make the point any more clear that this is not a search engine. Search engines add value to a data store with intelligent parsing and ranking. If I wanted to look up people like this, I'd use the fucking phone book.

PeekYou, and its competitors Spock, Wink and the like... ARE the phone book. That's all they are. Specifically, they are phone books for social networks. Phone books are, by their nature, dumb. In a structural sense, I mean. Sure, they have utility, and every once in a while you'd like to have them around, but they're not very complex. The US White Pages includes separate form input boxes for each of its fields. So does the Australian White Pages.

Is that a search engine? No, I don't think so. Just because the site allows you to search a database doesn't make it a search engine, in my eyes.

Similarly, there was a stink a little while ago about Robert Scoble announcing that a gestalt entity comprised of Facebook, Techmeme and Mahalo was going to kill Google in four years' time. As punishment for the obvious linkbaiting, I choose to perform a gillmor (a verb meaning "to not link a vital underpinning part of one's argument, assuming that the reader knows what one is talking about, and additionally, fuck you readers, you little worms"). Anyway, so behind all the handwaving and whiteboard engineering, Scoble seemed to think that Mahalo's search results had the potential to become better than Google's.

Is Mahalo a search engine? No, I don't think so. The front page is rendered in a directory structure, and while there is a search box for the site, once you stray past the minority of authored pages, you're not in Kanmahalosas any more. Essentially, it's a bunch of link whitelists.

Obviously I don't think Wikipedia or Citizendium are search engines either, they are encyclopedias. The point I'm trying to make is that we need a new vocabulary for describing what we now call search engines, because as the uncov boys point out so cuttingly, many of the startups who currently bask in the status of being called a search engine are no more worthy of the name than the dead tree doorstop that used to get delivered to your home each year. Persai, the project being worked on by uncov denizens Ted, Kyle and Matt, is a real search engine, or at least it promises to be.

So, what do I think Tinfinger actually is? Well, apart from the fact that it's going to have a social networking element tacked on, and a Techmeme-style news aggregation feature (which made me wonder if Scoble had hax0red my bizplan), I think it's going to be an omnibus. By that, I mean it will be a collection of articles about a subject. It's not a very sexy word, but there it is.

You may be wondering: what does it matter what we call them? I think it is critical to the success of these ventures what they think of themselves as. I shall explain in my next blog post.

Podcast with Duncan Riley on OpenID and attention

2007-08-22T20:06:00.000+10:00

I recorded a podcast today with TechCrunch writer and Aussie 2.0 kingmaker Duncan Riley as episode #2 of his new TPN show called On The Pod.

I started off with the usual spiel explaining the history of FanFooty and Tinfinger, with a bit of a sideways discussion of Mahalo (awesome review by Rich Skrenta, btw). Then we moved on to talk of turnkey social networking applications, with which I have some experience as a developer because Tai and I are in the middle of integrating the PeopleAggregator app from Marc Canter's startup Broadband Mechanics into Tinfinger.

Then we got on to the meat of the discussion, which centred around online identity, OpenID and what the future holds for privacy in the social networking industry. I threw in some points about attention management software because I think there are significant connections between the future of the two concepts. We talked in passing about Facebook, Spock and Root Markets. Fresh in my mind were the thoughts of a few luminaries: Dave Winer and Brad Fitzpatrick (plus bonus anti-OpenID rant from someone I've never heard of!).

This was the second time I've appeared on The Podcast Network in recent times: I was on episode #268 of Cameron Reilly's show G'Day World to talk international politics late last month. Despite both Duncan and Cameron having confessed to being long-term Liberal voters in the past, they're both top blokes and I enjoyed myself during both shows immensely. Thanks to both!

Meanwhile, the Coaches Box fantasy footy podcast I co-host with Phillip "Molly" Malone is up to episode #16, and talks are ongoing about moving the show to a certain offline format for next Australian rules football season. I never thought I was much of a talker, due to my terrible habits of mumbling and rabbiting on (not to mention I've got a face for radio but a voice for print)... but I'm getting plenty of practice in.

Photo suckers

2007-08-17T23:06:00.000+10:00

I have recently removed from my NetVibes page the Thoughts of a Bohemian blog by photography industry exec Paul Melcher, plus the attendant metafeed of photography blogs that Melcher compiled. I had added them a couple of months ago to try to get some idea of where the photography industry is heading, because I was concerned about how to use images of celebrities on Tinfinger.

It has become quite clear through reading Melcher that the photography industry is pretty much screwed. Market leaders like Corbis and Getty are poorly run, glacier-like in their movement, and have no answer to the questions posed about their business models by the Internet. The microstock and royalty-free models have destroyed the margins of most types of photography products, and the cost of picture production has come down so drastically as to make many old models completely unworkable.

Having said that, I was still surprised to see the way newly launched social network white pages clone Spock handles images of celebrities. Take their Chris Judd images page - Chris Judd is one of the most famous Aussie rules players in the game right now. Ignore for the moment that the two pics on the left are not of the Australian Chris Judd. Notice how you can click on each thumbnail image and it expands through the magic of Javascript to show the full-sized original image.

How do the Spock people think they can get away with that? Isn't it a blatant breach of copyright? This is an honest question, I would like to know. I have been jumping through a lot of hoops with Tinfinger trying not to build a system that would give offense to image copyright holders, but am I the sucker in this equation? Is it really a free-for-all with celebrity images now?

It's no wonder that Melcher and his peers are so depressed about the photography industry. I am a journalist by training, so I understand the desire by content creators to be rewarded for their work. Should I abandon my morals and just scrape every image I can get my hands on, or is there a reckoning for the likes of Spock where the photography industry will stand up for its rights and, ultimately, its survival as a commercial concern?

Growing pains

2007-08-13T13:04:00.000+10:00

I've been watching the feed of Plentyoffish.com founder Markus Frind for a while now, because he has been the poster child for AdSense-driven Web sites. Frind is the famous US$10,000/day AdSense millionaire who runs the business as a sole proprietor.

Or at least, that's what he has been doing. Now, he has announced that he is going to ditch AdSense and hire his own sales force with a salary budget of US$300,000/month and also hire a bunch of software developers experienced in Microsoft technologies. I guess there is a ceiling of how big a one person show can get, and Markus just hit it.

At a much smaller scale, I'm having some of the same thoughts myself about our FanFooty business. AdSense can be very frustrating, as I have found during August especially. There is a point beyond which a site's traffic gets so high that the revenue difference between AdSense and an alternative sales structure will be so great as to outweigh the extra overhead of time and effort that non-AdSense solutions imply. FanFooty has pretty much hit that point already, with an inventory of three million page impressions per month to play with. The 2008 Aussie rules football season is going to be bigger and better for FanFooty for a number of different reasons, and the AdSense part of the business may have to be sacrificed as part of that transition.

EDIT: but now Markus is saying he's not going to hire for a while! Make your mind up, mate!

Cyclingnews: Aussie Web 1.0 success story

2007-07-05T22:55:00.000+10:00

You probably won't see this story in much of the trade press, but one of the quiet achievers of the Australian corner of the Internet has just had what sounds like a very satisfactory and lucrative exit. Knapp Communications, based in the inner-city Sydney suburb of Surry Hills, has sold the bicycle news Web site cyclingnews.com to UK-based Future Publishing for £2.2 million (A$5.2 million, US$4.4 million).

Proprietor Gerard Knapp's post on CN about the acquisition lays out the operational details of the deal, whereas the Future press release goes through the business side of it, along with some surprisingly revealing numbers.

In 2006 it attracted an average of 30 million page impressions each month, representing approximately 500,000 unique visitors. The majority of its revenues are generated from advertising on the website. For the year ended 30 June 2006 revenues were A$1.5m and EBITDA was A$0.4m.

The acquisition price is thus a multiple of 13 times EBITDA and 3.5 times revenue, which may seem low in these heady times of Web 2.0 but is a respectable number for a publishing business. As for the multiple on what Gerard paid for the site from founder Professor Bill Mitchell back in 1999, I know what that is because I was working for Gerard on his other business at the time, but I won't say exactly how humungous that is! ;)

On edition #20 of The Spokesmen podcast several industry types discuss the acquisition, and aside from some snide remarks about the "dreadful" old school design of the site hurting their eyes, they make good points about CN's proudly internationalist strategy (which means they thrash main competitor VeloNews outside the US) and the invaluable back catalogue of content stretching back since 1995 which is all online free of charge. Both of these things are rare in an Australian publishing venture.

Congratulations to Gerard and his team. I know first-hand how much of himself he has put into his work for many years now. I only wish I could have his drive and stamina. He should be held up as a model for what hard work and the right moves at the right time can do for an entrepreneur and his business.

From stealth to launch to success to stealth

2007-06-22T00:40:00.000+10:00

I feel like FanFooty, our fantasy football business, has turned into a stealth startup all over again. As one business partner of ours remarked to me the other day, "You guys should be working out of Soviet Russia!"

The Aussie rules football industry is not very advanced when it comes to Internet technologies. We are at least five years behind the US in most important online aspects of the sport. Thus, people like myself and Tai have become valuable because we bring a level of expertise that the industry has not seen before. Frankly, we are amateurs in Silicon Valley terms, but to the naked savages in certain parts of the local sports sector we are like spacemen descending from a rocket ship.

The problem with this is that FanFooty is not what you would call a reputable business. It is wildly popular with the fans, but we are not an official licensee of the Australian Football League. It could be argued that we are actively undermining certain parts of the businesses of some official licensees with some activities that have brought up questions in meetings with said licensees (though I don't think so). This messy situation makes it dangerous for companies who want to keep in the AFL's good books to have us as a partner or subcontractor.

Nevertheless, we have built one very solid subcontracting relationship out of the aforementioned skills shortage, with several others in the pipeline. Every week seems to bring a new cold call from some potential partner, enemy or co-opetioner. Threats seem to come in at the same rate as opportunities, sometimes in the same call.

Tai and I talk a lot about geese. Golden geese, to be exact. We know that consulting work by its nature means that you're not going to be able to keep a slice of the goose, that's the whole point. You're supposed to get a lump sum in return for building the goose, and someone else gets to keep the eggs. However, in this murky world of non-disclosed, tenuous relationships between casual acquaintances, some of these deals involve waving the ghosts of future geese in our faces, so that we may toil in the present for no reward in the hope of whitemeat equity.

The words of Paul Graham ring though my mind on this issue. Consulting is the long-term enemy of a startup, but also its food at critical points early in its life. As detailed in the outstanding interview Cameron Reilly did with him the other week, Adrian Giles of Hitwise did it right 10 years ago with pioneering white hat SEO consulting outfit Sinewave Interactive. Adrian and co-founder Andrew Barlow treated Sinewave as cashflow, pure and simple, because they could see early doors that it wasn't going to scale. Then they found the product startup hiding inside the consulting business, and the rest is now history.

FanFooty is not quite black hat... our intentions are good. We're just a little naughty, that's all. FanFooty at this stage is not a cash cow of Sinewave proportions, but it's at least starting to generate something to build on. I can only dream of enjoying the success of Adrian and Andrew. (And thanks again Cam for an inspirational interview!)

Google's successor will not be the new Google

2007-05-26T07:26:00.000+10:00

Robert X. Cringley is making a habit of being wrong about Google. This time he tackles how Google will be superseded. The real answer is far closer to the scenario outlined in the comments to the article - proving yet again that the blogosphere is far more valuable when considered as a conversation, not a medium - by someone called David Christie, who I am guessing is this Perth-based consultant:

So the challenger that will unseat Google (eventually) will have to be an open source creation. Nothing else can do it. Whatever it is, it will have to turn the web inside out, by moving control from giant sites like google.com out to thousands of smaller sites, binding them into an effective non-proprietary counterforce for the delivery of distributed (as opposed to centralized) web applications and services.

In short: Microsoft Windows was unseated by TCP/IP, so Google will be unseated by whatever open source protocol supersedes the Google OS. The main reason that ex-employees are not dangerous, as it was for Microsoft, is that the incumbent actively militates against its own employees eating its lunch. By locking in their workers with non-competes, owning the IP on their 20% projects, steering those 20% projects towards being G-features rather than G-killers, and making life extremely comfortable to the level of a human-sized cocoon, Google is trying very hard to ensure that ex-Googlers will have already spent the peak period of their working lives inside the 'plex and won't have much to offer the world afterwards.

At this stage, BitTorrent looks like the most likely ancestor for the coming messiah, though the peer-to-peer model will have to go through a fair few iterations before it can support the sort of mashup of SETI, X3D and the Metaverse that might knock the big G off. So what do current Google employees have to do with any of that? Bugger all, most likely. I seem to remember there was a lot more mainstream focus on the W3C and the ISO in the last boom, but I see standards organisations, not startups, as being the midwives for the next big change that will make Google as irrelevant as Microsoft is today.

Charles Knight SEO: GTFO

2007-05-16T22:00:00.000+10:00

I have become increasingly annoyed at the blatant spamming tactics of Charles Knight, an occasional writer for Richard MacManus's otherwise excellent Read/Write Web blog. Charles Knight, a bank manager from Virginia with an interest in wolf hybrids who decided to get into the search engine optimisation business last year, has his own company called Charles Knight SEO, LLC through which he evidently wants to build a small search engine SEO consultancy empire. Charles Knight has spammed me and over a hundred other proprietors of search engine startups in emails promoting his conference appearances, R/WW blog posts, his shitty 100 Alternative Search Engines list, his LinkedIn group, and whatever else he's doing that day.

Charles Knight's latest missive (which he had to send twice because he only sent half of it the first time, while also making the rookie mistake of CCing instead of BCCing all recipients, a terrible faux pas in Internet etiquette):

Greetings!

By now, 78 alternative search engines or interested parties have accepted my invitation via Linked In to form a new community of search engines. "Alternative" means any search engine that is not Google, Yahoo!, MSN, Ask.com or AOL.

The purpose behind Linking In your search engines together is not to pad my "contact" list!

The purpose is to facilitate cooperation between alternative search engines, the recent partnership of ChaCha and blinkx being an excellent example. Please see my post below:

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/chacha_and_blinkx_partnership.php

So, does this idea have "teeth?" It certainly does. We now have documented 700 alternative Search Engines. A project that has taken six people countless hours to assemble. No one has been paid to do this; we wanted to because we believe that in the struggle between the smaller search engines and the "Big Five," you can win.

So, this database has already been sent to one of you. It is not secret, it is not private, it is available for alternative search engines (in whole or in part) who feel that they can use it to benefit their engine and thus raise the bar for everyone. Engine-to-Engine conversations are encouraged most of all.

Now, I have a favor to ask of you. I just got back from Italy, and I brought back "The Top 100 Alternative Italian Search Engines" (Yes, I'm serious). I want the Top 100 search engines in French, German, Spanish, Russian, Chinese/Japanese/Korean/Vietnamese - you get the idea. I have been accused of only collecting English search engines. Please forward to me any foreign search engines that you know about.

Why the hell would anyone want to join a community of their competitors? Most of the companies he has contacted are in different verticals anyway, and thus have nothing to talk about. And why would anyone want to do any of Charles Knight's work in compiling lists of their competitors? It doesn't even make sense. Obviously the only function of this whole thing is for Charles Knight to pad out his contact list, despite his protestations.

Quite apart from all of that, Charles Knight was the author of a recent article on R/WW called Weird Search Engines, which included Tinfinger in a poll of about 10 startup sites. No consultation, and I have no sense of humour about it. Fuck you, Charles Knight! How dare you poke fun at my site and then pretend to be on my side? Do I call you a furry freak for liking wolves?

I can only assume that Richard, whom I have talked to and think highly of, doesn't know what Charles Knight is doing. I ask Richard to either tell Charles Knight to stop using R/WW to promote his private SEO shilling, or if he won't, then ban him from R/WW. He's not doing anyone any good, and he's trading on R/WW's good name to further his own grubby little goals.

(And if you're wondering why I spell out the full name of Charles Knight so much in this blog entry... two can play the SEO game.)

So many levels of wrong that it's right

2007-05-09T04:03:00.000+10:00

While live-Twittering his wife's labour, Second Life developer Nick Wilson somehow finds his way to a computer and types the following:

Can somebody please IM Vrynox Mingn and tell him that I can not make the appointment inworld today. Thx

Several minutes later he's back!

Sorry the spelling should be Vrynox Ming Thx

Let's pack up the Internet and go home for a while, nobody's going to be able to top that.

Too big to Twitter, too small to blog separately

2007-04-23T01:53:00.000+10:00

• The Allure Media versions of Gizmodo and Defamer soft-launched today. The editor of Defamer Australia is Jess McGuire, who was poached from another blog called Ausculture according to blogs.com.au. Nice choice of launch day: Jess liveblogged the first episode of the new series of Big Brother.

• I started a new FanFooty blog during the week. A couple of days after starting it, one of the handful of bloggers who had started fantasy AFL blogs this season contacted me and as a result he has joined the blog as a writer. Nice to have you on board, Tim N! I haven't been on a group blog before but I'm sure it will be fun.

• From my NetVibes subscriptions: 901am OUT, Found+Read IN.

• We're commissioning a second Web server. Naming systems for servers traditionally follow a theme, something which I enjoyed back at RMIT where all the servers were named after planets which appeared in episodes of Doctor Who. Our first server is called mataji, after the guru Shri Mataji of whom co-founder Tai was enamoured for a while. We have discussed what we'd codename the second server. Our first thought was gandhi, though that started to cause confusion with a business associate's name. Our latest choice is mandela. I'm still not happy with that since it sounds too similar to mataji. Further thought is undoubtedly required. Deep, deep thought.

Hitwise: biggest Aussie Internet buy-out?

2007-04-19T23:53:00.000+10:00

Hitwise, arguably the best Web measurements service in the world and a true Australian success story, has been bought by Experian Labs for US$240 million. The company put itself on the block last December for an asking price of around US$360 million, so co-founders Adrian Giles and Andrew Barlow didn't quite get what they were asking for, but it's a pretty good exit nonetheless.

Revenues for last year were US$40 million, up 50% from the previous year, giving the deal an effective multiple of six times revenue. Compare that to the ten times revenue multiple of the Google-DoubleClick purchase. Hitwise's business model from the start - I interviewed them back in the 90s in a previous life when I was editor of Internet World Australia - was to sign exclusive deals with ISPs to place their software inside the ISPs' systems to siphon usage data. This model has proved defensible, scalable and profitable, and there's no one else who has even approached their technology and partnership lead in their space. Alexa may have gained more publicity, but Hitwise's numbers are far more respected in the marketplace because their methodology is relatively robust.

Hitwise's core business is actually like Google's AdSense product, in a way. In both cases, the target was a disparate range of potential customers to monetise their assets: in Google's case, every Web site with textual content; in Hitwise's case, ISPs who had terabytes of data pouring through their pipes. In both cases, if the provider in question had not come along, it's probable that by now no one else would have thought of it, or would have come up with less satisfactory solutions. At the least, whoever came up with the idea first was bound to get a significant first mover advantage, assuming critical mass. The killer feature of the respective products was their Net-nativity: AdSense evolved past the scattershot old media banner ad format by taking advantage of the online environment, and Hitwise superseded the Nielsen controlled logbook sampling technique by ignoring the shortcuts of probability theory and pushing the boundaries of what constituted a respectable sample. In both cases an old business model was massively scaled by removing humans from the equation, thus reinventing each industry for the Internet.

I can't recall any Australian Internet company being acquired for anything like that price. Congrats to Adrian and Andrew, as well as current CEO Andrew Walsh who is also an Aussie, and also Aussie investment firm Allen & Buckeridge who got a nice piece of the action. Hopefully the local media gives you all the kudos you so richly deserve for building a demonstrably global business.

Invade rage, maintain the meme

2007-04-16T18:28:00.000+10:00

I haven't got tagged with a blog meme yet, but I like the Invade rage one started by Bruce at Thinker's Podium. I think I'll seed it to the 2.0 community. For the uninitiated, rage is a 20-year-old music video program on Australian government broadcaster ABC on Friday and Saturday overnight. Unlike MTV, rage still actually plays music videos... and that's all they do. Every Saturday night they have a guest programmer, usually another musician, who spin the vids and gives a short commentary on about every fourth one, usually giving shoutouts to their musical influences. They currently have a contest on for some random viewer to program one night.

rage influences my dreams a lot. I spend a lot of post-midnight Friday and Saturday nights coding with rage on in my headphones (yes, yes, I'm a sad individual). On Saturday and Sunday mornings I often wake up after dreaming that I had gone back in time to my high school years in the late 80s and somehow I knew how to play the songs I had heard on rage the previous evening, and I had started a band, recorded those songs before the real stars thought them up and turned myself into a big star. Kind of an extension to Michael J. Fox showing his parents' 60s homecoming what 80s power chords are like in Back To The Future I, that sort of scenario.

Maybe I've said too much. Anyway, here's my rage playlist, limited to 20 as per the competition:

INXS, What You Need. INXS was my first favourite band, Kick was the first album I bought. Kicks off the playlist with a killer song and awesome video.
Men At Work, Land Down Under. My family somehow procured a tape of Business As Usual while spending two years living in India in the 80s, it was a vital piece of Australiana when we had precious little of it.
Ratcat, Don't Go Now. This band was huge in my first year of uni, perfect disposable pop. Nice simple video too.
Regurgitator, Kung Foo Sing. I interviewed two of these dudes while editing Catalyst, then watched them play at the Corner Hotel. That got me hooked.
Butterfingers, Yo Mama. I like many of the new breed of Aussie hop hop merchants, and Butterfingers has an enjoyable jokey vibe.
Sonic Animation, Theophilus Thistler. I loved their double album, played that shit for months.
Kylie Minogue, Can't Get Blue Monday Out Of My Head (live at the 2002 BRIT Awards). I'd like more mashups since that's been pretty much the only music I have listened to recently, but there are precious few videos available and this one is pretty special.
The Beatles, Get Back. I was named after Paul McCartney, so I had to include one of his.
Stone Roses, I Wanna Be Adored. Everyone picks Fool's Gold when they come on rage, but it wasn't even on their first album, which is one of the best albums ever made. If it was possible to get I Am The Resurrection then that would sub in here, but I don't know if there was a video for that.
Massive Attack, Rising Son. Ideally I'd like Angel here but I don't think there is a video for that. Quality band.
Radiohead, No Surprises. 2001 homage in the video, beautiful music. What's not to like?
Muse, Stockholm Syndrome. I once got a speeding ticket going up the Hume Highway for going 140kmh while listening to the guitar riff of this song and forgetting about my foot on the accelerator whilst headbanging. True story.
Beastie Boys, Sabotage. Greatest video ever made.
Red Hot Chilli Peppers, What I Got. Hot video, awesome song, another from my uni days.
Nirvana, Lithium. Of course.
Lenny Kravitz, Mama Said. Tough to choose between this one and Are You Gonna Go My Way, but I like this one's edge better.
Busta Rhymes, Put Your Hands Where My Eyes Can See. Awesome video, fine song.
Madonna, Respect Yourself. I always respected Madonna, she had complete control over her message.
Jeff Buckley, Lover You Should Have Come Over (live version). No explanation necessary. It was a bloody travesty that Pink Floyd beat Jeff for Australia's favourite album.
American Pie, Don McLean. Every playlist should end with Don McLean. The greatest song of all time. My dad infected me with McLean love, and I still love him.

So there it is. A bunch of Aussies followed by Poms and then Yanks. Now, I tag ben barren, Duncan Riley, Phil Sim, Cameron Reilly and Bronwen Clune. Get programming!

Seamus Byrne to head Gizmodo Australia

2007-04-16T15:39:00.000+10:00

Seamus Byrne - freelance journalist, columnist, nominee for this year's Best Consumer Technology Journalist at the Lizzie Awards, blogger and Hydrapinion member - was revealed over the weekend as the new editor of Gizmodo Australia, a localised version of the popular gadget blog announced last month by Allure Media (and blogged about by me).

At the moment the local domain redirects back to the US parent, but according to an interview Seamus gave to industry site ITJourno he is working on a model of 25% local content produced by him alone, and the rest shoveled from the parent feed.

While most would believe that not being based at the heart of the action in the US is a crippling disadvantage, Byrne has spun this into an advantage and believes that the time difference provides him with an advantage over their American counterpart.

“I’ll get up and have most of the overnight content [from Gizmodo US] ready for the mornings, when Aussies are hitting their desks. There’ll also be a breakfast wrap on the best content from overnight.”

“We’ll be talking to the guys over there and getting content that [the readers] don’t see first. We’ll see stuff overnight that they might not have seen.”

Pretty standard business model for a licensed Australian technology publication... it's just that instead of an IDG dead-tree magazine it's one of those new-fangled blog thingies. Seamus will be working under Allure's managing director Chris Jansz, in a structure which sounds distinctly like it's under the News Corporation thumb. The fact that netus chose an established journalist with solid credentials indicates to me that they're not taking too many chances. Is this the first time that an Aussie IT lizard has been hired to be a full (or near-full) time blogger? My guess is yes. Not that it's a bad thing not to have hired some fresh-faced kid off the street, by any means.

By the by, Seamus said he'd be giving up his spot at Hydrapinion, amongst other freelance commitments at HYPER and Desktop magazines. Does this mean that Hydrapinion will be renamed to Quadrapinion? :D

The semantic Web: sentenced to life in a federated plenipotentiary

2007-04-12T23:15:00.000+10:00

One of the last tasks to be completed before we open up Tinfinger to real users in our beta is how we handle our tag structure. Tags are used in Tinfinger to record any kind of information about people. We've tried a few different approaches, and they have been clumsy and unworkable. The addition of Wikipedia's structure via dbpedia, however, has been the catalyst for a solution - though not the solution itself.

In researching how to use dbpedia, Clay Shirky's repudation of the Semantic Web stood out to me as a cautionary note to be reckoned with. Clay even uses an example central to Tinfinger, people's names, along the way to dismantling the usefulness of the simplicity of the semantic Web concept.

My understanding of Clay's argument as it applies to me is this. dbpedia uses the W3C's specification for N-triples. Take the W3C's first example of a triple:

<http://www.w3.org/2001/08/rdf-test/> <http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/creator> "Dave Beckett" .

The three elements are subject, predicate and object, which are the building blocks of grammatically correct sentences. You can write that in plain English as: "The creator of this document is Dave Beckett." Ah, but there is another creator also listed below, so that sentence is wrong. It should be: "The creators of this document are Dave Beckett and Jan Grant." Without the second triple, the first one leads to error. XML is reductive by nature, which leads to syllogisms and thus can result in absurd and/or wrong deductive conclusions when the data set is not complete.

So is the solution just throwing more and more tags until every bit of metadata is covered? That's the approach by places like Spock, recently gushed over by TechCrunch. I disagree. Apart from the fact that it looks damn ugly, I think tags are not an endpoint for giving understanding. The problem is in the strictures put on comprehension of information imposed by the W3C's spec. Having just one concept in your subject, predicate and object is limiting. Imagine if every sentence you read in a profile of somebody went like this:

Bill Clinton was a president of the United States. Bill Clinton is a womaniser. Bill Clinton is a disbarred American lawyer. Bill Clinton is a great leader. Bill Clinton is a saxophonist.

You get the idea. What about compound sentences? Sure, you have nouns and verbs, but what about adjectives, adverbs, prepositions and conjunctions? XML-based tagging leaves no scope for complex ideas expressed with nuance and juxtaposition. That's what prose is for. For semantic metadata to be expressed usefully, I think it should be encapsulated in prose sentences.

That is what Tinfinger profiles will be: a collection of sentences which will first be assembled by our robot mascot Ned as generated from simple metadata triples, to the best of his admittedly limited ability, but later incorporated by human authors into human-comprehensible prose which nevertheless maintains that W3C-approved tag structure. Instead of infoboxes and templates for tabulated datums, as Wikipedia uses, Tinfinger will focus purely on the sentence as the primary method of communication.

Thus organised into barely submerged paragraph structures, we hope the resulting hypertext will bridge the gap between the illogical flaws of metadata and the chaotic echolalia of human-authored prose text, so that both spiderbots and meatbags can grok.

Citizendium launches, gets ignored

2007-03-26T21:01:00.000+10:00

According to Google Blog Search and Technorati, I'm the first blog to link to Larry Sanger's announcement that Citizendium has launched. (The blogosphere seems too preoccupied with yet another iteration of Why Haven't Newspapers Died Yet, Would You Hurry Up Please FFS.)

Browsing through Citizendium is kind of weird at this early stage. Take the Computer page, for example. Its CSS, layout and page furniture are exactly the same as Wikipedia, but the vast majority of the internal hyperlinks are coloured red instead of blue, because the links refer to pages which have not been created yet. It feels like, as someone once said of the alpha version of Tinfinger, a town that no one has come to live in yet. The Wikipedia version of the Computer page is superior in content and has only one red link among hundreds of blues, but it is locked for editing. The Computer:Talk page reveals that Wikipedia's editors have spent a lot of time perfecting this page via peer review, to the extent that the community (or whoever represents it) now considers this page to be "A-Class". The Citizendium version contains a lot of passages copied verbatim from the Wikipedia article, and many more which are changed only slightly with addition or subtraction of a clause here or there.

The overall impression I get is... probably unfair. As Larry points out in his essay Why the Citizendium Will (Probably) Succeed, Wikipedia itself sucked horribly at this stage in its development, so it would be uncharitable to pick on CZ for its early flaws. I am still concerned about Larry's attitude though:

A good number of disaffected Wikipedians have joined us. Our increasing activity will bring over even more. These are frequently the sort of people we want. After all, our natural contributors like the idea of Wikipedia. They love the ease of contribution, the instant visibility of their work, the sense of shared purpose inherent in strong collaboration, the gradually improving quality, and so on. They love working with Wikipedia's many excellent contributors. Despite all that, they even more strongly dislike having to deal with its many problem users--disrespectful, immature, ideologically driven, or unstable people, that administrators are unable to rein in. Indeed, if the many complaints are to be believed, such people are to be found among Wikipedia's administrators.

Such people will also be found amongst people who leave the big W and go to CZ. Troublemakers. People who have been proven not to work in a team environment. Trolls. Setting yourself up as I Can't Believe It's Not Wikipedia only works if Wikipedia is not working: if it's actually the good people who stay at Wikipedia then CZ will become a renegade hideout of sorts, a hive of scum and villainy where all those disaffected with the Wikipedia culture or power structure go to bitch about the other site.

Ideas I would have blogged if I wasn't Twittering

2007-03-23T15:11:00.000+11:00

Too busy to flesh these out into separate blog posts, so here they are in abbreviated form:

I see Nik Cubrilovic summed up a thought that I had too: that Open ID is not living up to the hype because everyone wants to be a provider but very few want to accept Open IDs from elsewhere. I learned very early on in the publishing business that publishing, be it offline or on, is all about your customer database, particularly contact details (i.e. email addresses). If you have little or no control over that, what is your business? Probably not a business. I don't blame AOL, Digg or the like from not accepting external Open IDs, but I do blame those who hype the technology without acknowledging the point that Nik makes so well. Unlike Nik, I don't want to support Open ID in my application, even though it comes standard in the People Aggregator code which we're still in the midst of integrating with Tinfinger. I'll be turning that feature off for the moment. Perhaps Marc Canter will want to make the business case for Open ID for me, but I don't see a compelling one.

I am on board the Twitter bandwagon, which stops about as often as a suburban train at peak hour for 10-minute outages. It's a fine success story at this stage of its launch cycle, though there are certainly things it could have done better. A default friend, for example, would be invaluable, especially if it was a bot that included 10 tutorial tweets about how to use the service. A way to differentiate humans from data feed bots would be very handy so you don't get friendly banter interspersed with the latest TechMeme headlines or Woot items... maybe even a separate tab for those insanely spammy location posts? Twitter with a NetVibes interface would, as the kiddies say, r0xx0r my b0xx0r. Though that's not surprising since they're both based on RSS, which as far as I'm concerned is the real star of Twitter.

I am skeptical about Google's PPA scheme. The simple fact of the matter is that PPA, or CPA or whatever the relevant acronym is, just doesn't pay as well. The Google ads on FanFooty do about four to six times better than our Commission Junction ads, which admittedly are all for eBay. If Google can find a way to keep publishers onside through some technological breakthrough then they will have something, but otherwise it just sounds like the Goog is mopping up the small fry of unexhausted inventory and this is no big deal.

And finally... FanFooty is doing 10 times the traffic and revenue that it did on year-ago figures. Tai and I had a nice meeting with a bloke from Champion Data earlier in the week, it's all good. This week marks the site's second birthday, so it's appropriate that it's only now getting past the crawling stage and is starting to make some noise...

Citizendium, Wikipedia and Tinfinger

2007-03-23T14:19:00.000+11:00

I've set up a CompInt tab in my NetVibes to track blogs of those founders who I see as having similar goals to me. Pride of place goes to Larry Sanger's blog about Citizendium. The more I work on Tinfinger the more I am appreciating how the 5-second elevator pitch I have been using - "Tinfinger will do to the Who's Who what Wikipedia did to the Encyclopedia Britannica" - means that we will have to learn a lot from the Wikipedia experience.

Citizendium has already made many mistakes in trying to break free from the Wikipedia model while still retaining many of its advantages. Larry's latest post, entitled We Aren't Wikipedia, is the starkest illustration yet of what I think is his biggest error: he is continually defining Citizendium in terms of comparisons to Wikipedia. In January he and the CZ community made a fine decision to unfork, which should have been the impetus to delete all references to Wikipedia not only from the content pages, but also in the minds of the contributors. Yet Larry spent many post-unfork blog posts detailing his criticisms of the Essjay scandal, and he never lets an opportunity pass to bag the big W for some ethical slight or another, as if he thinks that is what motivates the CZ base. It may well be what motivates them, but if so, then that's not the basis for a healthy community IMO. You want people who are in your community for the community's sake, not just to spite some other project.

As for Tinfinger, we only share Citizendium's similarities with Wikipedia on items 5, 7 and 8 in Larry's list. We do share more differences, though: all but item 7 fit us to some extent. More details on how all of this works closer to the full launch.

The reason I have got so far into this debate is that Tinfinger is going to adopt Wikipedia's data structure: unique identifier strings for pages, which are cross-linked via category, type and property metatags for which pages are automatically generated. We have downloaded the relevant data from dbpedia.org of the roughly 60,000 profiles of people in Wikipedia. Instead of being stored in text-based infoboxes, however, we will store the tags as relational data in rows of MySQL tables to allow greater granularity in searches. However, like Citizendium, we will not republish any Wikipedia articles.

I don't know what that means in terms of licensing - the Wikipedia:Copyrights page doesn't talk about this issue - which is part of why I'm stating this in public. Perhaps there are lawyers well-versed in the GDFL who can tell me whether taking just the titles and metadata of these profile articles, not any of the prose text, means that the GDFL still applies. I want to act in good faith here, so I need some help.

Inform in limbo, News 2.0 deflates

2007-03-14T23:44:00.000+11:00

Um... when did Inform.com turn off its public news aggregation service? I didn't notice that when it happened. It now appears to have turned into a private consultancy for mainstream media companies - Washington Post, New York Sun and NewsOK.com and VIBE.com being its reference clients. Its public service copped a fair hammering when it launched, and I suppose it makes sense to concentrate on where the money is. If you're going to act as outsourced product development for MSM companies, you might as well get paid by the hour while you're doing it, rather than wait for one of the giants to buy you out.

Looking around, a number of the companies listed in my Feature lists for News 2.0 post at the start of last year have changed their business models on the run, and some of them have stopped running entirely. Topix, which has been in the news recently, has shifted away from GooNews vanilla towards a hyperlocal strategy, not surprising because it was bought out by a consortium of local newspaper chains. NowPublic used to be all about video, but its front page is now a generic textual news aggregator. Daylife started out in January by looking schmick with eye candy everywhere, but their design seems to have been beaten down by user demands to fit the text-stuffed GN norm (also noteworthy: even after Mike Arrington dinged them for lacking RSS feeds at launch, they took eight weeks to add them). Findory and Bayosphere bit the dust, of course. Gabbr appears to be broken, none of its news links work. Backfence looks pretty rundown, like a small town where the train don't stop no more.

Paradoxically, it's the sites which haven't changed which look the best. Newsvine and Techmeme haven't iterated their design at all and they look fine to my eye, though it's a bit worrying that I still can't see any ads on Newsvine. I guess when you have funding you don't need to worry about revenue. Gather actually looks okay and has some ads, although whether it's worth the millions in VC is something only the investors will know.

News 2.0 has not had quite the crash that the naysayers had predicted, more of a slow deflation. Topix and Reddit are the current winners, I suppose, because they had a successful exit, plus NowPublic is pretty cosy with AP so they're on the right track [note: EDIT]. There is still time for some more victories, I bet.

The continuing saga of the Britney/suicide problem with AJAX

2007-03-14T16:29:00.000+11:00

Via PaidContent, it was interesting to read Avenue A/Razorfish’s 2007 Digital Outlook Report which, as with most analyst reports, tells us things we already know. In this case, it tells us that page views are becoming obsolete in this increasingly AJAXified world, and some other way of monetising dynamically updated Web content has to be found:

AJAX Metrics and Time-Based Ad Serving. Analytic tools are already capable of measuring AJAX interactions. They simply monitor the number of requests to a server AJAX makes (known as an “event”), which allows us to infer interactivity. However, that’s still not a replacement for the page-view metric. Instead, look for this AJAX measurement to trigger timebased ad serving (e.g., the serving of ads, which refresh, over a given span of time). This seems like a much more appropriate tactic given the sheer amount of time users are spending while consuming audio and video online today.

This little pony would be nice to ride, but I'm not holding my breath. Apart from the technical, political and economic problems getting the ad providers to engage with this or some similar new model, there is also the issue of the Britney/suicide problem - where contextual ad content which is fed into an AJAX-flavoured page may be catastrophically unrelated to the updated content which has appeared since the initial load - which I blogged about almost a year ago and was talking about on the WebMasterWorld forums 18 months ago. There has been no indication that the GEMAYA ad network players have even spent any time on this dilemma, busy as they are working on audio/video content, defending lawsuits and other stepping stones on the path of global domination.

It's a sticky situation. Get it? Sticky! Aaahahaha, I kill me sometimes.

Megatriples are a thousand times better than "Web 3.0"

2007-03-10T15:28:00.000+11:00

Mummy and daddy are fighting and I don't like it. Dave Winer thinks Freebase is just the latest half-baked idea but Rich Skrenta says holy smokes, this is cool. Crazy uncle Nick Carr thinks it's the first major Web 3.0 application.

My position is firmly on Dave's side. Like Dave, I think Freebase and Pipes are just overhyped clones of Google Base, and we all know how that turned out. It seems like Silicon Valley is striving ever harder to build the biggest, emptiest vessel ever. I have little time for empty vessel startups. Give me content, give me value that I don't have to contribute myself. Give me something to latch on to. It's no use banging on about how you're building the Semantic Web if all that you contribute are some architectural drawings, and you expect someone else to do the heavy lifting.

As Kingsley Idehen points out, a far better example of the Semantic Web is dbpedia, a rendering of Wikipedia as searchable, downloadable RDF files. dbpedia holds around 25 million RDF triples, where triple refers to a W3C-approved syntax for abstracts of RDF files. The Persons dataset alone weighs in at just under half a megatriple, and when combined with the 8 Mtriple Infoboxes dataset it will provide metadata for around 59,000 people stored on Wikipedia. That is the sort of thing that makes my mouth water, because it can be added so easily to Tinfinger's 350,000-strong person database.

And while we're mentioning Web 3.0, here's something that has bugged me for quite a while now. Many bloggers pilloried Tim O'Reilly for coining and then trying to cash in on the term Web 2.0, and there was a noticeable push about six months ago to deprecate use of the term by the Arringtons, McManuses and Cashmores of this world. Now the people who want to be hip and cool talk about Web 3.0, as if 2.0 is all done and dusted and it would be totally gauche not to listen to the new stars of 3.0. I call bullshit. No, Tim O'Reilly does not own Web 2.0 and has no right to restrict usage of the term, but by the same token no one has the right to say that Web 2.0 is now useless and obsolete either. Nick Carr and John Markoff are guilty of the same elitist claptrap as Tim O'Reilly, and the surest evidence of this is that they're all on the same hypewagon on this one.

Podshow metrics showdown: Adam Curry says 52,000,000/month, KATG says 12,000/day

2007-03-04T22:23:00.000+11:00

Following on from the claim by Keith Malley of the Keith and The Girl podcast that Podshow had only 12,000 downloads a day of its podcasts (which I blogged about last week), Adam Curry has hit back with a number of his own:

For the record, In December 2006 the network produced 52 million download requests.

At first glance this seems to be a huge discrepancy, but as with most metrics discussions, we're talking apples versus oranges here. First, Podshow hosts podcasts but users can also search for podcasts outside the Podshow network through podshow.com. Presumably, the phrase "download requests" would also apply to searches for podcasts which are not hosted on its network... in other words, that 52 million includes people who listened to Diggnation or Morning Coffee Notes or even Keith and the Girl itself through Podshow searches. This is obviously a ridiculous metric.

Even if we're just talking about shows hosted on Podshow's servers, there are more than 25,000 podcast shows hosted on Podshow according to the comments in the Curry.com thread, but so-called "Podshow shows", i.e. shows that are wholly owned and produced by Podshow, are far less numerous. Wikipedia only lists five flagship shows: "The Dawn and Drew Show, Curry's own Daily Source Code, Madge Weinstein's Yeast Radio, CC Chapman's Accident Hash, and tech vidcast GeekBrief.TV". It is far more believable that Keith's 12,000 figure was relating to those flagship shows, not the third-party hosted shows and definitely not the podcast searches.

Adam Curry is being fast and loose with the facts, but that is to be expected in an environment where credible metrics are non-existent. Along those lines, I would be interested to hear the opinions of podcasters on this comment on the Curry story by Homer the Great (who also appeared in the comments of my last post):

I as a listener have donated money, bought products, supported movements and entered contests. The only thing that I can say is that is the only way that any shit talk could be put to rest is by everyone voluntarily agreeing to a common measuring stick. This said, I think it is a lousy idea. As soon as this is done, then podcasting becomes another form of media publishing that has no clue or commitment to the listeners. People who enjoy podcasts because they don’t behave like traditional media.

Having a Nielsen or Hitwise for podcasting is a double-edged sword. It puts a stop to pissing fights like this one and gives advertisers a reason to invest, but it does smack of the dreaded professionalism that Dave Winer so mistrusts. Just as AdSense-driven Web sites have an advantage over newspapers in that their metrics are completely granular down to the individual reader, podcasters can find out where each and every one of their listeners is coming from. Instead of tailoring content for pre-skewed focus groups and abstracted demographics, the Internet is supposed to herald a new age of perfect market knowledge.

Adam Curry is not helping matters by fudging his own figures. Adam, please break out that 52 million into external shows, hosted shows, and flagship Podshow shows. If you don't, your number has no credibility.

UPDATE: Keith Malley confirmed in KATG episode #454 that his 12,000/day figure was referring only to Podshow contracted shows. Adam Curry has still not coughed up an answer to this specific number.

KATG claims Podshow has only 12,000 downloads a day

2007-03-01T13:08:00.000+11:00

Keith and the Girl, arguably the biggest podcast in the world, has continued its occasional series of attacks on Podshow in its latest episode, Prove Me Wrong, by spending around the first 15 minutes of the episode claiming that the entirety of the Podshow network has only 12,000 downloads per day. This is less than the KATG show on its own, according to co-host Keith Malley. No word on where the figures came from as yet, but KATG do have a history of being leaked sensitive Podshow information from disgruntled insiders as in episode #247, The Podshow Contract, where they read out a leaked version of the contract offered to new recruits which had all sorts of restrictive music-label-like clauses.

The publication of such figures, if true, would be a further blow to the new audio media industry which has already seen consolidation in the satellite radio industry this year. I wonder how those numbers would stack up with The Podcast Network. Podshow has to date received US$15 million in venture capital while I don't remember hearing about TPN getting any funding, apart from out of Cameron Reilly's own pocket, yet it seems that TPN doesn't have much to beat.

The Name Inspector inspects Tinfinger

2007-02-28T13:39:00.000+11:00

One of my favourite new blogs has been The Name Inspector, written by a PhD in linguistics called Chris Johnson who delights in dissecting company names. TNI was kind enough to review Tinfinger today, and Chris had good things to say.

This is one of the geekiest and most thought-out startup names that The Name Inspector has come across.

...

The name Tinfinger conjures up an entertaining vision that helps us imagine how the underlying search technology works.

Things like this start my day off with a big smile on my face. Thanks Chris, you turned my frown upside down! Now about that Logo Inspector concept...

After 10 years*, Telstra's afl.com.au is in.... beta?

2007-02-24T00:32:00.000+11:00

This week sees the return of Australian rules football for a new season and the return of afl.com.au to its seasonal position somewhere near the top of the most-visited Web sites in Australia. The renewal of Telstra's exclusive Internet deal with the AFL in the off-season, this time for A$60 million over five years after a bidding war from five or six competitors, has been marked by a new version of the flagship Web site. This one was designed by C4 Communications, whose C4Sport division seems like a part of Telstra in all but name, having also been used by Telstra for the NRL.com.au site for rugby league and its BigPond Sport site.

The problem is that the afl.com.au site, and the NRL one for that matter, are bywords for mediocrity among fans of both codes. Today there were three different threads on the biggest AFL forum, BigFooty, started by fans complaining about the new site. Of particular note was the complaints about bugs with the live game statistics page, which like so much of the rest of the site, is rendered completely in Flash and suffers from execrably poor readability and usability. The new system marks the first time that a flat HTML version of the stat pages has not been made available in conjunction with the bloated Flash monstrosity. Worse, the stat database went down for a time during the first quarter of the evening's games, and then there's this problem:

Is it awesome for overseas visitors. I don't know where it is getting the current time from, I've tried setting my system clock, but no matter what I do it still believes that the Port vs Crows game is going to kick off in over 6 hours (the match is over)...

I can't see live scores, or the result on the website - all I can see is a stupid clock counting down to when the game starts.

For anybody from another timezone who is smarter than me - and has figured out a way around this - please let me know

Ok. So from the other thread - if you set your timezone to Melbourne it all works fine. Not really a great solution really...

I don't think Telstra or C4 should get a pass on basic errors like that just because they put the word "beta" on the front page. They are spending oodles of money on the site, they should look further than their office cubicles to see how users interact with their code in the real world.

Let's be honest, the C4 designs are a pile of shit. From an SEO standpoint they're a travesty, with all that Flash hiding much of the great content. Jakob Nielsen and the usability crowd would have conniptions with all the tiny aliased text and tiny scrollbar-infested boxes. The W3C Validator has a field day. If you look at the front page now there are two separate boxes listing scores, which is a ridiculous waste of space considering that the news content has been pushed way below the fold. The front page file is 150 kilobytes. It's like an exercise in everything wrong with corporate Web site design.

The gold standard for sports sites is still mlb.com, which still uses Flash for its Gameday coverage (e.g. the last World Series game) but sticks to Javascript at most to present its text content. Compared to the MLB, Telstra and C4 look like two-year-old finger-painters.

* (Maybe afl.com.au is older than that, but the Wayback Machine's earliest memory of afl.com.au was from 1996.)

UPDATE: Sandra Davey, head of BigPond Sport, has started a thread on BigFooty about the AFL.com.au beta. Sandra is already getting smacked from pillar to post by disgruntled users. The fun has only just begun!

Shirts!

2007-02-21T13:36:00.000+11:00

Here I am showing off our new T-shirts. There are grey ones for men, and bone ones for women, in all sizes S to XL but in limited supply for this first 60-shirt run. The printer also screwed up some of the colours, so these little beauties will become collector's items!

And here's Tai modelling his custom Tinfinger wifebeater, the only one of its kind (he provided the shirt so that's why there's an Adidas logo on it).

News Corp rolls out first netus play: a blog network called Allure

2007-02-19T15:54:00.000+11:00

netus, the News Corporation-backed venture capital firm about which I have blogged before, is about to get rolling with its first launched company, Allure Media. Philip Sim has the scoop over at his blog Squash which reprints about half of a story posted on Phil's MediaConnect/ITJourno portal for Australian IT public relations practitioners and journalists.

In short, as I have had it told to me by those who have heard the pitch, netus' strategy is to copy the business model of five successful American Web 2.0 companies and launch local versions for the Australian marketplace. netus has A$40 million in the kitty, and a targeted 100% success rate. After Allure, I presume we'll see green-and-gold-themed clones of four out of the following: Technorati, Wordpress, Digg, Topix.net, delicious, Netvibes and Flickr. Allure Media appears to be their copy of Gawker Media, a parallel made all the more stark because Allure is licensing Gawker content.

After the cut Phil makes on his snippet, the ITJ piece (which I have access to) goes on to question Allure MD Chris Janz about whether it makes sense to have a localised version of a blog. Janz tries his best to justify netus's decision, but I think the idea is weird. Much of the Australian journalism industry, especially in magazines, is built on localisation of US content but in an Internet context it is hard to understand how anyone would think that people would not go directly to the original source. Aren't blogs about bypassing the gatekeeper function of MSM? Why would readers put up with a gatekeeper filtering content based on their own prejudices of what Allure's demographic is supposed to be, when they can get the unedited version at Gawker sites? This might make a little bit of sense if we were talking about an old MSM masthead which had trusted brand recognition, but no one knows Allure or any of its brands.

The whole netus affair reeks of News Limited desperately trying to feed off the energy and hunger of a lean startup, while retaining oversight control and middle management overheads. It's not going to work. At least, not unless the netus people learn that A$8 million can get burned pretty damn quick in Surry Hills.

The template for making phat bank from social networking code

2007-02-17T16:22:00.000+11:00

We're putting the finishing touches on our code here at Tinfinger in preparation for the beta, which will happen Real Soon Now. Yeah, I know, I've been saying that for yonks. When It's Done, people!

One of the areas where we've zigged where others before us have zagged is that we left the social networking elements to last. We decided to try out Marc Canter's People Aggregator (a.k.a. PeepAgg) system, liked it, and are in the late stages of implementing it.

Let me say first of all that Marc is a top bloke, which from an Australian is a high honour. I wish him and his company all the best with PeepAgg, and I'll be a big supporter of his future endeavours. He has built a very modern company whose workforce is mostly Indian with a few Euros thrown in and a couple of New Zealanders, including consultancy from Richard MacManus whom many of us Aussie 2.0ers know. His business model of allowing free downloads of the PeepAgg application and only charging commercial users based on their network size is daring and innovative.

The PeepAgg system is not perfect, however. It reminds me strongly of the Smarty system, which I encountered last year while doing a separate client project which had been implemented by some Russian programmers for a third party. Both Smarty and PeepAgg are PHP-based template engines, where the presentation layer is separated from the business logic of the Web application. In simpler terms, it means that there are template files which specify the DOM structure of a page (and contain no PHP at all), and then there are module files which then populate the DOM with content.

In practice, looking at the code, template engines strike me as the next evolution of those implacably evil WYSIWYG HTML editors of days of yore, like Microsoft FrontPage. FrontPage and its ilk were notorious for producing terribly-formatted, bloated code that ran like a dog in the wild. To prevent this added complexity from gumming up the Web server accessing all these files at once, the resultant HTML outputs are cached as flat files on the fly, but the code can still get horribly bloated.

The default CSS style file for PeepAgg is over 100KB, for instance. 100KB!!! I couldn't believe that when I saw it. There are styles for every last little element on the page, so you get classes with names like .public-module-block-data-content-parent-home-page-tags-child. I shit you not, that's a real PeepAgg class. (It's specified as padding: 1px 0px 1px 2px, if you wanted to know.)

Now, I may just be too old skool about this. I mean, bandwidth doesn't mean that much these days, surely? Doesn't caching fix most of these problems anyway? Ah, but the problem comes when you download something like the PeepAgg tarball and want to customise it. That's what I'm doing right now, and I can't help but get the feeling - the same feeling as I got while hacking those Russians' Smarty code - that somewhere there is a FrontPage-like GUI for these systems that makes editing it a whole bunch eaiser for the developer... but I don't get access to it. Because that's what these system are all architected towards, as the Smarty documentation says: "quick and painless development and deployment". It's all about rapid application development, but post-gold customisation or bugfixing is an afterthought.

In People Aggregator's case, Marc made it perfectly clear in his presentation to me that the PeepAgg system is all about getting his company consulting work to customise his own code. (I presume this is not secret knowledge, BTW.) Giving away the tarball is all very well, but it's not going to do him much good unless he can get those $100/hour custom publishing jobs, as he freely admitted. When he said that to me, I thought back to Paul Graham and his frequently stated bugbear about how founders have to avoid their startup degenerating into a size-limited consultancy and be more product-oriented in order to grow. Marc has a lot of competition in the space - Affinity Circles, Social Platform, IBM, Five Across, KickApps, CrowdFactory and many more - so it's understandable that he took the radical step of giving away his core product to get market share.

I say again, none of the above is intended to be a slight on Marc or his chosen business model. I'm sure he is in control of his own destiny with full knowledge of his destiny. I'll be there on the ride with him, wishing he'd give me the keys to that FrontPageian T-Bird I just know he's got locked away somewhere...

IDG, Fairfax and the bottom of the trough

2007-02-11T21:21:00.000+11:00

Time for another round of Old vs New Media. You know you love it.

In the blue corner, we have Colin Crawford of IDG, who says that for the first time, IDG's online revenue is rising by more than their offline revenue is falling.

The brutal reality that we’re facing today is the costly process of dismantling and replacing legacy operations and cultures and business models with ones with new and yet to be fully proven business models. However, we face greater risks if we don’t transform our organization and take some chances.

In the red corner we have Cameron Reilly, about whom no journalist I have ever asked has ever had any other opinion than the word "dickhead". Or sometimes "that bloody dickhead". Cameron, ready as ever to get stuck into Old Media, takes aim at Fairfax's James Farmer (in the... yellow corner?) who left a comment at the Australian Newsagency blog:

The vast majority of people come to a few sites to get their media fox, listen to a few radio stations, watch a few tv channels and read a few publications... we are what's commonly known as 'geeks' - most people are not.

Cameron says that unlike IDG, Fairfax's online revenue growth is not matching its offline revenue decline. Fairfax's last annual earnings report shows that its online operations are currently less than 10% of its business, but the shift is most definitely on. In total, Fairfax's Australian business generated A$297.7 million EBITDA (down 8.1%) on revenues of A$1,279.6 million (down 1.3%). Fairfax Digital contributed A$24.3 million EBITDA (up 268%) on revenues of A$96.4 million (up 75.6%) out of that.

The math is not hard, but we have a disconnect here. Is it just a matter of Fairfax "getting it" like IDG did, and finding the magic formula to turn around its consolidated revenue? Have they already got it, and it's just a matter of time before they hit the bottom of the revenue trough like IDG? Or is that strategy only workable for a publisher targeting the "geek" niche?

James may say that blogs are mostly irrelevant timewasters, but Fairfax's own blogs are booming, with a huge amount of comments (e.g. 83 on a blog entry about air conditioners!) showing a big mainstream audience who is gagging for good quality stuff. The numbers would suggest that James doesn't know what his own company is doing.

Tinfinger: stuff to do

2007-02-06T18:38:00.000+11:00

Important note: very few of these items are unstarted, but all of them are unfinished.

Useless Account: sign up today!

2007-02-06T17:18:00.000+11:00

Congrats to Jim Whimpey, the 19-year-old Brisbanite who got a fantastic writeup on TechCrunch for the site he created over the weekend, Useless Account. I haven't experienced as much new account fatigue as the TechCrunch mob, but I certainly appreciate a well-executed parody when I see one, and Jim hits all the high notes.

I'm sitting in the IRC channel of his company, Brisbane Creative, and chatting with him about his big plans. At the moment those plans are mostly based around seeing how much he can spam Digg to get the word out, but we did discuss an API. I wanted one so that I could get his users to come across to Tinfinger (or any other site). However, an API would make his accounts useful and thus go against the spirit of the thing. Maybe not.

I wish Jim all the best with his future career which, if the start of it is any indication, could be a fun ride!

Blog posts that stupid up the Internet

2007-02-02T06:32:00.000+11:00

1. In-depth articles discussing the relative worth of two or more Internet companies, like Fotolog and Flickr, which are based solely on Alexa traffic numbers. Please Jason Kottke, allow comments on your blog so we can flame you in person.

2. Puff pieces on how wonderful it would be if Google finally released that OS/PC/Metaverse/flying car that everyone just KNOWS that they're developing in secret. No, they're not doing any of it, they're concentrating on their core business of search because they're smart. Geez, are you all 12 years old? Om Malik should know better, Google is not an ARG. They're just human beings.

3. Someone working for MySpace just farted! Isn't Chad Hurley cuuuuute? Or at least that's what Mashable* sounds like some days. Come on Pete Cashmore, it's getting a little ridiculous with the MySpace/YouTube coverage. Why are you posting digests for the interesting smaller companies on which you have been a significant reporter, and spending all of your time on the already-blanket-covered giants? Expand those snippets out into their own stories and give me something more interesting that the latest widget war story from GEMAYA subsidiaries, please.

Kipple of the day: workgroups

2007-01-30T05:22:00.000+11:00

Today marks the launch of the Media 2.0 Workgroup, following in the prestigious footsteps of such towering, industry-changing, juggernaut organisations as the Web 2.0 Workgroup. The members of such elite inner circles as as gods to us puny mortals, and through their shared workgroup activities they wield such fearsome collective power that entire countries are laid waste in their paths. They get so much WORK done, it's amazing! A little-known fact is that the real achievements on world peace are not being made in Davos, they're being nutted out over frappucinos and mocha lattes by our glorious workgroup leaders.

Some may say that workgroups such as this are an exact facsimile of what used to be called "web rings", but I think that's a mealy-mouthed, small-minded viewpoint. Others may estimate the serious usefulness of such organisations to have a half-life of about 2 weeks, until the mailing list peters out into gossip and petty squabbling. How cynical those doubters must be, I feel sorry for their souls. Some may go so far as to accuse Chris Saad of Touchstone of starting the Media 2.0 Workgroup as part of an agenda to astroturf 2.0 bloggers into treating his pet subject of attention with a level of respect which it surely does not merit. To those naysayers, I say nay! Chris is a fellow Aussie, and I would never suspect him of such base motives (not that I'd know him from Adam).

No, such criticisms are beneath any self-respecting blogger, and are fit only for the lowly troll. Membership of a workgroup confers a saintly quality not matched by any earthly honour, save perhaps beatification by old Pope Benny himself. I, for one, welcome our new media 2.0 overlords.

Blackballing bastards.

"Wikipedia biography is doomed"... plus beta signup form!

2007-01-29T09:37:00.000+11:00

Via Dave Winer, Mark Bernstein sings some sweet music today as Tai (flirting briefly with the name Tony, but now reverting like a Wikipedia edit) and I are putting the finishing touches on Tinfinger in preparation for the beta, which we envision as happening this week some time (see signup form below).

Wikipedia biography is doomed, at least for living people. People who are passionately admired by some and detested by others are going to generate revert wars and nonsense. People who don’t, won’t — but nobody will notice.

That is exactly what Tinfinger is for. As our 5-second pitch goes: Tinfinger will be to the Who's Who what Wikipedia was to Encyclopedia Britannica. Through our fandom system - where only the most devoted fans of a person get top-level editing privileges over profiles, pictures, tags and similar biographical information for the objects of their devotion - the idea is that profile pages for people on Tinfinger will present a positive face.

Not that it's going to be all whitewashed niceness. Trolling will play a big part in Tinfinger. But that will have to wait for the full launch. In the meantime, here's the signup form if you're interested in the closed beta. Like I said, it should be open by the end of the week.

HumEngadget versus RoboScoble

2007-01-29T02:28:00.000+11:00

Engadget, under fire from Robert Scoble for being stingy with the outbound links, was defended by Ryan Block yesterday with some interesting PNOOMA estimates of the structural distribution of the problog network school of journalism:

Just for grins here’s my totally unscientific breakdown Engadget content:

60% news found on other tech sites, blogs, forums, etc. (non-MSM)
15% press releases / directly sourced news
10% MSM news (found there or editorial)
10% original feature content
4% insider info, tip-offs, etc.
1% announcements, contests, etc.

Jason Calacanis, founcer of the Weblogs Inc empire of which Engadget is a major part, argues that Engadget has a "symbiotic relationship" with smaller sites. I'm not a regular Engadget reader, but I would agree to the extent that Engadget relies on tiny niche sites for most of its content - though I suspect Calacanis might be blowing sunshine by saying it's symbiotic where "parasitic" or even "inoculatory" might be more accurate. By "inoculatory" I mean that my guess is that a lot of readers skim Engadget's bald rewrites of other stories and rarely click on the link - note that with those rewrites the ONLY links from within the story are to other Engadget pages, and the external link only appears at the very end.

The Weblogs Inc/Gawker business model is not primary journalism, it is to be a human-edited aggregator/memetracker. It's not modeled on CNET, it's more like Techmeme and Digg. I think Scoble's frustration comes from the fact that the end result of Engadget's human editors is different to the robotic, algorithmic norm of Techmeme and the memeoclones. To put it simply, Scoble prefers robots. Where Techmeme will always put the originating link at the top of the tree, sometimes a Weblogs Inc editor will decide to omit relevant pieces of primary journalism because they don't think it would, as Block says, "benefit[...] our editorial".

Should a meme's outbound link history define its hierarchy? For those who think so, there's Techmeme. For those who prefer a more granular, subjective view, there's Weblogs Inc and Gawker. For those who prefer a bunch of monkeys throwing feces against a wall, there's Digg. As for Tinfinger, we'll see what you make of it real soon now.

Toecutter 2.0

2007-01-26T05:43:00.000+11:00

Three posts today, I'm outdoing myself. As part of my self-appointed role as the Toecutter Of Web 2.0, I keep an eye on Nick Carr's blog, and spent a bit of time yesterday flaming him and his supporters in one of his regular Wikipedia bashing sessions. The tennis match between myself and censorware crusader Seth Finkelstein got so long that Nick promptly reprinted it as a separate post, with some snide asides inserted by Nick.

For those of you wondering what a toecutter is, Wikipedia won't help you. Neither will Google, surprisingly, without knowing what you're looking for already as I did. This is a good toecutter definition:

The term toe cutter is Australian slang for a person who lives by torturing other criminals, then robbing them. As the name implies the torture usually involves painful removal of the digits or in some cases the complete foot. Few victims ever inform since their loss has been acquired illegally. An infamous toe cutter was "Jimmie the Pom". His gang operated in the Sydney area during the seventies. They prayed on fellow criminals threatening bodily harm, till they disclosed the whereabouts of their ill begotten gains. Their modis operandi was to cut people's toes off, with bolt cutters. By day, the leader of the extorionists, ran a dress shop. He emigrated to Australia in 1967 and claimed to be a member of the notorious Kray Brothers Gang from East London where he picked up the idea. His technique seemed to work because over the years it is reputed the Toe Cutter Gang were able to amass considerable loot from their fiendish toe fetish. Less adept copycats used blowtorches applied to the soles of the feet to achieve the same end. Tablillas were pillories used by the Spanish Inquisition and immobilised the toes when the victim was bound to the rack. Sharp wedges were hammered head-on into the toes one by one to obliterate the phalanx.

The most famous toecutter was Mark Brandon "Chopper" Read, from the movie of the same name. Now, I don't actually go around to Nick Carr's house and apply an arc welder to his extremities, but I have taken it upon myself to do so in a figurative manner. I snark the snarkers. My reward is not wads of drug money, as it was for Chopper and Jimmy the Pom, but the satisfaction of seeing a sniper get a taste of his own medicine. Well worth the effort.

They can rarely take it as well as they give it.

The business case for Google to nerf Wikipedia

2007-01-26T00:00:00.000+11:00

One part of the recent Wikipedia rel=nofollow hullabaloo which didn't get enough play, in my opinion, was Shelley Powers' suggestion that Google remove Wikipedia from their search results entirely, and perhaps add them as a sidebar to every search. This would certainly cause much rejoicing amongst SEO professionals who fight with Wikipedia for top billing on almost every worthwhile search phrase, but what would the discussion be like if Matt Cutts and a bunch of Googlers sat round a table and jawed it over?

First, it must be said that Wikipedia is just the sort of content that Google wants to link to. Structured prose, highly subject-specific, stuffed with keywords, nice and lengthy, and arguably the best linklove in the business. I don't think removing it altogether is going to fly. As to whether they get relegated to a sidebar, I don't think that's out of the question.

Second, let's look at the bottom line and be a teensy bit cynical about the big G's motives for a second. Would pushing Wikipedia below the fold increase Google's revenues from AdSense? It would need to be tested, but I'm guessing it would boost revenues significantly. My guess is that users' eyes (and mouse arrow) would gravitate towards the trusted Wikipedia entry if it's above the fold in #1-3 result position, but if it's not there then the average user's attention would wander more frequently to the AdSense positions. Not by a lot, but given the volumes we're talking about here it would add a considerable amount to Google's revenues.

Third, would it hurt the user experience? Some argue that it's pretty ridiculous that Wikipedia is on the front page of Google results for every damn thing. It's getting to the stage where if you're looking for non-encyclopedic content, the Wikipedia result is actively getting in the way of your search experience. On the other hand, many people use Google as their Wikipedia search engine, so they might be discouraged by the shifting of the result to a less accessible place and stop using Google.

Last, does it violate Google's culture? It might be argued that it's a little bit evil, but there are arguments on the other side as well to say that it would be good for users. It is also, arguably, a perversion of search engine ethics since the only results you should really be tampering with are those from other search engines, for obvious reasons. Wikipedia is not a search engine. But is it a special case which requires a new rule? Google might even be helping Wikipedia if the campaign to add rel=nofollow to all Wikipedia links (which now has a Drupal module and a Wordpress module) gains traction.

I would love to be a fly on the wall for any real discussion about nerfing Wikipedia (or IMdB or tv.com or other SEO category killers, as Everton Blair points out) on the Google campus. I'm sure they'd bring up other points, but the above is how I imagine it to be framed on the whole. What will they decide, if they ever do meet about this?

Link-based search algorithms lose followers

2007-01-25T21:33:00.000+11:00

After earlier in the week Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales decided to reinstate the rule that all outbound links in Wikipedia would have the rel=nofollow attribute, meaning that search engines would not count them for the purposes of calculating a page's popularity, Dave Winer has announced that he wants to do the same sort of thing with Techmeme for his Scripting.com blog.

Actually, what Dave announced was that he was blocking Techmeme's crawler script, called Wazzup, via Scripting.com's robots.txt file. However, it came out eventually at the Scripting.com Wordpress annex that he didn't want to block himself from appearing at Techmeme at all, which is what the robots.txt change would have done, but wanted to stop his links being used as part of Techmeme's algorithm. He was quite fine with being indexed and his stories appearing as headlines, he just didn't want to be a secondary discussion link.

From a technical standpoint, there is no way to get exactly what Dave wants at the moment, because the rel=nofollow attribute is not search-engine-specific, as robots.txt can be. Maybe, if Dave can get some support for the idea, there will be a new "version" of robots.txt where the site can still be indexed but you can specify that links are to be discarded for the purposes of TechMeme or Google et al.

It all adds up to a trend of political and epistemological discontent for the power structure that link-based search algorithms have accreted. Andy Beal decided to champion a crusade to reduce Wikipedia's PageRank to zero by encouraging every blogger to add rel=nofollow to their links to Wikipedia. Wales' stated reasoning was to prevent spam by cutting the power source for SEO experts who were filling Wikipedia with decreasingly relevant links, while Dave's agenda appears to be more to subvert the hierarchy of patronage that Techmeme has become. I wonder what the next step will be in this evolving power struggle.

Google vs Internet: Internet ftw

2007-01-21T01:24:00.000+11:00

Following up from the hullabaloo over Google's non-existent plan to replace the Internet, let's remind ourselves about the scales we're talking about here.

The Internet: 106,875,138 servers, growing at an ever-accelerating rate that was last clocked at 1.63 million per month.

Google: 450,000 at last estimate, in July 2006. In April 2004 Rich Skrenta quoted the figure at 100,000, giving a monthly growth rate between estimates of just over 15,000... which is evidently where Rich gets his current figure of 500,000.

To be fair, Google's growth rate is currently outpacing that of the Internet, but at the moment it's less than 1/200th the size. To get to 1/120th the size of the Internet, Google will have to keep building data centres until... the year 2030.

What was that about "a huge proxy server for the Internet"? Mmm-hmm. Google is having enough trouble providing resources to run its own applications, which of course is what all these data centres are actually for. The Internet can take care of itself.

Cringely: Google rising, sky falling

2007-01-20T15:11:00.000+11:00

Robert Cringely contradicts himself today by saying Google is going to save the Internet. Of course, two weeks ago he said the Internet would crash due to the mainstreaming of video downloading. Yet here he is today, attributing that same phenomenon to Google aiming to become "the proxy server of the Internet". So which is it, Bob? Will the Internet crash or will Google ride in on its primary-coloured horse to rescue us?

In amongst Cringely's typical PNOOMA methodology, his main argument seems to be that Google's ever-increasing data centre assets will lead to its takeover of the ISP industry. This is wrong. Those data centres are not eating anyone's lunch, they're actually supporting an industry: the carrier-neutral data centres, the peering exchanges. I know a bit about this because I worked for a peering organisation called AusBONE during the first boom. I kept a close eye on companies like Equinix and Savvis at the time, particularly Equinix because I thought it had the best business model. Equinix is still going, despite going through some very tough times post-first-bust while trying to fund expansion, and after flirting with disaster at below US$3 per share in 2003 it has exploded to US$83 per share today.

I wouldn't be surprised to hear about Google either buying Equinix or more aggressively partnering with it. I like Equinix's tagline of "The Home Of The Internet", and it certainly converges with Google's goals. Google first entered Equinix's data centres in 2001, and it's still there making new peering arrangements with ISPs. All that super secret Google fibre that Cringely references is merely to (a) connect Google's distributed data centres with one another, and (b) connect those data centres to peering points - like those of Equinix - to pump data through to ISPs.

Where Cringley gets it most wrong is in thinking that Google is interested in killing the ISP business. That does not advance Google's goal of organising the world's information. However, Google is interested in gaining a powerful market position so that it can dictate the terms of engagement for the market - and it's not afraid to forego large sums of money to do so. In the case of the music industry, that meant negotiating huge cash settlements with copyright holders so that YouTube could eat the media giants' lunches. In the case of the ISP industry, that will mean that Google will provide ISPs with free or near-free data at peering points... as long as they embrace Net neutrality. If they cause trouble, like Ed Whitacre of AT&T, they can expect to sit across the table and have a peering contract containing a lot of zeroes shoved under their noses. Google doesn't want to have to charge those huge numbers to carriers because its users would suffer, it's merely a bargaining tactic to get what it really wants.

Call me an optimist, but I don't think Google is the business of destroying industries just because it can. Let's face it, they could pretty much enter any industry and gut it at the moment with the backing of the revenue from their search business, but they're smarter than that. A decimation of ISPs' profit margins would actually hurt Google, because it would leave itself open to antitrust investigations. Cringely is getting ever less relevant, and he's backing the wrong horse here.

UPDATE: Mathew Ingram agrees with me.

A handful of stuff

2007-01-16T20:17:00.000+11:00

1. Gareth Butler of the BBC left a comment on last October's entry Who is pmeme's Gareth Butler? saying he was not pmeme's Gareth Butler, but that he did write a book about politics. That just leaves the author of this article about freelancing as the only other candidate as to the identity of Mr Butler. The pmeme site seems not to have changed or improved at all in the intervening ten weeks since I first wrote about it: the design hasn't changed, there are no new features, and the FAQ/about pages are still just placeholders. The scripts are evidently still running because it has fresh content, but it looks as dead as Findory at the moment.

2. Speaking of which, a couple more interesting posts on the sunsetting of Findory. Over at Yoick, Chris Saad tried to use Findory's demise as an argument for his project Touchstone by tying the two together as parts of the "attention economy". Yaron Galai over at Web X.0 makes an excellent point about this attention falderol:

I bet many people (me included) would love to sit around and consume content on Findory (or Digg, etc), but just don't have the time to do so... Findory required me to spend more of my scarce attention to use it. What I need is a service that has 'net positive attention emissions'... A service that saves me time rather than consumes more of it.

Again, Yaron has his own barrow to push with his venture outbrain, but he does a good job highlighting what is I think is an adversarial relationship between the attention economy, if such a thing exists, and the "wisdom of crowds" technique. It's the difference between believing that you are the font of all wisdom, or admitting that thousands of other people can think better collectively than you. It's solipsism versus solidarity. Sociopathy versus socialisation. This tension is why the "personalised memetracker" of the kind that Matthew Chen is experimenting with is so problematic in a conceptual sense: how can you take the received wisdom of the mob and reconcile it with your own "special" biases and prejudices? Pramit Singh probes the same area and concludes that it was just a matter of advertising and user support, but I think the problem is more structural.

3. On Matthew, he was interviewed by Search Engine Journal and let slip a few new facts amongst all the typical handwaving and obfuscation that seems necessary to not let your competitors know what you're really up to :D . Evidently he has "several site sponsors in talks", and I wish him luck with them. It will be interesting to see if Matthew decides to give them featured blog post placement, as Gabe Rivera pioneered with Techmeme and Memeorandum, or whether the advertisers are more interested in straight display and/or rich media ads.

4. And finally, another Y Combinator clone called TechStars was launched by Brad Feld in Boulder, Colorado. One day, I'll do the same in .au. Ben Barren can play good cop and I'll be bad cop. That's the plan, anyway.

Findory's sleepers

2007-01-15T16:50:00.000+11:00

Greg Linden has decided to discontinue working on Findory, his one-man personalised news site. This is strange to me on a couple of fronts, and I will try to list them here without speaking ill of the deadpool, or of Greg who deserves nothing but congratulations on his hard work over the four years of the Findory project.

First, Greg announced just over a year ago that Findory was cashflow-positive. I don't know what Greg's balance sheet for the site looked like, but if Google's server farm numbers 500,000 and Topix.net's contains 500 boxes as Rich Skrenta says, then I don't think Findory was anywhere near those orders of magnitude. At a guess, I'd say five boxes, max? I don't know. In any case, I don't think Greg's burn rate, given that he's only one dude, was anything more than a slow smoulder.

Second, Greg didn't mention anything about problems with revenue streams, but I'd hazard a guess that if that side of things was all roses and sunshine, he wouldn't have made this decision. Findory's revenue was (reportedly) based on a personalised advertising engine that Greg launched back in May 2005, originally based on Google AdSense but evidently shifting more towards Amazon affiliate ads over time. That sort of thing was necessary because Findory's front page is a dog's breakfast in terms of spidering - something I'm finding with the Tinfinger top-level "Human" category. When you have 10 different stories about 10 different topics on a page which change every 24 hours, the Google spiders don't know what to make of it, and they decide different things on different page loads about what that page is about. When I went to the Findory front page today the five AdSense links were all to spyware removers, for instance.

I found one comment on Greg's blog post interesting:

I really like Findory. In fact I have read 2,565 articles through findory so far.

Although I must admit I wondered about your monetization strategy

thanks very much for the service

As it is now, Findory's front page contains four Amazon affiliate ads (which are just shots of book covers) above the fold on the left edge, and then one wide skyscraper from AdSense towards the bottom left and another Amazon banner at the foot of the page. With all respect to Greg, that doesn't seem like a sound ad placement strategy. I know Greg is an ex-Amazonian, but Amazon ads don't merit that sort of prominence.

To me, Findory always seemed like a fabulous product that could have done with some better marketing. In some ways that's true of many News 2.0 sites: Kevin Burton, Matthew Chen, Gabe Rivera, myself, even Rich Skrenta are technologists first, second and third, and marketers about 17th behind all their other skills. For one-(or two-)person shops that can be a killer, and so it seems to have been with Greg. I wish him luck in whatever helse he puts his mind to in future - and the best of health too.

News 2.0 alpha algo mojo au-go-go

2007-01-08T22:30:00.000+11:00

Today I had one of those moments of conceptual breakthrough that make this caper worthwhile, at least in this pre-launch alpha larval limbo stage we're in at Tinfinger. After reading about the widespread pooh-poohing of Daylife a few days ago, I had been worrying about several of the criticisms of Daylife and whether Tinfinger would itself stand accused of same when it officially launches. On one of those points, I think we're safe: the criticism, characterised best by Scott Karp, that Daylife's editorial algorithm offers nothing new or trustworthy.

Current providers in what has been called the News 2.0 sector have traditionally used one of three methods to sort their news items and figure out which ones should be given most prominence. The simplest is to use humans, either your users (Digg), paid editors (Netscape) or a combination of the two (Yahoo!). The second method, made most successful by Google News, is a fully automated set of algorithms giving rankings to various arbitrary concepts like relevance, recency, frequency of certain search terms, article length and so on. This ranking method can only be employed with an extremely imposing amount of processing power since the algorithms are very complex in their execution: last time I heard, Google updated their front pages only every 15 minutes. I don't know how much RAM that Topix.net, Newsvine, Inform.com and Gather.com throw at their algos, but it must be in a similar range to GN.

The third method, popularised by Memeorandum and Techmeme and the other sites in the Gabe Rivera family, is based on hyperlinks between articles, creating clusters of linked stories. This cluster method has the advantage of being relatively simple in database terms so that it can be operated on one-man-budget startups, such as those of Gabe, Kevin Burton of Tailrank and Matthew Chen of Megite.

The problem with both of these methods is they tend to produce samey results, leading to problems for the market followers to find differentiation. The ranking methodologists have the big G sitting there with all its toys giving it enough scale to comfortably keep its lead, and the Memeoclones have to suffer through forever being compared to Gabe. My guess is that Daylife, despite the VC dollars, doesn't have enough money to spend on iron big enough to handle GN-scale processing either, but they look like they are using that method along with Newsvine, Gather.com, Inform.com and the other wannabes.

Thus with the market winners already decided, so it seems, the smart operators have decided to take a different tack. Topix has already chucked in its lot with local newspapers, and is doing quite well from all reports. Matthew Chen is doing some interesting things with personalisation and has a link up on Megite for licensing. I'm sure Kevin Burton is dreaming up something in that humungous brain of his, though from the looks of it Tailrank might be moving away slightly from the Memeo link model and towards ranking algos.

So, where does Tinfinger fit in with all this? That was the subject of my revelation today. The Tinfinger algorithm, which goes by the name of tinscore, has been getting its first real workout over the past fortnight or so as we added a few more blogs, and it will get even more meat to chew on once our site discovery script is unleashed. For the first time, I can see how the equations resolve into reality with a non-pre-alpha-sized database to work with. And the results, I am happy to say, are different. They identify many of the same topic clusters as the other News 2.0 sites, but the stories which are chosen to get top billing are often not the primary or original breaking news story. They are the more thoughtful, longer, in-depth feature articles. That's the way that the algo works, unlike the status quo: timeliness is not much of a factor, as long as the story appeared in the last 24 hours; links mean nothing; all sites are ranked equally. What matters is the prominence given to the names, their frequency in the story, the amount of other people mentioned in the story, and the length of the article.

In some ways, Tinfinger will be different because it's not News 2.0, it's Feature 2.0. Substantial MSM feature articles, expansively-argued opinion pieces and passionately wordy blog rants which would on other aggregators get shifted to the bottom of the pile (or ignored entirely) because they would be considered as secondary sources are instead pushed in front of the footlights in our system, and used as the basis for their own clusters with names as the connecting factor.

Because of this thought, despite having previously architected the system to harvest external links from all articles and waiting until now to incorporate them into the Tinfinger algorithm, I am seriously considering not including links in our algo at all. That would defeat the purpose of having something distinctive. The algo's simplicity, its dumbness if you will, is what makes it unique. Hopefully it will prevent people throwing the same darts at Tinfinger on our launch day as were aimed at Daylife.

My part in the Acer Ferrari laptop scandal

2007-01-06T10:45:00.000+11:00

The inestimable Frank Arrigo links to me today in a most mysterious way. Apparently my Top 5 Aussie consumer tech blogs post way back in October was "Post Zero" for the scandal in .au territories. All shall be revealed tomorrow in the Australian Financial Review, evidently... though Josh Gliddon didn't contact me about it!

UPDATE: The article actually appeared today, and surprise surprise, it's not behind the AFR paywall! The piece, entitled Blogger takes free laptop in his stride, focuses mostly on Darren Rowse's bemusement, with quotes from Frank himself. Since Frank revealed my part in it already, I should say that I had no knowledge that any free schwag was involved, much less $3000 worth. All I was asked, by a Microsoft PR person whom I know very well, was to name the top 5 Australian consumer bloggers-who-were-not-also-journalists. Turns out that I didn't stick to the brief all that well since I have since found out that Stephen Withers, #5 on my list, is also a professional journalist. The other four are all worthy, however, despite Darren's protestation in the AFR that he doesn't "do reviews". (Another disclosure, if needed: I had not met or spoken to any of the five, except for William at last year's Influence event.) As someone has already pointed out via email to me, I created the list but didn't get a laptop, so boo for me! :D

A day in the life of Daylife

2007-01-05T22:29:00.000+11:00

I've just come home from my grandmother's funeral so I missed the kerfuffle over Daylife. I consider Daylife to be a potential competitor, if tangentially, so it's an important issue for me.

Marc Hedlund, one of the names on the practically endless investor/advisor/friends list of Daylife founder Upendra Sharma, quoted Sharma's original five-second pitch for Daylife as being "IMdB for the news". IMdB has a database of hundreds of thousands of people in the movie/TV business, plus thousands more entries for the movies and shows, all cross-referenced. To that extent, you can see what Upendra was getting at with the "connection" feature, where each topic page includes links to related topics down the left side. However, one feature which Daylife hasn't got for its topics is permanent descriptive content, at which IMdB excels with its comprehensive CVs containing biographies, work histories, trivia and user comments. That kind of high-quality descriptive text is GOLD, JERRY, GOLD for Google spiders, they love that shizzle. Let me tell you, that's pretty fricken hard to build up, so I don't envy Upendra's job there. Unless he convinces his VCs to give him money to buy those databases off someone else, in which case good luck to him.

Speaking of VCs, Michael Arrington blasted Daylife even though he is an investor, causing a few raised eyebrows, but the reason is obvious: Michael has developed a sincere and public dislike for the doings of the New York Times group, and the NYT is the lead investor into Daylife... and most importantly, Daylife's structure has seemingly been designed to pander to the needs of the NYT and its fellow MSM broadcasters. Very few blogs appear in the results, it's mostly stuff you'd see on Google News. Take their John Howard page, which shows that Daylife tracked 72 mentions of his name in news sources on December 7 and only four blog mentions. Who wins out of Daylife? At the moment, it's not Daylife's investors - it's AP, Reuters and Getty Images. Like Newsvine, the VC moolah is not going mostly to fund new technology based on new understandings of the way media works - despite the manifesto - it's acting as outsourced R&D for the wire agencies... and Daylife is paying those agencies for the privilege!

Actually, on that manifesto, does it not strike you as a highly politically charged document? There is precious little focus on the user (or whatever you want to call the customer/consumer/reader/person). It seems to me to be a sop to the varied special interests in the Daylife investment ranks. To wit:

1. Provide a wide variety of perspectives, framings, and points of view – and help people triangulate stories and form their own perspective

Call this one the Jeff Jarvis Rule. Bloody hippies.

2. Surface the interconnections throughout the world we live in

Um... what? Someone was hitting the bong a bit too hard that day. The only things that should surface are things that had previously been submerged in liquid.

3. Provide more ways to engage with the news, and increase the utility of news and reporting

To... engage with news. And increase its utility. So nothing about increasing the quality of the news that users get, or broadening their choices. News is a nebulous Singular Thing, not to be fragmented. Yep, that's a sop to the NYT, alright.

4. Make the news ecosystem more transparent and self-correcting, for the benefit of all involved

All? Seems like that benefits the New York Times better, doesn't it, especially given their recent scandals?

5. Consider and serve all stakeholders - citizens, journalists, newsmakers, suppliers, the environment, shareholders and employees

This should never be a part of a manifesto by a startup. If you have a list of seven stakeholders, it should contain these seven only: users, users, users, users, users, users and users. And now, here's Gir to sing the Doom Song!

6. Develop new models for funding journalism

Aha, here's the Craig Newmark Rule. I knew it would get in here somewhere. He still feels the need to prove to all those journos he indirectly retrenched that he's not the Son of Satan. Good luck with that one, bro.

7. Enable a civil discourse that is pragmatic, solutions-oriented, and doesn't exaggerate divisions in favor of celebrating what unites us

Is Kofi Annan a secret investor? WTF? What sort of solutions could a news aggregator possibly provide for any division? Call this the Oh Fudge, Our Investors All Hate Each Other, Quick Write Something Telling Them Not To Scapegoat Us Rule. Well, I guess that one didn't work Mike! :D

Too many snipers in the Web 2.0 clan

2007-01-04T12:17:00.000+11:00

Pete Cashmore over at Mashable* pooh-poohs the use of the term Web 2.0 yet again today in what has become a rather boring and elitist trend, in my opinion. Michael Arrington has also been on the Web-2.0-is-passe bandwagon and of course any bandwagon that Mike gets on is bound to have a lot of passengers.

I think the chorus of snark at the Web 2.0 phrase rather misses the point. Who elected Michael or Pete - or Richard MacManus or Dave Winer or Doc Searls or whoever else wants to take a shot - as Final Arbiters Of What We Call Things? Most of the original push away was in response to the perception that Tim O'Reilly was trying to marshall the phrase for his own purposes, but in doing so the naysayers have puffed themselves up as self-appointed Phrase Police.

If the people want to hear about Web 2.0, and they obviously do if Pete's story on Wikipedia search phrases is true, then who is qualified to try to re-educate the masses? Web 2.0 is supposed to be about bottom-up control over content, not elitist broadcasting. Web 2.0 is a perfectly useful phrase, and its fuzzy definition is actually good for the industry because it does not limit its development or pigeonhole it into something that can be marginalised.

I'll continue to use it, especially on Tinfinger which now has a Web 2.0 news page which is slowly filling it up with new names harvested from a batch of sites I fed in. If your name is on that page and you feel constricted by being lumped in with the 2.0 crowd, then tough luck because that's how the world perceives you. Embrace your inner Web 2.0, people!

Here comes another year, not like the last one

2006-12-31T23:10:00.000+11:00

Halfway through a six-pack, trying to code drunk on NYE and feeling like livestreamblogging ben barren style, with a sliver of Cameron Reilly chutzpah, a bit of Duncan Riley determination, and hopefully some William Pramana credibility.

2006 has been a good year in some respects, shitty in others. Family issues haven't gone well (nothing to do with me though). Startup issues haven't overwhelmed us, which I suppose should be seen as a win as the bodies start piling up (cf RawSugar). Tinfinger's burn rate hasn't got above a smoulder all year, which can be seen as a problem, but all it does in retrospect is delay our shot until '07. The opportunity is still there, perhaps even more so. Amazingly, no one launched anything that remotely resembled what we plan Tinfinger to be, despite my early blog entries which laid much of our plans out in full.

I remain confident that Tinfinger is still a proposition worth working on, because I see that the work we have put in will pay off eventually. It's a piece of piss to build a social network site, since it's just a bunch of forms and an empty database. Social network platforms are the new CMSs, it's stupid to even try making a new one. You could buy one off Scriptlance for $100 or less. That includes social news, which is just a social networks where you can enter in new URLs. The value, the distinctiveness, of most startups comes from having your own database - not AP's, not Reuters' - and having your own distinctive algorithms. For cash-strapped startups who can't pay Lexis-Nexis or whoever to rent databases, there are ways around this, you can use copyright law to your advantage to make a base from which you then develop your own unique flavour.

The key, assuming you don't have any sugar daddies (which if you're not in the Valley is almost guaranteed) is to keep the burn rate low as you grow. I can only now see that we have got our systems to the point where we actually need more iron, better connectivity, more capacity.

Tinfinger is perhaps more ambitious than is strictly healthy for two dudes. Tony's always looking for the quick fix, the more efficient method, the get rich quick scheme. I have faith, possibly misguided, in the virtue of hard work for its own sake, because I think it will teach us lessons that we need to learn to succeed. We are reinventing some wheels, but it gives us an appreciation for how valuable those wheels are. It's kind of the difference between reading a car manual or having built your own car from parts. Wait, where am I going with this again?

Oh yes, we're getting the engines warmed up for some sort of chequered flag jobby. A few burnouts to heat the tyres up and we should be cooking with gas. Hmm, creating analogies whilst intoxicated is like skinning a rabbit with your fruit salad, or something.

The Carlton Draught cans are lining up before me in a maroon wall. That was a simile, those are safer. I think.

The point of this post, if there was one, which there isn't, so this sentence peters out into nothing. Not even a verb!

Oh wait, yes, that was the point. Tinfinger is supposed to be about people. It seems to me that many of the other Web 2.0 sites are based on technology... no, I lost this train of thought too. Bugger.

In the words of Geordi LaForge: "We lost a lotta good people." Vale Vera.

Bah, now I'm getting maudlin. Happy thoughts! Sunshine and lightness! Who knows, who knows. Not me at the moment, that's for sure.

I used to be a better writer than this. Before I opened my first beer of the evening. When is it that a journalist-turned-programmer is supposed to have his best years? Is it in his early 20s, like physicists? Or in his 40s like poets?

Now the fireworks start. Sounds like gunfire in Iraq. For five minutes, I can pretend I'm in Baghdad or the Gaza strip waiting for the mortars to hit.

I suppose it's not liveblogging if I only post this at the stroke of new year's, but ah, wtf.

Withnail & I: The Sequel

2006-12-19T07:23:00.000+11:00

It appears I may have been a bit hasty in my last post. Tony and I have been working hard for the last week or so and things became a bit heated for a while, but we're currently still business partners. In better news, Tinfinger may be close to something like a launch pretty soon. More news presently.

Tinfinger down to one

2006-12-14T08:19:00.000+11:00

A sad event today. Tony Tran has decided to leave Fansports Committee, which is the company he and I started under which we developed FanFooty and Tinfinger. I am sorry to see him go, and wish him well in the future. We finished it on a handshake, no hard feelings. For the moment I'll be continuing on alone, though in a different form.

UPDATE: Turns out I was wrong.

Australia's answer to Udell: who?

2006-12-13T04:34:00.000+11:00

Commenting on journalist-cum-coder Jon Udell joining Microsoft, Frank Arrigo of Microsoft Australia asks:

It got me thinking - who is the Australian John Udell? ----- Mark Jones ? Paul Montgomery ? Phil Sim ?

Does such a person exist?

Does it matter?

Any suggestions?? Especially since I am also looking for someone with a passion for technology and also a desire to change the world ?

The short answer is that there is no one who qualifies. To be an Australian Jon Udell, you would have to not only be a respected practicing journalist with a long and decorated career, you would also have to be a successful author of software products, have launched your own successful Web site/s, have the solid credentials to be paid as a consultant to other companies, and have a reputation for evangelism for pioneering technologies. In Udell's words, an "alpha geek".

Australian technology journos, on the large, are not actually geeks. They may be prosumers of technology, but when it comes to knowledge and history of code or engineering, the vast majority haven't progressed much further than BASIC on their Commodore 64s, if that. That's not a knock, since journalists are trained to be generalists, and many journalists working in IT would much rather be reporting for general news desks. There are a number of Aussie IT journos who have cut code for a living, perhaps most notably Eric Wilson. I'm sure there must be other examples I don't know about, but none have reached Udell levels.

To answer another of Frank's questions: it does matter, because we need a Udell clone out here to help transition the IT journo community as the industry evolves (or devolves). Over the last five years or so, IT publications in Australia have shed most non-essential permanent staff and now rely on those ex-employees as freelancers to fill out their pages. It has got to the point where some publishers find it hard to replace their permanent staff because the freelancers enjoy their unstructured lifestyle so much. There have been some rumblings of journalists realising this situation can't last, as in the launch of Hydrapinion, but I think before this cycle finishes there will be some more radical ventures that challenge the economic structure of the industry. I'm involved in discussions for some of them so I can't say too much, but suffice it to say that I think local IT journalists are too smart not to eventually figure out that Web 2.0 is not a threat to their livelihood, but an opportunity which they are the best equipped to exploit. The Beer Files is a step in the right direction, but someone can do better than Stan Beer and Stuart Corner have at creating a new economic model for professionalism in local new media.

Sacred COWBs want a gerontolution

2006-11-26T21:18:00.000+11:00

The latest in the long line of crotchety old white bastards, in this case some superannuated Pommy called Bill Thompson writing an anti-2.0 rant for the Register, has perked up the interest of a fellow COWB, Nick Carr.

It's hard to see what Thompson is proposing, since he rambles all over the place like a Trotskyite after a night on the bottle. The less said about the absurd Marxist analogy, the better. He lays on the purple prose, yet doesn't manage to communicate a coherent vision. (Never forget: this is the Reg we're talking about here. Not a noted bastion of advanced thought.)

If Thompson is so old and wise - I think I saw in his bio that he was present when the Declaration of ARPANET was signed in 1776 - then he should know that the Web itself is a presentation layer, so it's no surprise that a movement called Web 2.0 is also mostly about the presentation layer. What he is talking about is a re-engineering of the Internet. It's a classic mistake, confusing the Web and the Internet, and one that I wouldn't expect someone of Thompson's experience to make.

Anyway Nick, you have found someone who is possibly even more of a COWB than you, bravo! I hope you and Bill can share many a good virtual sherry whilst decrying the horrors of today's youth from the safety of your respective ivory towers.

Hydrapinion: a different problogging model?

2006-11-22T13:58:00.000+11:00

Via ITJourno comes news of the recent launch of a joint blog called Hydrapinion by five Australian freelance technology journalists. The concept is that each of the journos writes one blog entry per week, in successive days, on technology niches: Stephen Withers on Monday about business IT, Seamus Byrne on Tuesday about gadgets, Patrick Gray on Wednesday about security, Anthony Caruana on Thursday about mobile, and Adam Turner on Friday about the digital home.

I commend this innovation by journalists, trying out new things to see what works. This model is an interesting alternative to what has become the norm: a couple of professionals who know what they're doing hire bums off the street to churn out content in a "blog network", and trickle the profits back down to the plebs, Reaganomics-style. These five pros know what they are talking about, and have years of experience and bodies of work to prove it.

Nevertheless the result, at first impression, is of unevenness. After reading so many blogs which stick to one topic and by one author, it's jarring to see every story about a different subject, and by a writer with a different style. I would be fascinated to see how the concept evolves. My opinion is that a collective of freelancers writing for a group bloggish publication is a fabulous idea, but perhaps stuffing them all into a single blog is the wrong way to do it. I would hazard a guess that it would work better if the bloggers maintained their own separate blogs, but used the group approach to go to advertising agencies for revenue. I think that the economic advantages of such a joining of forces are far more important than changing the well-established blog template of one blog, one author. There are also technical advantages in establishing separate sites if your revenue comes from Google ads, since advertisers can buy individual sites in AdWords making, for example, the gadget sub-site much more attractive to a gadget advertiser.

The problem is that freelance journalism for MSM publications still pays far more than problogging, at least for these long-time journos. It is easy to characterise Hydrapinion as a mere toe-dipping exercise rather than a real immersion in the blogosphere - a place of mystery and terror to most MSM journos. I look forward to tracking the adventures of the Hydra boys as they engage with legions of Hercules wannabes.

When betas are a bete noire

2006-11-17T16:43:00.000+11:00

Last night, during a D&M* with Phil Sim after the launch of version 3 of his MediaConnect platform, a project for which I have been in Sydney for the past week acting as database consultant, he explained to me a view that I had not thought of before but found very interesting.

The perpetual beta is a cornerstone of the Web 2.0 manifesto. Web 2.0 applications are considered to always be in testing mode. Gone are the days of iterative point releases which are published en masse like they are hardcover books; now, code is dribbled out like sausage meat from a grinder.

Phil's contention was that this process was perfect for someone who couldn't handle the pressure of failure. It is an easy out, a sop to your own ego which might be too fragile to face criticism of a product that you might dare to say is finished. The result of this is that entrepreneurs, who as a breed are notorious for starting projects and not finishing them, now have a ready-made excuse for all of the flaws of their creations, bestowed upon them by no less a dignitary than Tim O'Reilly. The state of having launched a beta but not graduated to the hard fact of a final product is a seductive one, because it means you never have to give up the defence of "oh, but it's only beta". You get to have a blog and participate in the 2.0 community as an equal, or at least a player. You avoid making the difficult decisions, to set yourself up to be knocked down. You delay the time when you put your skill and work ethic on the line.

By the way, mea culpa.

This leads me to think that at some point, this dynamic of passivity will become less attractive and more of a sign of weakness. The computer game site GameIlluminati.com, for instance, is an industry forum whose sole criterion of membership is that you have been on a project team which shipped a commercial game. Will there be sites or events in the 2.0 community that will adopt such an attitude of professional exclusivity, to weed out the amateurs and wannabes? At the moment it's anathema to most of the culture of the community, but I can't help but think that it's just a matter of time before someone stands up for the shippers.

* "deep & meaningful": a long, serious philosophical discussion usually conducted under the stars after a heavy drinking session at a party.

The Asher Moses debacle

2006-11-01T19:58:00.000+11:00

Mike Arrington seems to be accreting enemies like barnacles on an oil tanker. The latest stoush involves Asher Moses (his blog appears to be down, though the Google cache isn't), journalist for the Fairfax newspapers (Sydney Morning Herald and The Age).

The last two weeks has brough a fresh wave of TechCrunch hate. I’ve learned to avoid responding to this stuff in the past because it just draws more attention to it, but tonight a reporter from the Syndey Morning Herald named Asher Moses emailed me and said “First off, great site - i’m a regular reader of yours.” He then went on to say he’s working on a story about the “disclosure scrubbed at techcrunch debacle.”

I took issue with his use of the term “debacle” before actually speaking to me - this tells me everything I need to know about this particular reporters slant on this “story,” and basically told him to fuck off. And while I’m not surprised that someone is looking to do a hit job on TechCrunch, I am surprised that traditional media is starting to see TechCrunch as newsworthy enough to attack. I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing.

The first lesson to learn here is that if you want to act like a journalist when you talk to Mike Arrington - or any source for a story, for that matter - it is best that you do your homework on the type of language you should use. Journalists are treated with apprehension at the best of times, as most people who have had any previous contact are highly aware that a wrong word by them could result in adverse publicity. This is especially true when you're cold-calling a source, who doesn't know you from Adam and thus doesn't know about your own level of professionalism and history of ethical conduct (or otherwise).

I don't blame Mike for treating journalists like heavy ordnance, because he knows all too well that little red glowing dots are being painted all over his head and torso by snipers in the MSM who would love to bag him for their trophy cabinet. Asher should know that, being a reader of TechCrunch, and his first strategy should have been to spend time disarming Mike. Just giving a glib bit of praise wasn't going to cut it. Asher's language got him in trouble.

As for why the MSM are attacking Mike and TechCrunch, that is obvious to me, at least in the context of the tech media. First, TechCrunch is a direct competitor to tech media such as the technology sections of the Fairfax newspapers, which have been sickly at best since the last boom. If there is to be a new boom, then TechCrunch and its imitators are the media vehicles that will dominate new ad campaign budgets. Second, the TechCrunch model is an attack on tech journalism itself. Its writers are not arts degree holders or J-school graduates, they have MBAs and computer science backgrounds. They're startup CEOs, not journalists, who see writing not as a singular full-time profession but as a tool that is only one part of their personal arsenal of weapons to Get Shit Done. Third, Mike is beating them. He's getting the scoops that previously bolstered the circulation and/or page views of CNET, Computerworld and PC Magazine.

All of this leads to a situation of mutual distrust that is bound to spill over into spats like this. Mike is perfectly reasonable if you treat him with respect. He doesn't owe journalists anything, and if they want to get anything out of him then they have to realise who they're dealing with.

UPDATE: Along with all of the other kerfuffle in the blogosphere, Herald journalists did themselves no favours by continuing to display arrogance in their responses. David Higgins left a highly condescending comment on Crunchnotes lecturing on how Mike must adopt formalised ethics and kowtow to journalistic institutions in order to join David's exclusive club of collegial old boys. Also, Stephen Hutcheon of the SMH's Mashup blog posted a petulant piece which characterised the post you are reading as an "uninformed rant". Hey, my rants are all informed! Hutcheon saw fit to publish a private email from Arrington to Moses... does that break clause 3 of the MEAA Code of Ethics about respecting confidences in all circumstances? Funny how the only supporting article that Stephen could find was at another MSM source. Not that there weren't more anti-Mike articles out there, but the Fairfax lads haven't shown any inclination to engage with bloggers at any level above paternalism. The more they talk, the higher they hoist their petard.

Who is pmeme's Gareth Butler?

2006-10-28T15:17:00.000+10:00

I finally cottoned on today to pmeme, the name-based blog aggregator, which has popped up only in the last week or so. It's fresh out of the vats so it would be churlish to critique it at this early stage, especially considering Tinfinger isn't finished yet either! Suffice to say that he's on a good track there.

The man behind it is appears to be an Englishman by the name of Gareth Butler, who doesn't seem to have any information about him on the Internets that specifically links him to pmeme other than the pmeme.com domain registry records and a link to tokyo26.com which has his name in the title. Is it the same Gareth Butler who was/is a producer for the BBC? Is it the same Gareth Butler who co-wrote a book on politics? Is it the same Gareth Butler who got made redundant in December 2004 and became a $10,000/month freelancer? Inquiring minds want to know.

Top 5 Aussie consumer tech blogs?

2006-10-26T18:18:00.000+10:00

I was asked by a friend today to give my opinion on the top five Australia consumer technology bloggers who are not also journalists. After consulting Gnoos, Paul Woods' TechTalk Top 25 (which uses Technorati) and other sources, this is the list I came up with:

- William Pramana, wpram.com
- Darren Rowse, problogger.net
- Mitch Denny, notgartner.com
- Long Zheng, istartedsomething.com
- Stephen Withers, homepage.mac.com/swithers/iblog/

I don't think anyone could argue about the first two, and I think the second two are also pretty solid. I would like to see other peoples' lists though, as I am sure there are other worthy candidates of whom I haven't heard. Also, in compiling the names, it struck me that there is a distinct pro-Microsoft bias in the names that keep bobbing up, which is a tribute to the influence of Frank Arrigo in fostering the local blogger community, especially through TechTalkBlogs. However, there still seems to be a gaping hole where there should be more local tech blogs, especially those covering non-Microsoft issues. Or maybe I just haven't seen them yet. Tell me about them!

Sweat of the brow beaten by lazy footy scrapers

2006-10-22T22:36:00.000+10:00

Thanks to Leslie Nassar for alerting me to last Monday's Media Watch, which featured a segment on live Australian sports scores, something close to my heart with my FanFooty business. The piece (transcript, video) detailed a sting operation that statistical provider Sportsdata played on two of its rivals. In short, Sportsdata put bogus data in its XML feed and then caught Sportal and Cadability with the same bogus information on their customer Web sites. They sent the smoking gun to Media Watch and let them off the leash with exchanges of correspondence with accusations of plagiarism and conflicts of interest flying everywhere.

Quite what Media Watch was doing in the middle of this is a bit of a question, seeing as it had nothing to do with journalism or plagiarism. As Cadability pointed out in its reply, Australian case law has established that facts and figures are not copyrightable. The only thing that has been broken here is the oft-mentioned 2003 "agreement" for its competitors not to scrape data from Sportsdata's servers. That agreement is based on a guess as to what the law would be if it went to court, since there is no Australian law that applies directly to the issue of whether live sporting statistics have more protection under IP law than the same statistics after the games have finished.

It may be that Sportsdata does hold some copyright over that data according to the "sweat of the brow" doctrine re-affirmed in Desktop Marketing Systems Pty Ltd v Telstra Corporation Limited, which has been obsolete in places like America for a while but still holds sway in European and Australian law. But then again, it may not. And this may just be a case of a grubby commercial spat being played out in the media by a bunch of cut-throat businesses where nobody can claim the high moral ground, and Media Watch has allowed itself to be used as a pawn in their sordid little game.

Not happy little Vegemites, it's Prohibition 2.0

2006-10-22T22:13:00.000+10:00

I find it highly offensive that the US allows its citizens to carry all manner of deadly weaponry and explosive ordnance, yet now bans them from carrying Vegemite. Perhaps Cameron Reilly will rethink his Californian sojourn? They obviously saw him coming.

I ask you, did a crazy man ever walk into a school and kill handfuls of people at a time armed with a jar of Vegemite? No, no they did not. Also, are they really going to search you for Vegemite at airports? Is Vegemite more dangerous than the kind of ceramic knives that the 9/11 terrorists used (and which could also be used for spreading said Vegemite on a bit of toast)?

I am researching the feasibility of starting a Vegemite-running operation out of Tijuana. We'll smuggle the folic goodness across the border in the dead of night, screw the prohibitionists. We'll set up spreadeasies right under the noses of the PB&J-guzzling freaks, where expats will gather in secret to commune with the national food of their fatherland. Viva Vegemite!

Mistakes, I've made a few

2006-10-18T07:28:00.000+10:00

I start a perfect 12 for 12, and 17 and 18 are locks. The only ones I haven't made are because my business isn't big enough yet, but I have faith that I can make them when the time comes. Or, as my buddy None-1a said: "You need to make mistake 13 then run".

Gotta collect 'em all!

Cameron Reilly to move TPN to the US

2006-10-16T11:54:00.000+10:00

What should we call this criminal lack of venture capital for early-stage Australian consumer Internet businesses? Capital cringe? Comes word from Builder AU, of all places, that Cameron Reilly is upping stumps as of October 22 and moving The Podcast Network to the US.

"I've been talking to investors for the last 12 months in Australia," he told Builder AU. "There's been a high degree of interest, but the challenge that we had was the valuations that we get given by Australian investors is a at significant discount."

The reaction by journalist portal ITJourno, in its daily Epitome article which was written today by ex-Industry Standard writer Ian Yates, was rather schaedenfreude-laden.

Rumours of the demise of mainstream media by the self-boosters of the Web 2.0 brigade may be a tad exaggerated. In this instance a “tad” is approximately the size of an A380 and just as likely to get off the ground any time soon. To confirm the delay comes news of Australia’s own podcast poster-boy, Cameron Reilly, decamping to the USA because local venture capitalists “undervalue” his business. Oh dear, how sad, never mind, better get a real job, eh?

I am sad to see Cameron go, though I don't blame him. I'm getting a new passport myself this week. This decision would have been made more difficult for Cameron since he has a wife and two young children to contend with, so the gamble he's taking has stakes higher than those for unladen single blokes like myself and Tony at Tinfinger, or Ben Barren at Feedcorp. I wish him luck, and I look forward to him presenting his own thoughts on the matter in one of his blogs.

UPDATE: Cam apparently broke this news himself in the last edition of his G'Day World podcast last week, as discussed by TPN member Rooster. Shame on me for not listening!

PPS: Josh Gliddon interviewed the usual suspects for a Bulletin piece on the capital cringe issue.