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Marc Andreessen, founder of Netscape (at age 22), Opsware and Ning (translation: the smartest guy in the room), is joining the board of FaceBook, according to TechCrunch.
Andreessen, of course, has a unique position in the history of the Internet. His entrepreneurial success is also well documented. However, it was not until he started blogging that I realized what a great thinker and writer — a communicator — he is. (Although, like others, he has slowed down his blogging recently.)
I hope Andreessen’s joining FaceBook’s board sends an “openness” message regarding the future of FaceBook. Andreessen’s company, Ning, offers a platform for setting up a FaceBook-like community for your club, church, cause or company. In the past, I have perceived Ning as competitive to what I thought the longterm plans of FaceBook were. Granted, I can understand how the two could be complimentary — FaceBook is focused on macro-community, Ning is focused on micro-community. Obviously, my understanding (translation: speculation) means nothing as Andreessen and Zuckerberg are the only two minds that really had to be melded on this.
Fortunately, because Andreessen blogs, we can understand a little of how his mind works regarding the ways in which social platforms need to work together. On May 14, for example, he wrote about Ning’s integration of two “social” initiatives from Google, Open Social and Friend Connect. (They also support other initiatives like “Open ID.”)
Here’s a quote from that May 14th post:
“From a strategy standpoint, we want to enable maximum flow both into and out of Ning networks and the rest of the web. It should be as easy as possible for users to get from elsewhere on the web into a Ning network, and likewise as easy as possible to flow from a Ning network to anywhere else on the web — and ideally, while taking their social context with them. We think this makes strategic sense for two key reasons:
First, it’s good for users, and whatever is good for users is good for a service like Ning. We think that’s obvious.
Second, you don’t get lots of flow into anything on the web without having lots of flow out to the broader web.
Having someone on FaceBook’s board who advocates that point of view is a good thing for FaceBook — and the rest of us who develop tools and content designed to build community.
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Link #1 on the topic of Twitter vs. FriendFeed.
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Link #2 on the topic of Twitter vs. FriendFeed
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Link #3 on the topic of Twitter vs. FriendFeed
A comment on comments: Yesterday, I wrote the following on Twitter:
“FriendFeed, Twitter, Seesmic et al, are pointing in the direction of something. They aren’t the destination.”
Because everything I post on Twitter (and other places) is mirrored on FriendFeed, the “tweet” appeared there at the same time.
If you look at the comments following that FriendFeed post, you’ll note that my friend (and I don’t mean that just because we said so on FaceBook) Dave Winer commented that he, “Totally agree(d) with this.”
Because so many people have learned that it’s important to listen to Dave (even when they disagree with him) his FriendFeed comment about my “tweet” led to a robust disussion that still lingers 17 hours later.
Which leads me to the topic of comments: A small group of the people who read this blog are currently obsessed with trying to understand where “comments” fit into conversational media. Even those of us who think we at least have a grasp of social media — who know its role in de-centralizing “content” — are fascinated (and some, upset) that comments on our blogs are now becoming de-centralized.
It fascinates me that some bloggers, who more often than not, are using their blog to comment on items they read elsewhere, are becoming upset that comments about their posts are taking place elsewhere.
As for me, I love that comments are finally being recognized as the treasure they are.
I don’t care where the conversation takes place. I want to understand it and embrace it.
Why I find all of this fascinating: You know that kid who loves tearing apart physical things to understand how they work. The one who can actually put the stuff he or she tears apart back together again. “She should be an engineer when she grows up,” people will say about that kid.
I wasn’t that kid.
But looking back, I was obsessed with tearing apart virtual things to understand how they work. I was never interested in how my television worked, but I was extremely curious about how programs were written and produced. I was never really that interested in printing presses, but I can’t remember a time I didn’t wonder about how reporters gathered news and editorial decisions were made. I was also fascinated with what today I’d call group dynamics and how teams and clubs and cliques came together and grew or fell apart. I was an organizer of groups and a conversation “moderator” decades before I even realized that groups and conversation need to be organized and moderated. I was fascinated with why fans become fans and what “loyalty” is all about. I was that kid.
For almost 20 years (back to the CompuServe days) the online world has provided me (and many others like me) with an amazing laboratory in which we get to tear apart the flow of information and the creation of conversation and community in an attempt to understand how they work. For some of us, that’s like being a kid in a, well, info-candy shop.
I’ll admit. I’m not merely doing this for fun. I have a business that allows me to apply what I learn in this laboratory to improve our internal conversations and community — and to incorporate what we learn into improving and enhancing the products and services we sell. But, I think it’s also apparent that I still have a child-like curiousity about the ways in which people use technology to share with one-another and to spread information — and create community.
The most important thing I’ve learned is this: It’s not about the technology. I know so many people who are “afraid” of something because they think it’s “technology.” Frankly, technology developers don’t help things by creating products that are driven by features and functions than by ease-of-use. It still amazes me that after 30 years, so many professional marketers don’t understand why Apple has a cult following. “Cool” is what marketers think Apple is all about. “Not corporate” perhaps, you know, that I’m a Mac, I’m a PC thing, perhaps. As a Mac-tard since 1984, I’ll tell you why Apple has a cult following. They make products for people who don’t give a rip about technology. They make products for users. And even though they don’t say it anymore, their products are for the “rest of us” who don’t really care how the technology works, we just want the technology to disappear so we can listen, read, write, create, share, buy, sell, etc.
I’m obsessed with what’s taking place here. But I’m obsessed as a user and “content” creator and “community” builder and participant.
That’s why I’m such a geek.
[Photo: cocoen via Flickr.]
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I can think of ways the “Netflix for magazines” does not work as a good analogy, but I’m greatly supportive of any new model for fixing the broken-from-the-start U.S. mag subscription model.
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I can answer that. The magazine industry generates $30 billion in advertising revenue plus many tens of billions in subscriptions, books, data, research, events and, yes, online ad dollars. Maghound won’t save it.
ABOVE: This morning, the New York Times devoted an entire page to a news article suggesting the possibility of Estee Lauder’s influence on editorial decisions at Harper’s Bazaar Magazine. The news article was preceded by Estee Lauder interstitial “pre-roll” advertising and two Estee Lauder ads appear adjacent to the article.
Today the New York Times Style section includes an article (sheepish clarification: it showed up on my RSS feed of “magazine-related” news) that, in a tone of righteous indignation, reported that Harper’s Bazzar was devoting 40 pages of an issue to glamorous fashion photos modeled by four super-models/actresses who regularly appear in and on the cover of the magazine. Except this time, they will be identified as the “stars” of a new fragrance from Estee Lauder instead of, say, the stars of a re-make of Charlie’s Angels.
In the San Francisco Chronicle today, a story appears about the possibility of the FCC tightening the “product placement” rules related to, say, a Coca-cola cup appearing on the table in front of the judges of American Idol.*
As I’ve written before — many, many time — I’m a advocate for transparency in the relationships marketers have with media. I think marketers and media companies should disclose the relationships they have with one another and let the audience decide what is, and is not, ethical. Indeed, I think they should be proud of the relationships.
That said, I must ask: Among the readers of Harper’s Bazaar, are there any who really care where the ads stop and the edit begins? Have you flipped through the September issue of any of fashion magazine? I think most readers would be shocked to learn there is anything in them other than advertising. More than any genre of magazines, fashion magazine advertising is the reason they are purchased.
As for reality programs like American Idol, is the “franchise” of American Idol not a product, itself? Do viewers care that watching the whole show is like watching a commercial for the brand American Idol and all of the performers appearing are also brands?:
When Ryan Seacrest tells viewers they should go download recordings of the evening’s performances on iTunes, are viewers really duped into thinking that was an editorial decision on the part of Ryan rather than a business relationship between the Fox Network and Apple? Do viewers think the Ford music video advertisement is something the contestants do to relax during the week? Do viewers think Coca-Cola is what’s in that cup in front of Paula Abdul?
Are readers and viewers that stupid?
Okay, some are. So perhaps they need some type of explanation or disclaimer below that NYTimes.com advertisement for the product being written about in article next to it. Perhaps they need a big box that includes a warning that, “this article about Estee Lauder’s Senuous is sponsored by Estee Lauder’s Senuous.”
Bottomline: When you attempt to apply the same journalistic and ethical guidelines to entertainment (i.e., fashion magazines and “commercially-sponsored” network reality shows) that you do to news journalism (general or business), you start heading down a slippery slope to school marm silliness that soon makes serious ethical issues seem trite.
*I wrote about American Idol’s creative product placement practices earlier this year.
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Differences in privacy laws, censorship, and national security fears may restrict places where data can flow freely. In that case computation will have to hopscotch around the world following the law.
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Quote - If you extend free psychology into the publishing realm … a publisher can use free, no-frills content to build buzz around a particular author, title or topic.
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Quote - As content recognition software gets more sophisticated, expect more copyright-related battles online like the recent AP-blogger flap
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TextOnPhone.com is beginning to alter my heretofore belief that I could not read a book on an iPhone screen. Handy text-size-setting makes it readable for my far-sighted eyes. Still waiting for bigger format iPod, however.
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Quote - And while it’s true that E-Ink, specifically, has brought the technology a long way, there’s little sign that newspapers will be on leading the way with this stuff. [Wow, and I get to tag it flyingcar.]
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Quote - Google News appears to be stuck in neutral and struggling to keep up with rivals.
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Google Map Maker, a new feature that allows users to contribute and edit Maps data for regions around the world. Note: It’s moderated so pranksters beware.
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Doc Searls uses lessons learned during his past week’s hospital stay to ponder where some solutions could be found to the complexity and competitiveness of treatment management records and data.
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Surely Scott Donaton was winking when he said : “We’re a category of one. When we cover a celebrity, it’s about what they do for a living; it’s not about who they’re sleeping with.”
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Four years ago, an article in the Wall Street Journal suggested Internet advertising would match magazine advertising by 2007 and blow past it in 2008. What happened?
Four years ago, an article in the Wall Street Journal suggested Internet advertising would match magazine advertising by 2007 and blow past it in 2008. What happened?
 The very short version: During 2007, almost $60 billion was spent on advertising that appeared in print while $11.31 billion was spent on advertising that appeared on the Internet.
The very long version: I don’t expect any readers of this weblog to remember a four-year-old rant I wrote (and here) about a Wall Street Journal article appearing in July, 2004. Screen grabbed on the left, the WSJ story carried the headline “Online Ad Dollars Set to Match, Then Go Ahead of Magazines (sub. required).” The article was based on a Jupiter Research report predicting that in 2007, Internet advertising spending would grow to $13.8 billion which, claimed the Wall Street Journal, “would match magazine advertising.”
My rant, which later became an article appearing in Folio: Magazine, was directed more at the Wall Street Journal reporter’s mis-interpretation of the research than it was at the Jupiter Research report. Their prediction was not really a comparison of Internet advertising to magazine advertising, merely their estimate of online advertising spending through 2007 and beyond. It was the Journal reporter who decided to mashup a comparison of future Internet advertising (based on Jupiter’s numbers) and its magazine number estimate.
However — and this was a major focus of my rant — the reporter (and Jupiter) failed to recognize that the Internet advertising prediction included all online advertising while the magazine advertising prediction excluded all business-to-business magazine advertising.
In my response to the article, I suggested that a better prediction of 2007 magazine ad spending would be the 2004 estimate by Veronis Suhler that $28.3 billion would be spent on magazine advertising (consumer and B-to-B) in 2007.
Fast-forward four years. Today, Advertising Age issued a report that included the actual ad spending (split by media) in 2007. As you can see in the Advertising Age pie chart below, $11.31 billion was spent on Internet advertising and $30.33 billion was spent on magazine advertising. Throw in the $28.22 billion spent on newspaper advertising and there was nearly $60 billion spent on print advertising last year.
Let’s break this down a bit. Let’s look at a comparison of the 2004 predictions vs. actual performance from Jupiter Research and Veronis Suhler regarding Internet and magazine advertising. As you can see on my comparison below, Jupiter over-shot their Internet advertising prediction while Veronis-Suhler undershot their magazine advertising prediction.
(Granted, Jupiter Research’s prediction during the most recent four-year span was dramatically better than their 1999-2003 prediction. In 1999, they predicted that online advertising in 2003 would total $11.5 billion compared to the $6.6 billion it actually hit.)
What does this mean? First, it means, (to quote a wonderful headline I saw this morning) “90% of all statistics can be made to say anything 50% of the time.” No doubt, the statistics in today’s report can be spun any way you want. I’ve spun them one way. Most bloggers would spin them in a way that suggests they are another nail in the coffin of the print medium. Frankly, the way headlines and intro paragraphs will be written can make most any statistics imply whatever you want — at least 50% of the time.
As for me, personally: I love Internet advertising. Without a doubt, it’s growing faster than any other form of advertising and I, personally, am benefiting from that. In 15 years, it has grown from zero to $11.3 billion, an amazing feat. However, my complaint is with the misuse of numbers by reporters and tech-oriented analysts — and, to be honest, just about everybody I know — to support a narrative that can be summed up in three words: Print is dead. As much as I love the Internet and all things digital, that narrative is probably not going to be true in the lifetime of anyone making that prediction.
Today’s narrative — as it was back in 2004 and 1999 and 1954 when TV was going to kill print and radio and movies — is that the Internet is going to bury all other forms of media one day. Today’s narrative is that Internet advertising is growing at a far larger percentage (which even a middle-schooler should understand is easier to do when you have a lower base on which to grow). Today’s narrative is that newspapers are going to be dead in, what, a year of so? Certainly, they won’t last for an entire decade, goes the narrative. According to Steve Ballmer, “…there will be no media consumption left in 10 years that is not delivered over an IP network. There will be no newspapers, no magazines that are delivered in paper form. Everything gets delivered in an electronic form.” (He later said he could be off on the number of years, claiming, “…If it’s 14 or if it’s 8, it’s immaterial to my fundamental point . . . “
Of course, he also said the iPhone would flop.
Personally, I am doubtful about the longterm viability of the kind of print product the national chains of newspapers produce. Outside the sports section, I find little of value or interest to me in my hometown daily churned out by one of those national chains. And as I’ve said many times on this blog, I think many business-to-business print publications that focus merely on the transactions of their industries will be replaced by online properties that can provide a better, more timely flow of such information.
So, yes, I do think print will constrict while the Internet grows — over time. But die? Not likely.
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Martin explains what a lede is called in the UK - It’s the intro. Makes more sense to me than ‘lede.’ Actually, it’s the intro par — as in paragraph.
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A tag cloud representation of the links I’ve bookmarked on del.icio.us/rexblog. From the looks of it, I guess “magazines” is a tag I use a lot.
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From the cardiac ward (from which he checks out today), Doc shares his wisdom: If I can influence one young person to quit smoking or drinking heavily — for the duration — I’ll be happy.
 According to an article in Thursday’s Wall Street Journal, I, along with thousands more, have been “hyped” into buying and reading the just-published book, The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, the debut novel by David Wroblewski. According to the Wall Street Journal “marketing” story, “Driving (the book’s) unexpectedly heavy demand has been strong reviews and promotional support from Amazon.com.”
I confess, I didn’t know I was being caught up in some promotional scheme when I purchased the book. Despite their reported promotional support, Amazon.com didn’t even recommend it to me. And I didn’t read about the book on any blogs, nor have I been targeted by anything remotely viral or word-of-mouth. (And I get targeted by those often — and I rarely blog about anything that I discover that way.)
This book hit my radar the good old fashioned way: I purchased it because of last Sunday’s Janet Maslin New York Times review that is filled with love-notes like this: “Pick up this book and expect to feel very, very reluctant to put it down.” When I read that review a week ago, I did a Google search and clicked over to WashingtonPost.com and read something similar: “The dog days of summer are nigh, and here is a big-hearted novel you can fall into, get lost in and finally emerge from reluctantly, a little surprised that the real world went on spinning while you were absorbed.”
I will note this, however. Despite me not being “hyped” into purchasing the book, technology played a role in my purchase. Had I not had a Kindle next to me when I read the review, I would have probably forgotten about the book until next time I was in a book store — and by then, I likely would have forgotten the title. And with a Kindle, it was a $10 item, not a $16-$25 item.
As for the novel itself, I am hesitant to provide a review of a book I’m only half-way through, but this is my half-time report: I’m very, very reluctant to put it down and I have found it to be a big-hearted novel that I have fallen into, got lost in and will be reluctant to finally emerge from.*
So far, it is wonderful. Especially if you’re a dog person. (When I finish the book, I will note it on this post.)
*Yes, that is plagiarism.
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Great interview about the development of what’s being called ‘The Best New Blog of the Year’ - And it’s from a newspaper. http://boston.com/bigpicture/
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Prepare to be challenged on your current perception of what a newspaper weblog should look like. After being blown away, I’m guessing your second thought will be, “But where are all the ads”? Here’s where: http://tinyurl.com/4n4q7c
The following is a guest post. I never have guest posts, but I made an exception this time as the guest post is written by someone who has me wrapped around her little finger. She is part of a group of university students participating in Vanderbilt Owen School of Management’s Accelerator Summer Business Institute and is on a team that is making recommendations to a local architecture firm. She’d really appreciate your help. Also, if you share your opinion, it could prove to her that someone actually reads this blog:
 I need some advice from Nashvillians who are concerned with the future development of downtown. I’m a part of a team of university students involved in a month-long business program at Vanderbilt’s Owen School of Management.
Currently, our team is involved in a project to consider viable alternatives for the 10-acre waterfront property between the new Gateway Bridge and the Shelby Street Pedestrian Bridge. You may know this piece of land as the site of the former thermal plant. And you probably know that it came close to being developed as a joint-use baseball stadium for the Sounds along with a retail, office and residential development before the financing package of the project fell through.
Our team is working on a project that asks (and we hope, answers), “Now what?” So I wanted to ask the best experts — Nashvillians — what your ideas are for what should become of this city-owned prime location? What’s missing from the downtown experience? As a Nashvillian, what are your thoughts, ideas or concerns for the future of the site?
Post your thoughts as a comment below (we will credit you in our recommendations) or email our Accelerator Program group if you prefer at annparker2008@gmail.com. Thank you for being a part of our “community focus group.â€
Your ideas are greatly appreciated and I look forward to my dad the RexBlog updating you with our progress!
Ann ParkerThe 20-year-old & Team (Vanderbilt - Accelerator Summer Business Institute)
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