I’m sorry. The title of this post is a joke. I’m merely referring to Kara’s post in which she talks about informally polling some friends outside the bubble of Silicon Valley (where she lives and works) regarding their awareness of Twitter and some other services that, well, a few of us use obsessively but that haven’t reached a level of awareness — even a level of obscurity — among “real” people.

Says Kara:

“I conducted a little experiment among the more than 100 folks gathered for the wedding (in Washington, DC), all of whom were quite intelligent, armed with all kinds of the latest devices (many, many people had iPhones, for example) and not sluggish about technology. They were also made up of a wide range of ages and genders, from kids to seniors. And so I asked a large group of people –- about 30 — and here is the grand total who knew what Twitter was: 0

As I’ve blogged here before, I’ve given up on trying to explain Twitter. I know how I use it and why I like it. But, as with most of the social media or gizmo-technology I experiment with: I really don’t care who uses — or doesn’t. I’m not going to attempt to convert anyone — although, I guess adding my Twitter account to my business card is an implicit act of network-effect evangelism and endorsement.

Over the years, I’ve learned that when it comes to certain types of new media, the gap between geek adoption and “real people” adoption is typically wide.

I’ve mentioned on this blog that in 1996, I gave a presentation about the Internet to the 300-member Downtown Nashville Rotary Club. I asked for a show of hands from the audience filled with civic and business leaders: “How many of you have your e-mail address printed on your business card?” I recall precisely that six people raised their hands. Six.

Two years later, I gave a similar presentation to the same group and asked the same question. Nearly everyone in the audience raised their hands.

One of the reasons (one among several) I register on new “social networking” services is to watch their adoption rates — often there is no adoption rate, but almost always there’s a long lag time between geek and real-world registrations. For example, I registered on LinkedIn on February 3, 2004 — over four years ago. For a year or so, I had a grand total of 3-4 contacts, all geeks, and probably all of them personal friends of the creators of the service.

I had nearly forgotten that I’d registered on the service when, a couple of years ago, I started getting a few more connection requests when they added a feature that allows users to upload their contact list and bounce it against a database of LinkedIn users. (I’ve written before about this use of e-mail as a means to assert identity and serve as a rudimentary precursor to some way in the future where we can all easily migrate our “connections” from service to service. In the past month, I’ve received more LinkedIn connection requests than in the previous 3 1/2 years combined — and they’re all coming from my off-line connections. But still, a poll of my offline friends would probably still reveal that few of them have heard of LinkedIn.

So, as for Kara’s friends. Mine are the same. I regularly ask people if they’ve ever heard of Twitter. I then work my way up to services like Flickr. (They’ve all heard of Google, for the record.)

Kara is correct. No real person has ever heard of Twitter.

Sidenote: About two months ago, I spent a 30 minute cab ride from Baltimore (BWI) to DC explaining my use of Twitter to a commissioner of the FCC. Later that day, I spent 15 minutes in a similar discussion of Twitter with 12 CEOs of business-to-business media companies who were perplexed by my use of the service — as they were with my early blogging many years ago.

As I listen to myself explain Twitter, I’m surprised anyone uses it. However, as I discovered just yesterday, using Twitter makes solving problems a snap if you happen to ask a question that someone who’s following you can answer.

Frankly, I think it’s a good thing that Twitter has not gone mainstream yet. But that’s another post for another day.

Later: I believe that Twitter — or something like it — will go “mainstream” one day. It’s just not going to be “soon” in geek-time.

Note: I’m stepping on a plane and will check back in later to edit this post.

Back in October, while moderating a panel at PaidContent.org’s “Future of Business Media” conference in New York, I asked IDG CEO Bob Carrigan about the rumors that The Industry Standard would be relaunching online as a dejazine (although, I feel 100% sure I didn’t use that term). Bob indicated that it would be launching last December as a “very innovative social media platform” that aggregates input from the community in a prediction market thing.”

While the site didn’t relaunch publicly last December, it has now.

Bonus link: PaidContent.org’s David Kaplan’s interview with Bob Carrigan.

I guess it’s theme week. And this week’s theme is all about magazines and the web.

Yesterday, I pointed to an interview with the business editor of Wired magazine regarding magazines and the web. Today, the Wall Street Journal has an article on the same topic, focusing primarily on the web strategy of Wired’s parent company, Conde Nast.

Quote:

“Web revenue for magazine companies is about 5% of their total revenue, says Martin Walker, chairman of Walker Communications, a magazine-consulting company. “While [online ad revenue] is growing quickly, it is not replacing lost print revenue,” he says. “None of them can compete on the Web in terms of traffic.”

While I’m sure Mr. Walker knows what he’s talking about, I sometimes think I’ve heard that statement said so many times by so many magazine industry people that it — to me, at least — has risen to the level of a tenant of faith — or an accepted myth. Again, I’m not singling out Mr. Walker — most of the people I know in the magazine world would say the same thing: Revenues from online operations are growing fast, but can only, ever be a fraction of lost print revenues because, well, magazines websites will never be able to compete on the Web for traffic (which translated, means: “with Google”).

I’ll skip the whole economics of the two different business models — economics that include the overhead of marketing, production and distribution in magazines — that make a mere comparison of top-line revenues irrelevant.

I’ll go ahead and jump to my challenge of the core belief represented in the quote: “None of them can compete on the Web in terms of traffic.” I don’t understand that theory. What does it mean, exactly? Who can Conde Nast not compete with in terms of traffic? (Again, those are rhetorical questions: The implied message is that magazine companies can never compete with Google for traffic.)

I believe a more important question to ask is this: Is traffic the the only — or the universally definitive — competitive metric of the web? Will traffic always be the metric used by advertisers to determine where they should invest their marketing dollars? Obviously, if I sell widgets online and search engines deliver me customers who are in the process of buying widgets, I’d place an extremely high value on the traffic metric. But what happens if (or, when) advertisers who aren’t driving online transactions decide “time spent” on a website is a more critical measure of engagement than unique users or pageviews? Or what about when they realize that massively-traffic’d web services and applications that are utilities and tools, rather than media one experiences — or engages with — are perhaps not the right environment for brand-building marketing?

Or what if some types of advertisers (i.e., consumer brands that aren’t using the web to drive online transactions, but to support a brand) realize that a better means of determining where to advertise is something like the Techmeme Leaderboard that ranks which websites tech-niche bloggers are pointing to. Can magazine companies compete for a top spot there? Well, one could easily dominate it if it they purchased a few properties like TechCrunch. But even today, there are plenty of print-centric brands represented on the list. Moreover, once you move outside the world of technology news, I’m sure one would find that the “leaderboards” of online media are already print-centric brands. Want one example? Here is the leaderboard for a sister “memetracker” of Techmeme, the politically-focused Memeorandum. Do print-centric brands compete there? Answer: They dominate it. (Hypothetical question: If a leaderboard of food bloggers existed, where would Epicurious rank?)

Obviously and without a doubt, Conde Nast will never compete with Google in terms of traffic. But is utility-oriented traffic what a Conde Nast’s goal should be? Google is a search engine. People use it to find what they are looking for. If Conde Nast’s web properties are what the searcher then clicks to — and engages with and blogs about and develops conversations and relationships around, isn’t that “engagement” what brand marketers want?

In the end, raw traffic will be the competitive metric of search-oriented advertising — a massive and powerful new form of advertising that leads directly to decisions and transactions. However, another form of online advertising that’s focused on brand-building and lifestyle-association will gravitate to those places on the web where people engage in their passions and loves.

And that’s an arena where magazine companies should be able to compete rather forcefully if the people who run them would get over believing in the myth that such a competition is over.

There was a time when I thought I had to fill this blog with insight that was actually produced in my very own brain — or, at least, in how my very own brain reacted to what I read on the web. But that was before I knew Scott Karp. Now, the rexblog is more about pointing to his great insight, like this post from Scott about the enhanced NYTimes.com’s Technology section:

Quote:

“The New York Times joins what I expect will be a rapidly expanding list of media brands that aim to create value for their readers by aggregating the best third-party content from across the web and thereby take an important step towards transforming media into a dynamic, collaborative, and fully networked endeavor.”

Sidenote (i.e., something from my very-own brain): The most unfortunate aspect of the new Technology section’s launch is the characterization of a new feature it has (a news aggregator) as a “Techmeme-killer.”

As a longtime observer of the -killer meme, I can pretty much guarantee that whenever something is described as a -killer, it rarely kills. Also, as a longtime observer of Techmeme (as in, observing it from the day it launched and from knowing Gabe even longer), I can recall when Digg was going to kill Techmeme and, well, about 100 hundred other things were going to “-killer” it since then. I have some beefs with Techmeme (it’s Valley-centricity, for example), but it’s not going to be -killered by anything that tries to -killer it by being “like” it, but different. (Maybe one day, my very-own brain will explain what that means.)

The opinion-leaders who obsess about what other opinion-leaders are saying about breaking tech stories will still be obsessed with what hits Techmeme.

Another thing: Anyone who is obsessed with Techmeme has got to know (or, at least greatly suspect) that it’s more than just “a machine.”

What Dave says: “Maybe someday these conferences could host real-time development, where media hackers put together new communication systems and deploy them before the conference is over. The moon mission approach to development, if you want to get something done quickly, make sure you know where you’re going and are excited about it. Sometimes it’s amazing how quickly these things can bootstrap.”

There are lots of different kinds of conferences and conventions — everything from the kind where organizations get together to elect officers and decide on by-laws to others that are more like training-academies where people get “certification.”

However, the type of conference I enjoy most are those where people get together to push around ideas and concepts — to challenge each other with provocative ideas and new approaches or new products. While Dave is focusing (in my simplistic interpretation) on conferences that explore the social, political and economic impact of new technology and new models of networked media, his ideas could as easily be applied to any group focused on the exploration of any “idea” — be it a group of plumbers, a group of brain surgeons or a group of academics — any group, that is, that is willing to embrace the types of conversational-enabling technology that Dave alludes to — and that are widely available.

I’ve often said on-the-record that the most valuable part of any conference or trade show are the conversations that take place in the aisle-ways. I believe any technology or approach that can help elevate to the main-stage such “back-channel” communication will, in effect, help get rid of the “lame parts” (i.e., panelists and presenters who only know how to promote their own pet project*) of conferences.

*Obviously, if they’ve been invited to present their pet project, that’s okay. Many presenters don’t know how to talk about any thing else, however.

Bonus link: From Doc Searls, on another topic, but related: “Here’s my big idea for the Times: Hire Dave Winer to come in and take the paper to the next level. Dave had Martin’s ear, and those of some other folks at the Times, way more than three years ago. And to some degree they listened. The Times did some good stuff with Dave’s advice (such as taking the lead with RSS). But the Times has otherwise ignored outstanding ideas such as the ones Dave demonstrates with nytimesriver, an application I often use on my cell phone. Nothing to lose, Times. Lots to gain. Trust me.

It’s official: Wearing an iPod in a thunder-storm is not a good idea. Quote: “Although the use of a device such as an iPod may not increase the chances of being struck by lightning, in this case, the combination of sweat and metal earphones directed the current to, and through, the patient’s head.”

Next month the New England Journal of Medicine will look into whether or not one should use a Blendtec blender in a thunderstorm.

At times, my blog has drifted into becoming a Paul Saffo fan-blog. That’s due to hearing him say things 20 years ago that I’ve later noticed have become reality.

Recently, I re-posted a clarification of something Paul said many years ago. That led to some off-line conversations with Paul that helped me fill in some blanks. Earlier today, he sent me a link to an article he wrote for the current Harvard Business Review that, and I thank them, is “free” and available for reading if you click through a few “acceptance” buttons. (And it’s probably just a temporary “free,” so hurry.)

The article is Paul’s examination of what he calls, “The Six Rules for Effective Forecasting.” I highly recommend it to anyone who is in the business — or hobby — of spotting trends and trying to figure out what will stick.

It’s easy, really easy, to maintain a blog — or be a columnist or reporter — and spout off predictions on whether something will succeed or not — typically based on about ten-seconds of hearing about it. Think back to the six months of hype before the iPhone went on sale. In addition to the hype, consider how many blog posts, news articles, podcasts and TV shows were devoted to forecasting whether or not the iPhone will succeed — that were totally focused on reasons that seem so lame now. Whether it succeeds of fails has little or nothing to do with its keyboard, for example. Yet millions of words were devoted to that subject by people who had no way to understand how the keyboard actually works.

Reporters are the worst forecasters I know. They make their living reporting on what’s happening today. However, forecasting — and true trend spotting — requires a 40-to-60-year horizon. You need to know what has happened during the past 20-30 years that leads up to today, and you need the wisdom to weigh the considerations necessary to determine if the “new thing” will have an impact 20-30 years into the future. Paul’s article examines what those considerations are.

I heard Paul talk about a 20-year horizon, strangely enough, about 20 years ago. Whenever I hear experts telling me how rapidly things are changing, I tend to ignore such conventional wisdom — things don’t move as rapidly as we believe they do, and often, in an historical context, things move remarkable — and frustratingly, achingly — slowly.

For example, about a year ago, I pointed back to a 20-year-old concept video Apple (during the Sculley-era) produced on a “futuristic device” called the Knowledge Navigator. Twenty years ago, they were describing a device that is very iPhone-like: but with more features. I’ve been waiting for the Knowledge Navigator for two decades and if they increase the size of the iPhone to 8X10 and put a camera facing the user, they’ll have it: just 20 years later.

When it comes to forecasting, never confuse your opinions with forecasts. Opinions are like looking up at the clouds and saying, gee it looks like rain. Forecasts are like having a network of satellites, a bank of computers and the training to crunch real-time data with historic data — and then saying, gee it looks like there’s a 50 percent chance of rain.

Here’s just one of the great quotes from Paul’s must-read article:

“Even in that hotbed of rapid change, Silicon Valley, most ideas take 20 years to become an overnight success. The Internet was almost 20 years old in 1988, the year that it began its dramatic run-up to the 1990s dot-com eruption. So having identified the origins and shape of the left-hand side of the S curve, you are always safer betting that events will unfold slowly than concluding that a sudden shift is in the wind. The best advice ever given to me was by a rancher who reminded me of an old bit of folk wisdom: “Son, never mistake a clear view for a short distance.”

Tech media company, O’Reilly, has started selling and site-licensing books in PDFs by chapter — or in their entirety. O’Reilly today rolled out this new feature on 714 books. All these titles are also part of a program called the “Copyright Clearance Center RightsLink” project, that will give customers “the option to purchase reuse rights of book content for their Intranets, newsletters, course packs, and websites,” says O’Reilly.

According to the press release, using Scott Raymond’s “Ajax on Rails” as an example, the new plan offers the following options (see the links along the right hand of the page):

Purchase the printed book for $39.99

Purchase the entire book in a PDF format for $27.99

Purchase a chapter for $3.99 each

Purchase reprint rights for portions of the book

Purchase a site license for the entire book or a portion of it

Also, you can read it online through Safari, an electronic reference library for programmers and IT professionals. (No relation to the Apple browser by the same name.)

Observation: This is not exactly from the “content wants to be free” school-of-thought. However, as I recently purchased an entire O’Reilly book for something that was contained in one chapter, I can see how I would have chosen another flavor if this vending machine approach had been available. Also, I like it when authors can sell more stuff. If this helps them do it, great.

I know, I know. Tech startup companies outside the Silicon Valley are not cool. (Note: that was an inside joke that goes back a few months) However, I’d like to give a shout-out to the first-round financing received by my young serial-entrepreneur friend, David Mason and his team at StudioNow.com. Their’s is a clever concept: To consumers, they offer an online, low-cost means to outsource video production. “Individual customers or small businesses interested in transforming digital photos and videos into high-quality content can now do so easily and affordably rather than investing resources in learning time-consuming and complex video-editing software.” The company, in turn, serves as a market=maker for those with video editing software and skills (”from novice editors to high-end professionals”). In other words, they are providing individuals who may be spending time creating “user-generated-content” with the means to make some money applying their video editing skills to a profitable dorm-room or home-based business.

Doc Searls is blogging this morning about the origin of a quote/theory/concept/law related to the idea that, when it comes to the impact of new technology, “in the short term we overestimate, in the long term we underestimate.” Doc Searls credited Paul Saffo for the line but he then found an earlier explanation from David Isenberg to clarify Paul’s role and relationship to the originator of the concept, Roy Armara.

Several years ago, Paul Saffo ran across a 2002 post on my blog (that, unsurprisingly, links to an earlier post by Doc) in which I had, basically, posted a shout-out to him asking about the origin of the concept he calls “macro myopia.” My original post was related to my desire to point out that something called “The Gartner Hype Cycle” was an unattributed ripoff of ideas from Saffo (and, as he says in his response, Roy Armara and Ev Rogers — and you’ll note, he’s more generous in saying that Gartner may have come up with the idea independently — right.). It took a couple of years and a wayward Google search on his part to run across that original post, but he did, and I posted his response in March, 2004. It may address some of the conversation taking place on Doc’s post.

Here is what Paul Saffo emailed me in 2004:

“The idea that we overestimate short-term effects and under-estimate long-term implications of emergent technological change comes from an observation of the last 100-odd years of technology diffusion. As best as I know, Roy Amara, IFTF’s first president, was the first person to explicitly note this phenomenon, and thus at IFTF, we often refer to it as Amara’s law. I started talking about it publically in 1985, and Roy had been talking about it for at least 10 years before that.

But like all good ideas, this has multiple roots and multiple contributors. For example, Ev Rogers authored a seminal book on technology diffusion title “Diffusion of Innovations” — first published in 1962, with multiple subsequent editions. Ev’s work is what brought s-curves to the attention of audiences beyond the history of technology community. In the mid-80s, “hockey-stick curves” became a focus of attention in Silicon Valley, often derided because of the frequency of its appearance in start-up business plans. Ultimately, the hockey-stick portion of the curve was memorialized by Andy Grove and his references to the “inflection point” — the point at which the curve takes off.

My small contribution (I think) to all this was to focus on the neglected part of the S-curve — the flat part of the curve before the inflection point. In the mid-80s, I began arguing that understanding the flat part was crucial to making sense of the innovation process, and that it revealed that even in Silicon Valley, diffusion was remarkably slow. I also argued in the same period that the then much derided “hype” was in fact a crucial part of the diffusion cycle, an element of communities persuading themselves to cause change to occur. In this regard, I did react with some surprise years later when Gartner began pitching their “hype-cycle,” but simply assumed that they had independently come to the same conclusion as I had years earlier and hadn’t noticed by essays on the topic.

I’ll credit Paul for one thing: He talks in a way lay-people can comprehend. It was from hanging out with Paul Saffo for a couple of weeks about 15 years ago at the Stanford Publishing Course where I first learned about technologies and concepts that have, indeed, become the future. He’s perhaps the only person I’ve ever heard called a “futurist” where, over the course of 15 years, I’ve personally observed their predictions come true.

Technorati Tags: doc searls, paul saffo

I cringed before pointing to the New York Times story about the files of an entire issue of Business 2.0 getting deleted before being sent to the printer. You see, it’s really bad luck for a magazine publisher to point out something like that and ask, “How the heck could that happen?” We run nightly backups of work in progress and have redundant files stored on and off site. However, as soon as I say, “that couldn’t happen here,” it will happen here. So, I won’t.

(via: TechCrunch)

The Wall Street Journal is suggesting the first primary may be taking place on the blogosphere. I will continue my apolitical blogging approach, however, I have added at least one RSS feed related to the 2008 campaign to my newsreader: TechPresident.com. They are tracking the use of web-oriented strategies and tactics by the presidential campaigns. (I believe I first learned about it from David Weinberger’s blog.)

Sidenote: Back in May, 2005, Patrick Ruffini, who recently announced he was working with the Giuliani campaign, set up an automated “Presidential Wire” website that monitors and ranks trend patterns of candidate mentions in RSS feeds. If you are thirsty for news about the 2008 campaign, it is a fire hose from which you can drink. (Here’s how it works.)

Bonus link: Marshall Kirkpatrick, who’s doing some “temp work” back at TechCrunch, has more about TechPresident.

Ajaxy start pages and widgets have been around for so long (what, two years?) that some startups in the space have given up and sold out on eBay and others have merely ended up in an emerging Web 2.0 deadpool of tractionless startups. However, today, the maven of cutting-edget technology for the business class, the Wall Street Journal’s Walter Mossberg, reviews the category as if it’s something new — and likes what he experiences. That’s great for people like me who work with business types and try to explain why RSS is an important tool. You see, RSS is one of the ways used to pump updated content into those “small modules” (apparently that’s what grownups call widgets) on those “highly personalized pages.”

Strangely, he ignores the one I (and a few others) use: the service found at the URL http://www.google.com/ig. The others he mentions are great, as well. I highly recommend to all I meet that they set up one of these pages Walt Mossberg reviews. After that, you can say you “use RSS” even if you don’t know what it means.

Technorati Tags: rss, web2.0

A little less than two years ago, I suggested that “the reason you’ve heard of podcasting is because no one first “demo’d” it at a conference and no corporate marketers were involved.” I was taking a cheap shot at the DEMO conference at which startups who pay $10,000+ can make a six minute presentation to a room full of VCs. Today, Jason Calacanis and Michael Arrington are posting of their aggitation with the notion of startups being charged $15,000+ (apparently there has been some inflation) to DEMO their ideas. And so, they have a barn and they have a stage, so they’re going to put on their own show where startups can demo for free. “A committee of expert analysts, entrepreneurs and journalists” will be choosing 20 such startups, so you can also anticipate a coming round of angry excluded startups who will want to start yet another competing conference. (See: BarCamp) Frankly, I don’t think what the world is missing is fee-free DEMO. However, I’m a big gung-ho supporter of anyone trying out a new idea — including yet another tech conference. I’m sure it will be a barn-burner of a well-attended show. I know it will be a blast and a great time will be had by all. While I doubt it will be the launching pad of any major new tech successes, connections will be made and old friendships renewed. But the real innovators will be at home somewhere, too obsessed with their ideas to attend.

Brad Burnham doesn’t blog nearly as much as his partner Fred Wilson, but when he does, it’s worth taking note.

Quote:

One way to look at that question is to argue that we have arrived at the end of history. The progression to date has been up the stack in a classic architecture diagram, data is on top of that stack, and nothing sits on top of the data. I disagree. The genius of Craigslist is in its governance system. It is its lightweight governance system that allows 21 people to administer 300 sites in 35 countries. I believe that the basis of competition in web services will shift from the data to the system that manages the acquisition, and use of that data. The governance system that yields the most utility for the largest number of users with the least overhead will ultimately manage the largest communities with the most valuable data.

Let that sink in.

Technorati Tags: technology, vc