[Note: I now (see comments) realize that the feature being reported today is not the two-week old one I thought it was, but a new, very similar feature that allows you to point to an exact timestamp on a YouTube video.]

When I saw on my RSS newsreader this morning that TechMeme was pointing to a story on TechCrunch about YouTube enabling users to change the “time code” parameter on embedded videos*, I thought the feed was messed up. Granted, I’ve started focusing most of my tech-blog watching to the weekends, but I swear that news sounds familiar.

Oh, wait, now I remember: Two weeks ago the feature was reported by the Google Operating System blog and spent several hours on Techmeme. However, I assume that on that day it got lost in all the stories about Web 2.0 companies laying off employees. (Not that RexBlog is where you should be getting your breaking tech news, but even I mentioned (and used) the time-stamp parameter setting feature on a post about Pacman Jones a couple of weeks ago.

Deja vu or not, it’s a nice feature.

By the way, here is a list of several ways you can adjust the parameters when you embed a YouTube video.

*Translation for the non-geekish: In other words, if you’d like to embed a video on your website or blog, but have the clip begin at a specific spot in the video rather than at the beginning, you can simply change a tiny bit of code to that “copy and past” stuff you use to embed it. If you’ve followed me this far, here’s the code you change: “#t=2m15s” ['m' and 's' mean seconds and minutes, so just change the numbers to the spot where you want the clip to begin]. Also, a work-around hack has been available for a long time using splicd.com.

There are several blog posts and photos and Twitter tweets that wrap-up Saturday’s BarCamp Nashville.

So I’m just going to mention how impressed I was with the work put in by the volunteer organizers of the event and even more impressed that 600+ people showed up.

For those who’ve attended a BarCamp somewhere else, this one seemed big and organized — more like a small version of SxSW than a BarCamp. And the format of the sessions was more “conference” than “unconference.” Except one thing that was very “unconference”: the registration fee was free.

The best thing about any conference are the conversations you get to have in the hallway. And there were plenty of those taking place.

I met several people I know only through Twitter and got to see many folks from years gone by.

So, again, thanks to those who organized the event.

Technorati Tags: bcn08

[credit: jurek d. via Flickr]

This is a link to a New York Times story that is informative, but I must admit, it’s filled with nuanced “link irony.” The irony is this: the headline is “Mainstream News Outlets Start Linking to Other Sites”, but the story (as of 7 a.m. on Monday) has no links to other sites — including to websites and individuals who are quoted in the story. (Brian Stelter, certainly the most blog-savvy reporter at the New York Times or any newspaper, wrote the story but I doubt he actually “posted” it on the site, so I feel certain the irony is not his making.)

The article is a great leap into the mainstream media for my friend Scott Karp who coined the term and started a company dedicated to the concept of link journalism. (Jeff Jarvis also gets a shout-out.)

As anyone who reads this blog will know, I’m a great believer in link journalism. As Scott has pointed out, the way to develop a base of readers who return to you time-after-time is by embedding links in an article or post that take the readers to the most relevant destination rather than to an internal link that is not relevant.

It is also a little ironic (coincidental?) that Brian’s article appears on the same day that a startup called MashLogic is launching in an invitation-beta version of a FireFox plug-in it says will allow users to take back control of the hyperlink. (In an article focused on a cool thing happening on the web — and not on doom and gloom — here’s Michael Arrington’s review of MashLogic.)

I’ve spent about 30 minutes using MashLogic this morning, and that’s enough to convince me they are on the way to solving a problem that is the making of media companies and companies like Vibrant media. That is, if you embed irrelevant links or embed advertising in the context of editorial content, then users will rebel. (And conversely, as Scott points out, if you embed helpful links, you gain loyal readers.)

MashLogic allows the user to say, “pox on all your links, I’ll use my own.”

Here’s a quote from MashLogic’s blog:

“Hyperlinks define relationships on the web. With the advent of self-serving techniques like internal links, SEO, and link farms, content publishers have diluted the utility of hyperlinks. We intend to liberate the link from their clutches and let you take back the web! Some refer to this as Benevolent Hyperlinking, but we’re not quite ready to print up the T-Shirts.”

Benevolent hyperlinking. Link journalism. User-controlled hyperlinks. Whatever you call it, the message is clear: If you are a publisher or marketer, hyperlinks should serve the reader, not abuse them.

Update: Via Twitter, Brian responds: “Thanks for the blog post, and for recognizing the irony. (I’ve asked the web producer to add links to the article.)

Technorati Tags: linkjournalism, mashlogic, publishing2

[Note: This post is generating a little more traffic than normal, so I need to encourage you to actually read what this post says, before reacting to the subject line. I remain a true-believer in many of the actual approaches that the regrettable label Web 2.0 is hung upon. But I think the label Web 2.0 and the "gold rush" mentality it has spawned is long overdue for a correction.]

I am lucky.

I became a blogger in 2000, early enough to remember when blogging and bloggers were a small group of people who were passionate about the phenomena and dynamics of online community and personal expression and conversational media and the technologies that underpin them. Back then, “social media” was not a business. Indeed, back then — and I’m an expert on this topic — venture capitalists wanted nothing to do with anything new that had something to do with “content” or “community” on the Internet. Recall, this was 2000, the year Google introduced Adwords and four years before Google rolled out Adsense, the two juggernauts that slam-dunked (to the tune of about $20 billion in gross revenues this year) the business model proof of concept of search advertising — especially within the context of tightly focused, narrow-niche online communities with plenty of content perfect for “contextual advertising.”

Frankly, it was the “freedom from business model” nature that first drew me to the nascent tech blogging community.

In my case, I was also drawn to bloggers back then because they (we) were not giving up on the web despite the near-deafening drumbeat of news about lay-offs and failures that, from about 2000-2002, made it appear the Internet was about to be unplugged.

As I mentioned in a post the other day, I call that time the F’d Company era, because of the website that caught the zeitgeist of the period — an online forum where very scared dot.com employees spent a portion of their day speculating what shoe would fall next.

Bloggers, however, were focused on something else. It was all about, “Hey, check this out. This is kinda cool.” It was about discovery and hanging out and talking about how cool it was not to have to spend lots of money on hardware to do stuff that a few months earlier would have cost tens of thousands.

It was a time where the DNA of today’s social networking sites was established: The inclusion of RSS and a bias against anything that is “closed” or “walled” were just two of the foundational concepts codified (figuratively speaking) during those couple of years when the VCs were convinced nothing of true value could come out of all of this goofy blogger stuff.

It took until about 2003 for people to even start attaching the word “business” to “blogging.” In June, 2003, I attended a conference in Boston that claimed then (and the website still exists) to be the first business event for blogs. Click through to that link and you’ll get a sense of the innocence of those times. Yet, as you’d expect, there was lively debate and lots of disagreement. But I can’t recall there being VCs in the audience — but a few were likely there as Blogger.com had been purchased by Google a few months before. (My post-conference post from June 11, 2003.)

Soon, however, blogging and business became intertwined. And money started flowing from VCs to anything with an RSS feed. And then all this cool stuff became something about marketing rather than changing the world. And then, in October, 2004, all the cool things people were doing got an incredibly awful name: Web 2.0, which meant anything, so therefore meant — and still means — nothing. And then everything once more (in Web 1.0 fashion) began to be about startups and VCs and debates about whether or not one is worthy of being taken seriously if they live outside a 30-mile radius of Sand Hill Road.

And then in June, 2005, it got a Bible: TechCrunch, a medium so powerful that web developers soon began to equate success with getting mentioned by it — and for good reason as more and more VCs who had no idea what was going on began to use TechCrunch as a filter for finding new ideas.

One more thing happened in June, 2005, that put those collective things called Web 2.0 into the mainstream: Apple — recognizing they had been handed a billion dollar branding present and endless free content for potential purchasers of iPods people thought they needed to retrieve, store and play them — began to incorporate podcasts into the iTunes platform. In other words, they turned iTunes into the equivalent of an RSS newsreader for audio files.

Within a couple of years, South by Southwest Interactive went from being a conference where a few hundred people discussed CSS compliance issues to a mega-convention where several thousands of people attend sessions where accountants discuss IRS compliance issues. (Okay, that was a joke. In addition to the “surprise, you’re an accidental entrepreneur” sessions, SxSW still draws lots of purist geeks who wouldn’t be caught dead at an event where ideas are pitched to VCs — unless in a parody fashion.)

The upside of the end of Web 2.0

Fortunately, the Web 2.0 Bust isn’t technically a financial market bust in the way the dot.com bust was, or the way the stock market is. The 2001-02 dot.com bust was a classic market collapse in which widows and orphans lost money on a wide array of publicly traded, but vaporous, companies that had imaginary revenues, or none — nada, zilch. (Unfortunately, widows and orphans have now lost all their money in conservative, safe investments, like real estate and bank stocks.)

The only people losing money in the Web 2.0 Bust are VCs and angel investors and individuals who have poured heart and soul and savings (and friends and family savings) and credit-card debt into starting the 20th knockoff iteration of Facebook they hoped would be mentioned on TechCrunch.

More importantly, Web 2.0 Bust will result in many good things: It will once more convince a lot of smart young people that they should pursue careers in other fields — that they should take their incredibly smart minds and find cures for cancer and develop alternative fuels and teach math to inner-city children.

Advice to journalists and bloggers: Don’t be F’d Company 2.0

During the past year, I’ve sorta drifted away from reading TechCrunch and its many imitators. I still subscribe to the feed of Techmeme, but feel certain that will also end if it becomes a Chinese torture drill of drip-drip-drip daily stories whenever a small company lays off a few employees.

Over the next few months — and longer — the easy thing for tech bloggers and journalists to write about will be business retrenchments and failures. Believe me, there will be plenty of layoffs and closings.

But that’s not going to take you anywhere. It’s not what your advertisers want. It’s not what your readers are interested in. Among your readers, there are those who still believe that we’re still in the midst of something that will change the world. That opportunities still exist. The discoveries have not yet been made.

There are still those who believe that hunkering down only makes you equivalent to the traditional media you were supposed to replace.

Cool new technology and creative web ideas are not going away. People are still doing cooler stuff than you can imagine.

Web 2.0 may be busted. But Cool 2.0 is just getting started.

What is Cool 2.0?

I’m not sure. But I feel certain it can’t be explained in less than 140 characters.

Bonus links:

Dare Obasanjo “TechCrunch Turns into F’dCompany 2.0” - Another observation regarding how sad it is that TechCrunch is serving up a steady diet of schadenfreude.

Louis Gray: “The Valley’s Proponents Become Its Critics in Hard Times” - I’m thinking the same thing Louis is thinking.

I just read Om Malik’s report that the VC firm Sequoia Capital organized a meeting for its portfolio companies in which they were greeted with an image of a Grave Stone with the message: RIP: Good Times. Then, four speakers informed the startup execs that “things can get lots worse than people think” and they were warned to batten down the hatches.

I wonder if Philip Kaplan was in the meeting. Kaplan is the founder of the Sequoia portfolio company, AdBrite. The company has raised lots of money and is the #3 ad-serving company in the entire universe, so, no doubt, they’ll probably skip through the whole nuclear winter thing without missing a beat.

However, when it comes to grave stones and technology startups, all I can picture is Philip Kaplan spending a couple of years dancing on the graves of hundreds of startups that had to shut down during 2000-01. See, Kaplan back then was better known by his nickname, “Pud,” and he was the founder and editor and hipster-in-chief of the website, Fu*kedCompany.com

F’d Company didn’t merely report on the closures of those startups — it mocked and taunted the startups’ founders, funders and anyone who worked at the companies. It was filled with some of the most caustic, mean-spirited venom ever spewed.

Back then, I wondered how the people F’d Company taunted would react if a company Kaplan started ever had to lay-off employees or faced even more difficult decisions.

Maybe some of them are wondering if they’ll get their chance.

Not me, however.

I’m a rose-colored glasses sorta guy.

Bonus reading: The deja-vu-ness of this post caused me to remember a couple of links, including to an 8-year-old post on this blog.

Dot.com Crash, Enough Already (RexBlog - 12/27/2000): One of the earliest posts on this blog concerned the 2000 year-end recap of the dot.com crash/meltdown/depression, which I called in the post, the F’d Company era.

Lessons of the Last Bubble (strategy+business, Spring, 2007): Quote - Quiz time: What percentage of dot-com startups have failed? If you are like most people we have informally surveyed, you probably estimated around 90 percent…Virtually no one assumes that the numbers of dot-com failures and successes have been roughly equal, but that’s what our research found.

A Later Sidenote: What Sequoia should be telling its portfolio companies:

Early-stage investor Brad Feld is a voice of sanity:

“My recommendation to all of you entrepreneurs out there is to get off the negative sentiment treadmill, step up, and lead. The people working for your company are likely confused, concerned, and overwhelmed with all the noise in the system. In the near term, building your business will likely be more challenging on a number of dimensions. So what - that’s the normal cycle of business. You don’t need to be a blind optimist and spout happy talk, but you do need to have a clear sense of purpose and goals for your company….Get some exercise, take a shower, eat a good breakfast, and get out there and build a great business.”

Even later: Slides from the Sequoia presentation. They’re actually quite helpful in providing context for the current economic situation.

I’ll hand it to Tina Brown. Her new web venture, The Daily Beast, has passed the first test. It has sucked in a gazillion links from the Macosphere.

What am I talking about?

I won’t repeat the history of the Apple lawsuit against the kid who started Think Secret when he was 13 and then grew it into a thriving venture by the time he hit Harvard. Finally, last year, he agreed to shut down the site and move on with his life. Well, today, Nick (dePlume) Ciarelli reveals where he moved in this article suggesting that Apple is throwing in the towel on suing fan sites. I hope Nick is getting paid lots because, on the blogosphere one Nick is worth about a dozen Tinas (unless her last name is Fey).

Poor Steve Jobs is like the U.S. economy, rumors of his demise keep being greatly exaggerated.

A month ago, Bloomberg (the news service, not the mayor) mistakenly published his obituary and this morning, a “citizen journalist” on CNN’s iReport.com, posted a false report that Steve Jobs had a heart attack.

Jobs has been puny-looking and mysterious about his health recently, so there was enough truthiness in both the obit appearance and the fake rumor to make Apple shares fall — something they’ve been doing a lot of recently.

Or perhaps, it was the report this morning that jobs (the kind people are paid for) are what is having a heart attack is what made the stock slump.

Whatever, I think we all need to declare Steve Jobs’ health rumors a no-fly zone. If you see a report related to it, turn off your computer and TV for 30 minutes before reacting.

Sidenote: There is actually a name for a high profile — and harmful — malicious use of a user-contributed platform. It’s called a Seigenthaler incident and it refers to a series of events that began in May, 2005, involving a hoax article on Wikipedia. That unfortunate event led to lots of analysis and to tightening the requirements for individuals who edit Wikipedia. I feel certain today’s hack will lead to some re-thinking of such policies at iReport.com & CNN, as well.

Recently, my friend Steve Rubel said somewhere (Twitter? Friendfeed? His blog?) that he could live with only his iPhone and Google Trends . Perhaps I’m making up what he said, but nonetheless, after he said it, I added a Google Trends widget to my iGoogle page (which I now use as a browser "home" page) and have become very fascinated with the ever-changing flow of the word and phrases being search for by Google users.

For example, early this morning, one of the top search terms was "haberdasher," a word that Sarah Palin used in her speech last night and a term that is probably unknown to a vast swath of the American population under the age of, what, 50? Anyone who is an American history wonk, however, will immediately recognize the term as describing a men’s clothing retailer, one that historians nearly always use in describing the trade engaged in by Harry Truman.

That in 2008 the term "haberdasher" can be atop Google Trends for a few hours is enough to make the service one of the most fascinating things I see regularly on the Internet. (Last Saturday afternoon, I noted here that over 80% of all the search terms involved college football.)

I wish I had a profound point to make about all of this, but I have no idea what it all means.

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.]

The Important Part: There are those who preach that print is dead. I’m starting to believe it’s reading that’s dead. I am convinced people don’t read past the first sentence of an email, the first paragraph of a blog post, the headline of a news story, the first 30 characters of a tweet on Twitter. I’m thinking of writing a very long book on this topic, but after the first chapter it will only be greeking.

The Funny Part: I think people look at pictures and love charts — even if they don’t understand them. And video, people really love video. But only if they are how-to videos, videos of someone making a fool of themselves — or of someone else. Or if they are funny videos that allow geeks to laugh at themselves, like these:

Over the years, it’s been fascinating to watch the light turn on for certain people regarding what’s taking place in the marketplace of “content” (excuse me, Doc). For example, today, Paul Krugman writes an “a-ha” piece after using an Amazon Kindle for a couple of months.

Quote:

“Indeed, if e-books become the norm, the publishing industry as we know it may wither away. Books may end up serving mainly as promotional material for authors’ other activities, such as live readings with paid admission. Well, if it was good enough for Charles Dickens, I guess it’s good enough for me.

Whenever I read something like that, I have to take a deep breath and admit to myself that not everyone has spent the past 20 years obsessed with this topic. Whenever I read something like that, I wish I had a place to point people to a few seminal writings that have provided similar a-ha-moments to really geeky folks (like me) — but a long time ago.

If you have some more writings that provided an a-ha moment to you, please add them to the comments.

Here are a few of my go-to ones:

1. The Esther Dyson essay, “Intellectual Value,” written in the July, 1995, issue of Wired magazine. (Krugman quotes Dyson in his piece today, but does not link to it.) Go ahead, commit it to memory. It’s like the Gettysburg Address.

2. The book, The Cluetrain Manifesto, grew from this now “read-only landmark website.” (Here’s a place to read the book for free.) It pretty much foresees everything that marketing is becoming. It’s like when Luther nailed his 95 theses to that door in Wittenburg.

3. While not a specific article, I find myself referring often to the concept Paul Saffo coined “macro-myopia.” It relates to forecasting the impact of new technology and means, roughly, “in the short term we overestimate, in the long term we underestimate” the impact of new technology. This is an idea I’ve written about several times over the years (on the Cluetrain listserv in 2000, here in 2002 and in 2004 when Paul explained his role in adding to a concept developed by Roy Amara, Ev Rogers and others. The importance of the concept today is this: When those of us who are obsessed with technology see something that we know is going to change everything, we delude ourselves into thinking the change will be overnight. Technology adoption has a very predictable cycle and even those technologies that look like instant hits are likely catching a wave that was two-decades in the building.

Two bonus long reads for those who find comfort in realizing all these new ideas have been around a long, long time.:

4. The 1945 article, “As We May Think,” by Vannevar Bush (synopsis).

5. The Machine Stops, a 1909 science fiction novella (12,000 words) by E.M. Forster.

The Important Part: Despite the fact most people have only been using e-mail for the past 15 years, it has become a dominant channel of business communication — and definitely the most mis-used. A couple of interesting thoughts on e-mail have hit my radar in the past 24 hours. First, this check-list from Seth Godin with some practical (and humorous) considerations you should take before hitting that send button. Second, (via a Twitter ‘tweet’ from Steve Rubel) I saw these blog posts by Luis Suarez, a knowledge management expert at IBM, who is 14 weeks into an experiment of giving up business e-mail.

The Take Away: E-mail is not going away anytime soon, but the people who used e-mail before you ever heard of it are moving onto other methods of staying in touch with one-another. Some of this is generational - Facebook and text-messaging trump e-mail for those under 24. Some of this is frustration(al?) - an effort to reduce the noise-level that has resulted from spam and the ease some people have with hitting the send button. Your not going to moving on from e-mail anytime soon, but the next few years will see a significant evolution in how you use and manage e-mail.

Time posted: 7:57 am | permalink | categories: business, facebook, internet, twitter, web 2.0, web culture | no comments »