TypePad introduces a tip jar for their bloggers.
Michael Parekh blogs his thoughts on it.
I think its cool, but am not sure I am going to add one to this blog.
My tips are your comments, emails, and links back telling me I am wrong, right, and plenty of other stuff.
Please keep those tips coming.
I am about half way through this book.
It’s great. I particularly like the footnotes.
As I know most of the story, its the details that I find the most interesting.
If you work in the Internet sector, you should read this book.
Mark Ramsey wrote an excellent post about the challenges of rolling out HD Radio.
I don’t take offense to any of what Mark wrote and if its a call to action, then its a good one.
But with all the hand wringing about the "death of radio" and the issues with converting an entire industry to digital, I think people are missing a fundamental point.
Radio needs to convert its spectrum to digital so it can offer digital services over the air.
There are many other ways for radio to go digital, including podcasting, streaming, and possibly wifi and wimax.
Radio needs to do those things too.
But the radio industry owns spectrum, and many of its leading brands are tied into that spectrum. And it can broadcast over that spectrum very cost effectively.
So it needs to get that part of its business digital.
And the industry will get it done because the executives at the largest station groups are strongly committed to making it happen.
It won’t be easy for all the reasons Mark points out and more, but its going to happen, and once it does, Radio will be better off because of it.
This time we get the board meeting minutes and a couple interesting emails.
There’s a good piece in today’s NY Times about Lloyd Braun’s efforts to create compelling programming at Yahoo.
Early in the article there is description of Lloyd’s mantras:
"more immersive," "more engaging," and most of all, more "original programming"
My initial reaction was, "that’s not going to work". Original programming isn’t really what the Internet is all about.
But as I read on, I learned that Lloyd’s job is to:
invent a medium that unites the
showmanship of television with the interactivity of the Internet. Find
a way to combine the best of Hollywood’s talent with the voice of the
masses
That’s more like it. The voice of the masses is what the Internet is all about.
I’d urge anyone interested in this stuff to go read the article because its quite interesting.
Lloyd’s challenge, and the challenge of anyone coming from the traditional content world, is to forget what they learned about original programming. That’s not where its at on the Internet.
The challenge is all about how to take the work of the masses and assemble it into compelling content. The company that figures that out will do very well.
A good first step is "Blog for Hope," a series of celebrity blogs about coping with cancer that Lloyd’s group is launching this fall.
I’d love to see more stuff like that.
My two previous posts on this deal were two of my most popular posts in the past 30 days.
I have no idea why people chose this blog to discuss, comment, and link to a deal that I had no part of (other than being a user and fan of both services). But the fact is I had 19 trackbacks, 28 total links (according to Google), and 40 comments to my original post.
I had 5 trackbacks, 2 links (according to IceRocket), and 10 comments to my follow up post.
That’s a fair bit of discussion for this blog anyway.
So, after reading Tom Evslin’s complete trashing of the deal (from eBay’s perspective), I figured it was time to weigh in once more.
Tom says that eBay could have gotten IP voice talk technology for way less than what they paid for Skype. Tom was one of the first guys in the VOIP space, so he knows what he’s talking about on this count.
He also says that while Skype does have a large user base in the developing world, its the availbility of payment systems (ie PayPal) that matters in those markets, not the ability to talk to the seller. I am not sure that is entirely true, but again, they could have gotten voice IP voice talk technology to build into eBay for a tenth of the price.
His final point is that Skype is not a great standalone business.
There is where I sort of disagree with Tom. Skype has amassed an enormous user base and its growing every day. It’s either Metcalfe’s law or Reed’s law, not sure which, but we are seeing serious non-linear value creation going on in the Skype network.
Tom calls Skype an asset, not a business. I guess the distinction is one has value, the other has cash flow. If that’s the distinction, I agree with Tom. But I would be willing to bet that Skype will (and would have if it had stayed independent) generate significant cash flow in the coming years.
My first instinct is to Skype someone if I can. I only reach for the phone if I have to. Skype offers me presence detection, the ability to initiate a chat first to set up the call, and then one click and I am talking. That is a much better user experience for me. When Skype appears on a mobile device, that’s going to be great too.
The big thing Skype needs to do is open its network to other networks. I want to be able to Skype someone on AIM, Yahoo, or MSN. That’s when it will get really interesting.
But back to Tom, I agree that the eBay deal was kind of nutty. And have felt that way since my original post.
But I don’t agree that the $2.6bn was necessarily an overpay. Maybe for eBay, but not for the asset itself. It’s a jewel of a business.
Last week I was flying through my blogroll and I saw some cool charts on Bubblegeneration.
I love math and charts. So I stopped and gave the post a serious read.
Umair said at one point in the post, "This is Metcalfe vs Reed, if you like, although I think several economists were first to these ideas."
I’ve been trying (and sometimes succeeding) to invest in Metcalfe’s law for a long time. Metcalfe’s law states that the value of a network scales with the square of the number of nodes on the network.
V = A + BN^2
Non linear value creation is a wonderful thing.
So I said, who is this guy Reed? Gotta go figure that one out.
Well I am pretty late to this one. Reed is David Reed, of the MIT Media Lab, and he published his ideas around group forming networks (GFNs) i.e Reed’s Law in the spring of 1999.
I am going to simplify this because its a blog post, but Reed pointed out that if each node of the network was itself a network (a GFN) then the value of the network scales with the exponential of the number of nodes in the network.
V = A + BN^2 + C2^N
Exponential value creation is way more cool than non-linear value creation.
And that was what Umair was showing in his graphs. Umair thinks that Google is showing exponential value creation. Who knows if they are or aren’t?
It’s too early to tell.
Because the thing is A is normally a lot larger than B which is normally a lot larger than C.
For those math challenged readers, that means that the initial value of a business (A) is much larger than the rate at which a network value goes non-linear which in turn is much larger than the rate at which a network goes exponential.
Or, maybe more simply said, you gotta have a boatload of nodes on the network before the non-linear thing starts to matter and you have to have way more than that before the exponential things starts to matter.
I have to give some credit to my favorite math geek entrepreneur here. Tom Evslin took some time away from launching Hackoff.com to send me a long thoughtful email on Reed’s law and its implications for startups. I know he’s going to blog it, so I won’t frontrun that post, but Tom really helped me think about what this means for startups.
So you’ll be hearing more from me on this topic and hopefully more from Tom too, which I will reblog when he posts it.
Stay tuned.
I can’t tell you how many times I have heard the phrase, "its binary, either we succeed or we fail".
Mostly its used to justify some kind of risky financial move, like borrowing a bunch of money instead of doing a safe but dilutive equity financing, or taking on a big lease, or licensing some technology that has large payments out in the future.
The logic goes like this. It really doesn’t matter what the terms of this deal are because either we make it and the cost of these deals will be manageable, or we don’t make it and we go under and we don’t have to worry about these payments in the future.
But I am telling you that every time I hear this line of reasoning come out of someone’s mouth, I cringe and feel like running away.
Because nothing is binary. It’s naive to think that way.
The truth is "making it" is an evolutionary thing.
I’ve never seen a business plan executed exactly like it was drawn up on paper.
The best entrepreneurs get into a market and evolve, weave and bob, and get where they want to go with a few twists and turns.
And it always takes more money and more time.
And so when you buy into this "it’s binary" thinking, you are making a huge mistake.
Because just when the bills start coming due, at a point when you thought you’d either have "made it" or not, you will actually be in the middle of your second weave and bob, with not that much to show for it, but lots of promise.
And then the bills will crush you, make it impossible to finance the company, and you’ll be hosed.
I’ve seen this movie and its always ends badly.
Because nothing is binary.
When I did my initial take on Google Blog Search I said that I did not see the spam blogs that Jeff Jarvis was complaining about.
Well I am seeing them now, in spades.
One of the problems with Google building blog search is spammers will build blogs designed to appear in the results pages.
Like this one that links to my blog
Or this one that links to my blog
I sure hope Google has a strategy to get these spam blogs out of the index more quickly than they get in.
