Quien es mas macho? Om Malik or Brad Fitzpatrick?

The week before last I received a Plaxo email about John Chaffee that led to this post that was picked up by a number of people, most prominently at first by Om Malik. Being the C-list blogger that I am, I saw an incredible surge in traffic which is illustrated on the graphic on the left. I don't recall the exact number but I think I must have made at least $.50 in Google Ad Words that day.

In addition to pick up by Om, there were links from Moconews and a number of other sites. It really was quite impressive for me to watch given that my normal daily traffic is 50-100 visitors a day.

What I didn't expect was the second spike you see on this chart. Sometime on Monday Brad Fitzpatrick, the founder of Live Journal linked to the post and up went the traffic again. If I were to factor out the extra pick up from Moco and others, Brad stood toe to toe with Om Malik. I personally have to say that this was not really a surprise to me, but when you think about it a bit, it is sort of amazing. These two subgroups of readers have very little overlap from what I can tell but have relatively comparable audiences in terms of size. The difference to me is that Brad's audience is spread throughout the country where Om's is more concentrated in urban areas that have strong technology links.

This all sort of takes me back to a post I wrote here about the lack of mobile coverage by the Web 2.0 press. A lot of my sentiment is less about the fact that mobile is a ghetto because 30+ years olds don't get texting but that the youth market isn't taken seriously by the technology crowd in general.

Fortunately there are some signs of increased awareness of what's going on. Robert Scoble posted this article about the secrets behind Myspace's success after chatting with the CTO of Myspace. Also Danah Boyd continues to churn out insightful pieces regarding the youth market and social networking in pieces like this one from earlier this week.

It seems to me that the awareness of the scope and size of what the "kids" are doing is starting to sink in. I have heard derisive comments about Live Journal and Xanga not being serious blogging but I think what John and Brad have built are extremely amazing and are truly a cultural phenomena not unlike what we hear that is beyond the Myspace hype and in my opinion is as much or more important than how cool the new version of Word Press is.

So Om, nothing personal, but I'd take a Brad link over yours just about any day. :-)

ajaxWrite

It's kind of funny that I am going to hang out with Michael today. He happens to work across the street from us but for whatever reeason we dont get to hang out as often as I would like. Prolly that whole startup thing. Anyways he pinged me over the weekend to swing by today to talk about music and stuff so I am looking forward to catching up. I wake up this morning and what do I see but some posts about ajaxWrite. Finally. Back in October I was hanging out with Michael and he showed me the prototype of this. I was blown away. I told him that I thought the other stuff he was working on was cool, but that this was the super revolutionary idea. At least in my opinion. I would recommend that you check it out. I wrote this post using ajaxWrite and it really is super cool.

Scraping, APIs and the monetization of Web 2.0

I realize that this title broke a previous oath not to say Web 2.0 but I couldn't help myself as I think that one of the issues that not enough people have focused on is the light discussion of monetizing Web 2.0 thus far.

Over the weekend, while crawling through my various feeds and readings I came across a couple of things that brought me back to a topic I have been thinking a lot about. First Debi posted an article about people re-purposing the feeds of other bloggers into their own product without their knowledge. Second I came across these guys who claim that they have integration with Myspace. How did I miss THAT story? :-) Both of these things made me think a bit about how content and information flows from web to mobile, web to web, and mobile to mobile.

I don't have much to say about the issue that Debi raises other than I think that the content creators should have a say in what happens to their content. Enough said. By the way the same goes from record labels and artists. :-)

On the second one I had to check out the Myspace integration to understand what was meant by integration. I signed up. During the registration process I was prompted by the opportunity to sign in with my Myspace account (complete with logo etc.) which I didn’t do, but I am left to assume that this then allows me to import my account profile settings into the new application. Ok, that’s what they meant by integration. When we refer to integration we mean that we have a deal with a company or we use open APIs or some other method. I know that in the past there have been questions regarding the legality of screen scraping and technically it is the least effective way to accomplish what you are trying to do. I would suspect that there are certainly some business issues associated with taking that approach (use of logos, how you represent the relationship with said company, copyright etc.) Frankly it’s not my concern as it is not how we choose to integrate with 3^rd parties.

So aside from scraping, what is a company to do if they want to cross the mobile to web or web to web divide? Generally you can use the API’s that are open to developers, like the Blogger API in Google’s case or you have to structure some kind of commercial arrangement with a company. As a company you need to be aware of what the policies are that different companies have with respect to APIs. In general, most of the companies that we interact with don’t allow public access to their APIs. This is a good thing in that there is no ambiguity for the path we have to follow. We have to initiate contact and make a convincing business case for why we should be able to establish a bi-directional relationship with those companies. We usually try to do that by sharing money that our subscribers pay to access our community.

On the open API front, you have to realize that whatever you do from an API perspective, that the other party has disclaimed any support and can do whatever they want with respect to changing their API’s etc. We originally implemented our Live Journal integration using XML-RPC and after a brief conversation migrated our implementation over to Atom. Supporting open APIs is a choice that we hope to enable with Rabble as we move down the road and our APIs become more mature. Making our APIs available to 3^rd parties and also allowing people to monetize that integration is something that we think is important in the future of mobile.

The problem category I have observed is when you allow access to API’s but preclude commercial use. The most obvious example of that is Flickr. Flickr will let you mash up, mix, create clients and go crazy for non-commercial purposes. Given what I have seen with Shozu and many other companies, I take non-commercial to mean that they aren’t charging customers. We actually do charge customers. All of our customers pay for Rabble. Because of that we went directly to Flickr and have been trying for many months now to get something in place that ranges from simply letting our users use Rabble to post to Flickr, to actually being one of the drop down options on the Flickr website (you have to ask right?).

I will continue to bug the business development guy at Flickr but I think an important question that should be asked is, what are the plans for the Yahoo API business? I am not aware of any commercial deals with any of their companies with respect to commercial use of their APIs. I hope I am wrong but if I am not, we are witnessing the aggregation of a number of businesses that have been touting the “small pieces loosely joined” concept on the one hand while not really fostering the development of businesses that have revenue on the other. Can anyone point me to some deals that exist? Stewart?

Miscellaneous Rabble Stuff

Did I mention that SXSW was fun? Eric wrote a nice piece on us in his blog here. Debi wrote up a roundup of Mobile Social Media that overviews some of the things going on and included a mention of us here. Finally, Carlo from Mobhappy asks the question of whether or not people who are used to social networking being free will be up for paying on mobile here. Be sure to read the comments as Shawn had a good response. I always find it surprising to hear people who are from mobile who should know better raise the question of free versus paid when discussing the internet vs. mobile. Internet music = free. Music on mobile ala ringtones, a giant business. Wireless infrastructure, unlike all the serious connectivity of the Internet is at least for now a scarce resource when you contemplate what would happen if we were all sharing videos and music on our cell phones. For now at least things passing over carrier/operator networks will come at some cost.

'LE' Naming Trends for Tech Companies

Ben points to a post by Red Eye VC that suggests that the 'ster' trend in company names seems to have been surpassed by the use of the ending 'le' in company names which is sneakily like Google. Rabble of course ends in 'le'. Although I'd like to say we were way ahead of the curve on this new naming trend, the dirty little secret is that our first choice (which in retrospect was an inferior choice to Rabble) was Rover. I had actually arranged for the purchase of the Rover.com domain from the owner. After a complete scouring of trademarks we determined that the Rover trademark was going to be a sinkhole of money to establish/defend/create. Several weeks later Shawn had the flash of inspiration that took us down the path of Rabble.

More Danah Boyd Goodness

I want to meet Danah. How do I make that happen? Here is her recent presentation link from Etech. Is anyone else convering communities like this right now?

Two Days In Texas

I woke up this morning in the Driskill slightly dehydrated. I was off schedule a bit yesterday and didn't drink enough water. I have a mellow day today and then I head back to San Diego on an evening flight.

It has been a great conference. I promised Jessica that next year we would come to SXSW and make a vacation out of it.

Our panel yesterday was opposite the Craig Newmark keynote but we still managed to get a pretty decent size audience. I really enjoyed meeting my fellow panelists and got to spend some time with Marc Brown from Buzznet. Surprisingly David Snyder from Opera told me that they had moved their US operations to San Diego, which I think is very cool. San Diego is quietly amassing a lot of great companies big and small.

In the early evening I headed up to north Austin to speak at the Mobile Monday meeting of the Austin chapter. There were a lot of presenters all around LBS. I was especially impressed by what the Bones in Motion guys have done/are doing. The highlight for me though was to get to chat at length with the founder of Mobile Monday who's name currently escapes me. I swore I had his business card. We got to chat earlier in the day a bit and then after the meeting I drove him and a guy from Motricity back to the main part of town.

I caught up with Dave and Dave from Eyespot and Damian from Vmix. We went over to the Lifehacker party and hung out for the duration. I spent a lot of time chatting with Eric Rice about Rabble, who, after lampooning me about having a locked down website, downloaded Rabble and had an aha moment I think. I then spent time lampooning Second Life which thus far has completely escaped me but after a pretty long conversation I think I will give it another go. Eric how do I get to your island?

Somewhere out there is a picture of me in a Rabble shirt with a Mexican wrestling mask on. I love Mexican wrestling. Also the Eyespot link has some videos of me. Gulp.

Dave and I then headed off with the guys from That Petrol Emotion to the party where Charlie Sexton was playing. I lasted about 15 minutes before it was time to crash. A good time was had by all.

Hanging with Eyespot

Got into Austin a little late in the day. Dave Todd and Dave Dudas from Eyespot are here unveiling their product at SXSW. We hit a couple of parties last night before wrapping up an early evening. Check out Eyespot, its pretty cool. Dave Todd is a former co-conspirator on Low Def with me and a number of guys from MP3.com are involved.

Flying to Texas

Off to SXSW today. Should be a good time. I am carrying a handful of Rabble Tshirts. If you want one drop me an email and we can hang out.

Six Apart Acquires SplashBlog?

I got an email earlier today via Plaxo telling me that John Chaffe from SplashData makers of Splash Blog was the new director of mobile at Six Apart. I thought, hmm, that's curious, I don't recall any news about Splash Blog recently. So I cruised over the the About Us page on Splash Data and noticed that John, who I believe was the CEO isn't on the list. I then clicked on the Splash Blog page and saw this and the mysterious Six Apart logo on the right side. Must be a recent unannounced acquisition by Six Apart.

Rabble On Reuters

Reuters followed up our press release with this article here.

Rabble On Cingular Press Release

We publicly announced the availability of Rabble on Cingular Wireless on this press release here.

Cyworld Glimpse

A little bird today told me that you can get to the US version of Cyworld at us.cyworld.com . That page didn't work. It didn't even let me sign up for the beta. Talk about building suspense. That seemed kind of strange so I looked up the page source and discovered that if you click on this link that you get at least a small glimpse. Hey how do I get a beta account? Somebody?

Rabble in an MSNBC story

Rabble and Shawn were mentioned in an MSNBC story about the growth of moblogs here.

Strange Myspace Link from School Districts

My referals over the last several months have included the following link :

0_arkg1kpdkj:www.myspace.com/

All the sites where they are coming from happen to be school districts. I wonder if it is some kind of filtering mechanism. Anyone else seeing this?

Myspace on the Daily Show

I am a loser because I don't watch the Daily Show. Debi sent me a link to the Myspace Parody on the Daily Show that you can see here. It is hilarious. And I am slightly embarrased to say that I am actually a fan of Emo rock.

My Congressman is going to jail

I happen to live in the district previously represented by Randy "Duke" Cunningham. On Friday he was sentenced to over 8 years in jail. I want to print up a t-shirt that reads:

"My congressman took $2.5 million in bribes, and all he got was 8 1/2 years."

Scoble and Debi on Myspace

There is an interesting conversation between Scoble from Microsoft and Debi/Mobile Jones that you can find here. I would recommend that you take a peek at the comments, which made me chuckle. Myspace has become a marketplace for a big chunk of kids. It's certainly not about the traffic (although they do serve something like 12% of the ads on the Internet.) it's more about it becoming a place where the youth of today hang out. See Dana Boyd.

The conversation in general reminded me of an encounter I had last summer. I walked into the office of the head of a hot indie label that has had a lot of past and current success. He looked up over a stack of CDs and papers and asked me "What's Up?"

I held up my phone and said, "Want to see my toy?"

He said sure. I walked through a quick demo of Rabble and showed him some of the other labels that are live. At then end he said, "I am not really into technology, but that's f'ing cool. Let's do it."

No Powerpoint. No khaki pants and blue shirt. Just an appreciation of what each of us do. I think that the discussion above is saying a lot of the same thing but in a less direct way. Technology is hard and technologists do amazing things to solve technical problems. Convincing a base of youth consumers to adopt your product, that's extremely hard to do as well. The key point with consumers though is to make sure that you are listening. As I said before in this post, I don't think that many in Silicon Valley are listening.

".0"

Yesterday someone sent me an email with a business overview and asked me for some feedback. I don't want to say anything about them or their idea as I don't really think I have any valuable perspective on what they are doing. Suffice to say they did one thing that I cringed at. I cant say the word they used but for examples sake lets just say they said that it's like Cat 2.0. Cringe. I know that I have used Mobile 2.0. I know in our company we talk about Phone Call 2.0 and it really means something to us. You can't sneeze without reading, hearing or saying Web 2.0. I think people mean the Read/Write web when they use that phrase, or at least that's what I think about. Mobile 2.0 to us means going beyond the first wave of mobile applications (SMS, MMS, Ringtones etc.)

At any rate, I am going on a 30 day fast from the use of 2.0 in anything I write, say, read or do, unless it is in a sales pitch.

Pandora & Last.fm

I have had several people ping me about Pandora and Last.fm . CNN just did a feature on the Next Net 25 or something like that. In there they included Last.fm and I just don't get it. Pandora is pretty damn cool. I have been using it on and off for the last month and have to say that I have been impressed. I have been creating channels based on some obscure bands, hardcore bands, and bands I am into right now while I am trying to find similar ones. Examples would include Swans, Let's Active, Guadacanal Diary, Wall of Voodoo, Circle Jerks and The Mars Volta. I have heard some complaints that the sample size is fairly small so some more mainstream requests have been a mixed bag for some friends. On some of this more obscure stuff I have to say I have been really pleased.

So far they don't have a bunch of that ".0" stuff but I am sure they will do some cool things with it later. It will be interesting to see where they go with this when they try to make money.

Last.fm is going to require some more time for me because it isn't as easy as Pandora and I am still not sure what I am supposed to do.

TVT Records on Rabble

TVT Records, home of the Ying Yang Twins, Lil John and the Eastside Boyz, and Pitbull, rolled out on Rabble last week. Rabble users can see up coming show dates, venues and news and pictures from all their bands. Check it out.

Intercasting in Billboard

I haven't subscribed to Billboard for a while. (Sorry)

Anthony Bruno today in the Music and Money section in an article entitled "INTERNET INVESTMENTS ON THE RISE . . . AGAIN" mentioned our company Intercasting. Research analyst Rajeev Chand referenced us as a company with great potential in the mobile blogging space. The quote was,"There is a next wave of applications that are emerging," he says. "We continue to see strong interest in the mobile industry."


That sounds kind of nice. Sorry for the lack of a link. If you are a Billboard subscriber you can pull it up though.

Rabble at SXSW

I am going to be at SXSW doing a panel called Content Distribution: The Mobile Web. I just confirmed yesterday so I am not sure who else is doing this with me but Marc Brown from Buzznet, a very cool guy also based in So Cal, is moderating. Come by and check it out. I am planning on hanging in Austin from Sunday through Tuesday night and will be doing a podcast session with Ewan Spence, one of my brethren from AMP. For the record, Ewan Rulez. And he is also the guy behind All About Symbian. And I am not saying that because he wears a mean kilt. If you are in Tex Ass and want to hang out or grab a beer or whatever, drop me a line. And I swear no more posts today.

C-List Blogger Part 2

Dave Blood who works with me saw my post earlier today and laughed his ass off. And then he sent me this link to a cartoon about C-List Bloggers. Nice. I need to send something out to Scoble. "Hey we do this cool mobile social networking thing called Rabble. Can you link to me?" Very Beavis and Butthead.

The Web 2.0 Graphic

Stabillo Boss has been accumulating the graphics of the various Web 2.0 companies and it has become a picture circulating the web with much fanfare. We didn't get into the first one, but the second one which you can find here has the little Rabble guy peeking out on the right hand side of the image. Think Kilroy was here. Are we a Web 2.0 company? I didn't think so but I guess the API thing kind of applies.

Google Pages = MySpace Slayer?

I have to admit, when I first saw the Google Pages rollout, I thought, "Wow, Geocities. Nice. Haha." I read a couple of articles wondering why they didn't make this part of Blogger or why would they try to make Geocites again.

I also thought for a second that when Google base rolled out, that I didn't see a need for having a web database set up. Or at least it wasn't obvious to me. Then it transformed into a Ebay/Craigslist assault. Nice Kung Fu. Your technique is very impressive.

So today in a meeting with John Hardin, we chatted about it for a second or two and he said something to the effect of, "Well there is no reason it couldn't be a first step in a strategy to create a MySpace competitor." Aha. Maybe.

A lot of the press I have seen has said that it is far inferior to Blogger and why do we need to reinvent Geocities, etc. etc. And frankly I agree. That is until I look at it in terms of what people are doing with MySpace. They aren't blogging. They are creating, their space, and customizing it and adding a ton of shit to it. And then we roll out video, cough cough, google video. And we wrap in cough cough Blogger. And we wrap in Orkut, well maybe not orkut because Eu não falo o português. But you get my point. Call me paranoid or weird, but when John said this today I thought it was pure genius. It's hard to say, but I'd love to hear other's take on this.

Rise of a C-list Blogger

I had two incidents over the last several days where I am now fairly certain that I have graduated to the ranks of the C-List blogger.

Winer posted about Blogging for Newbies. As I am a Blogger user going on close to two years I guess I won't take too much offense to that. We do also use Movable Type and Word Press in the office on occasion. I would have to say though that Blogger continues to get richer and richer. I had a conversation going online on this post with Scott Rafer and I wanted to make sure that no Viagra, Fantasy Football, Home Re-fi, Cialis, or any other nonsense found it's way into the discussion.

In order to do this I had to enable comment moderation. I was hoping that it would allow me to go back and clean up some of my more popular posts like this one, that are littered with blog spam. No dice. But I do get to see all the comments going forward. Nice. Or not actually. By this morning I was up to 100 or so comment spams. Ouch. That sucks. Why me?

At the same time, I received an email from a company. They said that they had read my blog and wanted to send me a product to evaluate it over a period of time because of my writing about wireless and media. Wow. Really? I am flattered. Hmmm. Wait a second, is this why I get all the spam now? At any rate I am excited about getting the new wireless toy sometime in the next couple of weeks. If any other consumer devices or services want to send some technology love my way feel free to do so. Sony? Samsung? Anyone? Bring it on.

So it appears dear reader, I am no longer an F-list blogger I may have graduated to the D, or heaven forbid C-list from here on out. Be afraid.

Rabble College Press

We have been getting some good press coverage with colleges. Here are some articles:

Rutgers
Oklahoma State
Auburn
Purdue
James Madison

Sony Blogger Phone

It appears that Sony and Google are entring deal where all Sony phones will enable publication to Blogger. Sweet.

My Weekend Digest

I was home alone this weekend with 2/3 of the triplets. I had a pile of work and emails to get through which just didn't seem to happen, although I did manage to get to the Lakers game last night in some amazing seats right behind Jack Nicholson. Seriously, like two rows right behind Jack. Brian Grazer was cross court, Penny Marshall off to the left. Pretty funny. Don't ask what I did with the kids. Shhh.

I read a lot over the weekend when the kids were asleep and there was a ton of stuff I want to blog about later this week. It was a really interesting weekend of reading though which seems kind of unusual to me, but maybe I just don't notice. So for my quick roundup:

Podcast hotel went down in Seattle. A lot of friends and acquaintances were there like Chris, CC, IODA, and Eric. Bummed I missed it as I am trying to get to most of the podcasting events. This one wasn't working for me.

Mashup Camp was last week. I have to remember to comment on the notes from the Wiki regarding mashups and mobility. I thought there were some interesting observations on WAP vs. Thick Client.

Dana Boyd refutes John Dvorak's assertion that researchers aren't studying youth culture. Other than Dana, I haven't seen much else trickle out to the rest of the world, but keep up the good work Dana!

Russ had a hilarious piece on the problems with Web 2.0 companies (Yes I hate 2.0 nomenclature even though I am guilty of perpetuating it) in that they really, really should have a business model.

Russ also beat everyone I know to the punch in unveiling that Myspace rolled out mobile alerts over the weekend. As we are more of a mobile pure play, with bi-directional support as a compliment, I don't have much to say other than the longer they focus on mobile to web and not mobile to mobile, the better for Rabble.

AmaGoohooBay

Via Moconews. Rafat pointed to an article in the Register reviewing the Yahoo! Go service. The title of this post came from the last paragraph in the article and it had me laughing. It was mentioned in the punchline about the fear the carriers have to have for the Internet cartel. The body of the article was really something that is a ongoing discussion in mobile. Mobile isn't the internet on your phone. That's not to say that there aren't really cool things you can do with mobile, but when you want to do the really cool things on the internets, there is this really cool thing called the PC.

So aside from the review, which is really funny in my opinion and certainly worth a read, the question remains, what is the right feature set for mobile? What things can take advantage of the communications capabilities, the fact that it's always with you, the fact that kids live on their phones?

I am not entirely sure what the right combination is, but I know that it needs to be something that is slimmed down, useful, and meets or solves some compelling need for mobile users. Although you could score this as one against the AmaGoohooBay guys, there still remains that for now Yahoo is the most mobile trafficed site, and there is no question that the big guys have a lot of time and energy to figure out what right is. If they can figure out that it may divorce them slightly from their existing business models, then things will get interesting.

Free Falling

It's 3:36 AM West Coast time. This isn't a bad time if you are on the east coast or in Europe. Problem is, I am not. The reality is, I am an insomniac. I don't remember how or why, it's just one of those things that creaped into my head sometime in my 20s. Some nights I just get up. When I was younger I would rummage through the fridge for a beer or a glass of wine or something to put me to sleep. That never really helped much. I'd find that the next day I would be groggy and spent most of the night fretting about being awake and thinking about how tired I would be the next day. Now, I just get up and work. Stressing doesn't help. The reality is, tomorrow night I will sleep in a deep coma. I can cope with that.

I wasn't sure what it was that was keeping me awake at 1:35 AM or so. It could have been my oldest son Tate who was sleeping in my bed last night, kicking me in the head and ribs. Prolly not. I find a way to get through that many nights. Rather I think it is flying. Around 2:30 or so I realized that I haven't flown since early January and a common theme in my insomnia is traveling. I am not sure if it is the excitement of being on the road (yuk) or my innate fear of flying. I don't recall how that started but as I have spent more and more time traveling back and forth across the continent, an irrational fear of flying has been one of the things I pack in my backpack for each trip. Laptop? Check. Business cards? Check. Presentation? Check. White knuckle fear of turbulence? Check.

I stopped traveling pretty much in the last several months of the year. Not because I wanted to or because it was an option. It was mostly because we hit one of those early milestones you hit in a startup. We had ramped up. The time between June of last year when we launched on Verizon to August when we raised money, to October when we were trying to go from a handful of people to an actual team had finally set in. It was time to put the pieces together.

The good news is we have. I think about the team we have in place and I am blown away. We are set to do much damage. The combination of internet and wireless talent we have assembled is impressive. Already in the last several weeks the output has been awesome. And so now it is time to get on the road again. Not the same platinum level of flying from last year, but certainly a good dose of the right meetings to make sure we move the needle faster than everyone else. The dirty secret in all of this is execution is key. All things being equal, getting things done quickly tends to give you an advantage. I think that this is something at the core of what we are and what we have become. Something about only the paranoid survive. I like that.

Ok. So this has run it's course. I think I can steal away a cat nap before I hit the airport. Yawn. More later. I am brining he camera. I like how San Francisco looks through the lens of a camera.

LBS and Zipcodes

When I was in my early 20s I spent a chunk of time as a studio dispatcher managing a fleet of cars running all over Los Angeles. I have to admit that trying to keep track of 40 cars running all over town with film, scripts, checks, and assorted envelopes was a hell of a mental exercise that helped me to hone my juggling skills and to focus my ADD in a positive way.

One of the by products of that is that I know every zip code on Los Angeles. By heart. I also know the address of any studio related business in Los Angeles. Cold. I was having dinner the other night with a friend who's wife worked for McCann Ericson in Los Angeles. 6100 Wilshire. Los Angeles 90036. I had to stop myself from saying that. I do that lot. I am not that good with New York, but I usually stay in 10019. Mid Town, West 50s. Sigh.

As LBS becomes a technical reality, apart from the privacy issues, I have to wonder what coordinates will mean to people. For example. Let's say for arguments sake that I am driving around Bird Rock or Pacific Beach in San Diego. 92169. It seems like a pretty big area that is encompassed by coordinates such as 32.79682, -117.25575 or 32.80830, -117.259114 or 32.798493, -117.246784. But the thing I have to ask myself is how do these finer slices of data help me? Especially in a place like Southern California where we drive.

Rather than the data being important in and of itself, I think that the relative measures of my specific location to things or people around me will be what's valuable. I don't know what this new world will look like, but it will certainly be interesting.

Danah Boyd on Myspace

Danah Boyd has a fascinating piece that is a high level overview of her research on Myspace going back to 2003. The most interesting take away for me was the idea that Myspace has become a virtual public place for kids to hang out primarily as other options become less and less available to this generation. Some of this seems pretty obvious but I think the conclusions on why MySpace and not Friendster as being driven by the differences between 20 somethings and teens was insightful and in general if this is a space you are interested in it is a must read.

Enter the Giant

Been a busy week for me so it's been a bit light on the blogging side. Of course the big news yesterday was that MySpace is launching with Helio when they debut sometime later this year. The announcement following repeated announcements of the impending launch of MySpace wasn't necessarily a surprise. To me it is certainly reinforced by what I wrote here in terms of what the impact will be. Debi did a pretty comprehensive write up here that fleshes things out a bit. Most of all though I thought what Russ wrote here, although saying he doesn't see it, shows that he understands it.

To me, it is good that there will be a lot of interest in this space. We are excited about what we have done so far, launched on Verizon, launched on Cingular, and are headed down the path to international distribution and the next generation of Rabble. It will certainly be an interesting year ahead.

Mobile 2.0: The Revolution will not be televised

Over the last several days I have been thinking a lot about the disconnect between thinkers in Silicon Valley and the youth market. While saying that there is a disconnect is a broad generalization, I certainly feel that it is the primary thought process among those who are designing and developing services for the marketplace as it relates to the web. This post I wrote the other day was picked up on Digg by a guy in Europe who posed the question regarding the relevance of A-list bloggers.

I personally don’t have an opinion on whether A-list bloggers matter or not but one comment to the Digg post on this page struck a chord with me. The response to the question about why there has been no mention of RSS support by Mysapce was that the reason nobody covered it or that nobody frankly cared was that MySpace was full of the “omglolkewl” crowd. I loved the comment but it also started my mind thinking about how transformative wireless will be/is and how the general ignoring of the youth market as trivial will be the Achilles heel of a lot of the companies that are focused on mobile.

Kids live on their phone. The Myspace kids and the Xanga kids and the Live Journal kids. They have grown the ringtone market place to the point that it is saving the record companies from years of declining CD sales and P2P networks. These kids use SMS messaging all the time. These kids don’t own smart phones. They don’t own Symbian series 60 phones. These kids don’t want the web on their phone. They have the web on their computer. They do other stuff on the phone. Kewl stuff. ROFLMAO stuff.

These kids have taken a geeky technology called IRC and turned it into something cool ala AIM, Y! Messenger, etc. Not that they invented it mind you, but they helped to drive adoption. They helped to drive the user base of sites like those mentioned above into the 10s of millions, not millions. There is a whole generation that is alive today that knows that their phone isn’t just for making calls. It is an advanced communication device that does a bunch of things, even if it is just a cheap phone.

When I think about all the web 2.0 companies and all the brilliant people who have created all the amazing things that I have been using in the last couple of years like RSS, Blogger, Podcasting, etc. I know that these people, like me are in their 30s and 40s for the most part. We grew up with the first PCs or had access to mainframes and really wanted to push the envelope at the time where the envelope was small. I recall fondly how I screwed with a guy in my Fortran class who was an ass by sending him messages over the PDP1145 without him knowing what was going on. I loved that shit. It made sense to me.

Most people my age don’t use their phones they way kids do today. They don’t really feel comfortable typing messages on their phones. They don’t really understand why people would buy ringtones (personalization, which by the way is a big part of the success of Myspace). They want to put their Yahoo on their phone. The problem is that my phone isn’t a Series 60 phone. Or frankly, I don’t want to do CERTAIN things on my phone when I have a much better tool called a laptop. The problem with my laptop though is that I can’t take it to The Mars Volta concert. I can’t send a picture of it to my friends RIGHT now while it is happening.

My general point though, getting back to what struck me, is that I don’t see much discussion on the fact that the first generation of people who are walking around with mobile connected camcorders are in our midst. They are using a technology that many of us assume to be mere pre-cursors to a wireless handheld computer when in fact it is something else different. The use cases are being created today by people who live in that medium much the same way many of us were tinkering around with assembly language programming of the Z80 and the 6502.

Which leads me to the conclusion that somewhere in the back of a classroom somewhere some kids are hacking their BREW or J2ME phones and trying to figure out what is really cool and what really matters to impress and share with their friends. With all due respect to Gil Scot-Heron I would offer that the Mobile 2.0 Revolution will not be televised. Or rather…

The Mobile 2.0 Revolution will not be syndicated via RSS. You won’t be able to download an OPML file of all the things you read or listen to as a podcast. You won’t be able to download all your settings and stuff. Because the revolution will not be syndicated.

The Mobile 2.0 Revolution will not be syndicated. It will not be brought to you by AdWords from Google, or Ad sense. It will not be presented in a dazzling array of Flickr photo streams. It will not be reported on by the Daily Source Code or The Gilmor gang or any other podcast on iTunes. The revolution will not be syndicated.

There will be no discussion of text messages of ASL? KEWL, LMAO, LOL, LMAO or ROFLMAO. There will be no commentary on Emo trends in music or the rise of Neo-Progressive rock bands and the return of Led Zeppelin. There will be no discussions of pre-paid phones, or Ying Yang twins ringtones. The revolution will not be syndicated.

There will be no highlights of Myspace Widgets, of goofy emoticons, of kids texting on their phones, day after day after day. Long after the discussions of Ajax and Flash Light and Windows mobile have died down there will still be tens of millions of people trying to find a away to get these damn communications devices to do more than they were meant to do. The revolution will not be syndicated.

Ok. So I may not be a poet. I think that the point of all of this is truly that there is something really big going on with kids and with phones and with communications and the creation of content and podcasting and videoblogging etc. But where it takes off, is with this generation that is more a content creator than a consumer. A generation that is more interested in seeing a funny flash show on ebaums world than on MTV. Ignoring that those who will decide which technologies are truly useful are large in number, long on time and short on attention will be a mistake. They are right in front if us but not many of us are watching.

MySpace has 2 1/2 times the traffic of Google

Maybe the shear size of what is going on with the youth market will start to get peoples attention. It certainly has at Business Week.

Walking Triplets

Brit,
originally uploaded by brikmaster.

Having infant triplets is a fascinating experience. Probably the most fascinating thing is watching the many and varied paths of development that each of them take. Unlike normal people who have to wonder if their kids are keeping up with the neighbors, we get to see if they are keeping up with each other.

So it was with great enjoyment coupled with fear of the coming months of head injuries, that yesterday we watched the runt of the group be the first one to really move into the walking world. Late in the afternoon after an ambitious expedition tide pooling, Brit let go of the couch and stumbled forward with fits and starts and took around 9 steps before succumbing to the floor. He repeated this several times to our great applause and delight. Welcome to the world of the bi-ped Brit.

Rabble WAP Portal

Yesterday we rolled out the Rabble WAP portal at wap.rabble.com/index.wml or link that we plan to use for some off deck GSM distribution in the future. There are some fun goodies there right now to play with.

Peter Raises a Good Point. Ping Servers and Technorati

Peter followed up on my post and highlighted something that I didn't think of, the impact on the ping servers when all the Myspace users pages start slamming the blogosphere. That would be huge! Hey Sifry, when are you going to add Myspace to Technorati?

The Blogger Intelligentsia Ignores the Youth Market

I was talking to Peter today about some cool marketing stuff he is working on. The topic of influencers came up and I told him that I am not interested in the blogging intelligentsia or the web 2.0 crowd in general as I feel that many (not all) of them ignore the youth market. I told him that case in point to me was that Dave Winer, the inventor of RSS, ignored the rollout of MySpace's implementation of RSS and Podcasting. I told Peter that it was funny to me that this post I wrote is the number one search result for Google for the words Myspace and Podcasting and that the "blogosphere" said nothing about the fact that 45 million people now see RSS and podcasting on their number one addiction. Hey Dave, What's the deal? THIS IS HUGE. This is way more important than the gazzillion web 2.0 companies that rollout RSS and other stuff that have ZERO customers.

By the way, Peter pointed out that he actually picked up on the RSS piece in this post before I saw the podcasting thing.

Rabble T-Shirts

T-Shirts,
originally uploaded by brikmaster.

Want one? Send me an email to derrick@intercastingcorp.com

Comments are Fixed

For no apparent reason. Glad thats over. ;-)

Amazing Community Blog

Denise posted a comment a couple of days ago on my blog post about communities. I saw that I had one comment but couldn't retrieve it. When Sander told me my comments were down I investigated and saw Denise's comment. She turned me on to the Full Circle Online Interaction Blog by Nancy White. This is both an AMAZING blog on community as well as a great storehouse of links. I haven't had a chance to dig in deep but the first article was a reference to a previous post about community archetypes. This was totally what I was looking for. Now I need to dig in and see if there is any god stuff about nascent mobile based communities. ;-)

Comments are Broken

Ok, Sander just told me this morning that my comments were broken when he was giving me some juicy info in response to a post. So to be clear, I am not getting rid of comments as I don't really have that many. I will send an email to Blogger support to fix it because I missed a really important comment from a couple of days ago.

Rabble on Eventful

Continuing our marriage of mobile and the web, we rolled out the first half of our integration with Eventful today. Rabble users can now send the events they create on Rabble to Eventful using a combination of ours and their EVDB APIs. The next stage will involve allowing Rabble users to subscribe to various events through Eventful and lot other Rabble users see those events as a part of their channel.

30 Boxes

I set up my 30 Boxes account this morning and was really excited to see what all the fuss was about. I have been on the eternal quest to set up a group calendaring function that will allow us to manage stuff going on in the business. At MP3.com we used something called Ctime that was really useful and had both Web and standalone clients. It's funny how their is such a big gap in group calendaring.

30 Boxes is really cool. I especially like that I can aggregate a bunch of stuff like my Flickr photos and do lots of the social stuff found on many sites today. There are plenty of good writeups on the strengths and weakness seen so far but I though that I would go on record with a couple of requests (like I matter).

My most important need was to be able to publish my existing calendar out to an open calendar. This would mean that 30 Boxes could subscribe to the RSS feed of the ical file generated from our internal web calendar. For whatever reason it wont do that. I am thinking that is a problem with https. Not sure but a guess.

The second thing I wanted was to subscribe to my Basecamp files. Again no dice and probably for the same https reason.

I am going to play with Sunbird and see if I can get Sunbird to subscribe to 30 Boxes and then publish back to 30 Boxes from Sunbird which I have been unable to do so far.

Brokeback to the Future

For the record I think that Brokeback Mountain will win Best Picture and Best Director. I thought it was a great, although depressing film that was extremely well done. I hope Heath Ledger wins Best Actor but it seems that Phillip Seymor Hoffman will get it for Capote, which was a movie I liked but thought that the role for Ledger was more difficult. What do I know.

Today Sean was in the office playing a clip of Brokeback to the Future on Youtube that juxtaposes Brokeback Mountain and Back to the Future. This is the funniest mashup I have ever seen.

IODA Promonet

Several months back I was told about IODA Promonet. Come to think of it, it must have been around September or so. I actually met with Kevin Arnold and Marisol Segal and some of the others at IODA through an introduction from Adam Rugel.

I had heard great things about Kevin from others like Steve Grady and was looking forward to the meeting. At the time they spoke about Promonet, which was the resource they were compiling through their relationships as an indie aggregator/distributor. The concept of Promonet, to provide pre-cleared content to podcasters, was awesome. How they planned on doing it was something that wasn't obvious to me.

Fast forward for a couple of months. Sometime in December I get an invitation to use Promonet. At the time we are knee deep in the holidays with kids etc. and preparing for our Cingular rollout of Rabble. I make a note and a follow up reminder to log in to the service to check it out when I get a chance. I of course don't do it for weeks on end. People start telling me about how amazing it is. I start hearing and seeing listings of amazing bands in podcasts. I scratch my head. How?

Tonight I logged into Promonet. WOW!!!

They have put together and amazing service with amazing content. I am a little short on time so I will neither go through the list of all the most unbelievable tracks and bands that are cleared, nor will I be able to do a podcast tonight, but God help me. You can count on one in the very near future. If you are a podcaster, get thee to Promonet.

Russ Gives Some Rabble Love

Russ Beattie wrote a post a couple of days ago talking about must have apps for the Razr. We got a nice plug as a cutting edge mobile social networking application. What wasn't said explicitly was that Rabble is on Cingular now.

The Rabble Community

When I got home yesterday I remembered that there was another point to my previous post. After months of the same Flash animation on out homepage we rolled out a significant change. The point of the change was to let outsiders peer into the world of Rabble. If you go to the Rabble homepage right now you can see a number of our users and their most recent posts. You may find it juvenile or banal but I find it fascinating.

Back to the previous post, I do hope that over time we can put together some good case studies and stories to contribute to a conversation on how communities evolve and govern themselves, etc.

Community Blogs

Last week I was running through my normal RSS/blog reads. Hit the social media blogs. Hit the advertising blogs. Hit the youth culture blogs. Hit the community focused blogs. Wait. There aren't any. Or more correctly there aren't many.

I talked to a couple of friends about this and received a couple of really good recommendations and found a couple of others that I will link to at the end here. But what am I talking about? If you go back to communities 2.0, (I would argue that Usenet and BBS systems were probably virtual communities 1.0) there was a lot of excitement and interest around Geocities and iVillage and the like. With the flameout of the advertising market there was in my opinion a vast discrediting of the community space as large ugly noisy places with lots of people and no business models to speak of.

Fast forward to today (Community 3.0) and you have the monsters of the community space in the likeness of MySpace, Xanga, Live Journal in the youth market in addition to the various online gaming communities around Warcraft, Everquest, etc. What I don't really see though are the serious discussions about how communities form, or how do communities govern themselves, or what are the different types of members of communities etc. etc.

I am sure there is more out there than I am finding but in general see a lack of concentrated thought and discussion on some of the more academic or cerebral parts around a community. My obvious fascination grows out of my past experience watching a large artist community at MP3.com and my current experience watching the fledgling community on Rabble where the most interesting commonality is that it is generally an entirely mobile phone based community.

Maybe Dana Boyd will be taking on this subject in the coming months. (I hope so)

Some of the recommendations I was given or that were made to me were the following:

The Digital Vision Project from Reuters/Stanford.

Christopher Allen - Life with Alacrity

Corante's Many to Many

Have some ones I should check out?

Small Is In

Although the RAZR has been a good example of consumers flocking towards thin or smallish handset designs, last week there were two things that caught my eye that make me think that small is in.

The first one was all the hype and noise around Bluepulse that I first caught wind of from Mobile Crunch. I am not going to get into what OADP and SPOT are, but I will say that the thing I am really interested in is that although the platform and application support Symbian, more importantly they support J2ME. It's nice to demo or release products on a Series 60 platform except here in the United States, there are very few people buying data products who have those kind of phones. If you want to market to data consumers in the US, you have to support BREW and J2ME.

The second one was the release of the Opera Mini mobile browser. I have had Opera on my P910 for the last year and it is without question a great browser. The day that the Mini was announced I downloaded it expecting to be underwhelmed as it is targeted at low end handsets. Boy was I surprised. It rocks. I think I may actually prefer it to Opera 6 which I have been using for over a year now. Again, like the bluepulse work, here is a product focused on handsets that people actually have instead of handsets that work well when you want to demo products to people unfamiliar with handset intricacies.

As the hottest properties on the web start to look at mobile extensions to their platforms, you can bet money that Myspace, The Facebook, Friendster and others will be using extensive SMS and MMS hooks to support their massive audiences but on the client side their mobile strategy will have to be focused on developing BREW and J2ME applications, at least in the US.

Rabble mentioned in New York Times article

Subscription required. Here is the story.

User Generated Content Explained

In the last several weeks I have seen an incredible influx of traffic of people looking for the word or combinations of the phrase user generated content . Since I am approaching two years of blogging on this blog I guess my google, yahoo and other search love juice is strong. So if you are one of the people who happened to wander here looking for user generated content then welcome. I guess it would be helpful for me to explain why I called this blog that to satisfy your interest.

Back in the early part of 2003, Vivendi had made the decision to divest some of the assets that they had acquired during the reign of CEO Jean Marie Messier. At that time I was President of the Internet Music division of Vivendi following the acquisition of MP3.com where I was the COO while we were a public company. The group of companies that I oversaw at the time included Rollingstone.com, eMusic and Get Music (Which I see UMG is now resurrecting).

The time period between our acquisition and the decision to divest the assets was an interesting time for me. Our company went from a technology driven innovator to being focused on primarily creating an advertising supported media business. My focus was on rationalizing the business and trying to build a media sales force. I was big on advertising. I know that there were many people who gave me funny looks when I said advertising was coming back but ultimately I felt justified in the return of the advertising market and the acquisition of Myspace by News Corporation this last year.

Because a lot of our technical resources were engaged in a variety of projects for the various sister companies at Vivendi we were fairly constrained on new development and ultimately decided to spend a fair amount of time trying to gain some market intelligence to support our advertising efforts and to explore content trends by rolling out some interesting data mining experiments that I have documented in the past here. I think it's very interesting that the MP3.com successor companies like Pure Volume and Myspace are now in the content business. Hmmm.

Around the end of 2003 I met with Ken Cron who at the time was the COO of Vivendi under Barry Diller. My goal was to convince Ken that Vivendi should keep MP3.com, at least in a shell form at the very worst, as it would be a valuable content laboratory for UMG. I knew going in that I wouldn't be successful but I thought it would be a good conversation. Towards the end Ken asked me what I wanted to do. I told him about the story linked to above and said that I wasn't sure what exactly I wanted to do but that I was going to focus my career on working on various aspects of user generated content.

Fast forward through a TV pilot that went nowhere(although the idea isn't too dissimilar to Current TV and some others) to Intercasting. We set up Intercasting to take advantage of the intersection of user generated content and the development of media capabilities of the mobile device. Shawn lays a great foundation on our blog for a lot of the stuff we are working on. To me, at it's core, we are creating a platform for the production and consumption of mobile content. Rabble is specifically the first instance of what we envision to be a suite of products around a common concept. Although we are very much focused on location based applications of media production and consumption, we are at out core a media company contrary to what some others may think.

So that's the business part of why I called my blog user generated content. Then there is the personal part. This blog to me was quite literally, my user generated content. I knew at the time that I was committed to creating text that I have managed to consistently do over almost two years. I also knew then that I would be photoblogging using sites like Flickr where I document my family and my travels. What I didn't know at the time was that I would be podcasting an indie rock show. Or any of the other things like videoblogging etc. that I have been dabbling with over the last several years.

So this site may or may not be what you were looking for. If you like I'd invite you to stick around or I'd recommend that you check out my favorite user generated content site unmediated. This is my daily first stop and over time have come to know a variety of the people working on this group blog. It's a definite must read if you were looking for user generated content.

Sony Ericsson P990

I must have been in some kind of haze, but back in October Sony did a press release about the new P990 coming out in Q1. Oohh, Aahh. I cant wait to get this. Here is the Engadget writeup. All I have to say is WIFI, Edge, 2 Megapixel, Videoconferencing and FM Radio. Not sure about the radio part but the rest rules. I can't wait until later this year when it becomes available in North America. My P910 is still doing well but the WIFI possibilities have me really excited.

Skype Spam

So there I was yesterday busy typing away on my laptop when my Skype window popped up with a request from one Svetlana to chat with me. Last I recall I don't know any Svetlana. At least not one who uses that as her real name. So she says hello. I say hello. She says something else I don't remember and then I ask who is this?

She is looking for online friends. Nice. Block.

Today my Skype phone rings with a call from Toni 101. I don't answer and say hi on chat. She says hi. I say who are you. She says she is looking for online friends. Block.

Hmmm. Ok, so AOL wants to embed some weirdness in IM as of one of my last posts and now Skype is spamming me with dare I say women of dubious background. Sigh. What to do.

Stowe Boyd's New Blog Message

Stowe Boyd, who I am a big fan of, has started a new solo blog called /Message. If you are interested in collaborative tools and social media, this is a must add to your aggregator or reader of choice.

AIM Mail

So I fire up the computer this morning and what to my surprise but a weird AIM mail prompt. Oh my, I am so excited! Yet one more piece of garbage running on my computer. Why can't AOL let me choose whether or not I want crappy things like Wild Tangent and now this email thing to run on my computer? I think its a really bad way to instill loyalty in a user of a product, especially in this world of spam and adware proliferation. I'd like to make the decision on whether or not I have more things running in the background on my machine. I have been increasing the migration to Skype and I think things like this make it more and more likely that over time I will probably make a new selection on IM clients.

Shozu thoughts

I was playing around yesterday with Shozu. Shozu is a mobile application that allows you to mass upload picture from your mobile to the web. The application is very cool in that it doesn't really feel like an application as much as it is more similar to an overlay on the Symbian OS that interfaces with your media.

It took me a day or two to figure out how to grant permissions to Shozu to use my GPRS network. Once I did, I accidentally began an upload of 160+ photos to Flickr. I managed to stop it about halfway through the process but not before knocking most of the relevant user photos for my friends and family way off the first several pages. Oops.

So for the most part a really cool application. One MAJOR pet peeve though. The application tagged all of my photos with the ShoZu tag. Not a problem, I will just go into Flickr and delete that. I can't! That sucks. I need to send an email to customer service.

Good Company Listing Source

Last year when we were out raising money, a friend from Time Warner Ventures, introduced us to Tom Gieselmann at BV Capital. Tom was super smart, as most of the people we met were, and had some really good insight into the community space. One of his co-workers at BV Capital, Christian Leybold, did a year end roundup of companies that they looked at last year that you can find here. We are included of course. If you want to find a good one stop place to find a list of new/cool/up and coming companies, I would recommend you take a spin with this list.

Rabble Widget

On the right hand side of this page, I added our new Rabble Widget. Right now we only have a couple, but we plan to make some more. Because I synchronize my Blogger posts to Rabble I had to select a couple of posts that were created inside Rabble that didn't come from Blogger. On the top, and in honor of his recent departure from this planet, is my fish Ralph.

Podcastercon Video

Randall Greg sent me a link to a 14 minute video he took at Podcastercon that was mostly of the Copyright Session. You can see the video here. I couldn't figure out the direct link to the page but the website main page is here.

Link to Audio of Copyright Session from Podcastercon

Ray Moore who attended Podcastercon this last Saturday sent me a copy of the audio he took from the Copyright session. The file is just under 100 Megabytes and clocks in at just under two hours. I put the file here and will also put the link on the wiki for Podcastercon.

Podcastercon 2006 - Epilogue

Got back home around mid-day yesterday. I was pretty burned out from the trip as I had a hard time sleeping the whole time on the road. Not really sure why. A couple of thoughts:

1. What a great event. It had a decidedly different feel than the Portable Media Expo. None of the main blogger intelligentsia was there, which I though was actually kind of cool. Not much of a cult of personality was in play. I also thought Brian did an amazing job getting more than 300 people together for a very ad hoc yet effective event. I think the protests that Dave Winer had, and he is entitled to his opinion, were misplaced. It was anything but a commercial conference. It felt like an educational seminar.

2. The session that I led, actually I would say co-led with Chris McDonald, was really well attended and received. I took a long deep breath at the start of what was to be a 2 hour session with the fear that there was no way we would go longer than an hour or so. I couldn't have been more wrong. We had an amazing group gathered together with a variety of opinions and experience coming from podcasting, journalism etc. which made for a lively discussion that was meant to be more informative than scary. I know that Richard/Madge from Yeast Radio thought we were slightly scaring people but that wasn't the intent at all. I think he made it through most of the session but I think he missed the part where we came back to the point that this wasn't meant to scare as much as it was to inform.

3. The after hours hang out was a total blast. Ryan Irelan documented the group of us that hungout afterwards here. There is also a good picture here. I especially enjoyed hanging out with the Libsyn guys who Chris McDonald had carpooled with. I think those guys are doing some great work and wish them a ton of success.

Chris recorded our session and as soon as I track it down I will stick it up on my server on Acme.

Podcastercon 2006

I am at Podcastercon today in Chapel Hill. I'll be doing some occasional posts and a lot of Flickr pictures. Search for tag podcastercon2006 if you are interested.

The $250 Million Radio Show #29

Hot off the laptop. Show #29 is here. Notes will be updated on the podcast site tomorrow here.

North Carolina

Flew into Charlotte yesterday evening. Spent the night with a good friend and his family and puttered around Charlotte a bit before heading to Chapel Hill. I always imagined that North Carolina was a lot like Oregon without the rain. What I didn't realize is that it is in fact kind of cold here. I also didn't realize that there aren't as many evergreens either so it looks a bit like an East coast winter landscape with hints of a lush time in the spring. Uploading a podcast and off to bed.

Copyright Law and Podcasting

I am facilitating the session on Copyright Law and Podcasting at Podcastercon on Saturday, January 7th. The format of the overall conference is an unconference. If you are not familiar with this style of event, please look at this overview by Doc Searls.

The session is meant to be a conversation among those present about the things they are interested in. Certainly we all have opinions on the topic if we are podcasting. One of the challenging things about podcasting is that there is in fact a lot of legal implications of what you do if you are playing copyrighted material. Although there are legal structures in place, there is also a lot of ambiguity about what you need to do to make sure that you don't stumble over one of these legal areas and expose yourself to penalties and fines.

Some of the things we may want to discuss during this session can be the following:

What are the underlying rights associated with copyrighted works?

Who administers permission and payments if you want to use copyrighted materials in your podcast?

What copyright protections can I have in protecting the intellectual property that I create in my podcast?

What is Creative Commons?

Let's talk about acronyms like DMCA, DRPA, DPD, and CARP.

What is the case law that has been established thus far in digital music that may be relevant to our podcasting?

What is Fair Use?

What do I need to do to play cover songs in my podcast?

If I am concerned about playing copyrighted music, what are my alternatives?

As the session moderator, I am familiar with some of the above topics and will contribute to the best of my abilities, but will only do so in a conversation with everyone present. I am not a lawyer. Hopefully there will be some of those in attendance.

The stark reality of copyright law and podcasting is that it is a fairly new area that has some precedence and some indications of a legal/not legal framework and associated fines. Making yourself aware of what those areas are, and identifying alternatives to taking risks in our podcasts is what I hope we get to have a lively conversation about on Saturday. Please feel free to join in the session and contribute your opinion and knowledge on the topic.

The Rabble.com Website

When we went live last summer, we slowly rolled out a website that was used primarily to let our users synchronize their rabble activity with their web activity. In my case that meant importing posts from Blogger like this one into Rabble for other users to see. It also meant taking posts that I create in Rabble and publishing them out to Live Journal and Zoto.

Over the holidays we pushed out a beta website for our mobile users that allows them to pretty much replicate the phone functionality on the web. We designed it primarily for users of the application, rather than to create a web competitor to other websites. Frankly, we think a lot of really great websites do an amazing job on the web and we would rather find ways to partner with them instead of trying to re-create their functionality. We prefer to focus on the mobile aspects. One thing we did do was allow people to view with guest privileges if someone wants to send a post outside of Rabble to their friends or family. So if you don't have a Verizon phone and want a sneak peek at what's going on inside the Rabble world. Click on this link.

CPM Based Advertising in Podcasts

Paul Colligan wrote this post in response to some Adam Curry comments about avoiding CPM based advertising in podcasting. I can't agree more. How would an advertiser know that they are truly getting value from a purely impression based medium. I think that advertisers should pay for performance. Sure it's great if a million people download my podcast, but what if none of them come to the website to buy my product. Now clicks, I'll pay for that. :-)

The challenge with podcasting is that it is today a small medium. Of course it doesn't want to move to a CPM based model because it doesn't have enough advertising units to support itself. If we apply the Google/Overture performance based structure then it gets worse.

A move to sponsorship model makes sense if the sponsor feels they are getting value and would be in line with the old "soap" sponsorships of days gone by.

Or you could do it because you love it.

Mobile Monday San Diego / January

Ok, so the mobile crowd up in San Francisco has a lot of technology companies that are interested in wireless. We have Qualcomm. We are hosting this January's Mobile Monday in San Diego at the Intercasting Corp Office on January 16th with people from the Media Flo group. If you want to hear about the future of media on your handset, swing on by. Details here. Map here.

Machinima

I don't believe that I have ever blogged about Machinima but I thought it would be worthwhile to mention to people who may not have heard of it.

While digging through my contacts to clean up for the new year/send out holiday cards, I realized that I hadn't talked to Paul Marino in a while. Paul worked with me at Vivendi and left to pursue Machinima full time. Currently he is the Executive Director of the Academy of Machinima Arts and Sciences.

So what is it? The various filmmakers of this genre utilize tools such as gaming engines to create movies/film etc. Imagine leveraging something like the Quake engine to create a movie. This is the type of stuff that they do. You may be thinking that it only applies to making movies like Aliens, but the Quake engine allows you to customize environments and scenery to make just about anything you can think of.

Why do I care? User generated content or any sort of edge of the network media needs to use platforms and tools that allow the costs to remain low. By cleverly repurposing tools such as gaming engines, these filmmakers can do some really crazy things at very low cost. I would highly recommend that you take a look at some of the projects that have come out of this group.

Reflecting on 2005

Taking a page from last year, I thought I would hit the highlights of this year for me:

1. A year of health and survival for my wife Jessica, daughter Mallory, and sons Tate, Tucker and Brit. Tate turned 3 and Mallory, Tucker and Brit had their first birthday. We managed two family trips including a long week in Palm Springs in the spring and a trip to the Midwest in the summer. Note to self, no traveling with four small children for a little while. Soon, just not now.

2. We launched Rabble on Verizon Wireless. We had hoped to do this earlier in the year but wireless development and rollout on a carrier's network involves some serious heavy lifting. That said we are really happy with what is going on in the Rabble world and expect to make some major announcements in Q1 of next year.

3. We raised $5.5 million in a series A round. We have been really happy with how we managed the process and the decision we made to work with Avalon and Masthead. They have been supportive and helpful and we expect to reward them in the future for their trust in our vision and our execution.

4. I continued, although a bit impacted, my blogging. Work has really transformed my ability to blog about technology the way I originally intended to but continuing to maintain the discipline to sit down behind the keyboard if however infrequently or briefly is it's own reward, at least to me.

5. I continued, in an even more impacted way, podcasting. Although the legwork that it takes to do a show has been a bit too much for me, I did manage to put together 28 shows by the end of this year and hope to push out 29 by tomorrow night. At least that's the hope. On the other hand, the original inspiration for me to start podcasting was to raise awareness about copyright issues that will impact podcasting. On that front we have around 70 shows on the Association of Music Podcasting site, I spoke on a panel on copyright law at the inaugural Podcast Expo, and I am leading a session on copyright law at the inaugural Podcastercon next week. The raised awareness has been great to see and I think there are going to be some really cool developments in the distribution of music content via podcasts in the coming year.

6. My many travels this last year put me in touch with a ton of great people who I have become friends with over the last year like Tom Ryan from EMI, John Hiler from Xanga, and Adam Rugel from Odeo, to name just a few. The work it takes to maintain and increase your friendships is more than offset by the good times you have with those people you spend time with. I expect a lot more of that in the coming year.

7. I started coaching soccer for my son's soccer team. Although I must admit that I am more of a football nut than anything else(American Football), I have always felt that if you want to have an opinion on things then you have to be willing to get involved. Whether it is youth sports, school boards, or local government, I think that we have a responsibility to contribute. At least I plan to do so. We can't do much about those things we see on CNN or Fox News but we can do things to make our neighborhood a better place.

May you and yours have a joyous, healthy and prosperous 2006. Thanks for visiting.

Holiday Recap

For the last dozen years or so I have spent Christmas in North Dakota. Very cold and very white. Last year was complete chaos as the triplets were born and Jessica has a terrible health scare after what seemed like a normal delivery.

This year was sort of the first year where we establish some of our own Christmas traditions. I don't know what the future holds but we made a first cut at some traditions. Jessica's aunt Mary came out to be with us which was awesome as she is always fun to have around and was a great help with all the kids. It can be scary being outnumbered by kids but we seemed to pull it off.

On Christmas Eve we did the family church service where the kids barely made it to the end. Afterwards we fed the triplets and put them to bed before having present opening with Tate. Late that night Santa showed up to bring the everyone their goods.

In keeping with the Swedish theme that was mentioned earlier in the post about Korv, we made a Swedish dish called Frask Pankaka. Sounds like something pretty gross? Well it is basically Swedish Quiche fried in bacon and bacon grease that is then topped with whipped cream and lingonberry sauce. That's what I am talking about. We couldn't find the lingonberries so we substituted marionberry. Here is what the dish looked like before the sweet toppings:

Intercasting / Rabble Named As A Top 50 Futurecentric Company

Wow. That sounds really cool. Apparently PriceWaterHouseCoopers, Thomson Venture Economics and the National Venture Capital Association selects 50 companies each year that are "entrepreneurial companies building ideas that are shaping the future." Blush.

We received a notice yesterday that we had been selected but didn't really know what it was at first. This is their 3rd annual list. You can find the list here. We are in some pretty good company. I am not familiar with many of the companies in pharma or biology or anything else like that, but I am familiar with Feedburner who many of my podcasting brethren are big fans of, Blue Frog, Digital Orchid, and GoTV.

MySpace Podcasting and RSS Support

This must be the week of quiet rollouts. Jason from Insomnia Radio/Kill Your FM pinged me on Skype this morning and told me to check out that MySpace has rolled out podcasting support on their site. At the bottom of the blog their is a box for your podcast enclosure. I went ahead and added the link to my file of my last show (reminds me, time for another one) and posted. I then went to Bloglines and found nothing when I subscribed to the RSS feed. Hey they added RSS support too! We played around a bit and didn't get anywhere but I did manage to subscribe to the RSS feed in iTunes and download the show. Hmmm. Ok so maybe there is a reason they haven't announced it. Here is my Myspace RSS - http://blog.myspace.com/blog/rss.cfm?friendID=1859573

Streethive

A company that is loosely in a similar space to Rabble called WaveMarket has launched their application Streethive on Cingular. I hadn't seen any press on it but ran across it on the Cingular deck. I will be spending some time on it tonight. I am not sure which handsets they support but I ran across it on a Nokia 6620.

Nutcrackers

Four years ago, Jessica started buying me Nutcrackers. I used to buy my dad beer steins from Germany for Xmas so this was kind of an update on that. Here is a picture of my first Nutcracker, a Santa and my latest one, a William Shakespeare nutcracker. Doesn't that rule?

CardScan

Since before Tate was born we have been in the habit of sending cards out to people around the holidays. We started with family pictures but quickly shifted to pictures of our kid and now kids. Jess made an amazing card this year so I felt an extra level of need to get a list of people to send cards out to this year. I rummaged through my office and realized that I have a stack of approximately 500 business cards that weren't in my PIM. Holy crap!

I started typing cards in (haha). After three I realized this wasn't going to work. I had heard mixed reviews on card scanners and decided to take the plunge. I ended up buying a CardScan scanner, I crossed my fingers and set everything up. Shawn laughed at me and told me that I would be scanning cards for days.

Surprisingly I blew through the stack in around an hour and have to say that the OCR was amazing. There are certainly some things that don't scan well but in most cases it worked great. I am a big fan.

I think my hesitation to use a card scanner was primarily because of the bad experience with products like Dragon naturally speaking and other voice recognition technologies, which I have to assume have also gotten better since I last checked.

So if you want a card send me your address! Or your business card. ;-)

Melodeo

I have a post to write later today if I get the time about business cards and technology. If you read that then you will understand that I am doing some catch up. Back at the Podcast Expo, one of the guys I ran into was from a company called Melodeo. Melodeo was interested in talking with our various podcasters in AMP because they want to have content to showcase their Mobilecast podcasting client for phones.

Occasionally I find myself in an interesting situation where on the one hand I want to distribute my podcast as widely as possible, and on the other hand we are working at Intercasting on creating tools for user generated content for mobile devices. Generally I think that most people have complimentary approaches to the market so it's at least fun enough to have a conversation.

So after chatting with Frank, I told him that I definitely wanted to add my show to their directory and that I would check out their client later.

Yesterday I decided to tinker with Mobilecast. I figured that they are probably focused more on the higher end of the handset matrix so I initially tried to download the client to my P910. Not supported. Hmmm. I checked out the list and grabbed one of our S710's from the office phone pool.

The client is pretty cool, and pretty straightforward. I dug through the music directory and found my show. I was given the option of downloading (doh!) or streaming. I selected stream and was pleasantly surprised to hear a not too bad down sampled version of my show. The audio support on handsets clearly has a way to go, but the first inkling of a start is there. I am a little busy with end of year stuff so I didn't get a chance to do much beyond that but the two questions I hope to answer later are what impact this has on a phone bill and battery life.

The most interesting thing about Melodeo to me was that during our VC fund raising process we had an encounter with one of the founders of Melodeo when they were still in the licensed content business. We, being strong believers in the user created content model, made a pretty strong argument for our type of business as opposed to the existing licensed music business. There is clearly a business for licensed content businesses but I just don't see it as a startup. I am sure it wasn't because of our meeting alone, but soon thereafter Melodeo was a mobile podcasting company.

Mobile Monday San Diego

We are hosting Mobile Monday San Diego in our offices next week on the 19th. The link to the site for information on speakers etc is here.

Holy Crap! It's my birthday

The Boys waiting for the show,
originally uploaded by brikmaster.

I can't believe that it has been a year, but tomorrow Mallory, Tucker and Brit turn 1. It is certainly a surprise when you are doing a startup and plan on having child number 2 but end up with child # 2, 3 and 4.

It has been an awesome year of joy, sleep deprivation and pure chaos. But I wouldn't change it for the world. Their mother Jessica and brother Tate have been amazing. I have been on airplanes and am so proud that they have kept it all together. As I recall year 2 was even better than year 1 with Tate so I can't wait to see what is ahead of us.

Podcaster Con

I am leading a session on copyright law and podcasting at Podcastercon in early January. Here is the session description.

Korv Party

December 4 2005 031,
originally uploaded by brikmaster.

This weekend I went to a sausage making party. That doesn't sound right, but it is true. It is impossible to be around a bunch of adults and spend time shoving meat into stomach casings and not make a bunch of really crude and off color jokes. This is one of the less obscene pictures I took. For the uninitiated, Korv is a rather bland Swedish sausage that is similar to bangers and it apparently is served around the holidays along with things like pickled herring and lutefisk. More pictures on my flickr page.

Gcast

Garageband just launched their consumer podcasting site at Gcast. I am uploading my last podcast up right now.