Drivers of Adoption

The NFL Draft is this weekend. For those of you who aren't crazy addicted fantasy football players, it is the weekend where all the great college football players find their new home in professional football. For me in particular, it marks the official starting point in my keeper fantasy football league(see I am extra sick) were we can begin trading people and draft positions in advance of our draft the weekend prior to the start of the football season in September. Does this sound crazy yet? It should.

Why am I sharing this with you? Because this is the sort of thing that drives the adoption of technology. Let me explain.

I have been playing fantasy football since 1998 or 1999. I was working for CSC at Sun in Silicon Valley and I had a lot of time on my hands as my wife was back in Los Angeles. Over the years my addiction to fantasy football has grown as my expertise (or so I say) has developed. With each year the level of engagement and involvement has increased to what I would say was probably a saturation point two years ago. Last year I was certainly on my game but I had developed the right balance to stay competitive and still remain married.

So fantasy football leads to technology adoption. Several years ago, I decided that I needed to be able to watch more than one game at a time. In fact, it became necessary for me to watch all the games. Especially since I had players on just about every team in football. At the time I had Cox digital cable, which is a fine service, but not one that had the NFL Sunday ticket package that was only on Directv. What is an addict to do? Get Direct TV.

I didn't want to get rid of Cox as there were some particular things I liked about Cox and most importantly they provide me with my cable modem at home. So I got both. I kept both for a number of months until I realized that Directv had just about everything I wanted except for the broadband connectivity. Goodbye Cox Digital Cable. Hello Directv. I kept the cable modem though. Cox lost me because of the NFL.

Last year I bought a PSP. A lot of the purchase was about my personal ongoing market research but quickly, given all the stuff going on in my life, I put the device in my bag and forgot about it. Until Location Free became available. Location Free was some gee whiz technology that was fun to show people but as I am not really a TV watcher it too sort of wore off quickly. Except on Sunday. Suddenly I could be watching my TV with split screens in my house with two games on and then use the PSP to watch a 3rd game. Nice huh? I wish this was a joke.

Recently I recently received a Sprint demo phone which has been really impressive for a number of reasons but most importantly to me because I can use it as an EVDO modem for my laptop. The TV on my phone stuff? Not so interesting. That was until Sprint announced the NFL draft coverage on my phone. Um, ok, that's kind of cool. Especially since we are busy this weekend and I can't stay glued to the television. Well, maybe TV on your phone is kind of cool...I will certainly be taking period looks to see who got who over the weekend.

Yesterday Shawn and I were up in SF and Silicon Valley for meetings and I was driving around in a car that had Sirius radio. Shawn commented that it was kind of pointless for Hertz to spend all that money deploying that. I suggested that it might be Sirius putting it in for marketing purposes. I am not sure what the actual answer is, but I told Shawn that I thought it was brilliant. I told him that last football season I was going to buy a Sirius radio but couldn't get entirely over the hump because I was worried about using it after the football season. Having rented two cars now with Sirius I am ready to make the jump as I think there is certainly enough other content to rationalize my football purchase. That is, I will buy it when football season actually starts.

Although this story is a sad indication of the sickness present in sports fanatics it highlights the marketing challenges to me of any new technology. What is the best way to drive adoption? What are the must have things that makes a consumer feel compelled to adopt a new technology? In my case the technologies association with the NFL will warrant an investigation into whether or not it is something I should acquire. There are certainly many other analogues to this for other subcultures or affinity groups. It will be interesting to see which levers work most successfully in mobile.

Myspace Banned from Texas Community College

This article details that Myspace use was 40% of the Internet traffic at this school. That was until they turned it off.

Russ hangs it up

One of the earliest people I started reading when I started blogging almost two years ago was Russ Beattie. Russ would sometimes iritate but always engage. His passion and understanding of mobile is something that I enjoy consuming and over time have struck up a casual relationship with him that I hope continues beyond the death of his blog (for now I am sure).

In one of his last posts which was an open letter to MobHappy, he beseeches them to have fun with mobile and show that they really enjoy mobile (which they certainly do). While there are certainly a lot of great mobile bloggers around today, Russ will certainly be missed as one of the most enthusiastic and a thoughtful booster for the differences between mobile and the Internets. I wish him well in his private endeavors and hope he comes back soon.

Quien es mas macho? Odeo or Podshow

I am an errant podcaster. I haven't done a show in months even though I have a lot of tracks lined up. I just haven't been able to get it together with all the work stuff going on. Today for some bizzaro reason I was doing some Alexa searches on podcasting companies that I believe started with some non-sequitur about traffic on Garageband. I couldn't recall their podcasting initiative and after digging recalled it was Gcast.

I then recalled that I hadn't been paying attention to the two big players in podcasting who raised approximately $9 million each in August or so of last year, Odeo and Podshow. I am a big fan of Odeo but hadn't heard much lately but was very excited to see this Alexa chart showing that in the face of all the satellite radio and Madison avenue style hype, that the Odeo guys are actually moving along quite nicely and quietly and at least according to the oft maligned Alexa, they are in the lead. Good stuff.

Track Your Kids from Sprint

Sprint announced earlier this week the introduction of the Sprint family locator here. I believe this is one of the first commercial deployments of LBS technologies in North America that isn't fleet management. Very cool. Wavemarket, the same company that offers Streethive is powering the product.

Based on the lack of understanding of phone applications by the over 30 set (What's a ringtone?) I am curious how many kids will help their parents set up an application that allows their parents to track them. There are interesting privacy and security issues in the discussion of LBS and this too will be a hot topic in the coming year or so as more consumer offerings begin to rollout.

Rabble Addiction

I don't like to talk much about the goings on inside the Rabble community itself although I do post about the various technical things and content things we are doing. If you want to see what is going on download Rabble and see for yourself. This post today had me in tears though:

"Im addicted to rabble. i quit and remove the application every day but just buy it again. so i am trading in my cell phone razr for one without get it now or mobil web. i am neglecting my job my friends my studies my body. i learned a lot about myself. goodbye forever shalom"

I am not sure if that is a good thing or not but we must be doing something right.

Just Because

Ok, now I go back to work.

Vacation Epilogue

A good time was had by all. It took me until Thursday but by Thursday, I was really on vacation. I didn't finish my book. I didn't listen to any more music. I didn't blog. I didn't read blogs. I scanned email headlines but didn't respond. It was awesome.

There was swimming, and more swimming. There was a lot of time with grandma and grandpa.

One day I had to drive someone to the train station in downtown San Bernardino. It was kind of bizarre because my great grandmother lived there and I spent a great deal of time at her house and my uncle's house when I was a kid and in my teenage years. Seeing the blight of the area was kind of shocking actually. The area around the train station and the neighborhoods where I had played looked like a neutron bomb had hit and all the business were gone. Pretty weird.

It inspired me to visit my childhood house in Rialto which is five minutes away. I hadn't seen the house in 6 years or so. It looked pretty run down although the neighborhood has changed demographically and I am fascinated by what the future holds for some of these blighted or in transition areas over the next 5-10 years. When I was a kid Rialto tripled population in 10 years resulting in the elimination of all the citrus groves where we played as a kid and their replacement with cheap housing. The area has some really amazing natural beauty in terms of setting with these beautiful mountains as a backdrop but is plagued with scorching heat in the summer and terrible smog.

We had an egg hunt. We took the aerial tramway up to the snow. And then as an added treat we swung by my sisters house and got to spend time with all my family and all the cousins which made it a complete sweep of relatives as Jessica's whole family was with in Palm Springs.

Now I am back but the calm and peace of La Quinta is in my soul.

Road Trip - Music and Books

I had to head up to work for a meeting and then drive back this evening. Not much time for commentary but the soundtrack today was:

The Bravery - The Bravery: This 80s revival band sound has a CD that has been sitting on my stack of to be listened to CDs for a long while. I had seen it on a number of best of the year lists from last year and have to admit that after a good listen I am kind of bummed that it had taken me that long to get around to it. A definite add to my itunes list.

Sleater Kinney - The Woods: I love this band. I was turned on to them on their last CD One Beat. This new one continues their unique, awesome punk sound.

Rogue Wave - Descended Like Vultures: I just started listening to this. Very cool sound but a bit more mellow than my usual taste. More after I finish the full thing.

Books. I am currently reading the The Lost Gospel. When CNN did all this promotion of the discovery of the Lost Gospel of Judas I thought it was news. What I didn't realize was that it was a big PR push for a series of books. Very nice. At any rate this is a fascinating book so far. It chronicles the discovery and the long 25 year trek of the only known copy of this document into the hands of people who actually knew what it was.

Last year with all the Pope mania and my previous reading of the Da Vinci Code I decided that I would read From Jesus to Christianity which was an awesome book. That book gave an interesting history of how the New Testament was written and over what time period that really is worth a read if you are a history buff. It talks about what books made it in and which books didn't. It also gave me a number of laughs when I think about people taking a literal view of the language in theology. Especially as many of the gospels came out of an oral tradition.

Vacation

This is the week we ritualistically take our clan out to Palm Springs to recharge. I am doing some work but not much.

Getting to Palm Springs involves a trek through the desert to our retreat. On this year's trek I was driving solo in the supplies vehicle and had a lot of time to just listen to music and unwind. For the trip this year my outward journey was highlighted by the following:

The Very Best of the Grateful Dead. A great compilation of Dead hits that reminded me yet again how great they are as a band and how glad I am that I saw them play several times back in the day. The great revelation for me was a quote from Touch of Grey where the lyrics say "It' even worse than it appears" and I had an aha moment when I connected the dots and realized that the header line from Dave Winer's blog Scripting News is that quote. It's funny when you realize things and they color your view. I thought that the headline before was kind of snarky and now realize that its kind of playful.

The Matchbook Romance - Voices. I am still early in my listening of this. I like it but don't have my head around it enough to give a good description.

Scarlet Symphony - Vulture. This is such an amazing CD. I believe they broke up. Such a bummer, I could have sworn they would have been huge. I need to find out what happened. Go find this hard to get CD and be prepared to be BLOWN away.

Mae - The Everglow. I love this CD. It took me just a bit but now I am completely sold. It takes the heart and soul of Dashboard Confessionals combined with Ben Folds Five and creates an instant masterpiece. See them this summer on the Virgin Megatour opening for Yellowcard.

Yahoo API Update

I always hate when people grouse and then don't give an update if something changes. So here is an update. I hadn't really spent enough time with the Yahoo Developer documentation. Once I did I realized that although I had been talking to a specific group, it probably made sense to go through the formal process of the overarching business group to make sure that things were tracked.

So I sent in my initial request to the Yahoo developer group and received both a form response and a direct response from Eleanor who is in the group. So we are going through the things companies have to go through to make sure that all the i's are dotted and the t's are crossed and we will see what comes out of it. We are certainly chomping at the bit but having been at a big company in past lives I understand that there are processes. I still am not aware of any companies doing anything commercial with the Yahoo APIs but no doubt there are others that are further along in the process than we are currently.

More as things develop.

You Can't Get There From Here or Planes, Trains and EVDO

CTIA wrapped up for us this morning. There were some meeting glitches today that were fine considering most of the heavy lifting had been done earlier in the conference. I have to say that I never really got to spend much time on the floor but had some great meetings, conversations, and saw a couple of cool new things.

We decided to try to catch an earlier flight out of Vegas back to San Diego. Shawn had a 4 something and I had a 7 something. Being that we were at the airport around 1 ish getting on a new flight was key to avoiding a long stay in the Vegas airport. We signed up for the first flight and we were something like number 35 on the standby list. Ouch. The next two flights were delayed. Hmmm. Not looking good. Shawn says, "Want to fly to LA?" I say, "Good idea"

We scramble over to the LA gate which is just about to close and manage to get on the flight. Sweet. We get to LA around 2:30 and then catch the 4 PM train to San Diego. We get a couple of hours to work in peace on the train. Wait a minute. We go out onto the runway and wait for around 30 minutes. The train is looking bad now. Eventually we get off the ground and get into LA about 3:10PM. This isn't too bad but it means we have to cab across town to Union Station in Friday rush hour traffic which isn't impossible but the over and under is close. We make it with a couple of minutes to spare. Then the train breaks before we leave. We get a 30 minute delay and they bring a new train.

Net net I am getting home earlier than my original flights departure, which I think makes it all worth while but what a journey. The point of all this though is that this is the first time I get to try out the Sprint EVDO network on the Samsung A920 they sent me a month or two ago. So far, I am WAY impressed with Sprint's EVDO implementation. Shawn is using Verizon's EVDO Laptop card and at some point we will do a data race to see which network is truly faster.

Edge of the Network Media Instead of User Generated Content?

A couple of days ago I saw this post from a different Derrick, er Derek. Stowe made a post about it here. Susan Mernit did here. Debi Jones here.

I don't recall where I first heard the term but I think it was sometime around 2001 or so. While I agree it may not be the most elegant term it seems very descriptive to me. In this post back in January I explained my use of the word as descriptive of an area of business interest/platform approach to me and as a bit of a joke on myself.

I don't have much to add beyond that post other than to say that the other word I was using when I was describing MP3.com, and our Low Def TV project and now Rabble, was Edge of the Network Media in addition to user generated content.

I think this term actually captures the concept that there is a decentralization of media production that is benefiting from cheap technology tools that allows people to create and consume media that isn't traditionally coming from the center of the media network ala Los Angeles, New York, Washington DC (depending on your flavor of media).

So if you want to kill the phrase User Generated Content, feel free to use Edge of the Network Media or whatever other phrase you desire. To Debi's point, this user plans on continuing to generate my content at this blog for the foreseeable future.

At CTIA - Day One

I flew into CTIA a day earlier than planned. A couple of meetings got moved around so today made sense. I came in midday and the coming storm left behind in San Diego seemed a bit off. I took care of some business and then got to catch up with a good friend Jim Rondinelli who previously worked with me at MP3.com but is now working at Warner Music Group (WMG) in publishing. We grabbed an early bite and a margarita and got to catch up since I hadn't seen him much since he moved to NYC recently.

Tonight is a bit of chilling at the Palms and then maybe one of the parties du jour. The next couple of days will be back to back.

We had a mention today in a WSJ article that I need to find a link to.

Eventful Part 2

Thanks to Brian and the crew at Eventful for pushing out the second part of the Rabble/Eventful integration. What do you mean part two? Well here are a couple of examples:

I am at work getting ready for CTIA. I go to Eventful to find out if they have an entry for CTIA. They do, it is here. On the description on the upper right hand side there is a drop down button that says Add to /Remove from a group or Calendar. You press the link. There is an Export this Event to: Rabble. Nice. If you are set up, then this event is published to your Rabble Channel. Other users of Rabble can see this event on your channel but more importantly, other users will now be able to see that event if they happen to be in the Las Vegas area.

Two weeks from now I am in NYC. I am sure one night will be free to I check out concerts in NYC. A quick scan shows that The Matchbook Romance is playing on the 20th here. Click add to Rabble. I need to remember to grab some tickets.

Eric's Podshow Flame

Eric sends up a post that captures what many I know think of Podshow here. I too know a number of great people involved and hope for only the best things for them personally. For a long time now it seems that these guys view podcasting as a necessary evil to sling advertising. How unfortunate.

Google Dating Launches

Big news. The front page of Google has a link to their new dating service, Google Romance. So Hot or Not? Is this a dating landscape game changer or something like their RSS reader (yawn)? Or is it April 1?

Rabble Email

We sent out our first newsletter today to people who signed up on our web and wap site. You can take a look here.

Cyworld US Launching Next Week?

I have been receiving a number of hits to my blog with people searching for Cyworld US. A quick review of the site I mentioned before reveals the following on the about us page. If this is right Cyworld US is coming on April 2. This is terribly close to April fools day so I could be wrong, but I didn't make the site, they did. :-)

Second Life Thoughts

Since SXSW, I have spent a decent chunk of time trying to grok Second Life. If it weren't for Eric, I am not sure I would have spent the time I have so far and therefore wouldn't have come to the understanding that I now have.

When I first signed up for Second Life my initial reactions were as follows:

1. The registration was way too long and detailed.
2. They want my cell phone number? What are you kidding? Why would I want to give you that?
3. It's a downloadable? No, I don't trust downloadable's anymore. Is Wild Tangent hidden in there like AIM or any of the other scary things that people like to payload in their software these days.
4. This is so UNBELIEVABLY laggy.

I was underwhelmed until I caught up with Eric at SXSW. After hearing him go on at length about how cool it was I was committed to giving it another try. I also sat in on the Linden Labs panel at SXSW that was interesting but very un-attended from my perspective given the current hype quotient.

After SXSW Eric gave me some guidance, showed me his island, etc. and I began to have the Aha moments that I was missing. I quickly found myself very excited by the potential of what is contained within the platform and structure of Second Life. I think I was/am most impressed by the blending of reality and virtual world. I found myself watching video clips of things that I could easily see on the web but had never bothered to but because it was in Second Life I was glued to it. You could quickly see the inter-relation of RSS, podcasting, videoblogging etc.

Simply put, I am blown away by Second Life. It is an amazing framework for the blending of cyber and real that was contained within Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash. It is the Metaverse. There is an amazing kernel of something profound and powerful that clearly has big impact potential. I am not sure that a wandering user will just happen in and get in the groove without the mentorship of a more seasoned user like Eric. But if someone is willing to take the time and come up to speed, it is something that you become a disciple of. I found myself talking excitedly about it to some of the super geeks who work with me/hang out with us.

The down side is that it is a time sink, which is something that I don't have much of currently. Back in my high school days of Dungeon Masterdom, I would have dropped everything and would have become a Second Life addict. Alas that is not in the cards for me. Maybe one of these nights when everyone else is asleep I can start to put the pieces in place to begin building my underwater house. Maybe. I signed up for a year so there will certainly be at the minimum some very fascinated lurking for months to come. It will be interesting to watch it unfold.

Rabble on MetroPCS

Today we announced the availability of Rabble on MetroPCS in a press release here.

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.