I talked to Chris Heuer from Brainjams.org about the very interesting work he’s doing with organizing “unconferences.” I didn’t know what a barcamp was before today (an admission that drew gasps from some of the hipper Gnomedex attendees) but it’s a cool concept. A barcamp is basically a conference that’s organized on the fly. Everyone has to contribute but no one gets to run the event. Kind of a physical blogosphere, really.

The concept reminds me a little of birds-of-a-feather sessions that have been part of user conferences for many years. People basically suggest topics on a white board and then self-organize the discussion. Barcamps are longer – typically one or two days – and more intense. There’s also a post-event conversation that continues online that BOF sessions rarely have. It’s very Web 2.0.

Brainjams is about to organize a multi-city barcamp tour. If they come to town, I’m definitely going to try it.

Categories: blog_culture, social_media, Gnomedex

Sen. John Edwards was the keynote speaker at Gnomedex in Seattle today and he gets my vote just for being here today. Gnomedex is a hard-core geek audience, very passionate about social media but with a bit of the smugness that unfortunately characterizes serious techies.

Edwards handled himself superbly, in my view. While his talk didn’t break any new ground (what political speech ever does?), he made it clear that the ideal of engaging with an audience through conversations rather than lectures was critical to the evolution of the political process.

“The changes that you are creating have the potential to literally change our democracy and get people engaged in a more serious way than they ever have before,” he said. “Instead of having leaders speak at people, there’s the potential for a meaningful dialog that just hasn’t existed before.”

Edwards’ OneAmerica Committee is using blogs and podcasts to communicate with constituencies and gather input. Prompted to install a vlogger on his campaign bus to write about the day-to-day activities of the campaign, he called the suggestion a “great idea.” The only time he flinched is when someone suggested his campaign start a wiki. The glazed look in the senator’s eyes showed that he had no idea what the questioner was talking about. But who can blame him?

On an issue near and dear to the audience, Edwards made it clear he comes down squarely in favor of net neutrality. “We need net neutrality,” he said. “I’m a very strong supporter of it.”

I thought his most interesting observation was on the tendency of politicians to fall into obfuscation and vagueness. “It’s very hard to do if you’re in an environment where there are reporters asking you questions,” he said. “It’s a very fast and intense situation and you have to think quickly. It’s hard in that environment to just be normal. I try to retrain myself to speak honestly in that situation but it’s hard even for me.”

He gave the impression that as a candidate, though, he’ll try not to mince words. “If the Democratic party is going to lead this country, we’ve got to show a little backbone,” he said. “Why can’t our party say we are for universal health care? Instead, we say we’re going to try to make health care more affordable. Those are weasel words that politicians use when they don’t want to say something.”

Someone near me criticized Edwards for talking too much and listening too little, but I was just impressed that he was here at all. I tried to imagine George W. voluntarily engaging with an audience of serious geeks and I just can’t see it. It would be horribly embarrassing for him. Edwards may not speak the language, but he understands the importance of the conversation. That, in itself, sets him apart from his opponents.

Categories: influence, Gnomedex

Technorati has an interesting chart in its “State of the Blogosphere” report. The percentage of posts in English has declined dramatically in the last year, from 44% to 31% of overall posts. This isn’t because the English-speaking population is falling but because the blogosphere is rapidly going global. A larger percentage of blog activity is in Japanese than in English.

Also, the number one blog on the Technorati 100 list is now a Chinese blog written by Xu Jing Lei.

Categories: blog_culture, research

Christina Kerley has an interview with me on her CK’s Blog marketing site. It was fun working on this. It gave me a chance to organize some thoughts and Christina is a delight to work with. She’s going to have a bunch of future interviews with bloggers and other social media players in coming months, so add CK’s Blog to your RSS feed!

Categories: social media, marketing

Media Post says the The Boston Globe is merging its print and online editorial groups in a move that “is believed to be…at the behest of Times Co. senior executives who are dissatisfied with the overall performance of the Times Co.’s New England operations, which are the worst-performing of the Times Co.’s regional divisions. In a May revenue report from the Times Co., its New England operation posted an 8 percent drop in ad revenue compared to the same month in 2005.”

The consumer Internet has been around for 12 years. It seems surprising that it took a progressive paper like the Globe so long to make such a seemingly obvious shift.

Fortune magazine reports today that Warren Buffett is giving away most of his fortune to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Last week I posted an extended blog entry about Bill Gates and remarked that, “Bill Gates intends to spend the next 30 years giving away $50 billion. I have no doubt that he will bring his remarkable critical thinking and intelligence to the process and that the world will be a better place for his philanthropy.”

It’s nice to see that a respected investor like Warren Buffett agrees! 🙂

Christina Kerley has an interview with Mike Kaltschnee, the blogger who writes HackingNetflix that’s well worth reading if you’re a marketer. It will give you some great insight into how clueless some marketers can be and I am referring to the marketers at Blockbuster.

HackingNetflix is a great example of an enthusiast site. Kaltschnee started it because he’s a movie buff and he was really excited by the DVD-by-mail business and Netflix‘s in particular. In the process of writing about his passion, he’s become one of the leading influencers in that market. He now writes about all the DVD-by-mail firms, not just Netflix. And he’s got 3,000 – 7,000 readers a day.

HackingNetflix covers everything from bugs on the Netflix site to rumors about competitors and new products to new promotional materials to information about Netflix’ stock price. He told Kerley that that about half the stories he posts come from readers and comments.

So here’s what floored me about the interview. Mike Kaltschnee has probably got his ear closer to the ground than anyone in the planet on the DVD-by-mail industry. And Blockbuster won’t work with him!

Can you believe that? Here’s Blockbuster, whose stock is trading at an all-time low and who has filed antitrust claims against Netflix, refusing to interact with an independent source who can most help them understand their biggest competitor, not to mention the rest of the market. And they won’t even acknowledge his existence.

It’s hard to chalk this up to arrogance on Blockbuster’s part because the company doesn’t have much be arrogant about. It has to be cluelessness. Someone in Blockbuster’s PR organization needs a dope slap. Or a pink slip.

Netflix, by the way, loves the site and has been all over it, Kaltschnee said.

Blockbuster is missing a huge opportunity by not working with HackingNetflix. If you’re a marketer, there’s probably a Mike Kaltschnee in your market. That person is a resource to you, not an annoyance or an eneny.

———————————————-
Update 6/26/06

Here’s an update to this commentary.

I e-mailed Blockbuster’s PR department about Mike Kaltschnee’s comments and received a prompt reply. Blockbuster’s responses are in bold. Specific addresses have been changed for confidentiality purposes.

1. Is Blockbuster media relations aware of the site HackingNetflix? Yes

2. Are you planning to engage with the author of this site or are youchoosing not to pay attention to it for now? To our knowledge, we have never been contacted by this site. We respond to reporters on a regular basis and are available 24/7 at 21X-85X-X190, or online at xxxx@blockbuster.com

3. Does Blockbuster’s media relations have a policy on communicating withbloggers as part of your media plan? If so, may I know what the policy is,please? We are communicating to the media on a regular basis. There is no policy one way or the other re: bloggers.

4. Do you have any comment on Mr. Kaltshnee’s statement that “I triedseveral times to reach Blockbuster, and finally had one exchange with the PRpeople, but subsequent e-mails went unanswered.” We encourage Mr.Kaltshnee to contact us at 21X-85X-X190 or at xxxx@blockbuster.com.

I’m starting to write my book, The New Influencers, and I’ll occasionally post notes and chapters for your perusal and comment. This is for a chapter on measuring influence:

Nielsen BuzzMetrics monitors 30 million blogs yielding 500,000 to 1 million posts a day. The service provides marketers with insight into what’s being discussed in the blogosphere, as well as what’s being said about their products. Links are the best indication of a blog’s influence, says Natalie Glance, Ph.D, a senior research scientist. “Readership is a good proxy for influence,” she says. “The more readers a person has, the greater their reach and the more likely they are to influence somebody in mainstream media and reach beyond the blogosphere.”

Nielsen mainly looks at links. It crawls the blogosphere daily for new posts and harvests links to other blogs. Proprietary technology separates blog posts from, say, newspaper articles, and filter out disruptions like spam blogs and link farms.

Not all links are treated the same. Blogroll links, for example, aren’t counted because they’re persistent and most bloggers don’t scour their blogrolls every day. The correlation between links and readership is elusive but measurable. To establish the relationship, Nielsen BuzzMetrics found sites that list traffic meters and then correlated link activity to those sites. The truth: the more active links a site has, the more traffic it gets.

While links are important indicators of influence, they can be situational, Glance says. Entertainment and celebrity sites, for example, don’t generate much cross-linking activity, while tech sites are notable for having a copious number of links. That’s where comments are figured into the equation. Sites that don’t generate many links often spark a lot of comment activity. Gadget blogs have a lot of both.

Influence in different markets is, therefore, different. Link counts are relative to the overall link activity in a market. In other words, a site that doesn’t generate links or comments may still be influential if its competitors don’t either. That also factors into the BuzzMetrics equation.

Glance acknowledges that influence measurement in the blogosphere is still primitive, and Nielsen BuzzMetrics, like other measurement firms, is refining its craft. One idea is to categorize blogs by topic and measure their metrics against each other on the assumption that overall activity is relative to the topic being discussed. Another is to weight different blogs differently, so that a link from an A-list blog is assigned more importance than one from a lesser-known outlet. Mainstream media is also not currently figured into the equation.. The service can measures links from blogs to newspaper articles, but not the reverse.

Two things are clear, Glance says. One is that the blogosphere be a very different place without mainstream media. “There’s more linking to mainstream media in the blogosphere than there is to other blogs,” Glance says. Mainstream media is the principal source of information upon which bloggers comment. Another truism is that blogs about sex, movie stars and Parris Hilton get a disproportionate amount of traffic. “The most popular stories in the blogosphere aren’t necessarily the most important ones,” she says.

Nielsen BuzzMetrics’ BlogPulse is an excellent window on the blogosphere with a lot of interesting metrics and search tools. If you’re a Technorati fan, check it out because you will find new and interesting tools there.

I had the good fortune to interview Bill Gates four or five times during my years in the computer press. I was even fortunate enough to spend two days and nights at his summer home, along with a small group of journalists. I got to know him well enough that he greeted me by name in subsequent years. While I have never been close to Bill Gates, I developed enough of an acquaintance and followed his career closely enough to develop a perspective on how he works.

It was no surprise this past week to learn that Gates is relinquishing his role in the active management of Microsoft and turning his attention to philanthropy. He remains chairman, but turns over the Chief Software Architect role to Ray Ozzie – one of the few people who has the intellect and technical vision to match Gates’ – and Steve Ballmer, who has been running the company day-to-day for the last six years. Gates has been withdrawing from an active role in Microsoft since 2000, when he gave up the CEO role. But he has also stated publicly in the past that he intended at some point to turn his attention to giving away the huge fortune he amassed.

I suspect there was some logic to his decision to leave now. He has run Microsoft for 30 years. At age 50, he may see himself as having about 30 productive years left and so, halfway through his adult life, he’s turned from creating wealth to distributing it. He leaves the day-to-day role with class and dignity, which also comes as no surprise. For all the terrible things that have been said about Bill Gates over the years, he is a class act.

I have always resisted the temptation to oversimplify my opinion of Microsoft. I have written many editorials and opinions about the company over the years, probably about half positive and half negative. It is a complex company run by a complex man. It has done many great things and some not-so-great things. To characterize Microsoft as simply good or bad is unfair to the company and to Gates. This is a company that exemplifies what’s good and bad about the industry in which it operates.

Gates undoubtedly has one of the finest business minds of the twentieth century. He pulled off what I regard as the greatest business coup of my lifetime, upsetting and nearly ruining IBM in the process of stealing its market away. Some people would say that Gates was deceptive in end-running IBM in 1991, but I think it’s more a matter of the people at IBM at the time being too out-of-touch to see what was happening. Gates saw his opportunity and he went for it. He understood the dynamics of the computer industry as few people did. He knew that a company with a 40% market share in operating systems could very quickly go to 90% share. His success at turning the tables on IBM – whose dominance of the industry prior to 1990 was almost total – is a story that people will be talking about 100 years from now.

Microsoft has always been a study in contrasts. It is a company that is capable of great arrogance but also surprising humility. Unlike many arrogant companies, it keeps plugging away at tasks and markets until it figures out how to do something right. It is not afraid of falling back and starting over. It takes a long-term view of many of its initiatives, which is remarkable given the constant pressure from investors for a quick return. Yet it has managed to reward investors with a run of almost 20 years of steadily increasing profits, a great achievement. Gates’ Microsoft was so profitable, in fact, that it eventually had to give back billions of dollars to shareholders because it simply had run out of ways to invest the money. Can you think of any other company that has done that?

Critics will argue that much of that money was made on the back of a monopoly and they’re right. However, that monopoly was built, by and large, because Gates’ Microsoft convinced a whole lot of people to pay money for Windows. Microsoft didn’t buy its way to the top; it produced a product that a lot of people wanted. Windows may not have been the most technically elegant product in its class, but it was the one people chose.

It’s true that Microsoft did engage in some unethical and illegal practices in pressuring its business partners to adopt Windows. However, I think Windows would have been a big winner either way. The company simply didn’t know where to stop, and that is one of its character flaws. Microsoft has never been satisfied with just winning; it needs to stomp its rivals into jelly. Under Steve Ballmer, that attitude seems to have mellowed somewhat, but the reality is that Microsoft has to live with a legacy of having shown its opponents no mercy. It will take years to change that image, if Microsoft even wants to change it.

Microsoft has drawn much criticism for not being a nicer company. But again, I think Bill Gates understood the past and was determined not to repeat it. The history of the computer industry is littered with nice guys who couldn’t compete. Ken Olsen, An Wang and Edson DeCastro were all nice people. And look what happened to DEC, Wang and Data General.

I suspect it’s difficult for Gates to leave Microsoft right now. The company is facing its most significant challenges in a decade. The natural inclination of a leader is to stay and fight, but Gates has made the decision to walk away and leave the fight to others. He’s sticking to his plan. That takes guts, and I think Gates deserves credit for that.

Bill Gates has never been a media darling. He doesn’t speak in sound bites and his thoughts and sentence structure can be maddeningly random at times. He also does something that interviewers hate: he challenges the question. I have come away several times from a Gates interview thinking I was an idiot to have ever posed certain questions in the first place. He is brilliant at applying logic to a thought process to make it sound like the choice is intuitively obvious. And he’s usually right.

I have rarely asked Bill Gates questions about things outside of his role at Microsoft, but about 10 years ago I did ask him about the money. I think he was worth about $10 billion at the time.

Why, I asked, was he so focused on making more money? He already had far more than he could ever spend. Shouldn’t he start giving it away? He responded that his time was best spent increasing the value of Microsoft stock because the higher the price of that stock climbed, the more money he would have to give away. That answer made eminent sense to me at the time and it has become more meaningful as the years have passed. Today, he’s worth five times as much much as when I asked that question.

Bill Gates intends to spend the next 30 years giving away $50 billion. I have no doubt that he will bring his remarkable critical thinking and intelligence to the process and that the world will be a better place for his philanthropy.

Below is a photo of Gates and group of journalists (I’m third from the left, in back; Gates and Ballmer are fifth and third from the right, respectively) from a meeting at his vacation home in 1996.