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Jeremiah and Shirley Owyang are about to celebrate their first anniversary at Lake Tahoe and I wasn't even invited to join them. The nerve. Congrats guys. It's been a pleasure getting to know you this year. You have both always felt like you have been married forever.
This photo from Techcrunch 7 was taken by Scott Beale/Laughing Squid.
Speaking ofTechcrunch, Jeremiah has posted a great sample Scrapblog page of the Techcrunch Party.
I was over at Sun Microsystems today to talk with a small group about blogging and social media. I'm always pleased when I walk into a room such as this one was and see our book on the table. In this case there was but a single copy--being used to prop up the projector. I guess we can argue that we support Sun's projections.
Our publisher, John Wiley & Sons, sent me four copies of the Japanese version of Naked Conversations which is apparently just out. This version, published by Nikkei Business Publications, Inc., Japan is interesting, to me, in that it is in paperback with cover around it reads from right to left and from top to bottom on each page.
The only words I can understand are the title and our names.
This is our first translation book. There will be at least two more and seeing it is yet another thrill in what has been a very thrilling path.
[NOTE--Photo added in response to Gabe's comment below. I'll post a professional shot when the publisher sends it.]
I haven't blogged for the past few days, mostly because I've been in the affluent Miami suburb of Coral Gables, a tropical-smelling, Caribbean-influenced place. I was there to work with a company and team I really enjoyed at Scrapblog, who is preparing to launch at DEMO about a month from now.
If you don't know the rules of Chris Shipley's DEMO, where 60-70 companies launch new products and technology twice annually, then you may not realize that the nondisclosure rules are tight prior to the event. Each company get precisely six minutes to present in front of 500-700 product enthusiasts. So I can't tell you much about the new version, but the name "Scrapblog" kind of gives it away. You can see a more primitive version of it here.
The new version is going to be a lot better.
But more than that I like the team and the feel. Carlos Garcia, CEO and founder, is co-founder of Nobox, a successful Puerto Rican interactive advertising agency. At a time when ad dollars are moving to insertion in dead trees to placements on sites, he's in fat city economically, or at least I surmise from our dinner conversations.
At precisely the moment in life when most people are settling in, Carlos is getting out. He's dipped into his own pockets, as well as those of his partners and is starting a Web 2.0 social media company. He is not doing this because he sees a market opportunity, so much as he just feels this is something he has to do.
Well, for the same reason, I've been hearing since Bill Joy and Andy Bechtolscheim told me they had developed workstations, when Sun Microsystems was my first startup--because they couldn't find the tools they wanted to work with so they developed their own and now they want to share them with friends.
In all my years of working with startups, this has been the best reason I've heard and nearly all the success stories I've touched upon over the years have had that component.
In this case, Carlos and his wife Margarita wanted to make scrapbooks of their first-born Lorenzo, now 2, and they wanted to share them online with friends and family. So did the friends and family.
I can't tell you exactly what happened there, without stepping on the NDA, but what I love is the way, Omar Ramos, his soft-spoken lead developer told me they had improved the photo framing feature. "My wife (Lydia) was in the other room shouting because it didn't work right. So I had to fix it to make her happy." It seems the caption balloons got improved in the same way after Margarita expressed the same frustrations with resizing them.
It was just a small project, but this company is playing in so many of the yards where I feel passion: photo-sharing, blogging, social media and startups. Geography prevents that I work with them day-to-day as I like to work with DEMO companies I coach, but I am certainly hoping these guys to well at the conference.
[Note--Photo added after I found it in the wrong folder.]
I had lunch today with Scoble. It was the first time in a very long time that the two of us could just sit down without some business at hand or without the need to discuss some upcoming gig.
For more than a year our lives have been closely intertwined. Co-authoring this book was in some ways very like a marriage. It took a while to find our rhythm. Each of us nearly walked out the door at one point or another. We learned the silliest little things about each other and a few personal things that not even Scoble would post. But, in time, we learned how to work and write and speak together in ways that became a joy for us and people have seemed to appreciate.
It's been a great relationship, but times are rapidly changing. We are both getting enmeshed in new "Post-Naked" projects. He's figuring out just what a vice president of video blogging is supposed to do, and I'm trying to figure out just what the hell a global neighborhood is and why anyone should care about it.
Our relationship just might drift like a boat whose rope has slipped the dock. We don't really know.
Yet, for two hours, we just talked and talked about all sorts of stuff. We had a really great time. And we know that we will both have been changed for the better from the experience we've shared.
Well, I've never been quite pummeled the way I have been for my broadside against Nick Carr's rant last week. Shelley Powers said the obvious about six times, but her using her blog like a graffiti board doesn't much bother me.
What does bother me is that so many people thought that I was over the top in what I wrote, that my post exuded bullshit and that I had revealed an arrogant and hypocritical streak by discouraging Nick to contribute to the blogosphere he holds in such contempt or so it seems to me.
As I noted in my earlier post, Nick rubs me the wrong way. This precedes blogging. It was developed when I read his book and it strengthened after I watched him on stage a few times. e rubs me the wrong way and its personal and when I responded to him, I did it with too much anger and too little logic.
I like blogging because it gives me license to insert subjectivity into my writing, and to show the passion which is very much part of me. But like TS Eliot wrote, "Only those who risk going to far, can really know how far one can go."
I went to far. In so doing, I damaged my credibility and lessened the strength of the argument I was trying to make.
Here is what I essentially object to: The blogosphere is not run by a small, elite group of bloggers with high rankings. They do not sit in a private room inside a castle set on top of the hill where it casts shadows on hungry peasant hordes. There is no moat and there is no gate. To claim it is so, seems to me to be the real fraud.
Does that mean, as several bloggers asserted, that I am claiming the blogosphere is flat? No. It does mean that I think there is more equal opportunity here in the blogosphere than in any other communications channel that exists or has ever existed.
. As this photo shows, castles do crumble and there's me on the outside of it.
One blogger commented that it was easy for me to say, because I had the help of Scoble to become an A-Lister. Well, Scoble himself certainly helped me on my path as did a great number of other people who had higher rankings than me, encouraged me and sent me link love when they thought I merited it. But it was I who took the initiative to approach Scoble through mutual friends. I flew to Seattle at my own expense, to persuade Scoble to write a book with me. The collaboration worked and a great number of people seem to think its a pretty good book.
Higher blog rankings was not what I was after, but they did result. In any case, the point is that I took initiative. I worked my ass off and for that reason, and for a limited time, I have the numerical rankings according to one pulse taker, whose accuracy I question, that says I am now an A-Lister. two years ago I was not n the top million and two years from now I may not be again.
One or more of you will replace me and the other hit tunes of this day. I assure you this will happen. One day Arrington and Scoble and the rest of us will wake up and discover that we are soooo yesterday, and that will be just fine with me. I will have had my run.
The blogosphere is not a flat world. It is an equal opportunity channel. The peasants at the gate can get in. They can push incumbents off the playing field. But if it were easy to do this, t would not be valued and coveted by so many people.
But that brings me to my second point. Bloggers should really, carefully think about whether or not they want to actually be so-called A-Listers. This may be a case of Groucho Marx Syndrome. "I want no part of any club that will let the likes of me into it."
There is great value in long and middle tail blog positions. What bloggers should want, or so it seems to me, is to be respected by audiences that are relevant to them. The entire blogosphere studio audience is not relevant to everyone.
This blog focuses on business people who want to learn about blogs. Those people are relevant because I want them to buy my book. I want them to contract me to speak or consult. Right now, that's a good place to be.
If I'm right however, that becomes less and less relevant and this blog will become as valuable and interesting as someone who posts about all the neat ways a business user can use a telephone.
I apologize for having gone over the top. I regret letting my temper overshadow the points I wanted to make. I hope this clarifies it somewhat.
No, the headline has nothing to do with swimsuit models. Our book is favorably mentioned in the Sports Illustrated, at least the online version. This is a particular honor for me, because as a kid I was usually among the last to be chosen for a pick up game in any sport. I have a hunch this is also true for Scoble.
So, for all those kids who got picked before we did. Who hit and jumped and blocked and caught and shot better than we did, to all of you who never got mentioned in Sports Illustrated, heh. Come uppance takes a long time.
Thanks for the birthday present, Sports Illustrated.
I went hiking at Point Reyes National Seashore [Flickr shots here] over the week end with my friend Richard Brandt. Richard, who is one of the best writers I know is blogging and writing a book about the history, business and strategy of Google. Richard is the past editor in chief of the late Upside magazine during its glory days and spent 14 years asking often acerbic questions of CEO as a BusinessWeek correspondent.
Richard's Richard is known for being hard-boiled and he sort of prides himself in it. The problem is this: He has been studying and researching Google for more than two years and he has come to the conclusion that Larry and Sergey really are good guys, really dedicated to doing no evil, really intending to remain loyal to everyday people who will continue to get free services.
He admits the company's fatal flaw may very well be it's paranoid adherence to secrecy. But in his blog, Richard often comes across, not as the hard-edged investigator, but as a wide-eyed champion of the company, defending t against less-informed cynics like me. I told Richard that he needs to either be tougher on the company or to carry pompoms with him when he's covering Google.
That led to a talk of tech community perceptions of Google. Richard thinks that Google has become hated, much as was Microsoft a few years back. I don't think that is the case. I thing there is great admiration for Google mixed with a rapidly rising suspicion level. The company's tight-lipped style makes me mot trust it and that seems to be the perspective of others.
Richard points out that my issue is secrecy and he asked me what the other issues are about Google. He would like case studies and anecdotes about Google that will had a more balanced perspective to his book.
Do you have one? Do you hate, dislike or mistrust Google? Tell me why or tell him why. But, keep in mind that Richard is looking for on-the-record factual information about evil, contemptible, malevolent actions by Google representatives. He is not looking to start an emotional forum.
I am an enormous fan of Malcolm Gladwell. It's not the enormous popularity of his two books, nor is it that he gets paid $40 K to spend 45 minutes talking from a stage. It's the quality of his story-telling, live, in books, in the New Yorker and I had thought it would be true in blogs as well.
Malcolm's last post was this one on June 21. Then he seems to have just tiptoed softly out of the blogosphere. It is not a bad read, neither are the sparse ledger of his previous entries. But they all read a bit more like magazine articles than blogs. He never got quite personal and conversational. Not really.
Because I am such a big fan of his, I was hoping for more. I anticipated reading early blogged drafts of his next book for example. Perhaps he'll come back and do this.
Perhaps not.
Right now, I would be boarding a Northwest jet to Tokyo where I would be meeting Rick, then on to Beijing. For reasons discussed, that did not happen, at least not at this time.
Instead, Paula and I jumped onto the Internet, found a dog friendly, lake view condo at Lake Tahoe and arrived with Brewster, our wonder dog, at about 1 this morning.
Tahoe, for us, is an old-familiar place. It is a pretty neat consolation prize that makes it easier to win the battle against gloom. This is what it looked like at dusk, the last time we were here:
Brewster, who has no concept of the word "gloom" woke us before 6 a.m. He know this place and his favorite activity is an early morning frolic at nearby Prosser Reservoir. This is what Brewster in the morning looked like today:
And this is what he looks like running at me full speed:
Thanks to all you well-wishers who left comments and email in sympathy of the aborted trip. While I appreciate an often expressed thought, I sincerely do not believe that the universe was trying to tell Rick and me anything. I just don't see the Universe as a micromanager, particularly on such a busy day as yesterday. I think we had an unfortunate confluence of bad data points that made it overwhelmingly clear that this trip at this time had too many risk factors. This is a much less poetic view, but it's how I see it.
I owe a lot of people email notifications and regrets. I need to get on the stick for some consulting opportunities that I turned down as recently as last week. But right now, I'm kicking back in the Ponderosa pines. All that stuff can wait until Monday.
For now, Paula, Brewster and I are going to enjoy this Consolation prize.
I think that when Rick Segal and I look back on this global trip, which begins the morning after next, we will remember leaving North America as our biggest challenge. In the past 10 days, we have changed our itinerary has changed four times. Each change, n turn has spawned at least dozens of emails to people we will meet, or will no longer meet, hotels where we had to cancel and where we will not stay and so on.
So yesterday, when Rick emailed me that the ticket was finally locked, that our itinerary was in place, I was more than a little relieved. However, we needed to get new tickets, that hopefully would be in synch to where we were headed. He gave me some careful instructions on what I would have to do and told me that he would reimburse change fees of approximately $100.
He urged me to not wait until Friday to take care of this."You don't want last minute surprises," he told me.
Little did I know, little did he know, just how significant those words would prove to be.
I arrive at San Francisco International Terminal, where, using the Delta 'round the world ticket, I leave Friday at 1:45 for Tokyo Narita Airport,hook up with Rick and and then fly on to Beijing. Except that there is no Delta Counter there, and I happen to be flying out on Northwest, a Delta affiliate. Northwest, of course, cannot cut a delta ticket.
So chuckling to myself that this 10 minute detour to the Delta counter in the next terminal would have made me a nervous wreck, had I waited until Friday. There is no traffic at the Delta counter and a smiling representative begins to process the new ticket. She asks me to check the itinerary. It's right on spot.
Then she asks me for my old ticket, and I stare blankly at her. Rick's directions had been very detailed. However, he had overlooked this detail, which of course should have been obvious to me, but it was not.
Heh. I live near the airport, and as I'm taking the 45 minute return drive, I'm really, really thankful that Rick knows about this stuff. I'm still thinking that when I approach the Delta ticket counter yet again where yet another nice woman takes my ticket and once again prints the itinerary, which she then again asks me to confirm that the itinerary is correct. It is. She asks me for my old ticket. I give t to her. Then she asks me for 11,084 Canadian Dollars. I offer he 100 USD.
A half hour goes buy. She speaks to someone somewhere. $113.76 is her next offer. I gladly seal this part of the deal.
She types a few keys and stares as blankly as I had when asked earlier for the old ticket. She calls over a couple more agents. They all stare at the screen, the same way a techies stares at a PC whose Windows is doing something weird. I wait for someone to say "Cool," but they just keep staring. They break huddle and someone taller, in a white shirt comes out. Clearly, this is the in-charge dude. They huddle. The white shirt tells me there is a problem in sequencing my ticket because there are so many legs to it and IT will need to get involved.
He suggests I go get a sandwich. It is 3 in the afternoon. I get a beer. 20 minutes later I return. The nice rep whom I had befriended, whom I had charmed, whom I had worked to end what has become an ideal smiles at me and says, "sorry, but I'm off duty. This is Gary, he'll help you from here. Gary looks like he had retired recently from an urban post office. He looked tired and like he'd rather be at home watching the Giants lose another one.
I watch a while as he spews ticket after ticket after ticket onto his counter. I sneak this photo of hw my world trip looks laying on an airline counter.
Gary suggests, that I go buy a book and have a seat in some chairs that are about 30 feet away. I tell him, there'd nothing I like in the nearby book kiosk. He suggests I try the Christian Science Reading Room. I decide not to point to my last name and take a seat, wondering if in fact, I may miss the flight on Friday after all.
I decide not to tell Rick about this adventure. I'm sure somehow, I had failed to do what he had directed to me. That was when Rick called me on the cell phone. He was calling from the Delta Airline Counter in Toronto where he was having a very similar adventure.
We make a bet on whether Canada or the US staffs will be able to solve our problems faster and I win by a good half hour after about 5 and a half hours. Before we complete it, I heed another of my travel buddy's warnings: Check each flight ticket carefully. Gary reads them and I cross checks against the itinerary. We find two missing legs. Without those tags, I would have been screwed once in Prague and then again leaving estonia for Dublin
My feeling of gratitude toward Rick, however, is short-lived. He is trying to reneg on the bet. He claims, I started earlier than he did. This is pretty lame, it seems to me, since we bet on who finished first, not who started first. I think you should all use the above link to go to his site and tell him to pay his bets.
We bloggers keep getting likened to a lynch mob. let's show this Segal thing how nasty we can get. Light those torches! Sharpen those wooden stakes!
There are two morals to this tale of woe:
(1) Always pick up international tickets at least one day early;
(2) Don't make bets with VCs. They are genetically programmed to rewrite the rules on handshake deals.,
I woke up this morning feeling downright sad. Actually it's been coming on for a few days, but without clients in my focus, I've allowed it to soak in. Here I am, three days from embarking on the dream trip--perhaps the most interesting professional thing I have ever done and what I'm feeling--at least this morning--is gloom.
I've been with Paula for the last 17 years. About 16 years ago we had a breakup that lasted about six months after each of us realized we really did belong together. Since that time, I have never been away from her for more than a week. Now I'll be gone for 33 nights. I've grown accustomed not just to her smile, but her love, but we've become essential to each other in so many ways. We are part of each other's habits.
Then there's this wonderful home, the yard and gardens; tug of rope with my dog Brewster and the trail of little nicks on my hands and arms from playing with my cat Kinko. It's not a bad life I lead here.
I will miss them all a great deal.
