Rhymes with Cars

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Who really cares about newspapers?

Final Edition from Matthew Roberts on Vimeo. Seriously. So the Rocky Mountain News, Denver's daily paper recently shut down. There has been a minor media storm recently around the idea of some large, stoic newspapers hitting financial hard times. It seems like it is only a matter of time before the SF Chronicle, the NYTimes or the Chicago Tribune is holding it's hand out for a bail out, hoping not to meet the fate of the Rocky Mountain News. A billion here, a billion there, why not save them. It's like super-sizing for a quarter. But come on, news papers? First, lets start with model - delivering news to your door step several hours after it happens. It isn't news by that point any longer, it's olds. When the plane crashed in the Hudson, Twitter & Flickr were the news, not the SF Chronicle. By the next morning, when the paper came out, everything to be known about the crash was already known. It wasn't like they were breaking some major story. Second, how many tons of paper or thrown into landfills each day. I'd love to see the study on this, but let's say that the Chronicle prints 1 million papers a day at a pound a piece (maybe a bit more on Sunday). You can do the math, but if you extrapolate that same number through the 50 largest cities in the US alone, you get pretty close to 1 billion pounds of paper being thrown away each month. That is a lot of dead trees and a lot of waste. Journalism isn't dead. In fact, I'd say that by looking at the Technorati numbers, that journalism is in more demand than ever. I don't believe that print media is even close to dead. But the idea of delivering daily content, in a manner that is wasteful and dated is just plain stupid business. Businesses come and businesses go. It is the beautiful part of capitalism. Got a great idea? Is there a market demand? Know how to execute on it? You might have a successful business. But if there is no demand (daily newspapers) or you can't execute (US automotive industry) then your business should go away. Don't bemoan the fact, simply adjust and thrive. And yes, I will miss spending Sunday's doing the NY Times cross word puzzle with my wife, but I suspect someone will build a social crossword puzzle that we can do together by that point.

Tagged Internet Mobile & Technology chicago tribune flickr new york times plane crash hudson rocky mountain news san francisco chronicle twiter

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Yes It Can

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post about how social media will make the world a better place . The past Tuesday, I think that this point was proven to the world as a junior senator from Illinois was elected the President of the United States. Much has been written about the way that, over the past 2 years the Obama campaign, has leveraged everything from YouTube to Facebook to MySpace to Flickr to Twitter in order to convey a consistent message and increasingly gather support for his bid for President. By the end of September, while the McCain camapaign seemed to be making a presence in these new fangled interweb thingies, the Obama campagin was moving full throttle, like Katamari Damacy , gathering up more and more supporters, $5 at a time, with a message of hope and change. In the end, Obama had out raised McCain by over 2 times. But more importantly than the money raised was the way that Obama reached out so frequently and was so transparent and so consistent with his message. When I look at the stats of their respective social media sites, it is clear that Obama was far ahead in having a medium that allowed him to communicate asynchronously with his supporters.

Unlike politics over the past 12,000 years, another unique component of the Obama campaign was the level of transparency and the interest in reaching out to get the opinion of his constituents never before seen. Obama and staff sent out regular missives, sometimes to the point of being spammy, to all willing to receive them. These messages were fairly consistent - this is where I will be, this is what we are working on, this is why, please make a donation. After 8 years of secrecy, this is just another one of things that Obama recognized that people wanted, a level of transparency in their government. Sounds simple doesn't it? The past 4 days, since Obama's election have been no less interesting in terms of the usage of social media. The day immediately following the election, the Obama administration (that sounds great) launched Change.gov , a site maintaining that level of transparency. The site keeps all of the public up to speed with what is going on with the administration and has even asked the public for ideas and job applicants. Of course, all of this information has been available on some hard to navigate site. What Change.gov does is make it easy to find and easy to communicate. This past week also saw a lot of Al Gore . He supposedly signed up for Twitter . He was on DiggDialog and make the closing talk at the Web 2.0 Summit . All amazing stuff. As I mentioned in my previous post, I believe that people want to do what is best for the community and do what is best for the environment. The election of Barack Obama shows that social media can really work to make a tremendous change. We now have the soon to be President of the US that fully embraces social media as well as the person most outspoken for climate change both building armies of people willing to listen, spread and modify their lives based on their message. It is a great time to be alive and to be part of this happening.

Tagged Barack Obama Social Networking Sports facebook flickr john mccain katamari damacy social media twitter web 2.0 youtube

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Dear Mom and Dad: Welcome to Friend Feed

Dear Mom & Dad, Comparatively, I don't live a crazy life. I'm fairly passive and things aren't too exciting, but I know that you love keeping up with my life. Work, kids, house, dog, etc. Like a lot of the kids these days, I'm doing all sorts of things on the interwebs. Blogging, taking pictures, making videos, sharing all sorts of stuff that I find interesting. Things move pretty fast. Sadly, neither of you use IM. I've tried to explain RSS on numerous occasions, but let's face it, most people in my industry can't explain it to their folks, so let's skip that one. And Twitter, I might as well try explaining things in Klingon. So what to do? My friend Alan and I were talking about creating a service that would allow you to follow just one person in Twitter. Just to keep our parents up to speed with what we are doing. Clever, but kind of dull, especially as your other kids start to realize that the interwebs are a series of tubes and post their own missives. But I've been using FriendFeed for a while. As a parent, this should be super fantastic cool for you. Kind of a one stop Scott shop. Want to know what I'm up to? Look for my Twitter feed. Want to see pictures of the wedding I was at this past weekend (or of the kids), look at my Flickr Feed. Want to see my latest blog post, that is fed into FriendFeed to. That article that I mentioned from the NYTImes? Like Prego, it's in there. Now it's all available in FriendFeed. So check it out. I even took the liberty to sign you up for the service and subscribe to my feed. Once in while check it out. Total strangers know what I'm up to, now you can too. Love, Scott PS - yes I realize the irony of the odds of you reading this on my site.

Tagged Social Networking flickr friendfeed prego twitter

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Flickr's Embeddable Slide Shows

Congratulations to my friends over at Flickr for launching embeddable slide shows. This is really very cool. Here is a slide show from when we built our house. You can read more about the process here.

Tagged & Others GOOG MSFT YHOO building castles embeddable slide show flickr scotts house

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Flickr Video Goes Live

One of the last projects that I was working on prior to leaving Yahoo was laying out the support guidelines for Flickr Video.

I’m really happy to see that the team launched Flickr Video tonight. Like everything that the Flickr team does, this product is really nicely done.

Congratulations to the entire team!!!

Here is the link to my first video.

Tagged & Others GOOG MSFT YHOO agnes bulldog flickr flickr video yahoo

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Flickr Turns 4

Had an awesome time last night at the Flickr Turns 4 party. It was great to see some old friends and meet some new ones. Photos from the evening are here.

Tagged & Others GOOG MSFT YHOO flickr flickr turns 4

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Photojojo - Your Personal Time Machine

Heather's recent post on the Flickr blog highlighted a service called Photojojo. Essentially, it is a time capsule for your Flickr photos. Sign up for it and it automagically sends you a couple of photos from a year ago. It is pretty sweet. Today, I got two pictures from when we were designing our house. I nice reminder.

Tagged & Others GOOG MSFT YHOO flickr photojojo

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YHOO + MSFT: Did You Hear?

I've been thinking about MSFT & YHOO ever since Steve Souders went to Google about a month ago. Not so much in regards to an acquisition, but for what MSFT did to Borland during my first year there back in 1996 (I'm old). If you aren't familiar with the history, during the battles between Visual Basic (MSFT) and Delphi (Borland), MSFT recruited away 30 members of the Delphi development team, including Paul Gross and Anders Hejlsberg, essentially killing Delphi and with it, Borland. MSFT threw obscene amounts of money at the Borland Delphi team. Literally, tens of millions of dollars. Why wouldn't MSFT & GOOG do the same thing? Why not just identify a few dozen of the key people within the company, throw a ton of money at them and kill YHOO from the inside? Facebook did it to the west coast sales team a few years ago. Why not keep that going? It would be cheaper than doing an acquisition. Then I started thinking about the old Bill Gates spam that came out in the early days. Remember that? If you forwarded an email, Bill Gates would give you a few dollars for each person you sent it to because he was tracking some new email service? For $45 billion, MSFT just paid about $55 per user for YHOO's 800 million users. MSFT may have been able to extend an offer to pay key users $100 to migrate their usage to MSN and generate some pre-defined number of page views. They would have still paid out a bunch of money, but it would have been far less than the $45B that they are paying for YHOO and they would have killed YHOO, possibly making them more intimidating to GOOG (maybe). It also would have gotten users on MSN faster than the integration will happen. Alas, Ballmer didn't call me for guidance and selfishly announced the acquisition before I could offer my two cents. Two of the more perfect metaphors that I've heard are 'two elephants mating' (Paul Kedrosky) and 'Tying the Titanic to the iceberg' (Andy Baio). The problem that YHOO has faced, with few exceptions (Flickr, MyBlogLog, Upcoming), for at least a couple of years is that YHOO needs to pander to the lowest common denominator. YHOO needs to make 800 million people come back to their pages on a regular basis. Not an easy task, but it is hard to release services that are unique and innovative that 800 million people will adopt (Twitter is awesome, but only has 800K users). In other words, YHOO has become the Wal-Mart of the internet. There is nothing wrong with being Wal-Mart mind you. Wal-Mart is a big, consistently profitable company, but don't expect the next big thing to come out of it. The company will be too conservative or too slow. In the end, the MSFT acquisition of YHOO will go through. The integration of 3 different ad plaforms (YHOO, RightMedia & MSN) will take a really long time. This will frustrate advertisers who will migrate to GOOG (for contextual) and Facebook (for display). The really good people within YHOO (the people they should have targeted in the first place), will get frustrated with the stock price, the direction of the integration and the idea of working for 'the man'. If there is a negative impact for my friends, I'll be bummed. They are smart, they will land on their feet. I'll be more disappointed if the YHOO services that are really interesting, like Flickr, like MyBlogLog, like the stuff coming out of Brickhouse, gets mitigated to the back burner in favor of less exciting services that pander to the masses.

Tagged & Others GOOG MSFT Microsoft YHOO acquisition brickhouse flickr google mybloglog upcoming wal-mart yahoo

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Flickr Stats, Uploadr 3.0, & Y! Shortcuts

It was one of those cool days at Yahoo. 3 very slick, unique to Yahoo products were released today.� I was at Flickr for 2 of them. The first, Flickr stats, allows Flickr pro members to get a better understanding of how many views a photo gets, how often and what drove users to see that image. It is cool to see how people are getting to your images. Ideally, it will help people protect themselves from the creepy factor. For me, I found out that one of my photos is in Wikimedia Commons. I was pretty stoked about that. The second thing that was released was Flickr Uploadr 3.0. I haven't played with it yet, but the team says it is awesome for a number of reasons including being able to do mass edits of titles, tags & descriptions. I have it installed, I just don't have any photos to upload at the moment. Finally, there has been much fanfare about the Yahoo Shortcuts plugin for Wordpress. This little gizmo is excellent for doing blog posts. Ian Kennedy does it much more justice than I ever could. It is actually pretty fun to have it count the number of potential shortcuts that it finds for you. Like the old days of email.

Tagged & Others GOOG MSFT Y!_Shortcuts YHOO flickr uploadr wikimedia wordpres yahoo

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Rock Band

I got my first taste of Rock Band today at Flickr. It is pretty sweet. The foot print and the fact that it doesn't work on Wii pretty much eliminates it from my house. Never the less, it was fun to play up here. The best part about it, as you see from the picture, is the crowd that gathers around when a band is playing. This, I believe, was a present to the Flickr team for launching two amazingly cool new features today Stats & Uploadr 3.0. More about that later tonight.

Tagged Politics & News Pop Culture flickr guitar_hero rock_band wii

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