Clint Sharp’s Blog an’ Vlog

So, if you hadn’t seen the news FireAnt was acquired by Sonic Mountain (Odeo).  You can read recaps of the news on two of my favorite blog networks, NewTeeVee (run by Om Malik), and Tech Crunch (by Mike Arrington).

 I came to be involved in FireAnt through my connections to Jay Dedman and Josh Kinberg.  We had some discussions at Vloggercon in July of 2005 which extended into the following months involving my helping them get FireAnt off the ground.  I had started a project I was calling MediaFeedr, which would poll RSS feeds, examine any links, and then develop a new RSS 2.0 feed with enclosures for downloading into FireAnt.  The theory was that you could put any feed into MediaFeedr and then come out with any linked content as enclosures.  In reality, it never really got out of testing, but the initial feedback was good and I was proud of the code and the idea.

 Jay and Josh were in need of a directory.  Josh had put together some rudimentary code to implement some server side components to tie in the Mac and PC versions of FireAnt, but while Josh is an excellent visionary and a good leader, he is by his own admission a pretty poor coder.  I took the best of what I had and the best of what Josh had developed and we developed a videoblogging directory and some really innovative server side features to go along with with the video aggregation clients.  We spent months developing it, and we released it to the public on January 24th of 2006 (initial TechCrunch coverage can be found here).  We were ironically directly competing with Odeo at the time for one of the best directories available on the web.  It was developed with AJAX technology which at the time was still fairly new and required a lot of hand coding of JavaScript, etc.

 I was incredibly proud of the work I had done, but even by that point it was becoming obvious that the things we had thought were important weren’t what the market felt was important.  YouTube had in the course of a year become huge, and flash-based web video was where the traffic and the money was at.  The idea of aggregating different forms of video (of which Flash was incredibly hard to play on a PC based client and for the most part no sites supported RSS 2.0 with media enclosures) was falling by the way-side.  After a successful launch but a limit in the amount of video content to be obtained through podcasting, I left in March of 2006 shortly before Katie was born to pursue other opportunities and to limit my workschedule to spend time with my newborn child.

What went wrong then?  I’ve had over a year to reflect on this, and I think I can boil it down to a few choice areas where we wrong:

• Too much focus on the business and not enough focus on the technology
  • We brought in BizDev people very early in the process, in fact before I even officially joined the company.
  • Our BizDev people were unsuccessful at selling the technology.  Simple fact is, they were opportunists who were looking to make a quick buck and really didn’t believe in the company other than they thought they had a gravy-train to ride on.  The early stages of the startup should focus on the technology first and the business second.
• Poor initial design of the business and ownership structure
  • The initial design of the business was a 5 way partnership between two visionaries, two developers and one business development guy.  First of all, equal partnerships never work.  There was no clear leader and far too many chiefs without enough Indians.  When I was brought in, the initial founders were reticent to give up more of their ownership structure since it was already fairly deluted as it was.
• We bet wrong
  • We bet people wanted offline content and simple aggregation of feeds across many websites across the Internet.  Fact was, people wanted one destination in their web browser to view content.  YouTube won, we lost.

 There were great people involved in the founding of the company, but there were just too many.  The next startup I do will have a clear leader, a core set of technology people, and we’ll worry about making money last.  There just isn’t enough of a small company to split it 7 ways.  It should be split three ways and then a quarter left over for the rest to come.  The development people, the ones doing the work to get the technology off the ground should come first.  I’m slightly bitter over the fact that I worked hundreds of hours and at the end of the whole story I ended up with virtually none of the company.  The technology I developed for them was critical to the initial success of the company and I felt from the beginning that even thought my work was highly valued, the ownership percentage was never ponied up.  This is probably why I left early and didn’t stick with the project.  I think had I have stuck with it and not run out of personal funds we probably could have been much more successful.  There were also numerous problems with the client development founders who were also having to work day jobs.  I was the best suited financially at that time due to my severance with Cingular to work for no money, and I was rewarded the least.

 While this may seem harsh to the people who were involved with the company, I want to point out that I feel no ill-will towards the people who I worked with.  Mistakes were made all around, and I have the highest respect for Josh, Jay, Daniel and Erik who were involved in the project during my tenure.  They are all excellent people, and I’d work with all of them again.  I only note these things largely for my own reference, and I point them out so that if I were to ever team up with these people again we can have an open and honest discussion of our mistakes so we don’t repeat them again.  This was a learning experience for all of us, and I hope that some time in the future I can find a way to work with these people again.

 I’d especially like to point out Josh’s effort.  Josh stuck with FireAnt from the beginning to the end.  Josh sacrificed far more than any of the rest of us, even delaying his wedding so that he could see this through to the end.  I consider Josh a close personal friend, and I’d jump at the chance to work with him again.  Josh is an excellent person of the highest moral caliber.  Josh has endured personal threats, personal hardship, and he has endured and completed this project while the rest of us moved on.  I have the utmost respect for the sacrifices he made, and I tip my hat to the Sonic Mountain team who more than the technology we developed got the best part of FireAnt when they got Josh.

 You can still see the technology I developed for FireAnt at getfireant.com.  Some of our more unscrupulous shareholders stole fireant.tv as part of a petty personal squabble, but at least it’s still available there.  To those of you shareholders who were involved in that, shame on you.  Being involved in a small company with no revenue is about sacrifice, dedication and a pursuit of developing your vision, not about cashing out.  Stealing money, lieing, and personal threats are no way to end a failed startup, and I hope you feel ashamed of your behavior.  You know who you are.

 Jay’s thoughts can be viewed here.  Josh’s thoughts can be viewed here.

Good post from Mark Cuban about the hypocrisy involved in having partially legalized gambling like we have in this country. Why is it legal some places and not others? Beats me. I ask the same question about why marijuana is illegal. More ramifications of a country founded by Puritans, and the case of marijuana, laws passed by racists (yes, I’m serious, look it up).

Tom has a good post over on his personal blog about marketing in the Web 2.0 age. Something we’re finding a lot of people are missing, especially in Arkansas, is how to integrate their web presence into their existing marketing strategies.

It’s especially fascinating to be bringing the web to people,especially skipping the last 10 years of the Internet, and trying to bring them up to what people are calling Web 2.0. People, even in Arkansas, are either going to get that the Internet is changing everything about the way they do business, from marketing to customer interaction, or go out of business. Tom’s a leading mind in this area, IMHO, right up with the best of them.

I like Steve Rubel. I like Robert Scoble too. Robert’s dead wrong on this one though. For some reason, bloggers seem to think that just because there’s more of us and anyone can contribute the conversation, that somehow everything has to change. Not so.

Perfect example, we just did a major release about 3 weeks ago of FireAnt. We spent a lot of time on the product. The directory was over 4 months in development. There were test sites available to the public about a month prior to release. We seeded the release out to trusted videobloggers and our users groups for the product to get feedback, but we asked all of them to remain quiet. They did. The reason? We wanted to give someone who had traction the exclusive to write about the new release such that we’d get a bit of a bang with our release instead of a gradual dull thud. That exclusive fell to Mike Arrington of TechCruch, and we were not disappointed. He got the exclusive, he was happy, his readers got the scoop the day it was released, and we got extended coverage in the blogosphere echo chamber because we gave a high-profile blogger the exclusive.

Steve groks it. I’m not sure why Chris and Robert seem to think everything has changed. I could have had the exclusive or given it to someone like my good friend Steve Garfield (whose readership/viewership is nothing to sneeze at), but why would I want to release something to my 200 readers and wait for it to maybe disseminate throughout the blogosphere when I can seed it to someone with a much larger and more influential readership? If we had given it to everyone all at once, we would have ended up with that dull thud I was talking about earlier. Somebody has to help control the noise, and a little bit of PR and marketing savvy can go a long way to doing that.

Mike gives the new FireAnt Directory the thumbs up, along with mentions for Blip.tv and MeFeedia.com. As the guy who’s spent the last 3 or 4 months slaving over that directory, I really appreciate the positive feedback. We’ve got so much more in the hopper for the directory that you’ll need to write another article just for all the cool social features we have coming up. Keep your eyes peeled, new stuff is coming every day!

Thanks Mike! A positive review coming from you means a lot.

A while back, I wrote about what I’m calling the Local Web. The Local Web, in my mind, is a group (an infinite number of groups are possible) which arrange their interconnectedness by sharing a geographical point of reference, traditionally Metropolitican Statistical Areas, or MSAs. The Local Web is already built in many of the larger cities, with directories and vertical search engines to allow you to search for stuff in major metropolitan areas, but a good percentage if not the majority of Americans live outside of a major metropolitan area. The connected netizens from those areas are being largely overlooked by current major initiatives to create localized web experiences.

I’m starting an experiment in a town that should be the perfect size. My hometown is Fort Smith, Arkansas, a town of about 80,000 with about a quarter million in the MSA. There are billions of dollars of business done every year here, and many companies here ship worldwide. However, for doing business in town, most people still reach for the phone book. The reason for this, of course, is because you can spend days Googling around for information about Fort Smith businesses without finding much but spam sites. No one in this town has made a concerted effort to make sure things are easily found on the web about businesses they’d like to do business with.

So, I’m starting an experiment. I’m going to organize a blogger meetup to start. I’ve already found several local bloggers and I’m going to find or create more. I’m going to organize them and attempt to get them to write about business and other activities (softball, church, whatever) they that they do locally and where they do them at. I’m going to try to incent people to create links from site to site across town and try to make information more easily indexable by the search engines so that when you search for something in the area you don’t end up at a spam site. We will be holding the meetings at Kirkham Systems of Fort Smith.

Once this is going strongly, I, along with the staff of Kirkham Systems are going to start showing the results to local businesses and convince them they should have a website with a blog and incent them to link to the people they’re doing business with and write about their experiences with it. The goal is to create an interconnected web of links focused on this geographical area, so that if you end up at Kirkham Systems website you’ll find annotated links about the people we do business with, and when you end up there you can find the people they do business with.

If I’m right, by the time I’m done, Google will be a far more interesting resource to find information about businesses, things and places in Fort Smith, Arkansas than any other resource, anywhere. This may seem boring to people who live on the coasts and can find a well designed and well organized website for even local businesses, but for the large portions of the country that have been ignored by businesses attempting to organize information for them on the web, I think this will be a large step forward. No one understands or cares about this because they haven’t been educated as to what it can mean for both their businesses, themselves and their community. My goal is to educate everyone here.

The Local Web is long overdue.

There’s some discussion going in on in the comments of my last post. Check it out, I think we might be in for an interesting discussion.

My friend Raymond is getting some attention for his love of OPML over on Dave Winer’s Scripting.com here and here. As is typical of format geeks, there’s a debate over on Raymond’s blog comments about why you’d use OPML over XHTML ordered and unordered lists. When are people going to realize that 99% of people don’t care? I’ve been involved in more format discussions than I care to remember, and in the end the reason RSS and OPML will become popular is because Dave Winer goes to the effort to develop tools rather than writing specifications and hoping someone will write tools for them. The format in the end doesn’t really matter much, it’s just a way to format data. There have been thousands over the years, and as long as everyone can read it, the rest is just syntax and semantics.

Josh and I were having a debate the other day as to whether using a pseudo-protocol like fireant:// was an acceptable solution for one-click subscribe in our aggregator. Most of the other aggregators are fighting over feed:// or some other specific file format (like iTunes pcast files). Why should we worry about all this when all we want is to enable easy one-click subscribe for people who already have our software? Josh’s concern is that the geeks will be upset over our use of a protocol that’s not really a protocol (of course, no need to remind people that feed:// isn’t a valid protocol either) instead of doing it through a file or some other method that’s more robust. Sorry, it works. The facilities are already in the OS and the browser to facilitate it, why not use it? Is it a hack? Yeah, so what? It works!

The same people who would be upset about us using fireant:// as a protocol are the ones who’d be upset that people are using OPML rather than XHTML formatted unordered and ordered lists. Hello? Who fucking cares. The user cares that it works! We spend far too much time debating the merits of one format over another and lot less time than we should making sure that software works for the end user. This is why Dave Winer continues to be a success in getting formats adopted, because unlike the Atom folks who have spent years making a format that’s the most robust and most well-documented, there isn’t a refrence implementation. Why is Microsoft Word the default format for exchanging documents and not OASIS? Because of the software people use. Why is RSS the preferred format for exchanging feed information? Because there was software that worked when the format was introduced that everyone could use as a reference implementation.

There something also to be said for simplicity. OPML and RSS are simple. Perhaps the specs are not complete and don’t cover all the use cases, but I can also code something up to work with them in a matter of hours. I investigated the Atom publishing protocol, and it would take me a couple days to do a pull implementation. By contrast, I have done a full Metaweblog implementation in a couple of hours.

Dave Winer can be an ass, but I give him credit where credit is due. The people who spend so much time complaining about him are excellent at complaining and not so good at getting things done. For that, I look to Dave.

Thanks to Rick Klau from FeedBurner, who answered my last post about problems with my stats in the comments.  Somehow I hosed my mod_rewrite rules and http://clintsharp.com/feed/ was no longer redirecting to http://feeds.feedburner.com/clintsharp.  Thanks for pointing me in the right direction, Rick.

I’m back from California, which of course i neglected to post to the blog to begin with.  We‘re really kicking ass now.  I didn’t really get to see much of the Bay Area, but it looks like I could be living there part-time in the next few months.  We had some really great meetings while down there.  I can’t wait until I can announce what came out of them.  Stay tuned. 

I really wanted a chance to hook up with Schlomo and Eric Rice, but there was no time.  Sorry guys, maybe next time.

I’m not a huge stats hound, in fact I only check them once a month.  However, imagine my surprise when I logged into my FeedBurner account and saw my subscribers drop from over 100 to around 24.  Something is seriously fucked up.  I know some of the guys over there, like Rick Klau who I met at Gnomedex, perhaps I should email them.  I have over 21 subscribers in Bloglines alone which are currently being shown as 1 subscriber in my Readership stats.  Seems to have happened on October 20th.  Oh well, I know you’re still reading.

Mark Cuban, Tim Bray, and Chris Pirillo all chime in this weekend about the Google Blogspot splog problem. It’s hitting me as well. Thankfully, they’re not hitting my vanity feeds, because an unknown blogger/vlogger/hacker isn’t worth writing about in splogs, but my hometown and soon to be again residence of Fort Smith, Arkansas, is getting hit mercilessly. I subscribe to a Technorati feed searching for “Fort Smith”, which should bring about about 4 or 5 legitimate posts a day. I’m now getting 20 to 30 splog entries daily. It’s ridiculous. Only 80,000 people live there, don’t they have better things to spam about? I hate to say this, because places like FreeVlog recommend them, but shouldn’t Technorati, Feedster, IceRocket, et. al. just exclude BlogSpot indefinitely until this problem is resolved? How does this factor into the Atom 1.0 API design? Is there facilities for captchas built into the protocol? This will make for an interesting next couple of weeks as this problem comes to a head.

I’ve added captchas (authentication images) to my comments now. If you can figure out what it says, the good news is you won’t be moderated anymore. The other good news is I can stop getting a bunch of non-sensical emails and moderating a bunch of stupid-ass spam comments. Argh.

Check out this post from Steve Gillmor on August 2nd (I know, I’m really behind on my reading):

Soon it will be September and a new budget year. Once more the Valley will turn back to flipping startups and serving fish and chips. But this time the deals will be with the new content kids on the block, and Firefox will rule the land. And I shall be editing the new Gillmor Gang video edition, brought to you in part by SkypeSight and InMediaWeTrust.

The Gillmor Gang video edition? I thought I’d die before I saw the day, but if I can make it till next year I might see it (lest we forget that Gillmor and his gang have been known to be video poopooers in the past). Give me a call Steve, my number’s on this site, I’ll be happy to help. We’re always looking for more people on the bleeding edge with us.

God, I love living in the Greater Seattle area (don’t want to say I live there, lest the West-Siders pounce on me calling me a poser ). I invited Phillip Torrone of MAKE Magazine out to the Meet The Vloggers event at the Apple Store on August 6th for an interview for Clint on Tech. While there, Matt & Pete from LeanBackVids and VlogMap.org showed Ander’s Wonderful World video, which he made with Google Earth and VlogMap.org data. It’s a great video, check it out. pt posted a link to this on the MAKE blog, and Scoble, via Daniel Nugent who obviously reads MAKE, posted a link to it on his blog. All this because of a simple email to pt asking if he’d like to show up. I love the fact I live in an area with so many successful new media players. Robert, I think you should be my next interview on “Clint on Tech.” Whatcha think, have some time in the next few weeks?

I’m hoping to stay in this area come the end of the year. However, right now the leading contender in the job market (the firmest thing coming) is in Denver. Anyone know what the blogging/vlogging community is like in Denver? Vlogging isn’t nearly as promising as it is here, but I’m a bit ignorant about the blogging community there. I’m not sure I’m in a position to start another company again, that seems like it would be better attempted in another 5 years or so, but I’d be happy to join an early age startup. I’m talking to a couple, but nothing’s firm yet. Anyone in Seattle looking for a New Media Guy & Technologist?

Update:

I love PubSub, Technorati, etc. I posted this less than two hours ago, and Robert’s already responded (check the comments). It’s better than email, really. I’m much more likely to respond to my name mentioned in my vanity feeds than my email, but that might be a volume thing.

Om Malik (who actually responded to my A-Listers slow down post yesterday), has missed the point of releasing products like DTV, which was released yesterday for the Mac. I’m continually amazed at bloggers, who are New Media plays, who are unable to understand the progression of video in the world of New Media and user generated content. If you were to come here and watch my back catalog of videos, you’d rightfully talk about what total shit it is. Honestly, unless you know me or you’re here to learn something from my “Clint on Tech” show, you’re not likely to find anything of value. Video diaries, which are the vast majority of vlogs being produced today, are not the future of user generated content, at least not content that’s for mass consumption. Themed content, including such illustrious genres as cooking shows, news shows, and technology shows are already here, and fiction content, which will entertain the masses, is coming.

User generated content is the long tail, which has been written about extensively. The appeal of user generated video content is the ability to generate content which exists solely in the long tail. With the barrier to entry at virtually nothing (a PC, camcorder and software can be had for as cheap as $700 or $800), the point is that the niche content that will never be produced by mass media now has an outlet. However, right now the community is just coming past the point where we’re getting over the idea that we can indeed put up whatever we want onto the Internet and people will watch it, and it’ll still be 6 months to a year before quality content with production values to rival cheap television production will be had. It’ll be another year or more after that before we can rival television for amount of quality content. Podcasting had the advantage of large amounts of out of work radio personalities, due to consolidation in radio from the likes of Clear Channel, and the talent, time and funding required to produce quality audio quality is significantly less than video. The talent is out there, but we’re still working to recruit it.

The irony in the entire situation is that in 1997 and 1998 (hell, even 2000) when blogs were just starting to attract good writers in droves, the vast majority of people would have looked at them and asked the same question they’re now asking about user generated video, “Who the hell would want to read (watch) this?” Without Radio Userland, Blogger, etc, it would have been impossible to enable the ease of publication and syndication necessary to give the bloggers, who are now accomplished writers, a platform to reach their audience. DTV, and other videoblog related items that are being released now with a dearth of content, are being released to provide the platform for publication and syndication that will be necessary to bring the droves of people into the video longtail.

Om is not alone here, Dave Winer, Steve Gillmor, and others have repeatedly poopooed video, when they not long ago were pioneering the same path. Why is it that bloggers, who were in the same position not 5 years ago, can’t seem to grasp the progression video is going to follow, when it’s so closely paralleled to the path blogging followed?

I know I know, don’t mention the A-List. I don’t care how you define it, but at least with my A-List, which includes such people as (not linking to them since most of them are on my sidebar over there and I don’t feel like typing out a dozen links) Jeff Jarvis, David Weinberger, Om Malik, Robert Scoble, Steve Rubel, etc, I wish they’d write less. Blasphemy! It really doesn’t have anything to do with the content, it more has to do with the fact that I’d like to keep up with these people but the volume is just too great, especially if you’re busy for a week or two. I need to learn to skim better.

Scoble’s taking a break. Good for him. No way I could keep up with his kind of volume, well unless I decided to read and send a lot less email from/to the Yahoo! Videoblogging Group. Make sure it stays fun, Robert. Hey, if you’re in town this weekend, come out to Meet the Vloggers. I’d really like to get a photo and some video of you at the Apple Store :).

John C. Dvorak in this recent column trashes the Creative Commons license, basically because he’s too damn dense to do any research or attempt to understand anything before writing a column.

First, let me address, are magazines stooping to this level these days to attract eyeballs? All I’ve seen from major publications recently is more and more controversy over journalists who are short on research and long on opinion. LinuxWorld’s editorial staff quit in May over a controversy regarding a reporting functionally stalking PJ from Groklaw. I’ve read too many poorly researched and biased articles from Rob Enderle to count, and John Dvorak, whom I used to trust as a source of authority in the industry, has basically turned into a crackpot who exists only to draw traffic to Ziff-Davis websites. Any reporter who cannot add value to the conversation and consistently gets his facts wrong should be fired.

To address points in Dvorak’s column:

Will someone explain to me the benefits of a trendy system developed by Professor Lawrence Lessig of Stanford? Dubbed Creative Commons, this system is some sort of secondary copyright license that, as far as I can tell, does absolutely nothing but threaten the already tenuous “fair use” provisos of existing copyright law. This is one of the dumbest initiatives ever put forth by the tech community. I mean seriously dumb. Eye-rolling dumb on the same scale as believing the Emperor is wearing fabulous new clothes.

I surely will, John. Creative Commons website says:

Creative Commons defines the spectrum of possibilities between full copyright — all rights reserved — and the public domain — no rights reserved. Our licenses help you keep your copyright while inviting certain uses of your work — a “some rights reserved” copyright.

Maybe this isn’t clear enough for you. Basically, it allows me to specify a wide range of rights I’m willing to give up to the public without giving away the ones that allow me to make money from my work. This means I can allow other people to remix my work, change it, modify it, etc, but they can’t just go throw it in their ad campaign w/o compensating me for it. It does not effect fair use (which BTW, isn’t law, it’s just common practice. Fair Use is hardly well-defined).

Creative Commons actually seems to be a dangerous system with almost zero benefits to the public, copyright holders, or those of us who would like a return to a shorter-length copyright law.

Creative Commons isn’t law, John, it’s a license. It exists as it does based on the current state of copyright law, and will be modified through time to make sure that it complies with current copyright law. If you want better law, I suggest voting for better representatives, but I don’t see how a license, no matter how widely used, affects that at all. I don’t think you did either, but it makes for a good sound-bite.

This is nonsense. Before Creative Commons I could always ask to reuse or mirror something. And that has not changed. And I could always use excerpts for commercial or noncommercial purposes. It’s called fair use. I can still do that, but Creative Commons seems to hint that with its license means that I cannot. At least not if I’m a commercial site and the noncommercial proviso is in effect. This is a bogus suggestion, because Creative Commons does not supersede the copyright laws. In fact, the suggestion is dangerous, because if someone were sued by the Creative Commons folks over normal fair use and Creative Commons won the suit, then we’d all pay the price, as fair use would be eroded further.

Total shit argument and you know it. It’s a god-damned license, not a piece of law. If you can do something under the law now the license can’t disallow that use. The non-commercial attributes are there to protect people who license their work under clauses that allow for redistribution from having their work used for commercial purposes without being compensated. It’s blatently obvious to me, and my wife who watched the video on their website understood in the less than 10 minutes that the video ran. Did you watch the video, John? It says to watch the video. I would think someone was well-read as you would take the time to do the proper research, but my instinct here tells me you didn’t. I mainly blame your editor though. I thought that was the advantage of the old-media system, with editors and a management structure behind every by-line? They’re supposed to keep drivel like this from being published right?

If you want to publish something commercially, in it’s whole form, which is the point anyways, you can contact the author and obtain permission, which might involve compensation. This is the same way as it’s always worked, it just means me, who’s not getting paid to write this, is basically free to use their work as I see fit as long as I’m not making a dime off of it. This is beautiful, because people can take my work, written, visual or audio, and make something new and exciting out of it for years to come. We’re pioneering the re-mix culture. My latest video will be an example of that, as I have started to use footage from the Prelinger Archives.

I’m just so sad right now at the state of the media. This kind of attention whoring is what will do them in. I guess they’re feeding right into the hands of the people who want to bring them down, but for me, it’s just sad. The alternatives aren’t up to the task of replacing mass media yet, and I don’t want to live in the blackhole that will be created as people like John C. Dvorak, and the editors who support him, are destroyed.

I wonder if Eric Rice is paying Chris Pirillo for this, but either way it’s fucking hysterical and a great advertisement for Audioblog. When you’ve got a funny idea, call up the fucking number and blog it. Awesome!

Update: I’m a dumbass and didn’t include a link to the post.