Why I write here instead of there
Posted: March 18, 2012 Filed under: Blogging Leave a comment »I often consider moving what limited writing I do today over to other services (Tumblr, Posterus (which just sold), etc), but I don’t. I’ve not given it much thought, other than I have this nagging fear that Dave Winer has articulated well in his last post:
Further, I am creating an archive of my writing, over many years. And if I scatter my writing all over the place, even if these services were part of the web, it would be against my interest to do that. Having it all in one place is value, to me at least.
Right now I’m using wordpress.com to publish the site, but up until about 6 months ago it was on my own servers. That’s merely for convenience. Wordpress gives me the opportunity to easily export everything from this site and import it into a site I’m hosting myself. I really believe in Dave’s effort to get people to run their own servers, and at some point I’d like to contribute. I’m just not a fan of his software stack or development environment (or Matt’s for that matter, the development environment not necessarily the software). Maybe I should write my own, but just don’t have the time right now.
Why you should let anyone say something positive
Posted: October 27, 2011 Filed under: Blogging, Business, Tech Leave a comment »
Today we had a bit of a clash around communications policy. We have had a number of problems at work recently with availability, software quality and defects, and an understaffed support department who were ineffective at getting back to individual users to address their issues. We’re finally clear of the backlog, software quality is improving, and in general system stability is at a place where we can finally start tooting our own horn again. The CIO decided it was time to create a marketing campaign to help rebuild IT’s brand with our end users. This campaign would be focused on the end users of our platforms.
There are some complications to this that bear explanation so you can understand why this is more difficult than it would otherwise seem. First, 75% or more of the user base sits outside the corporate firewall and does not have access inside the network. This means that without a significant engineering effort to authenticate them, we cannot easily provide content and messaging to them from a simple to use platform like WordPress.com or any other public SaaS. We decided that the best way to reach them would be from within the software they use every day, a web based CRM system, but since we didn’t want to make it into a blogging platform too, we decided it would be easiest to post the messaging in a blog on WordPress.com. It was publicly accessible and everyone would be able to read the same content.
However, as it turns out, it’s better to ask forgiveness than permission. We decided to check with the public relations and legal teams to ensure they’d be ok with this. As it turns out, not surprisingly, they want to control the messaging around our brand. Now, to communicate with our users, unless we can put it behind an authentication system to ensure only reps can see it and not the whole Internet, we need to get Legal and PR to approve every posting. The best case scenario from writing a blog post to send to our users and approve the posting is 2 days. Obviously, this process is burdensome and defeats the purpose of blogging, which is to get out quick, concise, and often time sensitive messaging.
I first started blogging 7 years ago. I started video blogging 6 years ago. I was on Facebook 4 years ago. Corporate America has had 7 plus years of customers, suppliers, employees, and everyone else having self-publishing capabilities where they will write about your brand. These people writing on platforms not controlled by the company need no approval!
One thing is certain about your employees when they want to communicate. They will write good things about you. With a minimal amount of training from Legal and PR they can be instructed not to give any forward looking statements, reveal sensitive information, or communicate anything that might be damaging to your brand. You must trust your employees. Creating undue process and centralized communication systems will ensure your employees are given a strong disincentive to try to communicate good things on your behalf! Being part of the conversation on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, WordPress.com, Tumblr, etc, requires brand ambassadors who are enthusiastic about your brand and are willing to be your advocates. The conversation certainly is going to happen whether your company approves of it or not, and if your company does not learn to trust its brand ambassadors, I am quite certain they will regret it.
Holy Shit, 1.5 Years since my last post!!
Posted: May 31, 2009 Filed under: Blogging, Personal 1 Comment »Holy shit. That’s crazy. Wonder if anyone still reads this thing. It appears to have been hax0r’d as there’s some links on my blogroll I didn’t add. This WordPress version is crazy old now too.
So, things are going great at work. Since my last posting I’ve signifcantly advanced in my management track and have something like 20 people working for me (although that’s about to go down a bit). I have lots of interesting commentary on IT Management, and I suppose I’ll probably refactor this blog to voice my opinions on IT Operations. Dunno if anyone even cares about such things, but we have a number of challenges I don’t mind sharing wisdom with the Internets on.
More to come in a week or two while I figure out what to do about this hosting situation and get this thing refactored.
My FireAnt Story
Posted: September 17, 2007 Filed under: Blogging, New Media, Podcast, Tech, Videoblog 1 Comment »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.
Yes, it should be legal
Posted: March 8, 2006 Filed under: Blogging, Politics 2 Comments »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).
Web 2.0 Marketing
Posted: February 19, 2006 Filed under: Arkansas, Blogging, New Media 2 Comments »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.
Why would you want to kill exclusives?
Posted: February 15, 2006 Filed under: Blogging, Tech Leave a comment »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 Arrington of TechCrunch gives FireAnt Directory the Thumbs Up
Posted: January 24, 2006 Filed under: Blogging, Cool Shit, Videoblog 2 Comments »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.
The Local Web Experiment: Fort Smith, Arkansas
Posted: December 30, 2005 Filed under: Arkansas, Blogging, Business, New Media, Tech 3 Comments »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.
Some discussion in the comments
Posted: November 24, 2005 Filed under: Blogging, New Media, Tech 1 Comment »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.
