/blog

Having a Blast Today at #WCDFW09

2009-06-27T18:40:00.001-05:00

The show has been a blast so far – I’m sitting in the speaker’s lounge right now writing up a couple posts for release today and tomorrow, but I wanted to fire off a quick one to recap the day and point to the highlights so far.

Liz Strauss did an awesome talk this morning as she dissected John P’s blog. John’s blog is particularly plain, but as he said, surprisingly popular. Liz lead the live crowd-sourced suggestions of improvement to the site, and it came out particularly well. A lot of the changes couldn’t be implemented live, but John promised to make some changes tonight and show us the blog tomorrow. If he changes his blog as rapidly as he changes his clothes, it should be done pretty quick (he’s gone through a surprising eight wardrobe changes throughout the day, including a Zoot Suite).

I enjoyed the talk from Cali this morning, and got some particular value from the talk Jonathon Bailey did on getting free content for your Wordpress blog.

I was a little unsure on how my talk would go over – I hadn’t had a lot of time to go over my talk this week, and it’s the first time I’ve done the talk, but I’ve had quite a handful of folks come up to me and ask individual questions afterward, so I’d judge it a success.

All in all, most folks seem most interested in the list of ad networks and the blog ad network we’re working on at SALabs/theCBs, so definitely keep an eye on this blog and over at SiliconANGLE for more information on that.

Those of you who might be catching this from the hashtag in the Twitterstream or from a quick Google search on the talk, feel free to contact me via phone, email, Twitter or any other social network you can grab me by, and I’d be more than happy to answer questions or help you out with your blog monetization plans (or anything else you feel I might be able to offer salient advice on).

I’m Lazy – Here’s crowdsourced liveblogging [#wcdfw09].

2009-06-27T11:40:00.001-05:00

Crowd-sourced liveblogging WordCamp Dallas 2009. Click on through to watch.

WordCamp Dallas 2009 Starts Tomorrow #wcdfw09

2009-06-27T02:40:00.001-05:00

I’m mostly done tonight updating my talk for tomorrow (still hafta practice it in the mirror a couple times since it’s been a while since I spoke in front of a crowd).

Just to update, though, this looks like the event is completely sold out. This means you’ve missed out on the chance to capture the magic of me speaking to a horde of WordCamp aficionados live, but Cali Lewis will be streaming the event live at GeekBrief.TV.

I’ll be speaking, as you may know, on monetizing your blog in a world where AdSense does just about squat for most publishers. I’ll be updating the blog here and at SiliconANGLE more on that after the talk, but I wanted to take a bit and showcase a few of the others that will be speaking at WordCamp Dallas tomorrow and Sunday.

Cali Lewis will be talking about what it takes to build a ‘vibrant community.’ As I mentioned earlier, you probably know Cali from GeekBrief.TV fame:

GeekBrief.TV is one of the world’s most popular video podcasts, with millions of downloads each month. During this lecture, Cali Lewis will discuss how she continues to build brand equity, drive traffic to her WordPress blog, and nurture her growing base of 46,000+ followers on Twitter.

Liz Strauss will be talking about what it takes to bring more eyeballs to your website. Liz and I go wayyy back to last year’s WordCamp. She’s a really fun person to know, and I’m looking forward to talking to her and listening to her again. Listening to her speak is a truly worthwhile experience, always. Here’s the gameplan for her talk:

Join Liz in a real-time blog intervention on John P’s blog. John will make the changes as Liz explains what makes a blog attractive, readable, irresistibly sticky.

Back in March, Liz and I sat down for a conversation in Austin.

Of course, as always, founder of Automattic Matt Mullenweg will be there. He’ll be doing a sort of “state of the Word” talk and a Q&A with the conference.

Matt and I chatted back on Mashable Conversations last year, and I hope to get a few minutes with him on camera this weekend (if you have any questions for him, leave them in the comments and I’ll see they get asked).

In Other Iranian Metacoverage [#iranElection]

2009-06-23T01:35:00.001-05:00

I’d also like to mention, while I’m irritated about the blogosphere’s short memory, the renewed attention that happened today regarding the Iranian Deep Packet Inspection issue.

It’s clear to most of us that the Iranian methods of censorship are not sophisticated. We all covered this last week when several very in depth articles on the topic came out (including several by me).

Somehow, when the Wall Street Journal says Nokia-Seimens is selling censorship technology to Iran, everyone believes it without researching or even remembering what they wrote three days earlier.

Infuriating, I tell you. Particularly when Slashdot draws attention to it, when that crowd should be particularly savvy to the fact that this isn’t what’s going on.

I wrote a comment there which got absolutely no traction, yet obviously should have:

Not surprisingly, the Wall Street Journal has this completely wrong.

The DPI software/hardware does *not* do the broadband filtration that the WSJ says it does. At SALabs, our R&D arm of the SiliconANGLE blog, we've done some pretty extensive research, and it's plain to us (and likely most of the IT audience here at Slashdot) that the type of censorship taking place in Iran is unsophisticated and isn't the result of DPI techniques.

We have several articles going into this matter on the site.
(http://www.siliconangle.com/ver2/?p=5972) (http://www.siliconangle.com/ver2/?p=5925) and (http://www.siliconangle.com/ver2/?p=5919).

The bottom line is that this stuff is good old fashioned gateway blocking of addresses. The DPI software that Nokia sells is for mobile network packet shaping only, and not useful for censoring an entire country's information infrastructure.

Is everyone set straight now, though?

Good.

A Round-up of My #IranElection Coverage

2009-06-18T16:43:00.001-05:00

Just because we’re coming to the end of the week on what’s been a hectic amount of information coming out of the #IranElection aftermath, and because my coverage is spread out across at least three sites, I thought I’d do a wrap-up of what I’ve written so far.

There are a few more coming this afternoon that I’ll append to this list, so be sure to check back, soon.

Update: Another update at SiliconANGLE from an IT angle this time… How Iran is Blocking the Internet Suggests They Weren’t Prepared for an Election Backlash [#iranElection]

My #IranElection Coverage is Moving

2009-06-17T15:46:00.001-05:00

I’m going to continue to provide the same sort of posts I’ve been providing so far this week on the #IranElection goings on, but I’ve decided, with Duncan Riley’s permission, to move them to a larger audience.

I’ll be posting for the next several days (or weeks?) over at Inquisitr on the Iranian election aftermath as well as it’s impact on social media (and social media’s impact on it).

You can find all of that in Inquisitr’s News + Sport category.

Joining me on the coverage will be Paul Short and Duncan Riley, who are of course Inquisitr regulars, as well as updates from Kyle Lacey.

My first post went up a few minutes ago, and can be found here: Twitter IDs Aren’t Personally Identifiable Info [#IranElection].

#IranElection in Pictures

2009-06-17T12:35:00.001-05:00

Searchme

View in searchme: full | lite

I’ve got another flurry of #IranElection related posts coming today, but sometimes pictures speak louder than words. You may have seen some of these pictures already, but watching them all together is mighty powerful. Take a few minutes and watch.

YouTube – Stop It Right Now #YouTubeFail [Iran]

2009-06-15T02:16:00.001-05:00

I caught this tweet earlier tonight – I haven’t seen much confirmation on this other than anecdotal evidence on Twitter, but given that this is a recurring wheelhouse for me, I figured it’s worth bringing to bear my flashlight on the issue.

I’ve written almost dozens of editorials over the years concerning the very troubling track record YouTube and Google have with it’s terms of service and censorship policies. Google seems to have gotten on the right track in recent months, but the YouTube division remains as troubled as ever.

I won’t re-hash my whole back-story here. Instead, here are a list of links you can browse at your leisure.

There are many others, but you get the idea – I’ve talked about this a lot.

If you do a Twitter search using the terms ‘youtube’ and ‘removed,’ you’ll come up with hundreds of tweets from folks who’ve ostensibly had their videos of the riots in Iran removed. This points to a larger pattern of removal, and based on what I’m reading, it seems to center around description and title keyword matches around words like “beating,” “death,” and “killed.”

There might be other terms, and if this is in fact the case as to why the videos are being so quickly removed, it’s a new tactic to me.

My educated guess is that one of several things could be happening (listed in no particular order):

YouTube is caving to certain takedown requests from the Iranian government to avoid being blocked (or re-blocked) in the country. I find this to not be a likely cause, but it wouldn’t surprise me based on past performances by Google (particularly in regard to the Egyptian-police brutality videos).
YouTube is autoflagging these and taking them down due to specific “violent” keywords mentioned in the descriptions. This, also, seems slightly unlikely, since much violent content already exists on the site (from video games to bum fights).
YouTube’s anti-Sharia bury brigade’s at work. Remember when I severely chastised Google and YouTube to not heeding Lieberman’s demands to get Al-Qaeda operatives off YouTube? Supposedly, Google obliged under duress, but apparently has since gotten lax in their duties. I received an invitation earlier this evening to join the “YouTube SMACKDOWN Corps.” It’s a group of self-appointed vigilantes that go and flag terrorist recruiting videos as “objectionable” to get them removed. I’m not sure how savvy this group is, and if they’ve caught Iranian protester videos in their net. When a video is flagged a few times, an age filter is put on it. When it’s flagged enough, it’s removed pending review.
The videos are being legitimately taken down due to violent content. Violent content is prohibited by the YouTube terms of service. The enforcement of this is arbitrary and capricious, but since no effort to obfuscate the the violence in these videos is made (and they’re unbelievable violent – several show protesters beaten to death on camera), they could be getting taken down through legitimate means.

Whatever the reason is – as soon as word of this spreads, it’s going to be a major PR stain on YouTube’s record. Up until this point, it’s been me and only a couple of other vocal editorialists in the tech blogosphere calling attention to YouTube’s ridiculous terms of service and censorship enforcement.

The bottom line is that YouTube needs to come up with a coherent policy, and enforceable policy, and stick to it. When it comes to infringing copyrighted material, they waste no time taking it down. When it comes to enforcing censorship and important videos under the terms of service in a way that makes sense, YouTube is all over the map.

That’s all I’ve ever said: just make some sense, YouTube. Will this be the time you actually listen to me?

Update: It appears there’s a movement to mark the videos as “adult” so that when they’re flagged “objectionable” they aren’t removed completely. I’m not sure that this method works – is there any confirmation on this?

#TwitterWin - #CNNFail

2009-06-14T20:13:00.001-05:00

I’m on a live call with Michael Sean Wright (@nicefishfilms), Robert Scoble (@scobleizer), and Cyril Moutran (@mocy) right now, and we’re discussing Iran.

Along our curious path we have the occasion to converse with some really BIG thinkers. Thinking Out Loud is the raw stream from some of these encounters. On this SPECIAL edition: The trending issue today on Twitter is #CNN Fails. We're joined by Robert Scoble of Building43, Cyril Mutran co-founder of Twazzup and Mark 'Rizzn' Hopkins to discuss the rise of real-time news. The lack of coverage by the US News Networks was just stunning and showed the complete failure of old media to cover breaking events like the real-time web. You can track the Iran Elections on Twazzup or wait a lifetime for tv news networks to catch up.

Download the discussion here.

I’ll do a longer, more analytical post Monday morning (or Sunday night). At this point, though, I’ll just give the bullet points and encourage you to listen to the show.

Robert talked about how this is a watershed event – CNN passing off the baton (involuntarily) to Twitter. CNN’s brand is irreparably damaged.
Cyril talked a bit about what he’s seen on Twitter so far.
Robert and Michael talked about the iconic image of the protests so far.
Cyril talked a bit about how Twazzup makes it’s judgments on what to display.
I discussed how it’s being theorized that Iran shut everything down in the media.

I’ll Be Speaking at WordCamp Dallas 2009 [Help Me Out! - #wcdfw09]

2009-06-11T03:17:00.001-05:00

Just a quick update – I’ll have more on this for you folks this week.

I just got pinged by Cali Lewis for my speaker information, which I guess confirms that I’ll be talking at this year’s WordCamp Dallas.

I had been racking my brain for a topic for several months – speakers block? – and I finally came up with a topic that I think is going to suit most of the folks who attend. Every blogger, when they’re not blogging for a corporate website that is, has gone through the hair-pulling and depressing experience of seeing that AdSense balance hover around pennies a day.

Recently, in conjunction with Steven and Sean at the Cynical Bastards and with John Furrier over at SiliconANGLE labs, I’ve been tackling this problem head on. It’s been fun to bring some of my Mashable experience to bear on this issue, and the interest in our private little blog network has been growing beyond what I could have ever imagine (which was my first clue that this might be a hot topic to bring to the conference).

I’ve currently got a rough outline of what I want to tackle in my mind – flat sponsorship, identifying your audience, knowing your niche, remixing ad networks, and basic terminology. Here’s what I put in my talk description, just to give you a better idea:

Getting Beyond Google AdSense: How to Make Money With Your Blog
Contextual-based advertising is so last year! Google's AdSense is generally a good value for certain types of small business and product sellers on the Web, but has traditionally translated to little to no cash for the average ad-supported blogger. There are, fortunately, a world of unexplored networks our there, if utilized properly, that can greatly increase the return on pageviews for most bloggers. Mark "Rizzn" Hopkins will discuss some of his hard-won knowledge and try to answer questions based on his experiences monetizing blogs with 10,000 monthly pageviews up to millions.

I’m going to use you guys here in my audience to build my speech, so I want to get from you all your questions you may have about my experiences and discoveries. With that, I hope I’ll be able to better decide what’s important to include and what’s best to leave out.

So lend me a hand? Throw your thoughts and questions in the comments below.

One Cynical Bastard Speaks Out on Trolls [Arrington vs. Laporte]

2009-06-08T15:29:00.001-05:00

Update: Michael Sean Wright sent me the follow-up broadcast that took place after the apology. Very interesting to listen to.

I completely missed out on the bitchmeme of the weekend, which apparently was a confrontation and apology between Mike Arrington and Leo Laporte that took place on the Gillmor Gang. I won’t analyze that much here – there was a pretty in depth post on it over at Techcrunch, Valleywag, Bwana, and on Friendfeed.

If you missed the whole debacle, there’s not much I can say that wouldn’t be better said in this video of the even.

The most amusing part is Kevin Marks (?) leaving just as it heats up.

In his response to the podcast’s abrupt end and in a followup from MG Siegler, the newest addition to the Techcrunch team, they both mentioned in some detail the great deal of trouble Techcrunch gets from their trolls.

From MG’s post:

I hadn’t really gotten to involved with it personally until I was working at VentureBeat, where as we grew in size, the trolls started coming out. Now that I’m with a site that gets even more traffic, TechCrunch, the situation is getting ridiculous. While still at VentureBeat, my usual approach to trolls was either to not respond, or to be a complete and utter jackass with the most sarcastic responses possible.

Unfortunately now, it’s gotten to the point where we simply have to moderate out comments. These aren’t just any old comments, they’re either completely out of line personal attacks, or straight up threats. While I have been threatened in comments both on VB and TC, I’ve never really felt any fear for my safety — they just make me mad. But as most people know, my current boss has. The situation is so ridiculous. We write news and opinions about technology. Technology. And that’s leading to threats. Absurd.

Several folks have said that there were over 600 comments moderated out of existence at Techcrunch, and the mob scene over at Friendfeed was supposedly so bad that it lead to them shutting down the account completely.

There are two angles on this I want to address before moving on any further:

On Techcrunch Trolls: There are quite a few people who don’t really believe that there are actual threats against Mike Arrington’s life, either in real life or to the extent he says they occur in online comments. I personally don’t closely monitor things enough to form a personal opinion. I can’t say that they don’t occur at all, since he moderates them out of existence. I do know examples of the type of stuff he’s moderated out of existence in the past – and from personal experience, I can tell you that it doesn’t need to be a negative comment at all. If he doesn’t like you or the company you work for, your comments will be un-published. I don’t begrudge him that, but I’m also saying that if you want to go down the rabbit hole of the state of trolling on Techcrunch – there’s a lot to it, and it’s not all one-sided.
On Friendfeed Mob Mentality: That there’s a Friendfeed mob around something isn’t exactly surprising to me. Long time readers of my site will remember the great Rizzn racist-branding of 2008. Flash mobs occur around a lot of really stupid stuff on that site. I’ve long since stopped trying to understand the ridiculousness of it all. It happens, and deleting your Friendfeed account doesn’t stop it from happening, as I found out – it just stops you from seeing it. Fortunately for me, at the time when I quit Friendfeed (before re-joining several months later), I was more interested in being shielded from stupid election-year debate, rather than not being talked about. Michael’s decision was for the other reason – and I’ll say it was an ill-thought-out decision, since people will still talk about him and Techcrunch, they just won’t say it where he can see it.

I’d like to focus a little bit on why Mike Arrington and Techcrunch attract threats, if you buy into that storyline, which I do to a certain extent.

Before I do that, I’d like to stress that I in no way endorse any threats on anyone’s life, regardless of whether you side with Mike or Leo in this debacle. It’s taking things too far, and it’s punishable by law if you get caught.

I’ve always been puzzled by the sort of negative attention Mike gets, though, in contrast with the sort of attention I generally get. You see, unlike Mike, I’m generally at home with the fact that I’m occasionally an asshole. My job, at Mashable, was to on occasion raise the trolls to get a little bit of excitement going in our comments area (in fact, we had a recurring “Mashable Troll” contest with actual prizes).

But there’s a certain method to the madness I executed in my occasional posting of troll-bait. In general, most of my posts aren’t troll-bait. I, like Mike, like to imagine that the bulk of my work has redeeming characteristics. Sometimes I tried to push the envelope in my troll-bait and see how far I could go with an unpopular position before I got ridiculous push-back.

In general, though, I tried to have good humor to dull the edges of my harshest criticism, and more importantly, I crafted a body of work that showed my true intentions of not someone who simply wants to have a constant argument, but also likes to evangelize cool tech and extend a hand up to those looking to learn the ropes.

Michael Arrington and most of the Techcrunch crew don’t have this reputation. Things like maintaining the deadpool and sometimes running with unverified stories at the top of their lungs have given them a reputation for being pageview hunters and muckrakers. Certainly, their actions should speak louder than their words. They’ve given a leg up to a lot of deserving (and sometimes, in my not-so-humble-opinion, undeserving) companies through their conferences, meetups and general coverage.

Despite this, he attracts a whole other level of troll that I tend to get. Occasionally, I get my doozies – my favorite are the wingnut crowd. There’s nothing better than being called a proto-fascist or a neocon new media whore.

In general, I tend to spark engaged discussion or at least a good natured laugh when we go off the deep end. I’m not sure exactly why, but I think it has something to do with the fact that I’m just having a lot of fun with my work, and my intent is not to move markets. Even when I wrote at Mashable, and comments would range into the 80 to 120+ category, there were only one or two occasions when I had to delete comments (not for their threatening nature, but because I didn’t really care to have some of the content they linked to one click away from my post – things of an offensive, pornographic or racist nature).

Still, as any avid blogger will tell you, when a comment thread gets up into that range, it’s pretty difficult to manage regardless of whether the trolls have taken up residence. It’s difficult to manage not just as a site owner, but as a reader. I’ve been toying about with a number of Wordpress plug-ins and I haven’t found exactly what I’m looking for, but ReadWriteWeb and Ars Technica have the closest implementation of what I’m talking about as a viable solution – converting the comment threads into a message board once they reach a certain threshold.

Beyond that, and more germane to MG’s concerns, hiring moderators either as full time or on the cheap isn’t a difficult proposition. Often, in tight-knit communities, moderators work for free. When they don’t, they can be outsourced cheaply to a Mechanical Turk-style situation – paying pennies for hordes of people to read comments and determine the level of offensiveness to the comments, and whether they should be pulled.

That, more than anything else, is what makes the claims of threat comments on Friendfeed or the Techcrunch site itself hardest to swallow – this is the company that came up with the Crunchpad, but they can’t come up with a viable crowd-sourced moderation solution for their bread and butter – the blog?

#Spymaster: Tips for the Twitter Game

2009-05-29T04:35:00.001-05:00

“No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die.” – Auric Goldfinger

Update: If you’re here for the invite, add me on Twitter, and fill out the comment below. By adding me, I can DM it to you so I don’t hafta send the invite along the public timeline.

Chances are, if you’re on Twitter this evening, you just got an invitation to go play Spymaster. If you haven’t gotten an invitation yet, just leave your Twitter address in the comments, and I’ll make sure you get an invite.

Currently the game is invitation only, but the invites are spreading like wildfire at the moment, so it’s not all that exclusive of a club.

If you haven’t wasted time before playing MySpace or Facebook Mafia-Wars / Mob-Wars style games, then how to effectively play may elude you at first. In an effort to cash in on this soon-to-be craze, I figured I’d offer the benefit of my experience, since I’ve whiled away far too many hours on the dozens of other clones in this style of game.

There’s definitely a trick to playing this game. There’s more than likely a number of ways to skin the cat, but I tend to play the same strategy because it generally works better than any other I’ve tried.

My strategy overall is to focus first on getting the most experience for the least amount of energy spent, and then to focus strictly on maximizing profit through investments (or, as they’re called in this game, safehouses).

It sounds simple enough, but there are number of ways to get off track if you aren’t careful.

Game Basics
I’m going to more or less assume you grasp the basics of how the game works, if you’re reading this. If not, a quick recap:

You’re a spy. Either for the KGB, MI6 or CIA.
You’re supposed to do spy stuff, and you get paid for it as well as gain experience (tasks).
You apparently have a license to kill (assassinate).
You’re also an agency recruiter, responsible for convert spys (inviting to game).
Your boss is a cheap bastard, and you hafta buy your equipment on the black market.
You’re interested in buying (and what, sub-letting?) safehouses.
You keep your money in a Swiss Bank Account, because let’s face it, you don’t hear them asking congress for a bailout these days, do you?

The overall goal is rather nebulous, but you’re motivated by not being too weak as a character, so that you’re not easy pickings for your enemies.

What You Actually Need to Pay Attention To
There are dozens of numbers and statistics that are thrown at you in games like this, and while they’re all generally fun to look at, they’re really only there to distract you from your goal, which is to be the richest and highest-level spy on the game.

Here are the stats in Spymaster to pay attention to:

Spymasters – these are people who follow you on Twitter that’ve joined the game.
Overall Funds – this is the amount of money you’ve racked up.
Energy per Turn – you can deduce this simply enough; whenever the “refresh in” counter reaches 0:00, take a look and see how much your energy level jumped by.
Maximum Energy – this gives you an idea as to how long you need to wait before you’re fully charged. If you’re getting 25 energy every 5 minutes, and your max energy is 129, then you want to visit the game every half hour for maximum character advancement.

Why Are These Stats So Important?
What probably alerted you to the game were the assassination attempts you saw flash by on Twitter. Assassinations play an important role in any game like this, but if you want to survive long enough to win any of those attempts (or survive attempts perpetrated against you), you need to be well equipped.

What’s ironic is though it’s tempting to jump right in and start poppin’ caps into your friends’ Twitter accounts, if you want to actually win an assasination attempt once in a while, it’s the last thing you should start out doing.

Your First Steps to a Life of International Mystery
Your first stop should be to perform as many tasks as you can to start so you can get some operating capital. I suggest for best efficiency at level one to do the task that requires 10 energy. You get the same experience for that as you do the higher energy task, and the money you gain at this level is negligible compared to what you’ll be pulling down later on.

After that, head straight over to the black market. Remember that first number I told you to remember? Your spymaster number is important here. Buy enough weapons and armor to cover everyone in your spymaster ring. You can theoretically buy more than that and it will increase your defense and attack scores, but the there’s a diminishing return to that.

Now it’s time to play the waiting game: since you’re armed up fairly well, you can afford to take a break and come back after a while.

While you’re waiting, it’s a good idea to invite as many people to the game as you think you can get away with. The real power in these sorts of games comes from having a lot of folks in your Spymasters group, since that (and your character level) are the biggest influencing factors on how easily you can be killed.

Your First Goal: Gain Level 3
Once you’ve come back to it, you want to get to level three as quickly as possible. Assuming you’re not the impatient type and you didn’t take your turns every five minutes, so you’ve got nearly full energy right now.

Go ahead and perform the 10-energy task until you’ve run out of energy or attained level three, whichever comes first.

Your Second Goal: Get a Safehouse
Once you’ve attained level three, your goals change again, and this means you’ve got to change the way you approach your tasks.

Your goal now is no longer to get to as high of a level as possible, your goal is to get as much money as possible, and as quickly as you can. The reason here is that, as I said, the best asset you can have is a large Spymaster count. The problem with that is you’ve got to provide guns and armor for every one of your Spymasters, which can get pretty expensive.

Just like in real life, rather than actually working for that money, the best way to keep that expense paid for is to invest. I’m not sure the in-story reason that owning a safehouse is making you money (perhaps you’re subletting?), but owning real-estate, as in life, is generally a good investment.

The game assumes you can’t qualify for a sub-prime mortgage, and makes you pay for the safe-house up front. This means you’ll need to come up with $80,000 to purchase the cheapest one you can find, a German condo.

The quickest way to get there, if you’ve followed these instructions so far, is to continue to perform the 10-energy task. This may seem particularly counter-intuitive, and it is. Here’s the explanation why:

If you’ve been performing the 10-energy task exclusively up until this point, you’ve likely gotten the proficiency of that task fairly high. It’s a low risk task, which means it’s hard to fail anyway, but with a high proficiency, you’re almost guaranteeing yourself that you’ll receive compensation towards the higher end of the spectrum (the spectrum being $900 to $1,500).

On the other hand, you’ll waste a lot of turns and time failing while you learn the brand new level three 20-energy task. The reward is higher, once you’re good at it ($2,100 - $3,500), but with your null proficiency, you’re guaranteed that you’ll recieve the low end of the compensation scale.

Thus two 10-energy turns will equal $~3000, whereas one 20-energy turn will probably equal closer to $2000.

Since your focus is solely money, the choice is clear.

Update: Since I’ve been playing the game today, I’ve noticed something that should have been obvious had I not been typing this long after my bed time. Right around the time your proficiency in a task reaches 25-40%, your returns start diminishing significantly. When this happens, you should switch up to the 20-energy task until you reach level 5.

Where to go from here?
Keeping in mind that I’m only a little bit less new to this version of the game than you are, I’ll give you the formulas I tend to work with, and let you adapt them as they work best for you.

Once you’ve gotten your $80k condo in Germany, you need to spend some time crunching the numbers on the real-estate market. Your first purchase will be netting you money even when you’re not playing the game, which will allow you to more easily purchase more real-estate and more equipment.

This allows you from this point forward in the game focus on taking tasks based on what will gain you experience, purely, while letting all the money from your real-estate investments roll over into future investments. I played this strategy on the MySpace version of Mob Wars, and within a month, I literally had more money than the game would allow me to spend.

As of the time of this post, my character is almost level four, and I’ve almost got enough cash for my German condo. I’ve really only been playing it a little longer than I’ve been writing this blog post.

This is a pretty addictive and ultimately fun game in all it’s incarnations, and pairing it with Twitter was a stroke of genius.

If you’re interested in learning more about the company behind this game, you should check out my buddy MG Siegler’s write-up over at Techcrunch. If you’re looking for an invite to play, leave a comment here with your Twitter username.

Otherwise, just go out and play Spymaster.

Technorati Tags: spymaster,playspymaster,twitter,game

It’s Not About Best Practices, It’s About the Constitution [Blogola]

2009-05-27T18:03:00.001-05:00

After my post over at SiliconANGLE, I’m glad to see what I hope represents a softening position at Forrester regarding the new proposed FTC guidelines on blogging and disclosure (discussed here, here and here).

Josh Bernoff posted at the Groundswell Forrester blog a nice recap of some of the controversy regarding this subject, and stopped short of endorsing the new guidelines, saying “I don't expect all you gentle readers to agree with this -- it's too controversial a topic. But paying bloggers is here to say [sic]. So if you do it, do it right.”

I’m going to keep this short and sweet for two reasons: because I want my point to not get lost in other debatable semantics and my wife is serving a very enticing dinner right now.

There’s a big difference between endorsing best practices and having them mandated by law.

There are so many varying shades of gray in the New Media landscape when it comes to sponsorship and disclosure. It has to be – the landscape is constantly shifting.

The bottom line is that my words are constitutionally protected, and if I want to use them to undermine my own credibility, who is the government to say I can’t do that?

Cost to Fence the US-Mexico Border? $11.8 Billion.

2009-05-19T21:26:00.001-05:00

Pictures are finally filing in from this vaunted fence that’s supposed to magically protect us from the evil Mexicans south of the border. The one above I found over at Zimbio. Part of the caption is below:

The new barrier between the US and Mexico stands 15 feet tall and sits on top of the sand so it can lifted by a machine and repositioned whenever the migrating desert dunes begin to bury it. The almost seven miles of floating fence cost about $6 million per mile to build.

Really? $6 Million per mile?

I don’t usually talk aboudefet political issues here on this blog, but this is an issue I’ve been following for quite some time, and the only outlet I’d really have to talk about it on would be my podcast with Art on RFC Radio. We just recorded that show for this week, and I really don’t want to have to wait another seven days to speak my mind on it.

Remember when we were talking, as a nation, about our immigration crisis? Remember how the best solution we could come up with was amnesty and a fence (and we somehow just ended up with a fence)? Remember how the comedians ridiculed the idea, asking if white folks stupidly thought they didn’t have ladders in Mexico? Remember how the retort was that this was some sort of intelligent electronic fence?

The new barrier between the US and Mexico stands 15 feet tall and sits on top of the sand so it can lifted by a machine and repositioned whenever the migrating desert dunes begin to bury it. The almost seven miles of floating fence cost about $6 million per mile to build.

This is a section of the border only seven miles long that cost a total of $42 million to create. Are we safer as a result?

Instead of wasting $42 million bucks every few miles on a fence, how hard would it be for us to simply allow everyone to immigrate legally, and kill the incentive for people to risk life and limb (and $10 at the ladder store) to hoof it across the border.

Beyond that, how about an intelligent approach to border security? As I talked about back in December on the /robots blog, people are making do-it-yourself military UAVs with a few bucks and some ingenuity. How hard would it be to slap a camera and a mobile phone on one of those puppies and save the cost of gas for patrols and the cost of raw materials on an overpriced, easily defeatable fence.

Look – I came up with that idea in about three minutes. Take your time, spend about a half hour thinking of your own method of cheap border patrol. I bet if we spend a day on it in the comments, we could easily beat the cost structure of building a “movable 15-foot fence.”

Seriously. Give it your best shot. I’m curious to see what people can come up with off the cuff.

..in which I beat up on Silicon Alley Insider

2009-05-18T16:27:00.001-05:00

How hard it is to RTFA?

There are some folks over at Business Insider (recently rebranded from “Silicon Alley Insider”) that do some decent reporting. Nicholas Carlson was always one of my very favorite ValleyWag authors, and I think he’s still doing good work over at BI/SAI.

Unfortunately, the place is run by Henry “Google-at-$2000” Blodget, and the sensationalist and cavalier research and reporting methods he’s known for seem to infect some of the other authors there.

It wouldn’t be so annoying if it didn’t attract so much attention. I generally kept my mouth shut when I was at Mashable, since we had a general policy of not badmouthing other fellow bloggers in our space for most of my tenure. It’s honestly past the point, though, where I think it’d be irresponsible of me not to point out what I see as an ongoing pattern of wrong-headed reporting and posting.

And it’s not that Techmeme is the measure of all that’s relevant in tech, but somehow today, BI/SAI has gotten Techmeme headlines on each one of their short and incorrect blurbs they’re passing off as posts.

Unfortunately, I don’t have the time to go too far into my backlog of irritating posts I’ve bookmarked from there over the years, but I’ve seen a few today that warrant mentioning (as well as a few that stick out in memory from days gone by).

Google at $2000: I’d never heard of SAI before this article. I’m sure I’d read them before this, but the absolute retarded premise of this post alerted me to what Henry and company were up to over there.

In general, the assertions in this article directly contradict a litany of posts from a few months later where he badmouths Google and ponders it’s eminent demise. If you page even further forward, he pretends like this was never even said as he talks about the eminent demise of all economies everywhere.
Google Isn’t Recession-Proof: This is a premise the team there has been advancing since shortly after “Google at $2000.” Every quarter, though, Google has continually outperformed every other ad agency on or off the web.

What’s worse is that by declaring Google not recession-proof, as Henry did quite often, it completely ignores the large market cap and cash reserves Google has, which in and of itself makes the company recession-proof. There would have to be some very calamitous events to bring about the end of Google.
Today – Wolfram Alpha Sucks. I wrote about this over at SiliconANGLE today. Henry doesn’t even bother to read the whole press release or do more than look at the template before pronouncing Wolfram Alpha an abject failure.
Today - “Peter Thiel Says Valleywag Is 'Silicon Valley Equivalent Of Al Qaeda'”. Certainly what Peter said, if you read only the first answer, is quite over the top. Dan Frommer quite obviously didn’t even read into the third paragraph of the post he responded to where Peter very clearly clarified his comment:

“Terrorism is obviously a charged analogy, but it’s like terrorism in that you’re trying to be gratuitously meaner and more sensational than the next person, like a terrorist who is trying to stand out and shock people. It becomes this unhealthy dynamic where it just becomes about shocking people. On the other hand, it’s an interesting theoretical question, whether, if Valleywag went away, something else would fill in to replace it.”

This doesn’t even scratch the surface of the host of un-researched and uninformed rants I’ve read by Hank Williams and other members of the team at BI/SAI.

I hate it when I’ve got a rant here that almost exclusively centers around a person or small group of people instead of an issue or an event. I don’t like beating up on people for their practice of their craft.

It just seems like a total insult is being levied my way every time I’m lured into clicking on an BI/SAI link. The headlines are craftily written, their topic selection is impeccable.

Their analysis, either intentionally or unintentionally, is almost always completely out in left field. I don’t understand how it can be anything but intentional, since these folks aren’t spring chickens. Most of them have been covering tech intensively for years. It’s almost impossible not to pick up on this stuff through osmosis!

Somehow, they manage to get it wrong more consistently than any other analysts I’ve ever seen, and more amazingly never get called out for their consistently poor track record.

Texas Coworking Space Roundup

2009-05-14T15:41:00.001-05:00

John Erik Metcalf on the podcast.

Coworking spaces are a mostly recent Texas trend I picked up on last summer during the SummerMash tour stop I attended in Austin. I got the opportunity to meet and talk with Cesar Torres and John Erik Metcalf, the founders of the company, both of which ended up giving a great interview to Aaron at the Stickam booth that night.

Learning about their journey into creating a shared office space geared around web and mobile tech startups reminded me of my own history in the 90s with a similar trend – geek houses.

It seems like not long after we profiled Conjunctured back at Mashable, and John Erik gave a perfect blueprint in the podcast on how to grow your own local coworking space, they started popping up everywhere.

This post was prompted by an alert I got this afternoon about a new (third!) coworking space that has cropped up here in the Dallas area, so I decided to catalogue all the spaces I could find state wide.

Here they are, in no particular order.

CoHabitat – Dallas – What is now an almost fully formed (and fully occupied) co-working space just North of the downtown area, it’s a converted historic district house that’s been retrofitted on all three floors to support a number of different startups.

They’re still in the early stages of formalizing their online presences and relationship with the community, but I know that there is a variety of leading edge tech being developed there, including a semantic-centric search engine technology as well as a number of mobile-based app developers.

The regular Jelly events are also hosted here, as is generally something of interest to the community at large at least every other month.

Big in Japan – Dallas – Big in Japan is a sort of “secret coworking club.” Their website is a front for most of their money making ventures, which are their iPhone and Android development efforts. If you know someone on the inside, though, you can get access to work in their posh Infomart accommodations under the watchful eyes of a nine and a half foot Incredible Hulk statue and a dozen or so toy robots.

I generally stop by the space at least once every couple of weeks and meet with the folks there as well as catch up with whatever work I happen to have on my plate. It’s a relaxed environment, and the coffee flows like water.

Alex Muse, one of the culprits behind the venture, has strong ties to the Texas Angel Network – and it’s not uncommon to be in the same room with folks who are in the midst of securing their angel funding (while you wait!), something that’s always exciting to witness.

company|dallas – Dallas – This is a brand new coworking venture, one that I’ve absolutely no information on yet except for what’s currently up on their splash page:

They’re scheduled to open for business May 20th.
They’re located in the heart of Telecom Corridor in Richardson.
They’ve got $20 day rates and $250 monthly rates.

Conjunctured – Austin – Even if you’re not in Texas, you’ve probably heard of Conjunctured. Just this March, I sat down with Cesar Torres to get the update on what’s new with them there, and if you don’t know what’s old with them,

Cesar Torres with me at SxSWi

there are plenty of articles throughout the Austin blogosphere, and even on Mashable.

Working at Conjunctured has been likened to many things, since it’s at the heart of the growing “startup district” in Austin: “like executive suites, but different,” “like a startup incubator,” and a way to “surrounding yourself with individuals passionate about their talents.”

There’s no doubt that community and the social media are at the heart of Conjunctured’s members, which include a branch office for Automattic, several designers and marketers, a number of professional bloggers, and a couple of rails developers.

Launchpad – Austin – Launchpad doesn’t have the same noteriety outside of Austin that Conjunctured does, but they’re well known to the the Austin community. I also briefly met the partners that started this venture, and while it’s a wildly different culture and caters to a different style of entreprenuer, they’re still a pillar of the local Austin community.

Whereas Conjunctured is more freewheeling SxSW style culture, Launchpad has a reputation for being a bit more planned and structured, while still maintaining the artists’ feel that’s endemic to Austin.

In addition to offering hourly rates for coworking space, they also play host to a cafe with “light healthy fare, specialty coffee drinks, and carefully selected beer and wine.”

Caroline Collective – Houston – We’re getting into uncharted territory down this far in the list. I’ve either extensive or passing familiarity with most of the previous coworking spaces on this list, but to be quite honest, while I knew there probably was a coworking movement in Houston and San Antonio, I had no idea who the players and locations were.

Caroline Collective seems to be the most popular and Web 2.0-friendly of the lot. Drop-ins are welcomed in free of charge, though at some point repeat visitors are encouraged to look at monthly plans ranging between $75/month to $300/month.

Your officemates there will include folks of the marketing, musical, blogging, designer, and app developer varieties. The location also seems to play host to community tech events on a seemingly bi-weekly basis.

KatyDock – Houston – KatyDock seems to classify itself as more of a business incubator and “accelerator,” than a coworking space, but the description given on their site seems to epitomize most of the other coworking spaces in the state:

“The Katy Dock allows Katy and West Houston area entrepreneurs - from freelancers to consultants to web developers to graphics designers - to work in a positively charged, creative atmosphere. Katy Dock has professional resources available through Katy Commerce Center and business advice and strategy through the TCWH. Most importantly, Katy Dock fosters a community that works together to help everyone grow.”

C4WorkSpace – San Antonio – For those that want to see what it takes to build a coworking space, an interesting blog to watch is the one for the C4WorkSpace – as of the time of this post, they’re still in the midst of doing the construction on the facilities for what looks like an interesting and aesthetically pleasing work area.

Their opening date appears to (currently) be June 1st, and they have a number of locals already signed up to start working together: Debi Pfitzenmaier of Pfitz PR, Gylon Jackson of Blog Training Academy, Dan Hong of emembaVET, and Stephen Vanderver.

The Creative Space – Bryan, TX – This site seems to be a well established coworking space, undoubtedly due to the nearness of College Station university Texas A&M. Fourteen inhabitants are featured on the front page, as well as a host of projects ranging from robotics to design.

Their motto is simple: “The Creative Space is a group of like-minded individuals out to make great work, together. We all work as one to push the local community through artistic and business endeavors while sharing space and cost.”

That’s all the co-working spaces I could find in Texas, excluding of course the numerous local Jelly events. Do you know of one that I missed? Leave it in the comments, and I’ll include it in the next list I do!

Present.io Goes Live

2009-05-14T12:43:00.001-05:00

The presentation and live collaboration utility Present.io goes live this morning – and I must admit I’m pretty duly impressed.

The program works with the feature set common to most online collaboration utilities like WebEx or GoToMeeting, but does it completely through the web with no plug-ins, Flash components or Java required.

Through it, presenters are able to play audio, video or slide decks with absolutely no problems stopping or starting it on the client side – it’s really quite effective.

The video presentation Sam Lessin put together for the project more or less says it all – give it a look-see.

Hulu: Content Checks In, But it Don’t Check Out

2009-05-07T13:57:00.001-05:00

Earlier this week, MG Siegler over at Techcrunch took note of the fact that Hulu has gotten more anal than ever about geo-retarding their content, even going so far as to block access from anonymous proxy servers in an effort to prevent those overseas from seeing content from Hulu producers.

As a side note, if our government worked as hard to secure sensitive servers overseas prying eyes, perhaps we wouldn’t have enough break-ins to keep Fergie posting to his blog on a near constant basis.

Asides aside, today Hulu announced that they’re striking deals with overseas producers to syndicate their content to Hulu.

“We’re having discussions in the top six to eight markets…we’re laying the groundwork,” said Andy Forssell, senior vice president of content acquisition and distribution.

There are so many interesting angles to pick apart and destroy about Hulu’s approach to content distribution – I wish I could get into them, but I’m at a McDonald’s serving my youngest son lunch, and my battery is about to die.

I just find it hilarious that they’re letting overseas producers give them content, and giving them the finger in return if they try to hit the play button.

In other news, watch for my buddy Steven Hodson to give himself a Gillmor over this later today.

RSS Being Dead Makes as Much Sense as Steve Gillmor

2009-05-06T13:36:00.001-05:00

“Apparently Rizzn hasn’t mastered the technology of escaping his ass.” – Steve Gillmor

Despite the fact that Steve Gillmor, host of the Gillmor Gang podcast on the TWiT network, has always seemed to talk down to me over the years I’ve enjoyed his recorded material. He has a way of making meandering conversations with altogether too large groups of technologists still sound interesting and engaging.

Unfortunately, his oratory skills don’t generally translate well to his written pieces. I say this as the general rule and guide to Steve Gillmor editorials, although once in a while he’s able to make an lucid written point.

Today was one of those rare cases – he wrote a piece over at TechCrunchIT today that got snuck into the main Techcrunch RSS feed. The point he was trying to make was clear enough: “RSS is Dead.”

Unfortunately, the first time I understand the thrust of a Steve Gillmor post, it’s thoroughly narrow-minded and outright wrong.

Steve explains that he now reads all his publications from links on Twitter, and I think he implied that he hasn’t used an RSS reader in over a year (at least I think that’s what the line “I’ve done the math: Twitter 365 Google Reader 0.” is supposed to mean).

He makes some valid points: RSS inspired the “real-time web.” RSS is less of a consumer experience and more of a tool of memetracking machines.

Steve Misses the Larger Benefits of RSS vs. Twitter
“As usual Steve is going on in a roundabout, stream of consciousness way of saying “I’m a victim”, but he’s pointing his gun at some different people than the usual suspects this time.” – Mike Arrington

I think he misses the larger point, and the true effect of “real-time web,” and that is what will be largely missed by those who choose to read their news through tools like Twitter and Friendfeed as opposed to those savvy enough to maintain an RSS reader.

I casually surf FriendFeed and Twitter, personally, because to me they’re like the IRC chatroom you might’ve left open during your workday back in the 90’s and early part of this decade – it’s your friends, sharing thoughts and interesting links. What you see in there is your crowdsourced news alerts – the important and popular stuff will tend to bubble up into your sphere of attention, but only if you pay attention to it all day long.

That’s never how IRC works – you don’t pay attention to it non-stop. It’s a background process, and unless you’re terminally unemployed (or Robert Scoble), it’s not how Twitter works either.

On the other hand, a well organized feed reader like Google’s or Newsgator’s will allow you to find and read the stories you would have otherwise missed. The time that the story was posted has little to do with whether or not you read it or not – if it’s in your “must read” folder, you’ll catch it. If you rely on Twitter to notice it, you’re simply pulling the lever on the one-armed bandit, and hoping you don’t miss something important.

Maybe He’s Talking About the Public’s Usage of RSS?
“I came across Steve's post in the ZDNet blogs RSS feed which is a partial text feed -- so, yes, his attempt to make fun of partial feeds is, indeed, cut off itself by his own partial feed. I read Jeremy Zawodny's feed as well, and it's full text. So, here we have someone who has a partial feed complaining about the partial feed of someone who actually appears to only offer full feeds.” – Mike Masnick

Even if he’s talking about raw usership of one technology versus the other, he’s still wrong. How do you think most of those stories are fed into Twitter and FriendFeed? If you said RSS, you’d be right.

We went through this exact same debate back in October of 2008 when Forrester released a report that loudly proclaimed consumer RSS adoption at a mere 11%. As I said in my response to Steve Rubel’s loud eulogy of RSS:

The truth is that it’s pretty difficult to hit a website these days that doesn’t use RSS in some way, shape or fashion. If you look at the average page here on Mashable, there are about two or three sections which rely on RSS to pull in information relevant to the readers. If you turn your attention to the most popular sites on the web, sites like Facebook, MySpace and Google all have syndicated content strewn all through them.
Let alone sites like FriendFeed, Plaxo and and thousands of blogs and news sites out there that rely on aggregation of content via RSS.

Why is Real-Time Web “Succeeding” Now Where RSS Has Failed?
“Steve Gillmor is a bumbling fool. Without Google Reader, I wouldn’t read three fourths of the sites I do. Twitter doesn’t replace that.” – schammy

There’s no doubt, though, that the term “real time web” is getting a workout lately, and a lot of attention is being paid to Twitter, Facebook’s public timeline, and FriendFeed.

But that’s the mainstream crowd. These aren’t news-junkies and writers. Sure, those of us that fall into that category use those tools, but those of us that want a thorough and nuanced view of the world we’re interested in generally use RSS readers. Real time streams simply aren’t set up to give you more than a snapshot of what’s going on right now, and the memetrackers certainly do little more than tell you what’s popular at the moment.

I’m not dogging the “real-time web” here (I’ve done that elsewhere). I’m simply saying that because it is popular, and because Steve Gillmor uses it exclusively for his news-reading does not mean that RSS is dead as a technology, as he decrees.

I’ll bottom-line it another way – RSS isn’t dead simply because web tools use RSS differently now. Even if most RSS feeds are read through “real-time web” utilities, RSS is still alive and well. Have you ever read an RSS feed in source-code mode? Is that how you consume your news?

If you’re honest with yourself, the answer is no. No sane person would. RSS is always meant to be a machine-level format so that programmers can more easily import the information into other utilities, be they RSS readers of the traditional type, or real-time fed news feeds.

That, by definition, means RSS is alive and well.

Daisy Whitney Joins Beet.TV (and SiliconANGLE)

2009-05-05T20:01:00.001-05:00

It’s amazing how fast things work in today’s always on world. I just happened to catch a tweet earlier today regarding TVWeek going to an online-only publication, and Daisy Whitney, the woman behind the New Media Minute, potentially being on the open market.

I shot her an email, inviting her to be a contributor to the site I spend most of my days editing, SiliconANGLE (which she graciously accepted), and no sooner had I finished wrapping up that email thread with her, I caught an announcement at the top of Beet.TV saying she was being brought on board as a Senior Producer in the brand new San Francisco bureau of the site.

She’ll also be partnering with SiliconANGLE on the New Media Minute. She’s moving the show to it’s new home at Beet.TV, but we at the ‘Angle will be an official distribution partner. You’ll be able to find her video updates there every week with a short write-up and any other thoughts she happens to have at the time of publication.

We’re glad to have her on board – I’ve been a long-time watcher of hers, and it’s cool to be able to work with her moving forward.

The Cynical Bastards: No One is Safe [podcast]

2009-04-30T14:58:00.001-05:00

Last night, Sean, Steven and I recorded the inaugural episode of the Cynical Bastards show we call CobWEBS (i.e. Cranky Old Bastards on the InterWEBS).

The show is for our new flagship site we’ve launched, theCynicalBastards. It started as a thought Sean and I had while we were both at Mashable – starting a blog network showcasing the crankiest of the tech blogosphere. The thought grew out of the fact that Sean and I took our headslapping at some of the infuriating things we saw on the web to each other almost incessantly throughout the day.

We would have launched the site ages ago, but really didn't want to jeopardize our positions at the company by starting what could possibly be viewed as a competing venture.

Now that we’re all off on our own and ex-Mashers, we have no such compunctions. The only thing stopping us from launching it was to get the crankiest friend we both had, Steven, to sign up and join us.

How does it work?
Essentially, the site is an aggregator that syndicates all the stuff that Steven, Sean and I write and record on a daily basis, organized by topic and category.

“We get away with this” by linking directly to the source, rather than scraping the feeds and hosting them locally. This means that as TheCynicalBastards grows in popularity as a destination site, we’ll be able to offer those we freelance for a better bang for their bucks, being able to funnel more traffic their way.

We’re also able to combine our pageviews, like any blog network, and get better sponsorship and ad deals.

You’ll Hear More Later
As the network evolves and grows, I’ll be providing more updates later on. In the meantime, enjoy three cranky old bastards pontificate about what bothers them in the week’s tech news on the show!

Yowza: One ‘Heroes’ Star’s Answer to Coupon Clipping [GBTV]

2009-04-23T13:29:00.001-05:00

I don’t tend to do a lot of iPhone app reviews, but local Dallas-ite Cali Lewis got a chance to sit down with Greg Grunberg, aka “not-baby Matt Parkman,” one of the stars of Heroes (a show I still prefer to Lost since things are actually explained once in a while).

In this episode of GeekBriefTV, Cali gets Greg to explain his new iPhone app called Yowza:

It’s an iPhone and iPod Touch app that uses your location to find deals near you. If you’re out shopping, you can find out what stores are offering deals near you, in either a 5, 10 or 15 mile radius. The app also lets you search by city to enable you to plan ahead and still save money.

I’m not a particularly huge proponent of the iPhone, though I can certainly recognize the brilliance of this idea, and I have to say I’m pretty impressed with Greg’s savvy in spearheading the project.

On the topic of life on Twitter post Oprah – I’m guessing we can expect to see more projects like this spearheaded by celebrities. One of the things that Twitter makes almost effortless for those with large enough social graphs is crowdsourcing ideas like this.

NAB Attendees Excited about mDTV and Attendance

2009-04-23T13:19:00.001-05:00

Chronicler of all things New Media and online video Daisy Whitney attended this year’s NAB conference, and reported on her general impressions of the event. In light of the prevailing opinion that our economy is completely tanking, Daisy expressed surprise that it wasn’t a complete ghost town. Attendance was impressive and decision makers were there to evaluate new purchases for both New Media and Old Media organizations.

The big topic on the floor of NAB was the mobile DTV announcements and plans I talked about the other day over at SiliconANGLE. Sure, it’s the same thing we’ve had at our disposal since 1980, and no one’s figured out how to make any real money off the ‘new’ technology, but they’re supposedly all very excited about it.

Watch the clip – Daisy, as always, is informative and entertaining!

SearchMe Rolls Out New Features at Ad:Tech SF 2009

2009-04-22T13:59:00.001-05:00

My friends John Furrier and Nate D’amico from SiliconANGLE have been roaming the halls of Ad:Tech 2009, and one of the more interesting updates has been when Furrier caught up with John Galatea, the VP of SearchMe’s marketing and sales.

The video contains a few words on where SearchMe is going as well as some demonstration of SearchMe’s new integrated search results and iPhone application.

Download the MP4.
Subscribe to the Feed.

Can I Be a Career Content Producer?

2009-04-21T16:33:00.001-05:00

A lot of people are thinking about blogging today, and more specifically, blogging as a business. It’s not surprising that this is a topic gaining grassroots traction, given the fact that the standby job for most prolific writer’s, that is working for an Old Media print organization, is a job that’s very quickly going the way of the dodo.

There have been a lot of posts this morning that have put this topic on the fore of my mind this morning, but on a personal level, a friend of mine and I had three hour conversation last night centered around what it would take for him to someone who made a living off his writing. He’s a gifted writer, always engaging and interesting, and very focused. The problem is that he’s seen the community around his writing erode lately because his niche is national politics, something that very quickly went out of vogue after the elections.

His problem, if you can call it that, is that he’s only at his best when he’s writing what he’s passionate about: national politics. Get him outside of that, and he doesn’t enjoy it, and thus his writing suffers.

He’s not alone, though. On a fairly regular basis, I get people that approach me and want a job writing either for my personal website or at some respected blog that I’ve either worked for in the past or have connections with. As Penelope Trunk pointed out on Brazen Careerist today, though, chances are, “you're not going to make money from your blog.”

In her post, she outlines ten reasons why you’ll never see dime one from your blog. Some of them hold water, like “supporting yourself from your blog is crazy hard,” and “you have to be controversial.” Others indicate a myopic view of what’s going on in the blogosphere, like “big bloggers come from big media,” and “you can make more money flipping burgers.”

The truth is that it takes a certain type of person to make a career out of creating New Media, be it blogging, videoing, and podcasting, and getting there is easier now than it ever was, despite the economic difficulties that exist currently.

As Jeff Jarvis and Mark Penn pointed out today, “there are more people making their primary income from blogging than there are those working as computer programmers, firefighters or bartenders.”

There are a number of ways to get paid for your words, but chances are your dream includes being self-directed and working in your pajamas. This means you’re going to need to posess a lot of skills not always commonly found in those with the gift of good writing ability.

You’re going to need to be a marketer.
More to the point, you’ll need to be able to market yourself, both to your readers as well as to those that would pay you sponsorship.

You’re going to need to be a salesman. You will have to ask people for money, whether you’re asking your readers for donations or asking corporations or ad networks to pay you for the attention of your readers.

You’re going to need to be flexible. Gone is the era where you can concentrate on one media type and be successful. You’re going to need to understand how to podcast, produce video, and write beautifully. You’re going to need to understand how to best distribute that content so you can monetize it and have it gain eyeballs.

You’re going to need to be customer service manager. It won’t take long for you to start receiving pitches for stories from those with a vested interest in serving a client or their company.CSRM is about balancing the needs of the company with the needs of the customer. It will be your job to balance the value of continuing to receive those story ideas from PR people with the best interests of your audience, or else risk losing both.

You’re going to need to be an aggressive businessman and researcher. If you’re really trying to make your fulltime living off writing, you’re going to need to understand your niche and understand who has a vested interest in marketing to your niche. This means trying out ad networks, bargaining and negotiating for the best deal you can get, and even cold calling companies that can help you achieve those ends.

Most people don’t understand all that’s involved with going it alone and making it work – which is why it’s easy for folks like Penelope Trunk to say “you’re not going to make it.” Chances are, she’s right, since it’s essentially starting a new business, and the majority of all new businesses fail.

Similarly, it’s understandable why Jeff Jarvis might be skeptical. In response to the WSJ figures quoted above, he said:

As much as I would like to believe that blogging is a lucrative profession, I’m not sure I buy it — not quite yet. He says that bloggers with 100,000 readers a month are making $75k. Name a few. Still, the trend is heading this way and I’m certainly happy to hear talk of blogging as a business model.

Granted, 100,000 readers a month won’t grant you an automatic $75k. It’s possible, but not likely, and that number certainly doesn’t scale upwards at a 1:1 ratio.

To say that blogging is a fruitless endeavor is completely wrong, and that is the sentiment that the uninitiated and the frustrated have been putting forward lately. It’s a very complex business, and it isn’t easy. For the dedicated and qualified, though, it is possible.