We’ve had some big news already this month, but we’ve got something else coming soon as well that I am pretty excited about. It’s locked down, but there are a few details that have to be wrapped up before we can make any official announcement (I’m actually surprised this hasn’t leaked yet to be honest). More soon.
Blogging culture, which is often at least partially anonymous, is going overboard. Death threats have forced blogger Kathy Sierra to cancel speaking engagements and stay in her house.
I’ve also received death threats in the comments on this blog and TechCrunch, and people have said they will kill my dog. I’ve had a lot of parties at my house and my address is fairly easy to find, so these comments do make me sleep poorly sometimes. But for the most part I ignore them. As a man, I am far less likely statistically to be stalked or attacked than a woman. In some ways, I see it as a cost to doing business.
A lot of people we interact with daily seem very normal. But put them behind a keyboard and allow them to make anonymous comments and some really evil stuff can result. There’s no clear line as to what’s acceptable and not acceptable. But if you find yourself making anonymous attack comments that may be going overboard, ask yourself if you really want to be causing people the kind of pain that Kathy is going through. And then just stop.
Lots of fascinating commentary the last few days on the demise of print media:
Tim O’Reilly: SF Chronicle in Trouble
Jessica Guynn: InfoWorld To Fold Magazine
David Lazarus: Here, let me throw myself under this bus
David Lazarus: Gets up from under bus, throws himself in front of train
Print media is what it is. I can’t imagine anyone will be printing news on paper twenty years from now in the industrialized world, so the only question is when it will go away, not if. At some point, these circulation numbers will begin to vaporize. And when it’s over for the New York Times, I can’t imagine many others will be around, either.
But forgetting the print part of print media for a second, there’s the question of whether they can survive in some other form. The more proactive publications are trying new things, and will keep the stuff that works.
Hopefully, the publications that try really dumb things like charging for content will stop before it puts them out of business (Doc explains why – no one will pay, and oh yeah, the search engines ignore your content).
Newspapers need to get over the mentality that they and they alone are qualified to gather, analyze and write news (see Lazarus’ second post above for their side of the argument). Bloggers as a group are just kicking their ass all over the place, even when it comes to doing real, live journalism stuff. Like talking to sources and digging for a story. Most print journalists are 9-5 types, and many are union can’t easily be fired. That makes them lazy (I would be).
What you get if you blog for a while is a sense of how valuable your readers are, and not because they view and click on ads.
Here’s an example – If a newspaper is writing about a startup and the writer is fairly sure there aren’t any direct competitors, they’ll still write “Snoozy, one of the leading startups in putting people to sleep” rather than “this is the first company to do this, and the only one so far.” They do this because they must never write an incorrect sentence. So instead of figuring out the truth, they will usually just write a noncommittal sentence. I never really saw this until I started blogging. Now, half the sentences in the average newspaper article jump out at me like they are highlighted – watered down, ass covering statements of nothing.
Now, I’ll write the latter if I can’t find any competitors after talking to a couple of sources and doing basic research. And even though startups are my area of knowledge, there’s a very good chance that statement will be incorrect.
But I write it anyway. Then I watch the comments like a hawk. And in an hour I have 95%+ certainty if I’m right or not.
My readers do the final fact check for me. And if I’m wrong, I correct immediately.
Now I didn’t go to journalism school, and I’m certain that my method for fact checking will horrify those who did. No one taught me this, I just figured it out on my own.
When I write, I write to learn more than I write to teach. I am not preaching to the masses, I am inviting them to have a conversation with me, where I get to set the topic and have the first word. We go from there.
Doc has more words of wisdom in his post that I linked to above. Things like linking to other publications and bloggers, linking back to your own old content, etc.
But I still believe that it will be difficult for newspapers to stay around. Their best and brightest will keep leaving to do their own thing. In the past this was impossible, because there was no way for them to make a living. But today, a visit to WordPress.com and a phone call to FM publishing gets you your publishing platform and your ad sales group. All you have to do then is write good content, and the audience will come.
Hopefully Lazarus will realize this before he’s the only one left at the Chronicle.
Mike,
I was checking-out at Costco a few hours ago, when the cashier looked at my name on the membership-card and asked if I have a relative named ‘Mike Arrington’. I said, “Yes, my Son.” She became excited and asked how she could get in touch with you.
I hesitated, then asked her “Why?” She explained that you had installed all the plumbing in her new house last year and now she is planning a room addition. She wants you to install a shower and a toilet!
I asked her if the existing plumbing works….and she said it did! So I told her we must not be talking about the same Mike Arrington.
Dad
And thanks for the pictures Andreas (see comments). You got me. It’s tough to make it as a blogger, and you gotta make ends meet one way or another.
The Sun event last night was a ton of fun. Tim Bray was a graceful and considerate co-speaker (translation: he didn’t destroy me on at least two occasions when I said something dumb), and we had an interesting discussion on web innovation and the usefulness of venture capital. A good portion of the audience were TechCrunch readers, and many contributed their own nuggets of wisdom to the discussion.
Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz also made a cameo appearance at the beginning, noting how much Sun is now listening to customer feedback. Dan Farber captured a couple of quotes:
“We have a little bit of the ‘what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger gene’ at Sun.” That gene is expressed in customer meetings by sitting down, shutting up and listening, he said. “We are trying to work on our listening gene.”
My only regret – I wish Dave Winer was in the audience – we could have had an excellent RSS v. Atom debate as well.
There were lots of video cameras at the event. If anyone has posted video or audio, please let me know.
Peter Rip, one of the smarter guys in silicon valley, wrote a not-bad post about web 2.0. But he used a well noted slump in Alexa ratings to back up his point, dragging TechCrunch and GigaOm and Technorati into the fight by saying these sites have peaked in traffic and are all now on the decline.
By simply clicking on our traffic counter, which we provide on our home page, he could have seen that our traffic is up, way up, over the period he says it was declining. Our highest traffic day ever was last month, and there wasn’t any particularly great news that day. I imagine GigaOm and Technorati are also way up, as are most startups that I talk to.
But Rip didn’t click that link, he just pulled a classic blogger move, one that I use often: Ready, fire, aim.
The astounding thing is that Valleywag DID do the basic research, and corrected him. They even contacted Alexa and asked why the dip is happening, and got a believable answer.
It’s like the world is turned upside down.
If you’re not planning on sitting home and watching Justin.tv all night, come by the Sun event where Tim Bray and I will be discussing Web 2.0 and venture capital. Menlo Park, 4:30ish. Free.
Orli Yakuel’s Go2web2 turned one year old last week. Over 2,000 RSS readers, and English isn’t even her first language. Good blogging!
Does this video scare you, or get you really excited for the future?
Check it out. They’re producing a video and audio version. Good content.
I’ve written about the new genealogy social network Geni a bunch of times at TechCrunch – latest is here. When I first started using it, I simply added my parents and stopped. My dad picked it up from the email invitation and added some people from his side of the family. Then his sister started adding people, too. Lots of phone calls were made to fill out the gray areas, and that’s when we discovered that I have a long dead relative named Alfred W. Arrington, who was a lawyer and a preacher, and also published poetry and a number of books.
Alfred was either my great-great grandfather or my great-great-uncle. We’re trying to locate a copy of at least one of his books – apparently there’s one in some university somewhere.
Awesome.
As TechCrunch traffic continues to grow, a problem is popping up more and more often – the traffic we send to a site when we write about it on its launch day can (and often does) take it down. It’s not that TechCrunch traffic is that massive, but it’s enough that if there’s a bug somewhere in application that wasn’t noticed with small traffic testing, it can be exploited and quickly take the site down. The last week, we’ve averaged one site down per day.
Examples: We wrote about Spotplex and it went down fast, as did Amie Street and Kegulator tonight (Kegulator is more of a toy, so it doesn’t really count).
Another problem is that the traffic doesn’t last. See this Alexa chart for Spotplex as an example. There’s a spike, and then most of the people never come back. Hopefully a few stick around, register and tell their friends, but building an application to scale to handle a TechCrunch post is a long term solution to a short term problem.
Startups are noticing, too. Occasionally a new startup tells us they don’t want us to write about them yet, because they aren’t ready for too many eyeballs. We comply, of course. But I hate not being able to write about something that I like.
I’m not sure what to do about this. One solution is to start a new blog to focus on really young startups that haven’t had to deal with any traffic load, and write about them on TechCrunch later. But I like to write about things on TC before anyone else has heard of them, so it isn’t a great solution.
Anyone have any ideas?
I just saw this ad on TechCrunch, which says “TechCrunch Should Review…Intellicontact” and links here. They bought an adsense ad specifically for TechCrunch, and are probably paying a dollar or so per click. Funny and creative.
There’s an article in Advertising Age about how the Red Campaign has (so far) only raised $18 million to fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.
I’m not a big fan of these sorts of things, although the bay area in general embraces opportunities to display altruism whenever possible. If you drive down the street in your Toyota Pious, wearing a yellow bracelet and listening to a red iPod, you are a caring person and have a good soul. If not, you aren’t and you don’t.
People shouldn’t give to charity to get laid or feel superior to those around them. They should do it because it’s the right thing to do. And if you care about AIDS, don’t buy an iPod. Donate $400 directly to the Global Fund instead. For more on this, see buylesscrap.org.
From the article:
The Red campaign can be a good start or it can be a colossal waste of money, and it all depends on whether this edgy, innovative campaign inspires young people to be better citizens or just gives them an excuse to feel good about themselves while they buy an overpriced item they don’t really need. (Trent Stamp, president of Charity Navigator)
CrunchGear has a good post on how to fix an iPod that won’t boot. Gizmodo liked it enough to link as well. I’m hoping to see more “how to’s” on that blog.
I’m honored to have participated in two of the top ten recent blogger tantrums. Calacanis beat me with three entries, though. 
