You may remember the story of how the devil and a friend of his were walking down the street, when they saw ahead of them a man stoop down and pick up something from the ground, look at it, and put it away in his pocket. The friend said to the devil, ‘What did that man pick up?’ ‘He picked up a piece of the truth,’ said the devil. ‘That is a very bad business for you, then,’ said his friend. ‘Oh, not at all,’ the devil replied, ‘I am going to help him organize it.’
Archive for September, 2008
Beware Shiny Objects
September 13, 2008The Media and the Election: More Noise, Less Signal
September 13, 2008Scott Klein called my attention to Eugene Robinson’s column, suggesting the McCain strategy is decrease the signal-to-noise ratio of this campaign: “Any day spent arguing about meaningless ephemera is a small but significant victory for a campaign that has nothing to say.”
Echoed in Politico: “ ‘Every day not talking about the economy, the war and how to fix a broken system is a victory for McCain,’ said John Weaver, a former top strategist to the nominee who left the campaign last year. ‘They’re going to ride it as long as they can and as long as the mainstream media puts up every ridiculous charge.’ “
The More Noise, Less Signal strategy has legs only as long the various media are a poor filter for the noise, or worse, are an amplifier for the noise being put out there, or even worse, start adding new noise.
Clearly cable news is guilty as charged. When was the last time you saw a panel of 3 economists discussing the mortgage crisis, or 3 foreign policy and military experts discussing the war? Almost always a a panel of partisan political experts either adding noise, or discussing the impact of serious issues on the campaign – not dissecting the issues themselves.
Where does print fall? Or the blogosphere? Does the sum total effect of the blogosphere serve to cut the noise and crank up the signal, or vice versa? Is the blog beast, effective, today, in keeping the campaigns honest, or is the net effect to make it more noisy?
Thoughts? [It'd be an interesting experiment for someone to take the Daylife API and possibly do a quantitative analysis on this topic.]
Boards Need Love Too
September 8, 2008
Image via Wikipedia Saul Klein, who in my book is already one of the best angel investors / startup advisors / directors in the business, sent a note to all his portfolio companies asking for feedback – 3 things he should do more of, 3 he should do less of.
Straightforward and commendable. And the first time I’ve seen it done!
Serving on a board of advisors or directors is a role and a skill, like anything else. But unlike other jobs, like being a engineer or marketer or salesperson, a culture and processes don’t typically exist to help one really hone their skills.
1) There is no professional training for it – you don’t study it in school
2) There is no formal mentorship or coaching for board members (directors or advisors), within companies, or VC firms
3) You don’t log many hours exercising that skill, or observing others do the same (by contrast – a engineer is an engineer 2,000 hours a year)
4) There is a small pool of directors and advisors out there – which leads to an even smaller pool of all-star role models
5) A small percentage have 10+ years of board experience – contrast that with the number of years your senior management has, doing the jobs they do.
6) There are no formal reviews or feedback loops. You do weekly, monthly, quarterly, annuals reviews of all your employees, after all.
If your company has more formal programs for helping board members (be they advisors or directors) improve, do share! And if not – would your company do a quarterly 360 review of all its advisors and directors?
Content Networks, Utility, and Supporting Content Creation
September 8, 2008Fred Destin was kind enough to notice Daylife’s quiet, steady growth (“A content network to rule them all”). Building businesses takes time!
Fred perceives a key aspect of a content network like Daylife: the super-distribution of content, and the audience it brings. Or put another way, increasing the economic utility of content. If a piece of content is used in more places, more easily, then its value increases and it’s easier to financially rationalize its creation.
Now, for Daylife or any other content network to make a dent in the economics of original content creation will require Google-esque scale, and likely a value-capture model richer than just “driving traffic.” Not quite there yet.
The more immediate and interesting economic angle, which we’ve got today (and which is pointed out in the comments to Fred’s post by Shaqfat of the promising newscred.com), is giving publishers a way to scale and support their original content creation.
Consider that Daylife.com is showing some great growth with zero marketing (or perhaps even negative marketing – we haven’t even gotten around to basics like e-mail to a friend, RSS, etc.) and no dedicated staff (the only human intervention is programming the large cover images on our front page).
Now, imagine you were a publisher with a brand, a decent page rank, an editorial staff, and your own voice. You can now mix in the Daylife API and create your own site or application, adding millions of pages that run automagically.
All those additional pages generate additional engagement, ad inventory, and $, allowing the publisher to underwrite their original content creation. (Which, as I argued, is more important than ever in this day and age).
The model is shifting towards a core of original content creation and human voice, robocop’d with automation to not only create new experiences but generate additional scale.
And in time the content networks will achieve scale, and the original content (the best of it, at least) will see increasing utility, as Fred forecasts.
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Branding Your Rivals
September 7, 2008On Daylife, almost every time we link to an article, we include the a tiny logo for that site, like these: 
.
It’s seems like the right thing to do – a service to the publishers we link to, and a service to readers. But we never figured folks using our platform would do the same. Linking out in the first place was a big enough deal.
I of little faith. A number do so. The Daylife API originally didn’t include these logos – the forward-thinking Guardian even insisted we do so before they launched. How cool is that? Cheers!
