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for July 2007.
The participant list, including several of us from Viget, just surpassed 100 and we’re still two weeks away, so it’ll be a great (and large) crowd. If you can make it, just add yourself to the list and show up.
For those BarCamp newbies out there, you should know that attendance is free, but this isn’t your mom’s “sit-and-listen” type conference. Attendees are expected to participate by presenting, demoing, or facilitating a group discussion. Being an unconference, the schedule and topics are organized ad-hoc the day of the event.
Who should attend? While the topics may be most relevant to web developers, designers, and marketers, I would encourage entrepreneurs, old media professionals, and others to attend as well. As Jason put it, the more diverse the crowd, the better the conversation.
Mahalo is serial entrepreneur Jason Calacanis‘ latest project. The goal of Mahalo is to create a human powered search engine for the most commonly searched terms of the web.
In a time in which everyone is starting a business by trying to take advantage of the long tail — that is, attempting to profit on the niche nature of the infinitely niche web — Calacanis and Mahalo buck that trend. Calacanis says the “big fat part of the tail are the searches that people do over and over again.” When people search for “Lindsey Lohan” or “digital camera,” he wants them to think of Mahalo.
Mahalo has been compared to Wikipedia and About.com. Wikipedia, however, leverages the wisdom of the crowds and is a collaboration of groups of interested individuals crafting and editing the entries of the world’s largest encyclopedia. About.com and Mahalo are similar but the former focuses on subjects and topics (e.g., Money Planning) versus search terms. The commonality of the two is that they are written by guides.
Calacanis recognizes that his human-powered search cannot compete with the likes of Google when it comes to the extensiveness of its results. But he’s not trying to dethrone Google. He wants to “hand-craft the cleanest, most organized, and spam-free SeRPs [search engine results page] available today.”
In an interview with Loic Le Meur, Calacanis talks about his problems with Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and its experts, some of whom toyed with Mahalo.
Jason advocates for a different idea that he calls “Site Experience Optimization,” which focuses on making sites better for people. SEO, by contrast, is all about optimizing a site for a machine — a computer algorithm.
SEO and Site Experience Optimization are not conflicting ideas. Blackhat SEO, determined to create SPAM results and game search engines, care nothing about Site Experience Optimization. But any intelligently designed web site considers both computers (algorithms) and humans. They are designed to ensure that sites are found by search engine robots and, ultimately, are useful for visitors.
I was playing with Pownce and Twitter over the weekend, and through various clicks on friends of friends ended up finding Gary Vaynerchuk — a guy who “drinks wine and tells people what it tastes like” — which led me to Wine Library TV. I expected a polite video about some nice chardonnay, but instead was smacked by the high-volume “VAY-NER-CHUK” opening Gary uses on his daily 15 minute wine review show.
Gary was recently featured in the article Totally Uncorked in Time Magazine. A telling point:
“I can’t write, so I missed the whole blog thing, and I was pissed,” he says. So when he saw Andy Samberg’s Saturday Night Live video Lazy Sunday explode on YouTube, he got himself a video camera and started winelibrarytv.com.
Video Blogging
Gary’s show shows how much video is changing the way people make and share content online. Here’s a guy who would never write a blog, but can sit down for 15 minutes straight with no cuts, no edits, and pull off an entertaining show that’s got something new every time. He leverages the medium well, too. He knows his web page layout, and points viewers to key spots where they can “friend him up” or click on a link he mentions lower on the page.
Expect to see more and more people who a couple of years ago might have launched a traditional text blog going the video route. Players like veotag, which includes a clickable table of contents and other text content, and the wide-format viddler, which allows time-specific tagging and comments, makes the viewing experience significantly better. Throw in the fact that search engines can pick up this meta content (not true of the video itself) and the video model gets even more attractive to content producers, because the primary method for attracting an audience (search engines) is covered.
Conflicts
The Time piece says:
Only on the Web could Vaynerchuk review wine … because he’s trying to sell wine on the very same website where he’s rating it–which, despite his deep knowledge and spot-on nose, reduces his trustworthiness. But, Vaynerchuk says, what people seek from him isn’t individual reviews but lessons in how to enjoy wine.
It’s true, the whole show spawned out of Gary’s wine shop, and he’s a life-long wine salesman. But would he really score a bad wine higher just to sell a few extra cases? He puts his reputation on the line (and in a permanent archive) every time he voices his opinion on the show. As soon as he hocks wine without his audience’s best interests in mind, his reputation will be gone along with his audience — and both are far more valuable than any one-time up-sell gains.
I’m all for journalistic integrity and I think the debate about conflicts with bloggers (read: not journalists) is an important and evolving topic. I think the transparency of Gary’s opinions, relationships, and conversations with the community go a long way to showing how it can work.
Gary knows a lot about wine because he sells it for a living. As he’s sharing his expertise, why not create a seamless shopping experience for me? I think the process should be even more integrated than what he has setup now. In fact, I think a see-it-buy-it process should be plugged into all online content (text and video). Done unobtrusively, it only enhances the user experience. Integrate it behind the scenes with affiliate programs (or direct sales) and you’ll inspire a lot more great content to be generated. Who wouldn’t want that?
Social Media Marketing
I caught Gary on a good weekend. On his 7/19 episode he went a bit heavy on the “friend me up” routine, asking viewers to connect with him on corkd, facebook, myspace, etc. They let him know their feelings in the comments, and he responded in a multi-URL video scavenger hunt that started with garyissorry.com.
He isn’t really sorry, of course, and at waitgaryismad.com he rants about his audience not appreciating his free content and late-night email responses. Fair enough, but it’s the whydoesgarysendmetosomanyplaces.com video that offers some lessons on the latest marketing techniques. He calls it “spreading the thunder.”
An example: on a recent trip to San Francisco he twittered about meeting him at a wine bar, which sparked a multi-hour exchange with some of his “Vayniacs” in person. No press release, no lead time, no event planning. A 5 second microblog post online leading to a 2+ hour meeting offline with people Gary wanted to meet. For more on his thought process, watch for yourself:
Two points of emphasis are spot on:
It’s about people. He loves making connections, and he’s using the latest tools of the trade to help him do it better.
It’s all up to the audience. He’s not telling anyone to do anything. He’s encouraging and engaging people. How they take it is up to them.
Social media marketing isn’t about manipulation, and going into it with a business-minded strategy doesn’t make it so. It’s about engaging communities and contributing value to make them better. Play a part. Gary was already providing value with his show, and he’s been savvy enough to jump on all (and I mean all) the social networks and community platforms to spread his message.
Will Gary’s show grow because of it, or will his shameless self promotion be too much for his growing audience to bear? Gary listens to his audience and reacts, and even if he doesn’t always agree at least he gives them free stuff. But as he’d probably tell you, it’s all an experiment these days, which is what makes it so interesting.
Each step we take seems to more closely connect and intermingle content generators with content consumers. The result is that success or failure is more about the quality of the actual product (in this case Gary), and less about all the fluff around it. That’s how it should be anyway, right?
Want to post serialized audio content on your site? Don’t know where to start? If you have very special requirements, you may want to contact a service; but, more than likely, you’ll be able to get a podcast set up on your own.
Step 1
Record your first audio file, convert it to MP3 format, and post it to your server.
Code up an RSS file that provides information about the MP3 (where to find it, titles of the podcast and episode, description, keywords, etc.) and post it to your server. You’ll add information about additional MP3s to this file each time you post a new “episode.”
Start an account at Feedburner, a free service to help you track stats and manage your podcast. Register your podcast (burn your feed) by submitting the path to your RSS file.
Take the feedburner URL they provide (something like: http://feeds.feedburner.com/[yourfeed]) and register it with iTunes and other podcasting sites. You can also post a link to the feed directly from your web site.
Ultimately, your major cost will be for bandwidth used when serving your podcasts. Audio files can be large and, depending on your audience and file sizes, you could start exceeding your monthly transfer allotment pretty quickly. For this reason, you might consider using a separate service (try PureStatic) just to host the media files.
As you’ll notice above, I’ve made heavy reference to Rufus White’s blog. You should definitely take a look at his five-part series on podcasting for a much more thorough explanation of the process.
As promised, here are the slides from last night’s talk:
Since the code in the presentation is taken somewhat out of context, I’m including the full code sample as well.
Even though it ended in a tie, it may not be as bad as “kissing your sister”. Both are great libraries that provide functionality that was never possible for us when writing PHP code. Choosing the right one is a matter of personal preference – right now, our preference is Mocha.
Back in January, I was blown away by the demo of FlexMock that Jim Weirich gave during his “Red, Green, Refactor” talk at the Rails Edge conference. Since then, we have been making extensive use of both FlexMock and Mocha when we need to control the behavior of objects inside the code we’re testing. This is especially useful when our models rely on external resources (e.g. resources fetched via HTTP), but it also comes in handy when we want to hone in on testing a single piece of code:
class Die def roll rand(6) + 1 end end
In our tests, we can stub out the behavior of Kernel#rand so that we’re working with a defined state (using FlexMock):
class DieTest < Test::Unit::TestCase def test_roll_when_rand_returns_zero_should_return_one
die = Die.new
flexmock(die).should_receive(:rand).once.with(Integer).and_return(0)
assert_equal 1, die.roll end end
I’ll be testing a simple bit of Ruby code and comparing both libraries side-by-side to discuss their usage. Mocking is a concept that I’ve been interested in for a while (and have been writing aboutmore and more), so I’m really looking forward to the event. Hope to see you there.
I attended the New Media Nouveaux conference — hosted by Success in the City — right in our own backyard this past Friday (the 13th - ooooh, scary). Brian was on one of the panels and, for most of the day, I camped out with my laptop and listened to a variety of speakers talk about social media and its implications in the marketplace.
The crowd was very much “newbies” to the whole Web 2.0 / social media world. They were hit with a fire hose of information, but I think they enjoyed trying to soak it all in.
Livingston kicked everything off by emphasizing the transparent, honest, and participatory nature of social media. For him, social media is about community. It is about sharing ideas. His Buzz Bin blog includes great coverage of the day by one of the moderators — Andrea Morris.
A special and pleasant surprise for me was Diaz, who authors a thought provoking blog over at evange.LIST. Diaz was on a panel (moderated by Andrea) that focused on “how to do social media.” The panelists seemed to cover everything under the sun, from social networking to wikis and viral video. Check out some of Qui’s post-conference thoughts.
Our fearless leader, Mr. Brian Williams, had the difficult task of being on a panel discussing what the future holds for the web and new media. He was joined by Aaron Brazell and Sean Gorman of FortiusOne (check out their blog for a heatmap showing the DC Madam Scandal). The future for much of the audience was actually understanding what had been discussed to that point — blogging, tools like Technorati, and how to get involved in conversations happening across the web. So, you can understand the challenge of his discussion. [Photo: Brian (right) and his fellow panelists]
Brian made several great points, but one that stuck out regarded technology.
“You shouldn’t have to worry about technology … you need to participate in the community at large to build your audience the right way. Your challenge is allocating resources and attention and focus … to have that mindset.”
Brazell did an interesting sink-or-swim segment. His sinkers included Yahoo, MySpace, and Mahalo. Twitter, Facebook, and ConceptShare were swimmers.
The day wrapped up with Bloomberg sharing about her own social media success story and her lessons learned. I loved the way she set the stage, “What if you guys don’t like me? What if my stories are boring or if I can’t do it?”
She was driving at an excellent takeaway point — there are many excuses not to get involved in social media. You have to be a bit vulnerable to enter this world. You have to put something of yourself into your content. If you don’t — and the passion to talk about your business, ideas, or whatever it is you are sharing online is absent — then you are probably not ready to embrace social media.
If you’re a mac user like me, then you can appreciate all the subtle nuances Apple adds to its products. One of these is the ability to add a custom search field in Safari. With a simple attribute change, you can transform a regular text field into a Mac-a-fied search box.
Basic text field:
<input type="text" />
Safari-specific search box:
<input type="search" />
Include past search data:
<input type="search" results="5" />
This method degrades gracefully in most modern browsers, but it isn’t valid markup. I’ve remedied this minor problem by using JavaScript to dynamically add these attributes. The following example uses the jQuery library but could also be written to use traditional DOM Scripting.
This past weekend, 72 co-founders got together to try to build a web start-up from concept to launch in an experiment dubbed Startup Weekend. They (designers, developers, UXers, marketers — even lawyers) started on Friday by selecting a business idea from a list of 50 suggestions. They cranked almost non-stop until the wee hours Sunday night, but ultimately didn’t accomplish the stated goal of having VoSnap open for business on Monday. The software just wasn’t ready, and to that end, they admit, it was a failure. It’s clear to me, though, that the weekend was a success on many levels, and I commend the group for being so open with their experiences along the way.
I was in Colorado and couldn’t resist stopping by on Sunday afternoon to see what was happening for myself. David, Andrew, and Matt showed me around a bit, and I was able to be a fly on the wall. I was there less than an hour, but a couple of things struck me right away:
There was a great productive energy. I showed up 40+ hours into it, and everyone was still getting along great and enjoying themselves. There was lots of collaboration and real work getting done. It was fun to be around.
It was more about the experience than the results. It was relaxed. People weren’t overly stressed — it was more about having the chance to work along side a bunch of other smart people. Everyone was clearly learning a lot from each other, and they seemed to value the experience more than any potential value of owning 1/72th of a start-up (something the TechCrunch flamers don’t seem to get). It was certainly intense and focused, but it wasn’t a make-or-break attitude. Given the situation, I think that’s fine.
I was disappointed for the team when I learned yesterday that the site didn’t launch. I know they worked hard, and I’m sure a lot them are frustrated. Several people have beensupportive, and I echo their positive sentiments. I’m hoping to help organize a start-up weekend in DC (and perhaps Durham?), and the Boulder team’s experiences will be key to any future successes.
The Key Lesson?
One of the coolest things about Startup Weekend was all the different disciplines represented in one room. Designers, marketers, strategy guys, and developers, all working side-by-side. Classic teamwork.
Appropriately enough given the team-spirit of the weekend, the no-launch isn’t being pinned on any one group. I think that’s fair — it was a team effort, and everyone no doubt cut corners to save time, turning in quality but in some sense ”incomplete” work.
Here’s the problem: developers can’t turn in “incomplete” work if you’re ever going to hit a deadline (they can turn in “crappy” work, but that’s another post …). It all has to work. That’s not an indictment of the developers — far from it. It’s a nod of respect. They have the hardest (in this context) job, period. Everyone gets to cheat but them.
Creative can design a imperfect UI. PR can write shallow promotions. Even the overall strategy can be somewhat off. When you only have a weekend, of course there will be limitations. All of these problems might mean than the business won’t do well, but they won’t keep it from launching. Bad (or a lack of) code, though, will. At the end of the day, some developer has to sit down and make everything work, or else everyone goes home empty handed.
The Startup Weekend experiment highlights the obvious: without a functioning backend, there is no start-up and nothing else matters.
This isn’t news to anyone. They apparently had tip 1(a) — “It’s the backend, stupid” — up on a board somewhere, but they didn’t need me to tell them. They knew it going in, but development challenges are simply hard to predict and overcome, and they’re always the most likely to blow your schedule.
Whether you have a weekend or a year, just remember that your app is probably harder to build than you think (technically). Plan and adjust accordingly.
I’m out in Colorado this week, and I had a chance to work out of the TechStars office yesterday afternoon before doing a quick talk with the 10 start-up teams participating in the incubator.
The energy was great. David has pulled together some really smart entrepreneurs who are working hard on some solid ideas. I’m excited to see where these companies — and founders — go from here.
Along with some of the lessons from our work with Squidoo, I had planned to focus on the importance of a strong front-end to any consumer-facing web app, but, after learning more about what the teams are working on, I switched it up to cover a broader range of topics. With some inspiration from Seth, I whittled my long list into the nine I thought would be most relevant. Since all good entrepreneurs are arrogant and argumentative, I beat them to the punch and disputed each tip. Here they are:
1. It’s all about the front-end
2. Hurry up
3. Make sure it scales
4. Keep it simple
5. Listen to your users
6. Make mistakes
7. Foster evangelists
8. Stay dedicated
9. Focus
1(a). It’s the backend, stupid
2(a). Take your time
3(a). Scale it later
4(a). Solve the problem
5(a). Listen to your gut
6(a). Make smart decisions
7(a). Passion, not just positivity
8(a). Quit!
9(a). Focus
All these guys are working on unique ideas but are facing similar (and familiar) challenges. While I think they’re getting a lot of great advice from the mentors (if I do say so myself), I think it’s the insights they’re getting from each other as they figure things out along the way that they’ll miss the most when the summer’s over.
Thanks again to the group for having me out. Seeing as how Boulder and start-ups are two of my favorite things, I’m up for an encore anytime.
We’re a proud sponsor of BarCamp DC, happening on August 11th at Fleishman-Hillard located at 16th & L. 
July 27th, 2007 | By Brian Wynne Williams - Co-Founder & CEO
In a time in which everyone is starting a business by trying to take advantage of the long tail — that is, attempting to profit on the niche nature of the infinitely niche web — Calacanis and Mahalo buck that trend. Calacanis says the “big fat part of the tail are the searches that people do over and over again.” When people search for “
I was playing with 
hosted by Success in the City — right in our own backyard this past Friday (the 13th - ooooh, scary). Brian was on one of the panels and, for most of the day, I camped out with my laptop and listened to a variety of speakers talk about social media and its implications in the marketplace.
Web 2.0 / social media world. They were hit with a fire hose of information, but I think they enjoyed trying to soak it all in.
“You shouldn’t have to worry about technology … you need to participate in the community at large to build your audience the right way. Your challenge is allocating resources and attention and focus … to have that mindset.”
almost non-stop until the wee hours Sunday night, but ultimately didn’t accomplish the stated goal of having 
The energy was great.