At least he admits that the first episode of his show sucked.
Somebody in the audience is going after him for the Mavs. He says he has heard an entire stadium booing while seeing his face on the big screen, but he has never been heckled at an industry conference.
Cuban's business rule -- and explanation of why he went after HDTV -- is that he likes "death wars." My table wonders: What the hell is a death war? And how does it relate to HDTV? And Saddam. (Sorry, I thought I was still watching the debate....)
It remains amazing to me that we are listening -- hell, paying to listen -- to a guy who made too much money selling a company for too much money to a company that was stupid enough to buy it and then kill it. And he has a TV show, too.
And they make fun of people for being egotistical enough to have a blog.
I understand why the world pays attention to Paris Hilton. I don't understand why the world pays attention to Mark Cuban.
: Heilemann does a word association. Donald Trump? "Role model for how to fail in business," says Cuban.
He continues to say that the Bryant case was good for the NBA because the rape story brought game highlights.
: Cory Doctorow stands up to talk HDTV. He says that we all have HDTVs in our laptops. HD tvs, he says, are just dumb laptops that are hard to carry around.
: UPDATE: Jason Calacanis collared me this morning saying he was going to flame me for saying that Cuban said rape was good for the NBA. I looked it up; I said he said the case was good because it brought TV time. Anyway, Cuban did make a point of saying that he did not thing that rape was good for the NBA and so I'll make that clear. OK?
Veep-off
: I'm now in a room watching the debate with Micah Sifry, Scott Kurnit, Dan Gillmor, Mitch Kapor, Zack Rosen, and other lumiaries. I think I'll enjoy the peanut gallery more than the action on stage. (Out of 600 people here, 25 are watching the debate.)
While I'm on insubstantial issues, I can already see that sitting is better than standing. I want sitting debates.
: Cheney repeats what both candidates said the other night: that our biggest threat is a terrorist having a nuke. I'm not sure I buy that. And i sure hope I'm not right.
: Edwards sure comes out shooting: "Mr. Vice President, you are still not being straight with the American people." The rules said there were to be no opening statements. Ha!
Now I understand why politicians go to law school. Nothing about making laws. Everything about rhetorical attack.
: Paul Bremer gave Edwards his straight line yesterday, saying there weren't enough troops.
And Cheney is on the defensive.
: Edwards, too, gets Saddam and bin Laden confused. It's catching.
: When Cheney says Edwards has his facts wrong and he has not connected Iraq to 9/11, this room breaks out in a guffaw.
: Cheney says we are four days away from a democratic election in Afghanistan. Let's not forget that, my friends. That is progress in the world.
Too bad Iraq ain't Afghanistan, eh?
Edwards won't allow that to be good news. "They are now providing 75 percent of the world's opium." I say that's a mistake to find the dark center to every cloud. At least celebrate the spread of democracy, guys. That's the vision I expect from both administrations.
: Edwards spins the "global test" quote. He says they will go over terrorists and they "will never give veto power" to another country. I'll wager that Bush will step up the global test advertising. I smell the coming of French cheese-eating surrender monkeys.
The moderator says she's going to come back to the global test and Edward says "yes, ma'am." Polite southerners.
She asks: "What is a global test if it's not a global veto."
Right question. This is the most upsetting single thing about Kerry to me. The French f'ed us along with Old Europe and we cannot depend on these alleged allies. It is very much the right question.
He says these nations need to trust us, that we are credible. "They will not follow us without that." They won't follow us anyway. They've said they will not go into Iraq. That dog don't hunt truffles.
: Cheney makes a big mistake answering Edwards, going after challenging facts ("the 90 percent figure is dead wrong"). No, he should be speaking in a French accent.
: Cheney says that Edwards and Kerry "voted against the troops." That was his first contact blow.
: CNN is leaving up the Chyron for many, many minutes: "Would it be dangerous to elect Kerry President?" What the hell is wrong?
: At :27, we have the first Halliburton mention. Micah Sifry follows the rules of the drinking game: Down goes the merlot.
: Good for you Gwen: She pushes the question of whether the efforts to internatinalize the effort in Iraq are "naive" given that the French and Germans have told us to F off.
Edwards: "We have a plan for success."
Bullshit meets bullshit.
: Wonkette almost live blogs:
8:58PM: They have just completed the essay portion of the debate. 9:10PM: Cheney: "I have never said there was a connection between Iraq and al Qaeda." Yes! And watch these monkeys fly out of my ass!"
: Edwards' eyebrows. That's what it's all about: Edwards' eyebrows. When Kerry hit Bush, his lips got thin and he lost. When Cheney tries to attack Edwards, he raises his eyebrows: 'What the F?' it says.
: Edwards is the prosecutor. Cheney is the witness. Hostile witness. If it keeps going like this, he'll be playing the role of the defendant.
Cheney gets wrapped up in specifics and doesn't give the big-picture view Edwards is giving.
: Edwards could go overboard: Cheney, Haliburton, Ken Lay, and Enron in the same sentence. and Edwards is the definition of smug.
Cheney pushes FactCheck.com. Server immediately hammered.
And let's factcheck the factcheck.com reference. It's actually factcheck.org.
It's a veeplanche!
: Cheney, president of the Senate, goes on an odd attack, saying that Kerry doesn't come to work often enough. "The first time I met you was on stage tonight."
: Edwards is getting cocky. With reason.
: I come to think that Kerry chose Edwards only to defeat Cheney at this debate.
: Amazing that Cheney acts as if he's talking to the moderator while Edwards knows he's talking to the nation.
: UPDATE: Aftewards, I asked the room their score. I thought Edwards won. Micah Sifry thought it was a draw. The room voted more for draw. Some for Edwards. None for Cheney.
And how do you feel about that?
: Ev Williams, a founder of Pyra/Blogger, just announced that he's leaving the company, now owned by Google. Time for the next thing. I saw him here at Web. 2.0 and made fun of him for one aspect of his announcement: His therapist told him to take time off.
Ev did many amazing things -- not just helping create Blogger but also stubbornly keeping it alive and with it this wonderful world of ours. We should all be grateful to him for that amazing grit. As some of you know, I got our company to invest in Pyra (along with O'Reilly, by the way). It wasn't much money. The company never had much money, until the end. It suffered through traffic and complaints about how that traffic brought the service down and Ev kept pushing on, like a pioneer heading west in a blizzard.
It's one thing to have a great idea. It's another to actually start it. It's quite another to have the courage to keep it alive until it is successful. That, ladies and gentlemen, is what made America great. And blogs, too.
I'll be eager to see what he does next.
Web 2.0: John Doerr
: John Doerr is interviewed by John Heilemann, who asks about Google, of course. I'm not hearing much fascinating yet. Will blog it if I hear it.
... It's 20 minutes later now. I haven't found anything to quote amid parrying over Google without saying anything and some hooha about string theory and parallel universes online....
But he just held up his Treo and I'm probably crazy but it didn't look the same. Does John Doerr have a Treo 650? I'm not at all sure. But that's what I want to know.
Web 2.0: comScore
: Gian Fulgoni of comScore is going to run through a lot of new data fast; I'll get the leave-behind and add data later.
Total users on Internet well over 160 million; growth is abating but broadband growth continues unabated. Some cities are over 50 percent.
Spending on sites will easy top $100 billion in 2004. Growth remains rapid. With travel and auction, is over $150 billion.
Broadband and tenure both increase spending. Broadband by 50 percent.
Categories benefitting: apparel, music, consumer packaged goods, online services. People are spending a lot on high-ticket items.Expensive items can be sold online.
Content spending is increasing, at a rate of $1 billion a year (including personals).
Consumers are getting over their security concerns; online banking and bill paying are growing.
Bandwidth consumption over the year shows an interesting trend: P2P consumption is going down (50 percent of all bandwidth a year ago to 15-20 percent today).
28 percent of searchers account for 68 percent of searches. As searching grows, online buying grows. They looked at brandshare among searches. Heavy searches look at Walmart, Overstock, Cosco, Amazon. The low-cost leaders are on top, they say. (I also see greater breadth of merchandise among these than with Barnes and Noble, HP.com, or LandsEnd.)
They find a direct relationship between web activity and buying activity offline. "Online advertising should be getting a greater share," he says. Amen.
He also looks at the activity at job sites to predict the government's employment number.
Web 2.0: Bill Gross
: Bill Gross of Idealab is going to introduce a new company.
He says he has been passionate about search because of how powerful, useful, and technically challenging it is. He says there were three big breakthroughs in search: The audacious notion to index the entire web, then using price, then link as relevance tools.
When you get the page back "that's when the search really begins," he says. "We looked at what we could add value to in that part of the search."
Three keys:
: User control
: User feedback - take what other users have done nad their post-click actions.
: Transparency - exposing every action and transaction to help the user avoid dead ends.
The new service is called Snap. He types in a search for "jaguar." The search has columns for popularity, satisfaction, web popularity, web satisfaction, domain.
He modifies the search live. He types on "os" and it reduces the results to just jaguar OS immediately, before our very eyes.
"Camera" brings up many more columns of choices: zoom, storage, resolution, etc. So the search knows these are factors and allows you to specify what you want. So go to the resolution column and type in 4 and it gives you just cameras that have more than 4 megapixels.
That is user control.
They licensed data about what users did after their search. So when people searched for "walmart" they now know how often they wanted to buy something or wanted a stock quote. Thus popularity. That is feedback.
Type in cars and you get four basic categories: buy, research, loan, insurance.
As to transparency, they are allowing people to see the conversion rate for sales because that is valuable data to consumers. He's opening up the stats for the site, even his revenues, what people are paying for ads, and so on.
He said they hadn't planned to open that up as an API but after hearing Bezos, he will.
Try it here.
(Battelle says it kills him he's not blogging this right now on his Searchblog.)
Web 2.0: Jeff Bezos
: Jeff Bezos shows Web 0.0: the original gray-and-blue Amazon page with no search box on the home page, nothing dynamic, nothing personal. Web 1.0 is Amazon today, he says. Humans create the content but computers place it all, allowing the whole site to be customized. Web 1.0 was making the "interface better for humans," he says. Web 2.0 "is about making the Internet useful for computers." He says we'll see a lot of APIs opened up to do more sophisticated things. He shows Amazon Web Services, now used by 65k developers.
They also just announced in beta Alexa web services. (If only they could get it placed on enough users' sites to make the data more valuable and reliable.)
He shows off things created with Amazon web servces. MusicPlasma.com, from France, allows you to search a favorite band and see the relationships. Try it.
This is "clustering." See earlier post and quote from Esther Dyson on "clustering." This is the 2.0 future. It's about trust and authority and organization....
Another: Scoutpal allows you to scan a bar code of a book so you can see whether it's cheaper on Amazon. He charges $10 a month for the service. "If this was something somebody at Amazon.com thought of"... they'd have to hire a developer and let it compete in priorities and who knows how long it would take.
Instead, let the people create.
Next: A9 plug. New and not yet "exposed" is a sophisticated history service that lets you search your search and site history. I wish someone would let me search my existing browser -- not a9 -- bookmarks, too.) What's most cool is that in searching from multiple sources of information, you can mix web results with results from Amazon's full-text book searches.
Bezos says it's Web 2.0 but it's still Day One.
O'Reilly asks where we will hit the point of tripping over each other with ripping, mixing, and burning all this content and people will complain that their businesses are being hurt. Bezos says there have to be business models for these things.
O'Reilly says that he and Bezos first met when they were butting heads over the 1-Click patent. He suggests that it should be opened up to similar Web Services development since he has millions of customers in a trusted relationship.
Bezos says the wallet is also open. Is it?
[We haven't heard the patented Bezos laugh once yet. I'm in the room when it happens. It's like Mt. Saint Helens erupting. I guess it's a more serious time.]
Bezos says he has a strong incentive to keep inventing because his customers will be loyal to him only until someone offers them a better service.
O'Reilly says the search got worse when full-text books were added. Bezos says they can tell whether they've hurt search because they see immediately whether they've hurt sales.
O'Reilly mentions Rutan's space effort and asks whether Bezos plans to go up in space himself. "Absolutely," he replies.
Bezos says searching inside the book is all about sampling at the point of sale. If you give a sample of ice cream at the store, it's that. If you give it away at a park, it's branding.
The guy who designed the effects in Matrix says to Bezos that he's good at thinking in 10-year chunks. So he asks Bezos what's coming in massive multiplayer gaming. Bezos says we may be in such a universe right now.
Web 2.0: The big time
: We're out of the intimate workshops and into the big room with the big names. John Battelle and Tim O'Reilly are kicking it off with their view of the web as the new operating system with an internet application stack.
Hell, the web is the new operating system of life, no?
They say that profit is migrating down to data suppliers and up to companies that can take advantage of network effects.
They like the architecture of participation with companies that grow as your customers build your business for you: Google, Flikr, eBay, Amazon, Blogger, Linux, Apache.
O'Reilly says Amazon is amazing because it overlayed network effect on an old, only OK business.
Yes, the advantage of this is that the people bring you (a) content but also (b) marketing and (c) valuable data.
"Data is the Intel Inside," says the slide. O'Reilly says Microsoft won the browser war but couldn't turn that into money; it gained them no leverage.
Next: "Innovation in assembly." (Don't you just hate overly abstracted PowerPoint headlines? Hey, in the news business we learned that headlines must inform.) O'Reilly explains as an example his new company that allows users to deconstruct and reconstruct text books.
"Lightweight business models" is the nirvanna of today, the cure for the '90s.
O'Reilly says we come to the end of the software upgrade cycle. So innovations are introduced a small bit at a time instead of a ton at a time. Amazon, eBay, Google add innovations that way; Microsoft takes a half-a-decade to come up with a new OS.
Software "above the level of a single device" is another trend they see.... e.g., the iPod.
Next they emphasize the "power of the tail." See Chris Anderson's story in Wired, which just went up online today.
Those are the themes of the confab, they say.
Web 2.0: Socialtext
: I'm at Ross Mayfield's SocialText and wiki session.
Ross says enterprise software has failed us. 90 percent of collaboration is done with email; knowledge management software goes unused by many. His view is to give people simple, bottoms-up tools to let the people all join in.
"It's actually worth the risk to let users step up and create something." The's the moral of the web, eh?
Mike Pusateri at the Disney ABC Cable Networks Group uses Socialtext and he's going to tell us how.
Note that Disney is also the company that is using RSS as a transport mechanism for video content and commercials in ESPN Motion. Note, too, that Disney has employee blogs. Who would have thought that Disney would be so advance in technology and vision?
Pusateri says these tools are "multiple orders of magnitude cheaper." That will go a long way bringing this new grammar of interaction to the enterprise and then the world.
He said they didn't call blogging blogging when they introduced it. They said here's new software, period.
They use these tools, for example, for a "shift log" to share information from one shift to the next. Switching to blogging software was better than a proprietary solution; it was cheaper; and it added functionality -- e.g., search. Then they added RSS to give people alerts. They didn't call it RSS. They just used it. The architecture is invisible, as somebody said in the prior session on RSS.
It was also a corporate benefit that they could hack at the software to make it fit in with other software.
Now Ross is demoing the software.
(They rescheduled this session and so lots of people didn't know it was here now. Somebody just told me that he saw this post and so he came over here. That's knowledge management at work.)
Veep-off
: I just sent this to the producer at the CNBC show where I'll be gabbing about the Veep-off as an email preinterview:
I'd say that no one will decide to vote FOR one side vs. the other based on the debate and the vice-presidential candidates. But this could make some decide to vote AGAINST.
And that is the problem with this entire election: It's mostly about 'against' rather than 'for.'
There will be the Cheney conspiracy theorists who hate or fear him and hold him against Bush.
There will be the Edwards dismissers who think he's inexperienced and slick and will hold that against Kerry.
Each group will see each man's ills as symptomatic of what's wrong with the ticket and presidential candidate they don't like.
Will that affect the vote? I doubt it. The folks who already hate Cheney hate him; the folks who don't know but mahy get to like Edwards won't come to like Kerry as a result.
What I'd rather see is a debate of each side's secretaries of defense and state and treasury and such.
That would be not only entertaining, it might actually be informative and meaningful.
: The more I think about it, the more I'm guessing that Edwards will try to spend the debate calling Iraq "your war, Dick."
: I'll be on with John Hinderaker of PowerLineBlog and Ana Marie Cox of Wonkette. It's on CNBC at 7p ET, I believe.
Web 2.0: RSS et al
: I wish I hadn't been at the table up front at the RSS session because (a) I don't know much -- to use the words of Dan Gillmor, this audience certainly know a helluva lot more than I do!, and (b) I couldn't blog it as it happened and so now, trying to recall what all was said, from notes, turns from blogging into reporting. How old.
Anyway.... It was a packed session; tons of interest and passion and action in syndication. All this energy is still flailing around a bit, which means that we're still in the early stages; we don't know what the 'it' is yet. But it is also vital that we learn lessons from the past -- from the early '90s and the starts of the web and HTML and commercialization -- and do it better this time.
Here's an earlier post I wrote about RSS; that's how I ended up on that table. I argue that getting more content on RSS is good but to motivate content creators to put it there we'll often need to give them data -- via cookies, as a start -- so they can track size and ad performance. We also need to give some opportunities for branding. That's my starting point. Now I'll give you random notes from my notebook....
: Bob Wyman of PubSub spoke a lot (and plugged his site a lot, which was comic relief) and had good things to say, especially recalling the history of HTML and advertising and the '90s. He said that what's radically different about this RSS world vs. the HTML world is that we move from a request/response model to publish/subscribe.
Wyman emphasized that we need to focus on the post not the feed in discussion of traffic, advertising, and all that (it is the RSS corollary of Meg Hourihan's rule that the elemental piece of content is now the post, not the page).
: Dan Gould, of a thing too new to name, made the exactly right point early on: It's all about power. Used to be, of course, publishers had the power; they fed us what they wanted to feed us. In this new world, we take what we want and if we don't like it we don't take it.
So there's a negotiation that happens: Subscriber says if you don't give me a good RSS feed, I'll go elsewhere. Publisher/content creator says if you don't let me make money from that feed -- or prevent me making money on my web site -- then I'm not motivated to put content there. Welcome to the marketplace.
: The folks at the table up front who were actually running this (I was a guest) -- Dick Costolo of FeedBurner and David Hornik of August Capital and a blogger of long repute -- made many good points about the models we will see in this world: Some people will pay for feeds; some will be supported by advertising; some will go out free because the publicity is what is valuable.
: Jeremy Zawodny of Yahoo found himself yingyanged a bit: Yahoo gets credit for bringing RSS to the mainstream, but Steve Gillmor beat them up for data going in and not coming out.
: Steve Gillmor give an impassioned and smart snippet about the need to empower and remunerate the content creator or else new people won't be able to create content and the power remains in the hands of Dan Rather.
Right on.
: Gillmor also plugged a new standard in the works: attention.xml. That's all I know about it. So more here.
: The founder of RealSimpleShopping.com was there: a cool use of RSS to aggregate shopping opportunities. There are new affiliate marketing opportunities here.
: Hornik said the advantage of af eed vs. email is that you can stop a feed from coming.
Jeremy also quoted someone else saying that RSS is the ultimate opt-in.
: I did my standard spiel on how this distributed world will start replacing centralized marketplaces -- see classifieds, for example. Said it before, so I won't bore you again.
: Much discussion ensued about whether RSS will start to dig into eBay. Brian Dear said all this could be a long-awaited eBay slayer.
Of course, eBay should start putting out RSS feeds because it will generate more sales. Some said that eBay still has value as entertainment. Yes, but I have plenty of entertaining RSS feeds that are distributed.
It's all about trust... and organization...
: Esther Dyson said that rather than looking at this as centralized vs. distributed, we should look at the value of "clusters." Social networking has a role in helping to cluster people of similar taste/needs/desires. And she added: "The dimension that really matters is time." That is a reason why she invested in Technorati; it adds those dimensions to Google. I agree heartily.
: There was much discussion about efforts to get data tagged. Uh-oh: The semantic web! Chris Tolles from Topix said he tried manual tagging in the Open Directory project and it didn't scale. Google did. He said the problem with expecting people to tag data is that they are either (a) lying or (b) lazy.
: I pleaded for efforts to come up with better names and descriptions for RSS to spread the gospel. I was properly shot down with the notion that the architecture should be hidden. Jeremy said, "My parents don't know what SMTP is but they send email."
: Hornik said the key to spreading RSS is getting more and ever-better readers out there.
Gillmor added that we need the ability to sync our readers.
: I wish this were a better report but I have really bad handwriting and my notes go cold. Anybody else who was there and blogging, please leave links....
In the heat of the moment
: I'm on the RSS panel (a kindergartener in college) and there's great discussion. Can't blog it now (would be rude) but will as soon as I can digest it all.
Issues2004: What else
: I'm continuing to write the Issues2004 posts but the time has come to ask you what issues we should include. See a list of what I've covered over on the right and the posts here. Those are most of my hot buttons (though not all... still need to grapple with the econmy, for example). But I want to know what you think I should cover. I don't promise to cover them. And it doesn't matter a bit whether I do; this is the farthest thing from an authoritative list. But it is yielding good discussion of issues -- instead of mud -- and so what are the other issues we should be discussing in this campaign?
Read Rosen
: I don't have time to quote it in detail, so just go read Jay Rosen today on the proper aftermath and analysis of what's really happening in blogs-vs-media vs. blogs-with-media.
Web 2.0
: I'll be blogging Web 2.0 today, at the generous invitation of John Battelle and Tim O'Reilly. Starting off on a panel on RSS. More later. Much more.
The veep-off
: I'm supposed to be on CNBC later today with fellow bloggers in a run-up to the veep debate. Note that bloggers are now regulars on bookers' lists. That's good (I think). I'll give you details if it happens later.
In the meantime, tell me what you think about the veep-off...
Don't call it Frisco
: I was feeling far more charitable and nostalgic this morning, with the bang-banging of the union goons gone. I went running early, past all sorts of memories:
There's the old Examiner offices where I worked, now with Herb Caen's typewriter enshrined in the lobby... That's where I stood to give away $10,000 when an Australian kid brought us a piece of SkyLab -- and my career survived... There's the old M&M, the cruddy bar where we used to hang out with pressmen and mailers when papers had such people, now a cutesier restaurant.... There's the apartment of someone I dated briefly when we were both on the list of San Francisco's 100 most eligible (I'm not bragging... there were only 100 straight single men in the city at the time).... There are the fast-food joints where I took a bunch of Chinese chefs for their first taste of America... There's the Punchline, where I got to see lots of early comedy stars (most has-beens already)....
But I was shaken out of my nostalgic reverie when I ran by the goons banging their garbage cans again... at 6 o'clock in the morning!
Man, these place needs Rudy...
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