Blogging Resolutions for ’08

By Mark Evans in Media 7 Comments

In 2008, I’m looking to:

1. Blog more because you have to feed the beast…and how else can you keep up with people such as Mathew Ingram, Om Malik, TechCrunch, Robert Scoble, Mashable, ReadWriteWeb, etc.?

2. Blog less, and focus on quality as opposed to quantity, and unique thoughts/ideas rather than jumping on the blogging bandwagon every time news breaks.

3. Be less obsessed with statistics because it’s not how many readers you have but the audience you want to reach, the conversations you want to encourage, the brand you want to build, etc.

4. Be even more obsessed with statistics because more is always better, right? Goals for 2008: 2,500 RSS readers, a lot more comments and a promotion within the Techmeme ecosystem.

5. Learn even more about how WordPress works, including design and SEO.

6. Stop spending so much time learning about WordPress, and stop fooling around with every single plug-in that looks quasi-interesting.

7. Spend less time on Techmeme.

8. Reduce the number of RSS feeds to focus on reading a small group of blogs.

9. Add more blogs to Google Reader, especially those not focused on technology.

10. Try to attract advertising other than AdSense.

11. Stop worrying about making money from blogging because it’s really not about the money.

Have a Happy (and safe!) New Year’s!

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Canada Needs a Peter Thiel

By Mark Evans in Venture Capital 6 Comments

If you’ve spent any time around the burgeoning DemoCamp, CaseCamp, BarCamp, mesh, et al scene in Toronto, one thing becomes obvious: there’s a lot of hard-working entrepreneurs desperately seeking a little venture capital.

These are people who have ideas and/or online services – some of them interesting – but aren’t able to commit themselves full-time and take their start-ups to the next level without an investment from a VC or angels. We’re talking $250,000 to $500,000 – enough to hire a few employees to give it a real go for a year, maybe 18 months provided you’re smart and careful with your cash.

Unfortunately, there’s not a lot of this kind of money floating around even for the best ideas. It’s too bad because just a little VC love would go a long way in boosting Canada’s online landscape.

What Canada needs is Peter Thiel, who co-founded PayPal and one of Facebook’s early investors. Or perhaps someone like Thiel, who has created a new fund that invests a little money (a few hundred thousand dollars) for a small stake (5% to 10%). For more, check out this story in the Wall St. Journal.

If you had a start-up fund with, let’s say, $50-million, you could easily finance 25 companies – provided you could syndicate your post-seed deals. While Thiel takes a hands-off approach, a smart start-up fund should probably offer value-added resources such as infrastructure, human resources, legal services, strategic advisors, etc. given there isn’t a large base of successful Canadian entrepreneurs who have been there and done that.

So where’s this money going to come from? Maybe someone like Research in Motion’s Jim Balsillie, a dyed-in-the-wool entrepreneur. Or perhaps Jeff Skoll, who has been putting his eBay dollars into the film, and social entrepreneurship through his foundation. Or maybe a group of well-heeled entrepreneurs will get together to do something. (Note: Extreme Venture Partners launched earlier this month with a $10-million fund that will focus on $1-million investments.)

In any event, there’s a need that isn’t being met right now. Let’s hope 2008 sees something change.

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Google Isn’t God…But Addictive

By Mark Evans in Google 3 Comments

Google Love
A few years, I took a half-hearted attempt at giving up Microsoft (sort of like my terribly unsuccessful endeavor to become a vegetarian.)

It was a difficult task given I was using XP and Office but there was a sense of satisfaction in embracing Firefox and Thunderbird rather than IE and Outlook. These days, Google is the new Microsoft but as much as I’d like to cut back on my Google addiction, it’s difficult. Let’s look at my Google “portfolio”:

1. Search. Simply put, Google continues to be the best, although I’m curious/interested about new search engines such as Powerset.

2. Blog search. Google Blog Search is, strangely, far from compelling but it will continue to be the tool of choice until something better comes along.

3. Image search. Love it. Works.

4. Finance. Google Finance has a nice clean look and feel but Yahoo Finance can be just as good, particularly when it comes to analyst information.

5. Picasa. I just started using Google’s photo tool. It’s pretty good but there are plenty of solid alternatives. For photo-editing, Picnik is great.

6. Google Docs. A great tool if you need to collaborate with other people, and a complement – but not a replacement – to Office.

7. Google Reader. I used to be a big FeedDemon fan but jumped on the GR bandwagon when it became obvious that an online tool was a must-have.

8. Google Earth. Tres cool.

The funny thing about using all these Google services is they kind of just sneak up on you. One day, you’re using search on a regular basis, and then before you know it, you’ve migrated to a bunch of other Google-powered services.

What’s interesting that I look at each Google search as a standalone entity rather than as an application suite – perhaps because there’s little integration between each service. One of the reasons that I really like the concept of a Google Browser (aka GBrowser) is it would give Google an interesting way to showcase its entire portfolio, while controlling the tool that’s replacing the OS as the foundation for personal computing.

More: Jeff Jarvis declares that “Google is God” after looking at the company’s growth in terms of search, pay-per-click, traffic, brand and financial results.

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Can the Music Industry be This Stupid?

By Mark Evans in Music No Comments

Now, this is incredible…and incredibly unbelievable.

According to the Washington Post, the music industry has filed a lawsuit against Jeffrey Howell for copying 2,000 songs onto his computer – from CDs he owns. The RIAA alleges these are “unauthorized copies”.

It’s a move that smacks of desperation. It’s a move that will only further alienate consumers, who are tired of buying the over-priced crap being pumped out by the music business. It’s a move that just might cause many people, who want to do the right thing by buying digital music, to stop buying music period.

It’s about time the music industry gave up the idea of selling music because it’s a commodity that consumers want to pay increasingly less to acquire. Yup, if the music industry was smart, they would give music away as a marketing freebie.

Then, they could focus on selling products and services that consumers value such as concert tickets, merchandise, limited-edition CDs, DVDs, Webcasts, etc. If people are willing to pay $200 to see the Police on tour but nothing for any of the Police’s music, what does that tell you?

More: Larry Borsato describes the RIAA’s move as a “grasping at the last straw”, and provides some interesting facts on how much artists actually make from selling CDs and digital music. Scott Karp is even more damning, calling the lawsuit a “desperate, senseless, lunatic attempt to save the collapse of their business” – while suggesting the music industry will be the first traditional media business to be destroyed by digital technology.

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Facebook to Buy Netscape Assets?

By Mark Evans in Browsers 2 Comments

Sad news from the browser world as AOL has finally decided to stop development of Netscape.

Actually, it’s not sad at all given Netscape has become irrelevant in recent years as usage as declined and Firefox has replaced it as the alternative to IE. It’s only sad because Netscape ruled the browser market once upon a time before allowing Microsoft to steal its thunder and most of its users.

So what does AOL do with Netscape now it has officially decided to walk away? How about selling the assets to Facebook, which should seriously think about launching the FBrowser in 2008? Netscape’s technology ain’t much to write home about given AOL has been ignoring it for far too long but it still has plenty of users.

Then again, if I were Facebook, I’d probably be more interested in buying Flock – aka the social browser.

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Opportunity ’08: the RSS Reader Market

By Mark Evans in Blog Services, Blogs 2 Comments

Rss-2
In 2007, RSS took a huge step forward as it edged a little closer to becoming a mainstream tool. (Check out ReadWriteWeb’s in-depth overview of the year in RSS).

While Google Reader made a big splash and Bloglines remains a key player, the RSS reader market is still ripe with opportunity and, not surprisingly, there is no lack of start-ups looking to establish a foothold as more people look for easy and efficient ways to use RSS to consume content.

Given RSS still has a long way to go, competition is healthy and necessary so it’s encouraging to see so a growing number of companies battling it out using a variety of approaches.

This ranges from Waterloo, Ont.-based aideRSS.com, which crunches data from sites such as Technorati and del.icio.us to measure the “social engagement” of each post within your RSS collection. This produces a ranking system that makes it easier to select which posts to read.

Another interesting start-up is fav.or.it, which lets you read RSS feeds as well as write blog posts and comment on other people’s posts within the fav.or.it platform. For more, check out Robert Scoble’s interview with fav.or.it’s Nick Halstead. (Note: fav.or.it is still in beta so I haven’t been able to try it yet).

There’s still opportunity in the RSS reader market for a few reasons: One, the market is far from saturated as many people have yet to embrace RSS, let alone use a reader. Two, no one has emerged with a killer service, although Google Reader has made some great strides in recent months. There’s still room for a service with a few bells and whistles beyond just being able to add and read RSS feeds, which is why aideRSS and fav.or.it are so intriguing.

While the consumer market attracts a lot of the RSS reader spotlight, it’s still unclear how these companies are going to make money from offering their services. The most common business model is – surprise, surprise – “premium services”.

A far more promising business opportunity appears to be the corporate market. This explains why NewsGator was able to raise $12-million in venture capital recently. Over the past two years, NewsGator has migrated nearly its entire business to the corporate market, and it now counts 12 Fortune 100 companies as customers.

There’s no doubt RSS will continue to become more popular in 2008 to deliver and consume content. The question is who will emerge as the leading consumptions tools and how they will make money.

More: For part I of my Opportunity ’08 series, check out this post on the vertical blog search market.

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