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Observations on Relevant Commercial Media

Review of My 2008 Predictions & 2009 Predictions (both via RWW)December 31 2008

This time last year at ReadWriteWeb, I contributed six predictions for 2008 as part of a post that all the contributors participated in.

Recently Silicon Alley Insider called out one of these as one of the best predictions from 2008. Thankfully they choose to focus on other RWW author’s predictions for the other part of their list that focused on the worst. However, they certainly could have pointed to a few of mine.

As Brad Feld recently pointed out this is a pretty much a waste of time - but it’s also something fun and so I’m still going to evaluate my 2008 predictions followed by my predictions (again contributed to ReadWriteWeb) for 2009.

First for 2009 I predicted:

1. Google will really start looking vulnerable in 2008. While the ‘one trick pony’ comment by Steve Ballmer drew sarcastic responses, this will begin to look prophetic. While they’ll maintain market share in the search industry, the lack of traction in any other of their other initiatives will start to cau

mSpoke Research - Blog Post PopularityNovember 5 2008

mSpoke’s Chief Scientist Paul Ogilvie has the first post up in a series of research he’s doing focsuing on what makes a blog post popular. The first analysis looks at reading difficulty as a predictor of popularity. His conclusion follows, but go read the entire post:

When I set out to write this post, I hoped to find some interesting correlations between feed item popularity and other features of the feed items. I wasn’t naive enough to believe I’d find strong correlations, but I was hoping to confirm some common sense wisdom. This post looked into some crude surface features of reading difficulty and post length in an attempt to understand whether a “well-written” post is more likely to be popular than poorly written posts. I failed to find any correlations between these features and popularity. Does that mean that I personally believe that the writing of the post doesn’t matter? Absolutely not.

I’ve really enjoyed talking about this research with Paul. Hopefully, you’ll subscribe to mSpoke’s Blog feed and follow along.

Updating my RSS Reading BehaviorOctober 20 2008

I’ve been using an RSS reader for about 2 years. It’s the only way I’m able to keep up with all of the information that I need to read to do my job well.

However, over the last month I had begun to feel overwhelmed and often was unable to keep up with my feeds. This was very concerning to me, because the company I co-founded mSpoke has created a tool called FeedHub to eliminate RSS information overload.

After reflecting on it, what I came to appreciate was that my information consumption needs had evolved and I hadn’t adjusted my feed management to evolve with them. To be more specific, two things had change:

1. While I’ve always traveled a lot, in the last 3 months this has amplified significantly. I feel like I’ve spent more time in an airplane than on the ground.
2. My interests have become slightly more diverse in terms of the feeds I’m reading.

First Change: Switching to Suite of NewsGator RSS Readers

I’ve pretty much always used a web based reader, because I like the feel of them. Over time I’ve switched back and forth between Google Reader, Bloglines and NewsGator Online. With my new travel schedule I’d like to be able to keep up with my feeds in the air (no wifi) and even Google Gears + Google Reader doesn’t seem to really support this use case well.

Therefore, I’ve switched to using the

Facebook’s Impact on Your Next JobOctober 17 2008

A few months ago, I went to Grove City College (my alma matter) to talk to a group of about 50 computer science students during an ACM meeting. I offered some brief remarks about what I did for a living (very brief.) Then we had a really interesting hour plus interactive discussion where I instigated some of the early topics by throwing out some themes I thought would be interesting.

We talked for quite some time about how social media was changing the job applicant process. While I was more focused on the positive things they could do, I also mentioned they need to pay attention to what stupid negative things they could be doing online.

One specific thing I encouraged them not to do was put pictures or other media on their Facebook or other social network profile pages that are in anyway unprofessional. (Note: I wasn’t implying it should all be professional, but at least keep in mind professional contacts will be looking at it.)

Today, Nick ONeill’s excellent All Facebook blog published a report from NPR on a survey Career Builder just released which states:

one in five employers check Facebook profiles when researching a potential job candidate. Additionally, one third of those that checked Facebook found a reason to reject an applicant due to photos with alcohol or drugs.

(Here is the

The Future of Media is Hosted!August 6 2008

I spent some time over the last two weeks consulting with a group of professionals at a large media company. I’m pretty confident everyone in the room (beside me) had started their career by going to journalism school. Even if that isn’t the case, they clearly had grown up before the merger of media companies becoming tech companies and tech companies becoming media companies.

Given that context it was fun to discuss with them the ways that technology could transform their business. I think we came up with a number of very powerful ideas! As they launch, I’ll point out a few of them here.

However, even more interesting to me then the ideas we came up with was their view on ‘the IT department.’ While I certainly understand their perspective, it was interesting to hear how compelling solutions delivered as a software as a service were.

It did remind me that the future of media is hosted! In many ways this is just an extension of the larger software as a service trend. Yet for traditional media companies it manifests itself in some interesting ways. For example, consider the following examples:

• Why try to develop your own widgets for virally distributing your content when you can partner with