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Feedonomics

The Art and Science of Feed Management

PR uproar coverage is over on our VibeMetrix blogAugust 13

I’ve started blogging on our new site for VibeMetrix, a product that simplifies the process of identifying key blog influencers and managing relationships with them. We think this is going to be a big help to PR people, and from what is going on in the tech blogosphere right now, it seems like it is right on time.

Scoble FeedbackJune 1

I wasn’t expecting this kind of a response from Robert Scoble to my comments on Mathew Ingram’s Blog regarding Twitter and their architectural issues. I really honestly appreciate the feedback on Grazr, even if it’s painful for me to hear as one if it’s creators.

First, I want to say, Grazr is still here. We have lots of users, just not as many as we’d like and not on the growth curve we’d been hoping for. We’ve been trying to evolve and iterate our service to find the elements of it that are compelling, what it “wants” to be. One of the truths of startups is that you rarely “hit it big” with your initial idea. Twitter had no idea what they were onto when they first launched the service. Flickr started as an online game for girls and it took them time to find their niche. The key is accepting feedback and looking for the aspects of your technology that people find interesting and moving emphasis. We are still very much in this process.

Robert, thanks for the feedback. What you’ve pointed out is pretty much an exact list of the issues we’ve identified as we’d planned for our next version of Grazr, one we intend to launch in a few months. The strength of our core team is the technology skill-base, which in a lot of ways gives us the

PR is an honorable professionMay 25

What a relief to read Brian Solis’ TechCrunch post on the role of PR in Web 2.0. I’m sick of the “how dare you try to contact me” attitude of so many A-listers. The “just be cool and hang out at Valley parties” approach is not only elitist, it is damaging to the active economy that we need to develop on the Web. Companies have a right to try and get their message out to potential customers, and to use professionals to help them do it. That doesn’t excuse sloppy PR efforts, but as Brian shows, there are acceptable ways of doing it, and being paid to do it for others is a job that deserves more respect. A-list bloggers forget that they are supposed to act as conduits for information flowing to their readers, not gatekeepers blocking anyone who doesn’t meet their standard of coolness. That is why I find the following advice from Brian to be the most important part of his post:

The best communications strategies will envelop not only authorities in new and traditional media, but also those voices in the “Magic Middle” of the attention curve. The Magic Middle, as David Sifry defined it, are the bloggers who have from 20-1000 other people linking to them. It is this group that enables PR people to reach The Long Tail and they help carry information and discussions among your customers directly in a true peer-to-peer approach.

Remembering the customersMay 24

You know, the people who pay for things. Last week I started working with an old friend of mine. By friend I mean someone I actually know in the real world. He’s been part of the software business since the mid-Eighties, but he hasn’t been following the Web 2.0 movement as closely as I have. I wanted to get a new perspective on what we should do with all the feed technology we’ve built. It’s been an interesting and sometimes embarrassing week. He keeps giving me the kind of advice I used to give him when he started 20 years ago.  My first software company in 1981 was a software mail-order business. It doesn’t get more entrepreneurial than that. We were selling things we didn’t even have in inventory. I can see just how much Kool-aid I’ve been drinking.

So much for kumbayaMay 24

It’s only Saturday of a three-day weekend, and the storm is gathering on Techmeme already. The mob is screaming “Kill Twitter,” “Kill Google, Reddit and Digg.” Is that what Web 2.0 supposed to be about? I thought we were going to all hold hands and reach a higher state of consciousness through continuous exchange of memes. The irony is that the site at the center of this bloodlust has the innocent name of FriendFeed. Are we really heading to a social network apocalypse, or is this just a duel of competing tech gurus linkbaiting for all they’re worth? How will we know when FriendFeed has killed everyone else? Will Twitter make less money than the zero revenues they have now? This is getting really silly. Why can’t anyone get excited about a business model that works? You can’t have zero sum when there is no sum to measure.