The Network Garden - Mark Sigal's Blog

Bullet to the brain...

Life imitating art, or vice versa.  Pretty funny.  Click on image for larger view.

"Priceless #1" from Hank Willis Thomas at Yerba Buena Center of the Arts.

AxisPoll.com: It’s Time for an “Axis” Poll

In Thomas Friedman’s recent (7/22/05) New Times Op-Ed piece, "Giving the Hatemongers No Place to Hide," he asserts that we should make a point of shining a light on hate-mongers and truth tellers where they exist in the world.  As I have always been a believer both that shadows are scarier and more dangerous than light, and that the resulting clarity created by the persistence of light forces a "need to know," this got me thinking.  In the age of global connectivity, why not create a moderated polling web site that ranks public figures, religious organizations and social groups based on their record of spewing hate, supporting violence and fighting free speech?

Here's how it would work.  The rankings would be based on a continuum (e.g., 1 = spews hate; 10 = espouses peaceful co-existence), and the results would shine a light on global perspectives and public opinion on what constitutes the true Axis of Evil on our planet.  Just as importantly, it would showcase the corresponding Axis of Goodness that too often toils in obscurity. 

A volunteer advisory board representing differing political, religious and social perspectives would work together to agree upon the criteria to be an individual or group rated in the poll, the frequency with which polls are taken and how the conclusions are to be disseminated.

By "how the conclusions are to be disseminated" what I mean is that there is real value in determining how different groups of people in different places think about the Axis.  Hence, U.S. college students (with a verifiable .edu email address) are very likely to have a different perspective than employees at major global corporations (with a verifiable corporate email address).  The same can be said about participants in countries like Jordan, Israel or China, as well as the religious, political or social "thought leaders." 

I can envision three primary mechanisms -- two formal and one informal -- to keep the process of creating and iterating the Axis Poll organic, vibrant, open and dynamic.  One is the use of formal editorials that are "official" interpretation of polling results. 

Two is the use of formal editorials that attempt to provide a "moral of the story" in terms of how and when a particular Axis member crossed the line from non-descript to truly good or truly evil, and what they are doing right now to maintain or diverge from that arc. These conclusions would be backed by transparent information sources so readers can reach their own conclusions.

Three is the creation of a Blog where individuals can informally express their opinions, as well as provide links to information sources and other postings of interest.  This would have the effect of creating a dialog between different communities based on openness and acceptance of contrasting perspectives.

I can think of few better ways to hold people and organizations in a position of power and influence accountable for what they do and what they say than by creating a mechanism like the Axis Poll.  It is inexpensive to implement, could leverage the good work of many other related organizations, including the media, and above all, is an inclusive, highly democratic way of shining a light in the areas that matter most.

What do you think?

Are bubbles only seen in retrospect?

Good article by Mark Hulbert in Marketwatch on the wacky real estate market that debunks the argument that we can't be in a bubble because so many people are worried that we are in one. The basis for the argument is that a bubble can only form when very few are suspecting that one exists -- since people who are worried about a bubble presumably are less inclined to pay inflated prices than investors who are blithely unconcerned about the possibility.

While Hulbert does not attempt to argue "YES" or "NO" on the bubble question (bubbles are only "obvious" after the fact), he does show that historians who have studied past bubbles have not found support for this argument. 

As this particular "NO bubble" argument is one of the key memes fueling a false sense of security for real estate buyers, investors and outright speculators, Hulbert's conclusion is worth shining a light on.

"Become" by Becoming

Too often in life, we fall into the all or none syndrome.  In trying to find our purpose, achieve passion and maintain personal integrity we get stuck between doing “nothing” (while awaiting for some magical moment of clarity) and affirming the path that we happen to be on as our “destiny” -- irrespective of whether it actually is.

In this regard, life presents a paradox: Do you just start doing "something" on the premise that you will figure out the details in the end, or must you first begin with the end in mind, before setting forth on the path? 

The paradox is that the answer is "yes" -- you must simultaneously do "something" AND draw a "sketch" of the desired outcome to succeed in your goal.  Doing so even catalyzes a virtuous cycle that gets you there that much quicker. 

HERE'S WHY:

1. You can't know what you don't know: Sometimes, you just aren't sure what the "problem" is that you are solving.  In such instances, the best you can do is to cobble together a reasonable guess, and test the waters.  Central to this approach is accepting that the process is one of trial and error, where rapid refinement is the goal, akin to planting some seeds, seeing (discovering) what actually sprouts and amplifying the results in the next go around.

AND

2. There is just no substitute for actually doing: Actual experience renders all theories and contemplations insignificant.  You must jump in to experience the sensation of getting wet.

SO

3. If you want to get into a space, just start doing "something" in it: It is amazing and heartening how much is accomplished by taking those first steps.  Not only does it break the chicken/egg dilemma, but a lot of clarity is gained and momentum solves a lot of problems.

Yahoo's Konfabulator buy and Yahoo APIs

Steve Rubel covers Yahoo's acquisition of Konfabulator.  Reading the tea leaves (and the Konfabulator site), this deal is driven by Yahoo's desire to build a committed developer community by continuing to enhance their APIs and provide lots of "consumer" applications for web apps developers.  This is right out of the Microsoft playbook (never a bad thing).  Win the developer community to win the consumer.  As a consumer, I am eager to see both what Yahoo does with this and how Google, Microsoft, eBay and Amazon keep pace.

The Role of Venture in Building a Technology Platform

Bill Gurley of Benchmark (and one of my favorite macro picture thinkers) has written an interesting post that asks that question of whether VCs Help in Building a Technology Platform.  Essentially, he draws comparisons between the strong venture investing and market uptake for open source technologies and the less strong environment around .NET (disclaimer: I built my last consumer oriented software product in .NET and am building my next one using open source, so from a pure technology perspective, I am a fan of both).

His takeaway is somewhat ironic, inasmuch as a few years back, Microsoft spent a lot of time with the venture community trying to "educate" them on which segments are safe for investment and which ones Microsoft will likely expand into (i.e., not safe).

The problem with this approach as it has played out was two-fold. One, Microsoft's "safe" investing grounds were largely niche markets which are exactly the types of segments unsuitable for venture. Two, given the company's historical zero-sum approach to business, when they did decide to buy their way into a market, it generally didn't translate into great financial outcome for investors in the acquired company. Contrast this with Cisco, where the venture community and Cisco's corporate development folks were practically kissing cousins.  If you were a venture investor, thinking to the end and working backwards to the present, where would you put your dollars down?

Moral of the story: what you sow is what you reap.

Relative to Bill's question about the role of VCs in building of technology platforms, let me say two things.  One, what gets funded is generally what gets built (this is a truism about markets in general, not just tech) -- either because the proof is already in the market, mitigating investment risk or because entrepreneurs read the fund-ability "tea leaves" and invest their time accordingly.

In my experience, VCs are the ultimate thin slicers so to the extent the meme, "Microsoft embraces, extends, extinguishes" sticks, Microsoft is stuck. Same story in open source where VCs can free associate on a built-in community model and open APIs translating to lower initial selling costs, more viral cross customer leverage, friction free upselling opportunities and a generally more fluid and agile ecosystem. And, oh yeah, no 500 pound gorilla.

Not a panacea to be sure, but gravity certainly feels a lot more favorable in the open source arena from an investing perspective.

Brand ME and the changing "face" of brands...

As part of a back and forth thread on the Power of Brands with John Hagel, Chris Anderson has written a compelling post where he espouses that in the information age, brands will be associated with people and not products (see Brands: Think people, not products AND Brands: Response).  Specific to this assertion, he goes into some detail on what he sees as the three types of Long Tail lines of business -- Filters, Aggregators and Producers. 

Three comments come to mind here.  One is that in thinking about brand creation and propagation, Anderson's thesis has a "kissing cousin" in Malcolm Gladwell's 'The Tipping Point,' which talks about the inter-connects between Mavens, Connectors and Salesmen in launching new ideas, trends and products in the marketplace.

Two, when people talk about "new" social searching mechanisms, it seems that they forget that several years back, collaborative filtering was all the rage as an algorithmic means of linking the product recommendations of liked minded individuals to one another. Amazon has certainly embraced the model by adding capabilities like "People who bought this CD, also bought this one."

One wonders, though, if this isn't the logical successor to the raw "popularity" search model popularized by Google's Page Rank. If consumers in the blogosphere could more easily rate the posts, books, movies and music they encounter in terms of "more like this" and "less like this" you would have the underpinnings of a very powerful Long Tail-oriented brand amplifier. The structure is clear, collaborative filtering has been around for a decade and you have a large enough community base for the results to be meaningful. Plus, I think this reconciles some of the issues Hagel raises about why he trusts the recommendations of his local wine shop who knows his taste more than the Robert Parker guide.

A final comment is that what this all looks like from a UI, usability and workflow perspective has been well contemplated by others including Mark Pincus of Tribe Networks in an excellent post The People Web and myself at a past consumer information management company that I did called Verdada (see user profile UI below).

What's your take? Is this just a case of people who've already drunk the Kool-Ade working themselves into a frenzy? Or an inevitable trend that will change the face of customer marketing?

Envisioning "must see" TV for video iPods

Wired has an interesting article about the need for short-form "Scorseses" to emerge in the age of internet video (note: that's short for famed film director Martin Scorsese).  After all, this is a different medium where content is viewed from different devices with a different level of viewer engagement and potentially different levels of interactivity.

This got me thinking.  As we flash forward to the next 18 months and video iPods are all the rage, what kind of programs do you think are both tailor made and compelling for the medium?  And what are the underlying business models to support them?  Plus, how much of this wave will be big industry driven versus?

I pose the question because I tend to agree with the Mark Cuban's of the world that suggest that there will be very few true standalone businesses (versus labors of love) that emerge based on creation of original audio podcast content (as opposed to big media companies re-purposing commercial content in a podcast format, thereby extending an existing standalone business). 

By contrast, I think that there will be lots of standalone business opportunties in the video podcast realm as the format lends itself to story telling, animation, music videos, comedic sketches and visual scanning of content (something that audio podcasts lack).   In fact, this seems to be the sweet spot for Long Tail oriented plays. 

What's your take?

GoingOn: But does too much have to go right?

Kudos to Marc Canter for swinging big with his Digital Lifestlyle Aggregator (how about a pithy-er name like Channel Me?), but one wonders if too much has to go right for this idea to succeed. 

Interoperability, or creating once and propagating everywhere, is an idea that makes total sense, but is a complete standalone business in its own right.

Nailing the UI, usability and feature sets of the container for all of this is a full time business in its own right.

And I wonder whether AlwaysOn is the right target audience. 

Feels very "3.0" value proposition at risk of missing mark in terms of "1.0" utility.  Hope I am wrong, though, because I think that it is the right idea, and Tony Perkin's underlying thesis about the evolution of online brands and online consumers is dead-on.

Mandala: There's Order and There's Chaos

I've got a philosophy derived from Tibetan Buddhism and the teachings of Chogyam Trungpa that drives the way I live.

The philosophy can best be summed up as follows:

Phase One: Prepare the mind

1. Fearlessness: when you climb steep mountains, sometimes you get hurt. Nonetheless, you just have to keep climbing.
2. Optimism: because perception has a way of becoming reality.
3. Discipline: there is a concept of crazy wisdom, where the discernable method for confronting the insanity of life is to practice discriminating awareness, which is the essence of discipline.
4. Experience: for there is no substitute for actually DO-ing.

Phase Two: Build a path

1. Not "but"..."What if?"...Rather than finding imaginary roadblocks before getting on the road, begin with the end in mind and work backwards.
2. Idealism not cynicism: we've all been burned, disappointed and left at the altar. Nonetheless...
3. Aspirations: It is amazingly powerful when you actually declare what you aspire to in life versus just being wishy-washy and sitting on the fence. Serial entrepreneur Jim Clark once drew a distinction between chickens and pigs. One is engaged the other is fully committed.
4. Assertions: A VC friend suggested this to me and I have found it to be really effective. Come up with a set of extemporaneous statements of fact and the outcomes or accomplishments that will serve as their measuring stick. This exercise is a great level setter, a good clarity of thought driver and an effective internal bullshit barometer.
5. Externally communicate with consistency and clarity: Because you are not a brain in a jar, articulating your personal path is absolutely critical. People will either help you or get out of your way if they know exactly where you stand and what you are trying to accomplish.

When facing a fork in the road with respect to your path, try the following exercise:

• What am I good at (pick top 5)?
• What do I enjoy (pick top 5)?
• What do I want to accomplish in terms of personal outcomes (pick top 5)?
• Prioritize each list and then take the top two from each category and create a list of six items.
• Write three DIFFERENT scenarios in 1-3 paragraphs that spell out how you accomplished your path (doing what you are good at, what you enjoy, and getting to an outcome that you aspire to). The output will give you a pretty good sense of which forks will most like lead to your personal nirvana and what that nirvana looks like.

Phase Three: Create a straw man in your daily life

1. Be-See-Act: define your near term mandala* and carry it with you in your "front pocket" at all times. With that perspective in mind always be cognizant of the things you are doing to BE true to your self, SEE things as they really are and ACT on that knowledge.
2. Mental approach: Deity, Non-Duality, Bliss. To be a DEITY is to take full responsibility for living your life as the spiritual guide of your own existence.  To operate with NON-DUALITY is to interpret life as it really IS without relativity to other circumstances, emotions, ego, etc.  To act with BLISS is to view the road ahead of you as something fundamentally to be looked forward to, discovered and revealed. This requires a sort of crazy wisdom because when confronting unknown paths or direct challenges, keeping one's head and maintaining a bliss-filled perspective requires a conditioned mind.

* Definition: Mandala: The mandala is usually a symbolic representation which depicts the qualities of the Enlightened Mind in harmonious relationship with one another. A mandala may also be used to represent the path of spiritual development. In the West the term is also used to refer to the "personal world" in which one lives, the various elements of the mandala being the activities and interests in which one engages the most important being at the centre of the mandala, and the least important at the periphery. Depicting one's personal mandala in pictorial form can give one a good indication of the state of one's spiritual life.

Contrarian investing for dummies

Fundamental logic from Rich Karlgaard in Forbes:

• My own investment advice. Listen up. I've paid a painful slug of money to learn this, so pay attention. I'm about to share my best piece of investment wisdom: When America's talking stocks, buy real estate; when America's talking real estate, buy stocks.

Put another way, when the chit-chat at cocktail parties and the infomercials on the radio are all touting that the only direction is up, and too much money is chasing too few deals, you don't have to be a rocket scientist to see that following the herd is a good way to get stampeded. 

A really good book that, while focused on stock investing, provides a good global metaphor for investing in general is The Vital Few vs. the Trivial Many by George Muzea.  Quick, concise read that will change the way you think about being a "smart" investor.

Thinking about Feeds: Excellent Post

Fred Wilson has written an excellent post called Thinking About Feeds.  It contemplates the emerging best practices for feed management and the market space in general in light of Microsoft’s announcement that they “get” RSS and are elevating it to a platform.

My knee jerk on this is that Microsoft is going to focus on really nailing the “message router” portion of feed management and ensuring that hand-offs between the central feeds repository and the consumers of those feeds occurs in a highest common denominator fashion.  They will also ensure that Visual Studio makes it easy to create custom applications around such a model.  Microsoft understands that the best way to ensure broad adoption of Longhorn is to hook the developers first, as they drive the ecosystem that will compel consumers and enterprise to toggle over.

In terms of what all of this means to the consumer, Fred covers an Outlook example already, but if you assume that RSS becomes a platform, then RSS becomes more akin to a web service with a set of well formed methods. 

Want to create a community calendar of things to do this weekend in SoHo?  Set the appropriate tags/parameters, identify your trusted network, and every time a relevant event is added to the calendar you’re custom calendar is updated. There are all sorts of content, advertising and contextual extensions that can be built on top of such a model.

Moreover, imagine a feed being able to carry a rich payload like video and not only automatically associate the content with Windows Media Player, but also add the content to the appropriate play lists.  One can envision interesting content programming plays around such an approach (think: About.com in reverse).

Along similar lines, specific to Fred’s queries on third party apps that can differentiate in such a domain, here’s a link to an O’Reilly blog I wrote on an application that I think has some promise.

The key point is that general feed aggregation becomes a commodity. Differentiation comes higher up the stack in terms of creating enhanced viewing applications that differentiate on ease of use, personalization and leverage of social networking algorithms. Working on a longer blog on this particular topic, but this is a start.

NerdTV: a long tail brand

Long Tail post on Robert X. Cringely launching NerdTV on PBS.  Three things are noteworthy about the announcement in my opinion. 

One, the fact that this is launching as a web downloadable show is yet another indicator that IPTV (I recognize the term IPTV is a loaded one for some) is getting pretty darn close to "ready for prime time."

Two is the staying power of the "Nerds" brand, inasmuch as the original was launched way back in 1996.  If you buy off on the premise of Long Tail, there are probably LOTS of other brands that can and will find new life on the web.  Such is the nature of narrowcasting.

Three is the fact that between the emergence of the blogosphere, cheap digital media creation and distribution tools/technologies and RSS as a ubiquitous publish and subscribe engine, aspiring brand creators have a pretty powerful "fire starter" platform within reach.

The Miracle of Life: Presenting Gabriel Sigal

Time to update my profile.  Meet my new son and check out the photo album that shares the (short) story of his birth:

http://thenetworkgarden.com/photos/birth_of_gabriel

The funniest joke you've never heard before

I came across this story in the August, '05 issue of Vanity Fair (a great magazine in terms of breadth of topics and depth of coverage on those topics).  Penn Jillette (of Penn &Teller) and comedian Paul Provenza are about to release The Aristocrats, essentially a documentary about one thing: a joke so disgusting and in such poor taste that you don't know whether to laugh or be offended. 

The angle that is unique here is the fact that the telling of the joke is a sort of rite of passage for comedians, and the movie captures the veritable who's who of Robin Williams, Steven Wright and even Bob Saget (plus many other BIG names) telling their version of the joke. 

The movie is one part slice of disgusto life and one part story behind the story of the telling of the joke and its place in comedian hazing and acceptance.  Three links to help frame if it's something of interest to you. 

One is an interview with Penn Jillette and Paul Provenza, makers of the film. 

Two is a Southpark version of the joke (Southpark Aristocrats)

Three is Taylor Negron refusing to share his version of the joke in Defamer.  Supposedly, his version sets the bar, so to speak.