Mark Zuckerberg: Facebook's Benevolent Dictator

Mark Zuckerberg is Facebook's Benevolent Dictator who says the social network is 176 million or the sixth largest nation in the World. Electing to preserve member privacy was him being nice. Suppose he didn't do it?

Julia Allison and Gawker's Obsession With The Online Star

Julia Allison's exploits are regularly covered by the online publications Gawker and Valleywag, who complain that she wants attention, then give her the attention in the process. Why? She's a great example of self-promotion.

I wrote about Allison a while back in this tongue-in-cheek take on her search for White Guys at tech parties. In the age of Obama I think she got the hint and started paying attention to men of color too, a good thing. But why is Gawker so taken with her?

Regardless of the reason, Allison is clearly an Internet star and a model of how to cheaply build buzz using online resources available to anyone. Heck, I'm taking notes from Julia.

Socialtext offering laid-off networks for free - Susan Mernit's Blog

Socialtext News - Susan Mernit's Blog: “As we all know, alumni networks frm opast companies ate great ways to get jobs, Ross Mayfield's Socialtext is going to be right there helping those folks out.

Ross writes: "Today, Socialtext is meeting this latent need with a free Corporate Social Network offer for the 2009 Recession. Any former employee and HR director of a company that reduced its workforce by 5% or more in the last year can create a private Corporate Social Network for free by applying here. Please note that this offer does not include free ”

-- Nice find Susan!!! I just wonder, considering the digital divide, how many companies will actually make the leap.

Valleywag's Owen Thomas On Yahoo's Collapse

Valleywag, Silicon Valley's Tech Gossip Rag: “Everything takes forever at Yahoo, the once high-flying, now famously sluggish Internet giant. Today's layoffs of 1,500 employees have been expected for months. And yet the strange thing is so many Yahoos seem unprepared”

Robert Scoble On China's New Disruptive Manufacturing Techniques

I am a frequent reader of Robert Scoble's blog "Scobleizer" and it's seldom without a great tip or observation.  While Robert's political views may be more to the "slight-right" on mine, it's no matter for he always has his finger on the New Media and Tech pulse.  Moreover, he's always ready with great advise, as he gave in my TechCrunch party video, which is long, but worth another look if you have 41 minutes to spare:












In this case, it's Tech.


In his  blog , Scoble discusses the new developments in Manufacturing Tech, and the work of a man named Liam Casey, who's the founder of PCH.   To avoid stealing thunder from Scoble, I'll report that it means you can go to a website and special order a car or computer, rather than the "one-car-fits-all" approach we have today.


That's of no surprise to me.  It's a direction the industrialized World has been on path toward this kind of development every since Dr. McCoy put in a card and out came instant hot chicken soup in a bowl on the Enterprise, and that was in the '60s.


But what's interesting is the kind of businesses that Scoble says we should be in:

"Now, get over your fears, because there are tons of new jobs in this new world, too, you just need to see how this changes everything and then take advantage of the new opportunities. Where are the high value bits in this whole process?

Not the manufacturing.

The real value and profit is in two places: R&D and coming up with new businesses and new ideas. Take, for instance, the Chumby which was designed at a Tim O’Reilly Foocamp and who’s company still has less than a handful of people. Chumby is the new post disruptive business model. Want a job? This is how to do it. Hang out at Foocamp. Come up with an interesting business. Get funding. Go see PCH. Profit! Well, yes, there are a few details involved there.

Other jobs that’ll open up? Anything involved in building brands. Marketing, PR, blogging/Twittering/FriendFeeding, building web experiences, videos, going to conferences to show off new products to audiences, etc."

Obama Will Reach Out To The "Other 46 Percent" - Reacting To Brian Solis

I just read Brian Solis otherwise well-considered blog post entitled "Barack Obama, The Social Web, and the Future of User-Generated Governance", and I have to totally disagree with his central idea that because of Senator Obama's huge win -- a landslide in the electoral college -- that the "losing side" of the coin of the election will not be reached. 

I take issue with this for two reasons: the failing economy and the need for government aide will cauuse a good portion of "the other 46 percent" to pay attention to President Obama.

I remind Brian and others that the reason Barack Obama won the 2008 election is 1) the failing economy, and 2) the fact that the Republicans' expressed reliance on "the free market" (the adherence to the belief in the existence of such which I take for intellectual laziness because it's a reason to do nothing), as well as 3) market failure is in part what helped Obama "over the top". (Solis is right about the other aspect components of Obama's victory.)

But my assertion is that the economy's continued deterioration will cause even Obama's detractors to look to hear and see what he's going to do about it. Our economy is tanking. Citicorp is set to lay of 9,000 people. Google's feeling the crunch. American Express wants a cut of the Bailout money.

We're in trouble. The "free market" is too sick to get us out of it, and it's actually under the influence of a confluence of international government actions. Everyone in America is waiting for us to act, and those who didn't support President-Elect Obama will watch on television and discover YouTube to see what he does.

Enter Barack Obama.

How Blogging Is Like An Election Campaign - A Set of Tips 1. You need a story

I saw what is an interesting take on Blogging and how it's like an election campaign, and since we just experienced and participated in one, I thought it was appropriate.  I found it at Problogger and it's by "Trish" of "Ideas for Women."

I disagree that a Blogger should take a break, not that Bloggers should not, but one has to make sure there's a constant churn of information -- posts -- daily.  I read somewhere -- I think here at Technorati -- that the most successful blogs had between four and 30 posts a day.  That's work. 

Here's an excerpt:

I followed this year’s U.S. presidential election pretty closely on T.V. and also volunteered for one of the candidates. Over I time I began to notice some parallels between running a successful campaign and a successful blog.

I don’t plan to ever run for president - but I would like to have a more successful blog. I would also like to share what I learned and hope that it will be helpful to other bloggers.



1. You need a story

Both of the presidential candidates and their running mates had a story. John McCain was a P.O.W., Sarah Palin, a hockey mom. Joe Biden was from Scranton, Pennsylvania and stuttered as kid. Barack Obama’s story is that he is the “son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas”.

The details of the stories don’t really matter. What matters is how they /framed/ their story - their story had to be everyone else’s story - a story people could relate to.

Buffi The Gym Girl - My New Sim Game - BuffiTheGymGirl.com

 

Regular visitors to our blog are undoubtedly saying "What?!" but I've not forgotten the basics of Sports Business Simulations: our sim games.  But I've spent so much time developing the online marketing and online reputation management aspect of the business, that I had to delay the introduction of my third classroom sim: Buffi The Gym Girl. 

What's Buffi The Gym Girl?

BUFFI THE GYM GIRL BETA is a simulation of a very real, daily activity: going to the gym and the reasons why we pick a gym or leave one. Since some consider gyms as great places to meet people, and to date, it comes as no suprise that people change gyms based on clientele. Enter Buffi, expertly played by actress Cynthia Lee (with her sister Mary Lee playing "Buffi's Sister".) 

Buffi is a beautiful, intelligent girl-next-door, approachable, talkative, and totaly hot and famous star gym rat and personal trainer. She's not shy about her opinions and if she comes to your gym, all kind of good things happen, namely, membership skyrockets.

Your job as gym owner is to make the right decisions to keep Buffi happy and prevent her from leaving and yet make a profit at the same time. You have several decisions you can make, from the monthly fee to use the gym, to the number of sales representatives you need to get new members, the money you spend on marketing and maintenance, the number of employees you have, and if you should expand the gym, provided you can do so.

BUFFI THE GYM GIRL is a system dynamics sim, so there are some business dynamics to be aware of. First, you can have too many members.

If you do, and Buffi's at your gym, she will leave.

You can spend too little money on maintenance, and if you do, Buffi will not come to your gym. You can have too few employees, and risk losing Buffi and everyone else. Or you can have too few amenities, and not get Buffi at all.

The question for you is can you run a successful gym and do without Buffi? That's something you will have to figure out for yourself, either for fun or as part of a business or sport management or fitness management class.  If you're interested in using this for your class, call me, Zennie Abraham, its creator, at 510-387-9809 or email: zennie@sportsbusinesssims.com

Buffi The Gym Girl Decisions

There are several decisions that make up Buffi The Gym Girl

"Expand Gym" - Select 1 for "yes" or "0" for no expansion.
"Number of Gym Employees" - Each change increases or decreases personel costs and impacts service.
"Gym Maintenance Expenditure" - Select the expenditure you will make for gym maintenance each month.
"Gym Marketing Expenditure" - Select the expenditure you will make for marketing the gym each month here.
"Gym Monthly Fee" - What You Will Charge Per Month For Gym Membership
"Number of Gym Sales Reps" - Select the number of sales people at the gym.
 Click For Buffi The Gym Girl - Beta

Arianna Huffington - The Web Killed Karl Rove Politics

 At the Web 2.0 Summit, where web tech people get together to discuss the ever changing nature of the advance and use of the Internet and Internet technology , Huffington Post founder Arianna Huffington summed up why President-Elect Barack Obama prevailed over Senator John McCain:

"The McCain campaign didn't have a clue," said Huffington in a reference to technical rather than intellectual deficiencies. "The Internet has killed Karl Rove politics."

I'm sorry I missed Web 2.0, but I'll catch the Expo.  But the matter of just how the Internet killed Karl Rove politics bears exploration.  In brief, the Internet allowed the free and rapid transfer of information between people, thus allowing a single episode of rumors and negative information that would have altered the course of a campaign in the past to be 1) quickly countered and 2) replaced by new news in the cycle.  That leads to a related point: the news cycle is now in less than a day, it's more like a six hour process.  Thus, news that's really a day old has been repeated again and again online often before it hits the newspapers the next day.  


That didn't happen in 2004, and so Karl Rove's "divide and conquer" strategy worked.  Not today.  

Y! Live Stopping It's Broadcast December 3rd 2008

I just saw this post  explaining that Y! Live, Yahoo's experiment in online broadcast distribution, will be going off the air December 3rd:

Our mission here on the Brickhouse team is to quickly develop product ideas that can add value to Yahoo! as a whole. To do this effectively we constantly evaluate our early-stage products and sometimes have to make the hard decision to move on, in order to continue exploring new territory and developing new products.

So it is with great sadness that I share the news that Yahoo! Live, a Brickhouse project in social broadcasting will be going off the air on 3 December 2008. We’d like to thank everyone who has participated. Without all of you, Y!Live would not have built the strong community that it has. It has been really interesting (and entertaining) to see all of the ways broadcasters have used Live, developing it into a place for all sorts of social interactions.

Commission Junction: Never Made Money Off CJ.Com; Now I Know Why

Commission Junction: Never Made Money Off CJ.Com; Now I Know Why

Class action lawsuit reveals abuses of the affiliate marketing industry.

Yep. Commission Junction, the pioneering affiliate marketing company, is involved in a nasty lawsuit. Here are the details:

If you joined or were a member of the affiliate marketing networks operated by ValueClick, Inc., Commission Junction, Inc. and/or Be Free (collectively, “Defendants”), between April 20, 2003 and the present, you may be a class member in Settlement Recovery Center et al. v. ValueClick, Inc. et al., No. 2:07-cv-02638-FMC-CTx, a lawsuit which is pending in the Central District of California. The Settlement Notice informs you of the Court's certification of a class for settlement purposes; the nature of the claims alleged; your right to participate in, or exclude yourself from, the class; a proposed settlement; and how you can claim an award of advertising credits under the settlement or object to the settlement.

The proposed settlement will resolve claims that Defendants failed to adequately monitor Commission Junction’s Network for the use by third parties of software that does not comply with Commission Junction’s (“CJ”) Publisher Code of Conduct and that is intended to steal or divert commissions from publishers on CJ’s network (“Non-compliant Software”), failed to adequately monitor or prevent third parties from engaging in the theft or “hijacking” of commissions from Advertisers and Publishers on CJ’s Network, and failed to make sufficient disclosures regarding the existence of Non-compliant Software and commission theft, resulting in losses to both advertisers and publishers on the CJ Network.

The proposed settlement will provide a monetary recovery to eligible class members. For class members that currently maintain an account on the CJ Network will receive payment through payments or credits deposited or applied to their CJ accounts; eligible class members that no longer have accounts on the Commission Junction Network will receive a check for an equal amount.

Cuil Is A Cool Search Site That Launched This Week

So have you tried the website Cuil, well, it's actually a new search engine like Google. Check it out. More later.

Robert Scoble Talks About PodTech Demise At TechCrunch Party

I present my long form video documentary of the TechCrunch | August Capital Party held Friday, July 25th 2008 at
August Capital and hosed by TechCrunch Co-Founder / Editor Michael Arrington. First, let me thank Michael for the opportunity to do this at his event, as well as the time he gave me. Second, let me thank all of you who gave me your time at the party, which was the vast majority of you.

I set out to form a pattern of opinions on what the Democratic Party and Senator Obama should address on the eve of the Democratic National Convention. I also tried to give a view of what people were working on in the tech / web community. There's a lot here. But I also tried to make something fun to watch, with a beginning, a middle, and an end.

The video is 41 minutes long and some of the highlights: TechCrunch's Michael Arrington explaining that he hope Barack Obama sicks to his concern for "net neutrality" as well as his hope that issues regarding H1 Visas, the FCC, and the avoidance of Internet Taxes are addressed. Technorat Founder and Chairman David Sifty introducing his new venture OffBeatGuides.com. The great EtchStar.com service for devices like iPhones. An iPhone App from VSmax.com. Sara Lacy telling the Democratic Party to "get some balls." Andrew Mager talking about the party and introducing Cathy Brooks of Seesmic, who in turn introduced the Legendary Robert Scoble, and Brooks echoing (unknowingly) Lacy when she says the party should "grow a pair." And Robert talking -- at considerable length -- about what happened to PodTech and what it says, if anything, about the economics of Podcasting.

In all the message to the Democratic Party and Senator Obama was to work to achieve unity, don't fashion policies that tax the Internet or harm Net Neutrality, be courageous, and for Senator Obama to stay the course.

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Zennienet.com - The Newest Social Tagging System

If you use Digg, or Reddit, or Mixx, then you're familar with "social tagging". Now, there's a new system right here at Zennie's Zeitgeist, and will soon be on our other blogs: Zennienet.com

Try it.

Microsoft's Steve Balmer: Newspapers Will Be Dead In 10 Years

Microsoft's Steve Balmer met with the Washington Post on Thursday and talked about why Microsoft worked to join with Yahoo! and the future of hardware, software, newspapers, advertising, and the Internet. In my view much of what Steve's talking about is already with us today, and many frequent bloggers see their blogs as a combination of advertising and content and ads as content and vice-versa. The world's catching up with us.

Here's the video set:

Balmer on Microsoft's Mission:



Balmer on Hardware and Software Changes:



Balmer on The Newspaper and Advertising:



Balmer on User Privacy:

VentureBeat's Matt Marshall @ Startup Camp San Francisco

Matt Marshall was formerly a reporter for the San Jose Mercury News and who started the company VentureBeat.com in 2006. We first met when I attended his party at the Amsterdam in San Francisco, and then ran into each other at Startup Camp San Francisco, where he took time to talk with me while we were in the chow line there.

As for Startup Camp itself, it was great for networking, but I didn't get out of it what I was looking for, which was focused, specific discussion of problems and issues that all startups face. For the most part, the discussion groups had general conversations and were too large in some cases to be effective on a personal level.

Ad-Tech San Francisco Digital Marketing Convention - Video

This video presents sights, sounds, and people at Ad-Tech San Francisco, a digital marketing convention annually held at Moscone Center in San Francisco. What I noticed about Ad-Tech this year is that there was less space used overall but more people, and far more people of color than ever before.

SF Ad Execs Don't Know Digital Media, But Act Like It

Ok, I warn you. This is a rant of massive proportions and designed to get my dander up for the day. Here it is.

I'm sick and tired of meeting San Francisco Digital Media and Ad Execs who work for or with Linkedin, AOL, Facebook, and other once nice little startups that suddenly became large companies yet don't know the first thing about coding a website, or don't even use state-of-the-art digital communications tools like Twitter, or even know how to make a YouTube channel, let alone upload a video to it....and will not admit it.

These folks are nice enough, but they're doing no one any favors at all and need a massive crash course in online tech, yet work in it! I realized this after a trip to the St. Regis Hotel on March 20th of this fine year 2008 to make a video for a kind of industry networkng group called "SF-BIG" or San Francisco Bay Area Interactive Group.

Now the video was a volunteer matter on my part and part of the agreement was that the video is mine, not their's and so I make it and post it and use it. I mean heck, if I'm not going to get an SF-BIG membership out of the deal, then I've got to protect what I do, right?

Which also means I get to rant, big time.

What I saw in the event discussion -- you can seee the video here after this break --



is a collection of 250 people, with maybe three Black faces inluding mine, and of which the vast majority were not tech-types, yet have some say over which tech-type gets what job if a tech-type dared to wade into their shallow end of the pool. Melinda Mettler , who represents the Academy of Art School of Advertising, made a flip set of remarks, indicating a near dislike forthe very students she's supposed to be trying to find jobs for. She says they're too cool, "life's a party, man."

Maybe it's because the tech-heads know that their real "job" is to go out and make their own company and not work for another large corporate bureaucracy full of game-players and back-stabbers. Maybe they know that the people doing the hiring don't know what they know anyway, so why go there?

Melinda says that tech-types don't want to leave San Francisco because it's too nice. No. The real reason is that the venture capitalists who would fund new firms are most likely to be here than in, say, New York or Chicago. That's why.

Watch the video. The only person who gets a pass from me is recruiter David Greenwald, and that's it. As far as I'm concerned, SF-BIG would do its members a favor if it had a panel on blogs and new media and coding and optimization, ....and a test. Call it a tech industry I.Q. test.

The lecture would be necessary, because as of this writing, most of the SF-BIG members would flunk the I.Q. test.

Newspaper Ad Revenue Drops 10 Percent In One Year

In perhaps the best sign of the impact of New Media on traditional media, "Editor and Publisher" reporter Jennifer Saba tells us that the newspaper industry has experienced the worst drop in ad revenue in a half-century. She wrote:

According to new data released by the Newspaper Association of America, total print advertising revenue in 2007 plunged 9.4% to $42 billion compared to 2006 -- the most severe percent decline since the association started measuring advertising expenditures in 1950.

Meanwhile, online ad revenue now represents 7.5 percent of total newspaper ad revenue, up almost 2 percent from 2006.

What we're seeing, in my view, is the transformation of media from primarily offline to eventually a balance of online and offline. But in this I don't think the nature of jobs in this industry will be the same. My prediction is that the best-paid writers will contribute to different online platforms and not just one, reflecting the fact that one site can't command readership online as consistently as it can offline.

Clinton Friends Snooping Around Obama Passport Records Illegally

In an election full of surprises and twists, this is the latest one. Senator Barack Obama's passport records were illegally accessed and on three occasions timed during Obama success in the primary season.

There's an alledged connection between the operatives in this case and the Clintons. Since Hillary Clinton is opposing Barack Obama for President, it's logical to look to her and her staff for evidence of wrong-doing. But to peak into private passport records is totally wrong and it seems that's where the U. S. State Department is starting.

The person who is over the U.S. State Department is Maura Harty, a State Department official in charge of the Bureau Of Consular Affairs during the first two breaches of Obama's passport, had served as an ambassador under now former President Bill Clinton.

The obvious question is were former Clinton cronies behind even one of the investigations?

I'm glad I'm not clearing the air!


Zennie