Panel: What are People Really Doing on the Web?

Moderator: Joel Greenberg Sr Planner, GSD&M

Holland Hofma Brown VP Internet Panel Mgmt, Harris Interactive
Joel Greenberg Sr Planner, GSD&M
Michele Madansky VP Corp & Sales Research, Yahoo!
Max Kalehoff VP Mktg, Nielsen BuzzMetrics

General comments from session:

• The Internet is now a way of life. A majority of poll respondents say they “can’t live without it.”
• One in three respondents say the Internet is their primary source of news, however, TV and newspapers are viewed as more trustworthy than Web sources
• Only three percent of SXSW attendees responding to a poll say they trust TV news
• Only 25 percent feel extremely or very comfortable with sharing private information via the Web
• The Web is regarded by a majority of respondents as their primary means of staying connected
• More men than women read blogs, and as expected, the younger demographic dominates the Blogosphere
• While blog usage generally decreases with age, 29 percent of males and females over age 65 read blogs
• Blogs are viewed as valuable for reading others’ opinions, for entertainment, to keep abreast of current affairs, and for family contact. However, most people are selective about the blogs they visit, limiting visits to only a handful
• Among the general population, personal diaries lead the list of what is being read
• Most respondents say that content is more important than the way a blog looks
• About ten percent of the general population is writing blogs; with men and women writing at about the same rate
• Fully three-fourths of blog writers write about themselves
• Yahoo gets 2 terabytes of usage data every day, which exceeds the amount of information stored in the Library of Congress
• Mobile phones are increasingly important for information delivery and retrieval (this point has been cited by several SXSW panelists.) This is especially true outside the United States
• On-line gaming is important globally
• Communication remains the killer app globally (IM, e-mail, SMS)
• The global food industry has been most impacted by grassroots/viral activity by Web users
• Video clips work especially well in swaying skeptical people (e.g. engineering types)

The Edelman Trust Barometer 2005 found that traditional institutions (government, media, business) are declining as sources preceived by the public as being trustworthy, supplanted by an increasing public trust in “people just like me.”

Panel: Does Your Blog Have a Business?

Panelists:

Phoebe Espiritu
Eric Rice Founder, Audioblog.com
Shaun Inman haveamint.com
Jeffrey Zeldman Founder, Happy Cog Studios
DL Byron Principal, Texturadesign Inc
General points:

Inman: Started by building a community… something that is common among all the panel participants.
Byron: A new market came to us that we didn’t know existed – “accidental entrepreneurship”.
Rice: Things are still evolving, but it is very important to have original content.

Espiritu: Talked about “situated software” and, if I got this straight, it’s when a person has know-how to solve something, but not all of the necessary knowledge. The online community then helps you connect to the missing parts. Cited as an example was an experiment with publishing online content and ideas as PDFs. The goal was to see how far it would spread. She says that real businesses are now using this technique (Before & After magazine, for example.)

Zeldman: Primary motivation for blogging was the ability to express self, not money. Says that contrariousness is a good thing. just pick someone you want to “kill” – someone who you think you’re better than providing information, a product, a service, etc. Then, set about the business of beating them at their own game.
Byron: Didn’t run live commenting on his blog for a long time because of comment spam. Is doing so now, because there now are tools to eliminate comment spam.

Inman: IS creator of haveamint – a Web site analysis tool. also, creator of shortstat – a Web site statistics utility. Inman says that he likes having is ideas challenged. He is a big proponent of viral posting, which creates buzz, and says there is great value in good Web design.
Espiritu: Entrepreneurs naturally want to fix something that’s broken.

Byron: Businesses want to know how this Blogosphere thing works.

Rice: Not everything created for the Web has to make money.

I asked the panel the following question: How much energy did they expend building their community of users? Did they go find the users, or did they find the sites?

Byron: The key was to keep putting content out there, content that is keyword-rich, that uses smart mark-up language. Use keywords in post titles. How-to content is also a great way to build traffic. It’s okay to ask for shared content and to ask for blogging relationships.

Keynote Conversation: Heather Armstrong / Jason Kottke

This keynote conversation featured Jason Kottke and Heather Armstrong, two celebrity bloggers discussing various models to monetize a blog site. Kottke, who recentlly gave up a year-long experiment with paid subscriptions said the experience changed the way he wrote his blog, having felt “pressure” to satisfy the 300 people who had paid for access. Armstrong is currently running ads, and has experienced a blizzard of complaints from loyal fans.

A major problem for Kottke was knowing how to use people’s donated money, saying that writing the site became more like a job. He added that as time has gone by, his site has become less personal in nature. Quite the opposite for Armstrong, who blogs very personal matters about her family, marriage, sex life, etc.

Kottke believes that sites offering a truly personal side are more engaging, and that drives traffic. In her quest to be personal, Armstrong admitted having crossed over boundaries that “devastated her life.” She now claims to have sacred things that she’s unwilling to discuss online. She does enjoy sharing her personal life with other people, but keeps the two separate.

Having been a TV news anchor and reporter for many years, I find parallels between celebrity blogging and the experience of TV journalists in the public eye. Such bloggers have much to learn from those of us who have lived in a fishbowl: you can’t have it both ways. One thing (wide exposure) breeds the other (lack of privacy).
General points

Kottke: Works from both home and work (i-beam). Enjoys having other people to talk to – gets blogging ideas from office mates. Says he is “married to my newsreader and browser, sorting through things.” People come back to blogs for the links – it’s important to post something new every few hours. Longer posts are good for getting people through the door. This kind of “meaty stuff” is what gets you linked. An example is a massively popular post from 2005 entitled “50 things you can do with your iPod”.
Armstrong: My readers are not coming for the links. Says that she doesn’t do links as well as Kottke does. Instead, her readers come for her stories, adding that “you have to live the content.”
Kottke: I usually warn other bloggers that he is going to link them, so they aren’t surprised by bandwidth costs, or even having their site go down temporarily. “I have a certain responsiblity because of that much traffic.”
Armstrong: Has a hard time dealing with negative comments from readers. Again, the parallel to TV news. You can’t expect everyone to like you, nor keep their opinions to themselves. Armstrong noted that she is still working on developing a thicker skin. Armstrong usually does not write in the mornings, instead spending that time with family, including chasing her kid around the house. Her husband manages her ads sales and hosting issues, she is responsible for photos and the writing.

Kottke: “I always assume that the people who read me are like me – a white male, 20 to 35 years old and fairly geeky. I am an introvert.”

Armstrong: Her readers are mostly women with children in their 20s and 30s.

Panel: Jim Coudal / Jason Fried Opening Remarks

Jim Coudal’s one and only contribution was an opinion that all creative people need to understand that “The curious shall inherit the earth.”
Jason Fried tackled the topic “How to Take Skills and Passion and Turn it Into a Business”. Fried says there are two ways to go about doing this.

1. Do business the traditional way, i.e. quit your day job, take lots of venture capital, and probably go bust.
2. Start small, go slow.

Fried believes that obscurity is a really good thing in the formative years of a business because it removes the fear of failure. You can make mistakes and learn while in relative obscurity.

He preaches Three Lesses

1. Make do with less technology when creating software or Web applications. Don’t succumb to one-upsmanship, feeling the need to add more and more features. Instead, concetrate on simplicity and clarity. Do a few things that work really well. Build simpler software or products. You want to eliminate things that can go wrong. Don’t build clever software that does unnecessary things. Your brain, and not software is better at problem-solving.
2. Make do with less time. Less time is good. You waste more time than you do spending it on good things by worrying about abstract issues that aren’t real work. Just look for five hours, and use them wisely. You’ll start building something that is real. Create things. It doesn’t have to always be right. Don’t worry about planning, paperwork, etc.
3. Make do with less money. You don’t need a lot of money these days. Don’t use venture capital, spend your own money. Save the VC money for later. Caution: if you use investor money you will probably need to take more and more and more of it, eventually losing control of the business.

You DO want to embrace constraints. Don’t try and get rid of them. You must divide the “must haves” from the “I wants.” Also, don’t be afraid to charge for something. People will pay for products or services they find useful.

Finally, Jason said that his company – creator of Backpack, an enormously successful personal productivity Web tool – never builds the back-end first. Instead, an interface is created first, so that developers and content providers will have something to react to.

Panel: How to Do Precisely the Right Thing at All Possible Times

Take a look at this formula: E(u|p, X)= xe xp (x)u(x)

Mean anything to you? Me neither. This was how the best session of the day began. Dan Gilbert, a psychology professor from Harvard University, explained that it’s a mathematical formula for the following:

Odds of Gain x Value of Gain = Expected Happiness

Gilbert proceeded to explain that people are inclined to make decisions based on comparisons with events in the past. And, that they usually are bad decisions because of it. His research has also found that people tend to overestimate that good things will happen. It is better to make decisions based on what acutally happens instead of what might possibly happen.
Other key points:

• Lotteries are a stupidity tax
• Most people surveyed said it is more likely to be mugged in Detroit than it is in Michigan. Go figure.
• Those same people say it is more likely you’ll die from natural causes than it is from cancer or heart attack. Uh, those are natural causes.
• The human brain doesn’t detect stimuli, it detects changes in stimuli
• When spending money, the percentage of discount is not important. It’s the amount of money saved
• Americans love variety, but variety makes decision-making difficult, and it is especially difficult to compare things over time
• people are patient about matters in the far future, but less so regarding the near future
• Our brains are working to exist in a world they weren’t made for (evolution)

Panel: Podcasting 2.0

Ostensibly, this session was to give us a sense about where podcsting is heading. While that was addressed to some degree, it fell far short of my expectations. Frankly, I think the panelists were weak, particularly Chris Pirillo. While he remains comfortably entrenched in the Web zeitgeist, I was not impressed with his presentation or his knowledge about the subject.

One exception was the good contribution from Eric Rice, who clearly was best among the four panelists. Look, I don’t need to hear someone tell me what I already know. I’m interested in learning truly new, cutting-edge stuff. And, none of it was here.

Having said that, there were some interesting points made. Here they are, in no particular order:

• Bad podcasting. It’s not about the tools or the hardware. It’s about a lack of talent
• It’s not so much about talent, but doing what matters most to you (there was disagreement among the panelists on this)
• Don’t stress about being good or bad when creating a podcast. Just do your thing
• Videocasting on mobile devices is the next big thing
• It is hard to do a solo podcast. Interviewing guests is far superior
• Rule number one of podcasting: Make it sound better (Chris Pirillo actually said this.)
• Use NPR as a model for podcasting best practices
• Rocketboom – a video submission site – has about 300,000 unique visitors a day (nothing to do with podcasting, but interesting
• The best use of podcasting is for branding, not to get clicks
• Go out of your way to break the rules
• Chris Pirillo is a goober

This last point bears some explanation. Chris Pirillo strikes me as an energetic opportunist who is living off his reputation as a Web acolyte. Not so much, methinks.