The Web 2.0 Bubble...tell me it isn't so

Here's a funny spoof on the latest build up of Web 2.0 valuations....

The Story of Stuff with Annie Leonard

I've always enjoyed the material from the folks at Free Range Studios. Funny, edgy, in your face stuff that really makes you think. The "Story of Stuff" is their most ambitious effort yet and doesn't disappoint. I question a few of Annie's facts, but the basic message is hard to ignore: We have developed a completely unsustainable way of life here in America, one that drives us, more and more I'm afraid, towards political and ethical positions any fair-minded person should seriously question.

I particular like her point that the way we live our lives is not inevitable. Our society was engineered this way intentionally by the drivers of industry...and we not only acquiesced, we cheered it along. After all, it truly is great to be an American and we amde sure the rest of the world knew it through our primary export—media and entertainment.

It's no surprise, then, that everyone else in the world would like to live as well as we do. The only problem is they can't. There's simply not enough "stuff" to go around. I could go on, but the movie does a much better job.

Here's the description from the website:

The Story of Stuff with Annie Leonard: "From its extraction through sale, use and disposal, all the stuff in our lives affects communities at home and abroad, yet most of this is hidden from view. The Story of Stuff is a 20-minute, fast-paced, fact-filled look at the underside of our production and consumption patterns. The Story of Stuff exposes the connections between a huge number of environmental and social issues, and calls us together to create a more sustainable and just world. It'll teach you something, it'll make you laugh, and it just may change the way you look at all the stuff in your life forever."

It's Always Harder than it Looks

Car-pooling has always been virtuous thing to do. It's always harder than it looks. It's really hard to find a compatible group that synchs up on the basics like starting location, time to go, destination location, and time to return, much less the finer, but just as important issues like what radio station to listen to.

Travel Convergence thinks they have the answer with their patented system (in New Zealand for sure and pending elsewhere). Apparently their pitching the system as a solution to New York's traffic problems at Less Cars In NY. They whole system seems quite well thought out. Ann Arbor is probably too small to implement a system like this, but you never know.

Location. Location. Location

The LA Times reports (free registration required) how Google maps are finding their way to gas pumps in a deal with Gilbarco Veeder-Root. It's only one small deal in among many in the emerging local search space, but it reminded me of something I learned as an eCommerce consultant in the late '90's.

When I worked at AppNet, I had the honor of working with John Cross, former CIO of then British Petroleum (now just BP). He was such a fine gentleman to work with. He pointed out that one of BP's biggest assets was its real-estate. If I recall correctly, at the time (around 1997), both BP and Shell each had more locations than MacDonalds, something like 20,000 to 30,000 stores each. As they began to see themselves as more than an oil company, they took advantage of their real estate to add retail outlets where you could buy high-margin "stuff" like pop, candy and other little necessities of life. If handled well, they could make more profit on the retail than at the pump.

Now they're equally in a position to leverage local search to their advantage. This assumes people figure out how to monetize local search adequately, mind you.

The importance of Story

One of the things NT Wright drove home for me is the importance of story in ancient culture. If you don't understand the general cultural stories people told about their lives, who they were, what the problems were and what the desired solutions would be, you're likely to mis-read an ancient book like the Bible. It is a story, told to people for whom story was a primary means of communication, entertainment and value sharing.

Today is no different, but instead of sharing stories personally we rely on mass communication for our stories. I wonder if we really understand the significance of this shift. Now, instead of telling "our" stories, we're left with others stories, conceived of in "Hollywood" (for lack of a better generalization), and co-opted as our own. Indeed, Hollywood is a powerful story teller as witnessed by the profound influence Western culture has on the rest of the world.

It's not just Hollywood, though. Brands tell a story, too. Listen to Max Kalehoff, vice president of marketing for Nielsen BuzzMetrics, talk about a recent study in Online Spin: We’re All Suckers For Narratives:

When people ask me what is my secret sauce, my answer is simple: it’s the ability to probe deep and elicit the essence of who you are, and to extract key stories that passionately demonstrate relevance, mission and a human connection to our world. While great brands are the result of many things — particularly all the factors that deliver great experience over and over and over again — it’s the presence of compelling, authentic stories that determine high resonance in our minds. Face it, we’re human and we’re suckers for narratives.

But it’s more than my gut that supports this notion. According to a three-year study by the Advertising Research Foundation and the American Association of Advertising Agencies, ads that tell a branding story work better than ads that focus on product positioning. As reported by Brandweek, 33 television ads across 12 categories were analyzed by 14 emotion and physiological research firms, with tools that included testing heart rate and skin conductance to brain diagnostics. Reported Brandweek: “The report contends that in many ways, advertising is stuck in the past. The 20th century was dominated by a one-way transactional focus where ads were pushed at consumers. Today, consumers interact with ads to ‘co-create’ meaning that is powered by emotion and rich narrative.”

He goes on to say, "But the most valuable takeaway is at the core brand level — specifically, how our minds are hardwired to embrace narratives and distill meaning with emotional force."

The Shift in Evangelical Thinking

The New York Times magazine had a feature-length article this weekend on the changes occurring within the Evangelical movement that I read while closing things out at Cloud 9 (which was an awesome retreat...great job Donnell and team!).

Jim Wallis does a good job of excerpting the article, describing the shift as a "Real Awakening" so I won't do so here. Suffice it to say, the article certainly reflects my own personal experience in my faith journey and a surprising number of those I know. Clearly the Spirit is doing something.

A complementary read, much shorter and perhaps more to the point, is this post provocatively titled Willow Creek Repents? in which Bill Hybels reflects on the results of a comprehensive study his mega-church conducted on the effectiveness of their programs in making disciples:

Speaking at the Leadership Summit, Hybels summarized the findings this way:

Some of the stuff that we have put millions of dollars into thinking it would really help our people grow and develop spiritually, when the data actually came back it wasn’t helping people that much. Other things that we didn’t put that much money into and didn’t put much staff against is stuff our people are crying out for.

Having spent thirty years creating and promoting a multi-million dollar organization driven by programs and measuring participation, and convincing other church leaders to do the same, you can see why Hybels called this research “the wake up call” of his adult life.

Hybels confesses:

We made a mistake. What we should have done when people crossed the line of faith and become Christians, we should have started telling people and teaching people that they have to take responsibility to become ‘self feeders.’ We should have gotten people, taught people, how to read their bible between service, how to do the spiritual practices much more aggressively on their own.

In other words, spiritual growth doesn’t happen best by becoming dependent on elaborate church programs but through the age old spiritual practices of prayer, bible reading, and relationships. And, ironically, these basic disciplines do not require multi-million dollar facilities and hundreds of staff to manage.

The blog post also has links to the full video presentation by Hybels.

It's great to see so many streams starting to run together.

Business Models for Making Social Media Work

I've been thinking about ways to use the Internet to promote books lately. There are the obvious things to try, a website, MySpace/Facebook/Name-your-favorite social network, a blog, etc. But its clear that the choice of venue for your efforts is not the most important decision. You need to pick the combination of things that works both in terms of your resources and your audiences predilections.

That said, I really like the model Ariana Huffington employs at the Huffington Post. Here's an excerpt from an article from Fortune describing it in a nutshell

Unlike a conventional newspaper that devotes the majority of its resources to basic newsgathering, the Huffington Post instead devoted its scant editorial budget to hiring a few key editors, staff bloggers, and political reporters who post links to the day's stories and imbue the site with a dishy and slightly indignant sensibility, while giving the endless parade of invited bloggers co-star status on the Arianna Show. To date, some 1,600 bloggers have accepted Huffington's invitation to write. They are given a password to log into the site's publishing system and blog at will.

It's an ever-changing stew. On a given day John Cusack, Deepak Chopra, Nora Ephron, Bill Moyers, Al Franken, Bill Maher, Governor Bill Richardson, John Kerry, and scores of other politicos, actors, activists, and academics take to the digital pages of the Post with their views, causes, and beefs.

This model of drawing together a collection of interesting voices into an ever flowing "collage" of opinions and ideas characterizes many of my favorite web sites over the years. A good example I like to point out is worldchanging.org.
Gotta run to the fall festival...

The Dread Cancer of Stinginess?

I recently took over leadership of the missions ministry at my church, the Ann Arbor Vineyard, and one of the issues we're dealing with is how to balance the need of our sister churches with the fear of creating a dependency. As John Rowell points out in the beginning of his article The Dread Cancer of Stinginess | John Rowell | The Christian Vision Project

Few principles have been as central to the modern missions movement as the "three-self paradigm." This seminal framework was popularized in the 19th century by three notable leaders: Henry Venn, Rufus Anderson, and John Nevius. It proposes that truly indigenous churches should be self-governing, self-propagating and self-supporting. For 200 years the three-self ideal has been nearly axiomatic. Modern missiologists have placed particular emphasis on the last point, interpreting it to emphasize financial independence and developing a whole stream of thought trumpeting "the dangers of dependency." These missiologists want to prevent the unhealthy dynamics they presume are unavoidable when outside funds are introduced into any newly developing indigenous movement.

Indeed, a desire to avoid dependency is also a core part of the "Missiological Assumptions for The Vineyard—USA" which states:

Dependency exists when churches in another culture are not able to function on their own without assistance. The most common form of dependency is financial. While we recognize that some level of dependency is likely during the pioneering stage of church planting, we are committed to avoiding long-term dependency among our churches.

But like Rowell, I think there is a real danger of misapplying this principle due to biases inherent in our western mindset toward the world.

To be clear, I'm not in favor of indiscriminate handouts driven by guilt at having wealth. The ability to create wealth is a gift from God and I don't feel guilty about it. At the risk of heading down a rabbit trail I'll add that I have to balance this with a strong dose humility when I realize that my ability to build a business may be dependent in large part on structural imbalances in the world. Never the less, as Don Bromley so eloquently said from the pulpit this summer (and I paraphrase from memory): "It's great if you know how to create wealth...now go give it away to help the poor!"

But how do we do that without creating unhealthy dependency? Rowell proposes a “more interdependent” model where, quoteing Samuel Escobar, "churches from rich nations add their material resources to the spiritual resources of the churches in poor nations in order to reach out to a third area." He then points to YWAM as one example of such a model.

All well and good, but it doesn’t seem to me to address the core issue: How to avoid dependency? For me, answering this question has to overcome a number of ingrained biases.

Living in a wealthy society, we’ve all had experiences where we realize we were taken advantage of. The world is full of con-artists and people “working the system,” isn’t it? Likewise, for most of my adult life I had been a Reagan, trickle-down, “the welfare system propagates poverty” Republican. I emphasize “had been” because I’ve come to see that too often this perspective fails to address the real justice issues that exist in how our society is structured. Never-the-less, the fear of creating yet another systematic imbalance through hand-outs is legitimate.

But I really think we need to carefully check the prescription for our glasses when we we’re looking at poverty issues in the world. It’s too easy to forget the yellow-tint that’s formed from seeing the local dysfunctions within our own system. Regardless of your perspective on the US welfare system, it doesn’t compare to the endemic poverty that exists in much of the world. For the most part, we’re not talking about giving someone extra money they might use to by a Nintendo instead of food. Many of our brothers and sisters don’t even have running water, much less televisions!

So what’s the answer? I’m no expert and I’m only musing out loud, but over the coming months, here’s what I’ll be pondering:

Can we trust local leadership? Can we get on the same page with them regarding the problem of dependency?

If we’re dealing with an area where Christians are persecuted, should we give more? Or give less because the perception that they’re beholden to “western” money endangers them?

Is there a way to give that fosters economic development such as micro-loans, etc.?

And finally, if dependency is such a big deal, why didn’t Paul address the topic in his letters? He clearly did on the local church level, but when talking about intra-church giving his advice was to give generously. Period.

A great TV Commercial

I watch so little TV that I miss out on all the good ads. This one is a few years old but I'm just now discovering it. I love it (and so did my son, Robert).

Sony BRAVIA - Balls - The Advert

It isn't supposed to be this way

I came across this C.S. Lewis quote reading Dick Staub's latest blog entry on the meaning of lost:

No man knows how bad he is until he tries to be good…Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is…That is why bad people know very little about badness. They have lived a sheltered life by always giving in. We never find out the strength of the evil impulse inside us until we try to fight it: and Christ, because He was the only man who never yielded to temptation, is also the only man who knows to the full what temptation means—the only complete realist.

...we only know how bad we are until we try to be good...too true...too true...Lord have mercy.

Give the Future More Power than the Past

The Reverend Robert Giannini, canon theologian with the Episcopal Diocese of Indianapolis, wrote a compact summary of N.T. Wright's book "Evil and the Justice of God" in the Indy Star this morning. It's a great book that I've read and discussed with my fellow Questers. Here's a thoughful quote fron Giannini:

Forgiveness, for Wright, is a matter of granting more power to the future than to the past, even though the future may be seen only dimly. It is to live actively according to the principles of a world of justice and peace that we hope humanity can someday inhabit rather than dwell in a world that remains saturated with the dregs of old evils. It is to make the moral choice to live presently as if the hoped for future has already been inaugurated.

Heinz Gets Good Resulst from User Generated Advertising

How many people are there willing to spend the time and energy required to produce an enjoyable 30-second commercial? Heinz will tell you quite a few.

When several advertisers made waves this year with user-generated advertising contests for spots that would run during the Super Bowl, some people questioned whether user-generated advertising would work. Dorito's put a stake in the ground when its contest produced a winner that was very funny, despite its $1000 production costs and last minute entry.

Since then there have been other companies with no such luck like the controversial Malibu Caribbean Rum contest that had less than 100 qualified entrants despite a $25,000 prize.

Heinz, though, seems to have gotten it right. Offering $57,000 for the winner and exposure on the Primetime Emmy Awards, they received 8000 submissions. Its worth a few minutes to view the 15 semi-finalists Heinz Top This TV Challenge website. The field was strong enough that Heinz also showed the 4 runner-ups on NBC's Today Show this morning. (The runner-ups received $5,700).

The winner, "Heinz: The Kissable Ketchup" by Andrew Dodson, is cute but not my favorite. I think "Heinz Worldwide" by Jeremiah Jones is wonderful with a good beat and an international flavor.

Having played with claymation in high-school I'm partial to animation, which several entrants used. "Heinz Always sunnyside up" by Michael Thelin is pleasant and "Uncap the smile" by Joseph Garner does a wonderful job of integrating CGI into a "Toy Story" like scene. "Heinz 'Moments' Competition" by Robert Castillo has a great story but seems like a 45 second spot crammed into 30 seconds by the time its finished.

It's less clear what the ROI will be for Heinz. To get the results they did took much more than $80,000 in prize money. They had an extensive demand generating campaign with in-store promotions, announcements on packaging and an on-line and off-line advertising campaign.

Amid War, Passion for TV Chefs, Soaps and Idols - New York Times

...I started to write this 6 weeks ago but never posted. I either need to write faster, or more often or post unfinished thoughts...today I choose the last option...

Amid War, Passion for TV Chefs, Soaps and Idols - New York Times
Today's NYT article on the popularity of television gives a fascinating perspective on the power and potential of television to influence populations. It looks at television in Afghanistan, a country where "according to the government’s latest surveys, only 43 percent of all households have nonleaking windows and roofs, 31 percent have safe drinking water and 7 percent have sanitary toilets."

Even though "a mere 14 percent of the population has access to public electricity," people find a way to electrify their lives. Nearly 1 in 5 Afghan households own a television which is all the more "remarkable" since "owning a TV was a crime under the Taliban." The times reports that city dwellers are even more addicted to the tube, citing "a study this year of Afghanistan’s five most urban provinces, two-thirds of all people said they watched TV every day or almost every day."

More interesting quotes....

“People watch television because there is nothing else to do.”

Reading is certainly less an option; only 28 percent of the population is literate. “Where else can one find amusement?” Mr. Akhgar asked.

Each night, people in Kabul obey the beckoning of prime time much as they might otherwise answer the call to prayer. “As you can see, there is truth on the television, because all over the world the mother-in-law is always provoking a fight,” said Muhammad Farid, a man sitting in a run-down restaurant beside the Pul-i-Khishti Mosque, his attention fixed on an Indian soap opera that had been dubbed into Dari.

Women, whose public outings are constrained by custom, most often watch their favorite shows at home. Men, on the other hand, are free to make TV a communal ritual. In one restaurant after another, with deft fingers dipping into mounds of steaming rice, patrons sit cross-legged on carpeted platforms, their eyes fixed on a television set perched near the ceiling. Profound metaphysical questions hover in the dim light: Will Prerna find happiness with Mr. Bajaj, who is after all not the father of her child?

“These are problems that teach you about life,” said Sayed Agha, who sells fresh vegetables from a pushcart by day and views warmed-over melodramas by night.

What to watch is rarely contested. At 7:30, the dial is turned to Tolo TV for “Prerna,” a soap opera colloquially known by the name of its female protagonist. At 8, the channel is switched for “The Thief of Baghdad.” At 8:30, it is back to Tolo for the intrafamily and extramarital warfare waged on “Tulsi,” the nickname for a show whose title literally means “Because the Mother-in-Law Was Once the Daughter-in-Law.”

What will the Afghanis see of American TV....

“We’ve just bought the rights to ‘24,’ the American show,” he said. “We had some concerns. Most of the bad guys are Muslims, but we did focus groups and it turns out most people didn’t care about that so long as the villains weren’t Afghans.”

Remembering Yahoo

Yahoo didn't start out as a search engine. It was a directory. I remember browsing it in 1994 while attending the masters program in Digital Libraries at the University of Michigan's School of Information and Library Studies. It was interesting, but barely useful. There weren't that many websites to catalog back then. Worse, few of them were experimenting with Mosaic's ability to show images. Sure you could search the directory, but you were forever dependent on the catalog librarian to control how things were tagged and labeled. It was old school.

Meanwhile, various others were attempting to overcome the limitations in the search software of the day. People had designed good systems for searching through thousands of documents, like you found in many corporate databases of the day, but researchers realized quickly that searching millions of documents was a completely different type of problem. Simply parsing text quickly to find the set of documents that match the query isn't enough when the return set itself has millions of documents.

With millions of documents in your index a number of other factors come into play.One problem was keeping up the index. If thousands of people are creating web pages every day, how to keep up? This problem was a primary focus in the mid 1990's. The general solution was to design semi-autonomous robots to scour the web for content. Some like to picture these agents as spiders or crawlers, jumping from link-to-link connecting each section of their semantic web. Alta Vista was the leader in this for a while, but eventually everybody good do it well enough and the focus shifted.

People with a question don't like to wade through the weeds to get to an answer. It doesn't matter if the perfect web page exists. If it doesn't show up in the first 10 or 20 results, it might as well be invisible.

The folks at Excite were some of the first to really focus on this for the web. The problem was well known and they advanced the work of Gerard Salton
who developed the SMART information retrieval system at Cornell in the 1960's. SMART's use of vector space models to cluster documents led the way to improved ways to rank documents based on relevancy.

This is much harder than it sounds. Language is tricky. SMART would cluster documents that shared the same vocabulary and word frequency. If you found a document close to what you wanted you could conduct a new search that returned all the documents that SMART thought was part of that documents cluster. It was pretty neat and the way search is done today still benefits from this heritage.

Meanwhile, Yahoo dabbled in search but its biggest emphasis was on building the ultimate directory. There were/are large bureaucratic layers of editors and organizers and such. Fees to pay if you wanted faster service, and so forth. In fact, when Google started getting some traction in the late 1990's, Yahoo outsourced its search engine results to Google!

Whither Yahoo

Gord Hotchkiss shares his perspective on the recent return of Jerry Yang to the helm at Yahoo in Yahoo Yang = Google (Page Brin)?

He has some insightful things to say about the leadership styles of the major players. Sergey Brin and Larry Page come off as the consummate micro-managers. But much like Bill Gates their collective brilliance is able to give back to the organization far more than their meddling takes away. If it helps them understand what really makes things tick, a little code slinging or architecture tweaks by the founders is a small price to pay.

Jerry Yang and David Filo, on the other hand, did not stay intimately involved at Yahoo. You can't blame them for cashing out early. They never have to work again so it only follows that they would work on things that interest them, and I doubt that search engines are their first love. As Hotchkiss points out, just the opposite is true at Google, where the search experience is a sacred cow, the center of everything they do.

This is a fateful moment for Yahoo. As long as the search experience remains the dominant factor in where people go on the Internet, Yahoo is in trouble.

Reflections on Amahoro-Africa May 2007

A thought provoking article by Brian McLaren about his recent experiences in Africa...

Brian McLaren: Reflections on Amahoro-Africa May 2007:
"TIA – you hear it a lot these days: this is Africa, where God is alive and where Pentecost is perpetual, hope and joy jostling with hunger and fear like trucks and scooters in the chaos of Kampala’s traffic."

Existential Angst

I rarely link to online video, but found this one to be particularly funny, though subtle.
MediaPost.com

Is it live or is it memorex? On YouTube it may not matter.

Ryan Burke thought Mindy Moorman was cheating on him and decided to break up with her...in a very public way. He set up a meeting with her, hired a chorus of singers, and used Facebook to announce the "public" event.

mlive.com: NewsFlash - Breakup becomes YouTube breakthrough: "Burke, a history major, said the breakup was something of an experiment in human behavior. But he also said it was genuine — he was furious about Moorman's alleged cheating.

'It was like they were reading from a script,' said James Mundia, a manager at UNC Chapel Hill's student TV station, who helped edit the online footage. 'There wasn't a lot of passion for a breakup where there's a lot of raw emotion.

'But I guess that's YouTube. It didn't matter if it was real or if it was fake, everyone wanted it to be real. People wanted that entertainment.'"

You decide...

John Battelle's best decisons and worst mistakes

Mark Fletcher has started a blog Startupping - A Community for Entrepreneurs which he describes as "a one-of-a-kind community resource created for Internet entrepreneurs by Internet entrepreneurs"

He asked John Battelle, whose Searchblog I read regularly to desribe his best decisions and worst mistakes. Here is his answer:

1. Either keep control, or don’t act like you have it. This was the primary lesson of The Industry Standard. I felt like this was the first large scale business I built on my own, and I acted like it. But majority control was always squarely in the hands of the company who funded it. We fought, and I lost.



2. Don’t skimp on hiring. Ever. I’ve hired folks who had the right resume, but I knew in my gut were not right for the culture of the business. I thought the skills/resume overshadowed the ability to work together as a team. They never do.



3. Do it for love, not money. This is pretty careworn, but it’s very very true. I’ve never ever started anything for money. Some folks are really good at starting companies to make money, but I’m terrible at it. I suspect most entrepreneurs are like me.
   
   3a. But make sure what you are doing makes sense to others. Everything I’ve started or been part of starting, I’ve talked to key folks who would make or break the idea, and gotten their buy in and encouragement/help first. If folks who are critical to the idea are not interested, well….that’s a pretty good sign it isn’t going to fly. Doesn’t mean it’s not a good idea, but it probably means you’re not the person to do it.



4. Pick one constituency and stick to it. Very early on, we decided that FM would be “author driven”. We could have made the company “advertiser driven” but it struck me the core business had to do with the folks who produce the sites we work with. At Wired, it was all about the ideas. At the Standard, it was all about the journalism. One clear core driving force helps clarify decisions during the tough early years.



5. Don’t do something because you can. Do it because it’s good for the folks in #4."

A belated goodbye to Bruce

I learned today that an old friend of mine, Bruce Reid, died late last month after a long, painful struggle with thyroid cancer. He was 44 and is survived by his wife, Lori, and three daughters.

I met Bruce the first year I cam to Ann Arbor, in 1981, and we fellowshipped together for nearly 10 years until he moved to New Jersey and we lost touch. But from reading what others said about him upon his passing, its clear that a man I saw as a role-model for my Christian walk, continued to grow in his tendency to reflect God's glory.

He was one of those rare people who are strong leaders, but so tender-hearted that they seem to lead through weakness. You want to work with them and serve them because you know they love you.

At 43, I still carry around a notion of invincibility. I'm not very limber and my bones are tired at times, but I still think of my life's end as distant place. It is sobering to think that such a great man had his legacy cut short so early in his life, only one year older than I am.

May he rest in peace until that great day when all things will once again be restored and heaven and earth are united once more. Maranatha!

Five Streams of the Emerging Church | Christianity Today | A Magazine of Evangelical Conviction

Scott McKight writes a nice article about the Emergent Church....Five Streams of the Emerging Church | Christianity Today | A Magazine of Evangelical Conviction: "Five Streams of the Emerging Church
Key elements of the most controversial and misunderstood movement in the church today.
Scot McKnight "