Michael Arrington Archive

Last month I discussed presenting at the DEMO and TC50 conferences later this year. In the comments, Techcrunch50 founder Jason Calacanis noted that one of the big differences between the two startup-infomercial conferences is that his Techcrunch50 offers $50,000 to the winner.

Now it appears DEMO has stepped up the prize pool bigtime by offering two $1 million dollar prizes. The prizes will be awarded to the best enterprise startup and the best consumer startup. The prizes are basically ad buys over the six month period following the conference.

Update 5:30PM: It appears that the total prize is $1 million, not two million as I previously noted. I am not sure if I got it wrong or if they changed it. I thought it read that two winners (one consumer, one enterprise) would each receive $1m.

Conference organizer Matt Marshall notes regarding the prize, “The campaign will include print advertisements, web banner placements, text link promotions, email newsletter promotions, and video ads. The package includes the development of creative content that is to be featured on IDG media properties – another huge value proposition to the winning companies.”

I assume the ads will be priced at the rack rate so the $1m is probably worth less had you bought the ads yourself and negotiated a better rate (probably 30% at best). No matter what, it’s good to see the winners get some publicity past the few posts they will get from the conference buzz.

How many of the companies that presented at either conference last year can you name? Can you name 10 of the 50 that presented at TC50? This huge ad buy should help two companies stay top of mind for at least six months and could give them a lift to build from.

Over the past couple of weeks the chatter about search functionality with regards to Twitter has come up again so I thought it might make sense to take a look back at how search has evolved with this exploding worldwide platform.

The Early Days

While most of Twitter’s users today weren’t around in the early days, many of you were. These were the days of the whale of fail, the rat in your pc and the general fun. Back then, there was no search function. If you wanted to know what your friend had for lunch or if your friend’s cat made a #2 on your friend’s carpet, you had to go to the account for your friend or his/her cat and just page back and forth. It was a tough time.

Summize

Then, like cream cheese on a fresh bagel, here comes NY-based Summize. Now we are talking! (well searching). Summize allowed us to search in near real-time for our friend’s messages. Want to know if that really was an earthquake? Pop “earthquake” into Summize. It was a real pleasure. Soon after the search engine was acquired by Twitter and renamed to Twitter Search and it still lives today. Twit messages are ranked by last posted in the results and there is no weighting to the results. The search functionality is also available within the Twitter site itself on the right side of a profile page.

Authority Search

Late last year during the “made up fights” between several valley bloggers and entrepreneurs, a discussion arose about creating an awesome Twitter search engine that would rank search results based on who has more followers. This was awesome…users who have lots of followers would appear higher in search. Bloody brilliant concept! Surely there would be no way to game the system to get more followers, right? Well, six months later and the rank by followers chatter has died out.

Note: somewhere in here Twitter introduced the Default List – this is the list that pumps certain celebs, FOT, fluffers, people who deliver cupcakes to twitter hq, etc.
Continue reading “A Historical Look at Search Functionality on Twitter and a Bonus: What’s Next” »

Last night I read a hit-job post like I haven’t seen since my days on the G in Brooklyn during the 70s. The hit-job I am referring to is Erick Schonfeld’s piece about Matt Marshall joining the DEMO conference team. Apparently because one person (Chris Shipley) decides to change her focus after running the conference for 13 years, they must be "desperate". Erick also makes the following observations, "He is going to have to reinvigorate a dying brand." and "It is fine by us if DEMO sticks to its model of extorting startups". I can’t believe we are still talking about this tc50 vs. demo crap.

Erick uses the post to explain that his conference, Techcrunch50, is the much better model and that now he will have to "crush" VentureBeat. He notes that techcrunch50 companies get in on merit (oh is that how they do it!). Erick also displays a chart displaying the very little traffic that demo.com receives but leaves the techcrunch50.com site out of the chart – the comparison chart is available below for reference.

I wrote an in-person review of both Demo and TC50 from last year as I was one of three people to attend both events. It was great to meet so many CN readers at both events. After the unprofessional treatment I received at TC50, I won’t be attending this year. I am not going to go into the behavior here but suffice to say that even the event staffers thought the behavior was unprofessional.

The truth is that the numerous stories I heard from the entrepreneurs of the demo pit startups, the ones that pay $3k/day, were not good. But, as one might guess, no one wants to speak on-the-record because they are afraid.

It’s totally understandable that the Techcrunch team is probably a little upset because Time magazine ranked their top competitor Mashable as a top blog for 2009 while Techcrunch was listed as "overrated". Might these be some additional reasons why Techcrunch might be the desperate one in this conversation?

• They’ve added a "javascript page refresh" – this means that if you leave the site open in a tab, it will refresh every once in a while – extra pageviews for the site
• They continue to increase the page views required to read the comments – first it was 100 on a page and a link to "view all comments" – now that link is gone and less comments are viewable on each page
• They have decided to break embargoes when it suits them to make sure they appear first
• Even with their reportedly strong-arm tactics, startups are starting to provide news to everyone but Techcrunch and as I’ve said since the early days the best route is to provide the news to all of the sites you trust to honor the posting time and get the most coverage and feedback you can.

Patricio Robles from eConsultancy has a good post reviewing the same post. He talks about why positivity sells; I guess he doesn’t read the aformentioned blog often. Let’s hope that Erick thinks about all the negative feedback on his post and offers up an apology to Matt and Chris, even if it’s handled privately.

This morning I sat down at the computer to write the story about Chegg’s funding announcement but I see it was already posted ahead of the embargoed time by Techcrunch and VentureBeat. No idea who posted first as the times on RSS feeds seem to always use different time zones. Perhaps another source broke the embargo first – I don’t know. I checked Google Blogsearch and those were the only two sources that were returned.

Today Techcrunch editor Michael Arrington has a rant about embargoes and how they are always broken. I agree they are always broken. I see them broken everyday. When I saw the Chegg embargo broken, I emailed the PR firm contact and asked what’s up. She said that when she awoke, she had a variety of calls and had to put out various fires due to the broken embargo. Here was my response to her:

I think of all of this as a relationship – you, me, the company, my readers, my advertisers/sponsors – its all about the relationship between all of us – and most of all its about trust.

The only way it will change is when the PR firms stop sending the news to the sites that don’t value the relationship. The problem is that you (general) won’t do it and the blogs know that. So they do whatever they want because they know that you won’t do anything against them.

Arrington seems to imply that because more blogs are receiving the embargoed news, it’s the smaller blogs that are breaking the embargoes. From the nearly one-hundred emails I have from PR firms and startups talking about their broken embargoes, it’s rarely the smaller blogs that are the culprit.

In his rant, Arrington notes:

“We’ve never broken an embargo at TechCrunch. Not once.”

Yet in the comments, when called out by Ben Metcalfe about the fact that Techcrunch has broken embargoes, Mike responds:

“You’re right, we did break the justin.tv embargo in 2007. It was an accident…”

I believe that today’s rant comes partially from the fact that embargoes are being broken but also partially because more news is spread around and everyone isn’t running to Mike like they did a year (or two) ago.

I have several emails (plus many calls and discussions) about embargoes that were broken by Techcrunch. So it’s not only the one “mistake” that Mike mentions above. I am not going to post them because there is no reason to drag the startups through the mud. If you trust me, you know I have the emails. And let’s not single out Techcrunch, the other “bigs” also have broken their share of embargoes. I have those emails as well.

There are two types of broken embargoes – mistakes and malicious. Frankly I don’t understand why any embargoes are broken under the “mistake” argument but it happens I guess. A year ago I wrote my thoughts on embargoes and we’ve written several times on the embargo topic since then. And my policy isn’t changing after today’s conversation.

Is it that hard to post a story without using a timed-posting? Is it really that hard to double-check the time of the post? Having been responsible for financial releases where the SEC would issue fines if a post went a minute early, I guess this “don’t put it into wordpress until the right time” just comes second nature to me.

At the end of the day, it’s all about trust and relationships. It seems to keep boiling down to that, no matter if it’s about paid reviews, advertisers, how winners are selected at startup conferences or embargoes.

Update: Arrington has posted a comment to this post and in the comment he notes,”What you don’t understand is that very often PR firms give us an hour or two head start on stories.” Let’s assume this is the case for argument’s sake. So then how does Arrington know that ALL of the other broken embargoes also didn’t have this special “privilege”. How does he know that the apparent line I am being fed is not the same one he is?

The Exclusive

I get offered exclusives every week and I turn down every single one of them. I turn them down because my belief is that it’s best that the startup (or big company) gets the most coverage they can. Some blogs like the embargo as it allows them to look like a news-breaking organization. The truth is, any exclusive that goes up on any blog, I can have a better post written about the story in 5 minutes. Exclusives are the real worthless item out of today’s conversation. But clearly for some blogs, they need to force the exclusive because it’s critical for their success.

There’s a belief that if you don’t offer an exclusive, you won’t be covered. Let me clue you in on a secret, that’s not true. If your story is newsworthy, it will be covered without an exclusive. And if your story isn’t newsworthy, an exclusive probably won’t help anyway. Many outlets won’t cover a story if they know an exclusive was issued. My advice to startups is that exclusives aren’t a good vehicle to use – you want as much coverage as you can, not one outlet.

The Arrington

Arrington is just upset because he no longer gets all the news exclusives first anymore. News is shared with more bloggers, more news outlets, via company blogs, via video interviews with people including Scoble and via tools like FriendFeed and Twitter.

Should be interesting to see if startups and PR firms are willing to stand up to Mike and not send him any news going forward or if ALL YOUR NEWS ARE BELONG TO US.

I’d like to present an idea this evening regarding the upcoming DEMO and Techcrunch50 conferences. Both conferences will rock and are great places to launch a startup. This year both conferences will overlap in early September. Bloggers and journalists will have to try to cover the 100-125 startups that will launch simultaneously, startups will need to meet with some large number of reporters and readers will be hit by potentially thousands of reviews.

Check out my proposal in the video below. Here’s the basic idea. We all work together. Instead of 50 reviews of the same startup, we create 1 or 2 reviews of each startup. The reviews would be licensed to all of the participating sites with attribution back to the sources. Writer combinations would be picked at random and could create some great matches. A main conference portal site would be created to house all of the reviews plus all of the overall conference coverage. This would allow for a great amount of discovery between the content sources. We’d work to get sponsorship as a whole from larger companies who would absolutely love to be involved with this all-star lineup.

The benefits of this idea are:

• writers can focus on interviews, industry information, overall conference coverage, etc. and not on scrambling to get reviews done. writers also get the chance to work with one or two other writers and pick up tips and techniques
• startups would be able to focus on their presentations and not worry about coordinating 100 reviews
• readers would be able to engage with more content from more sources over the duration of the conferences 

This is just an initial proposal and if the idea is well-received, we would need to get started right away on the details. As a side benefit, these new blogger and journalists relationships will provide education, and you never know what the new relationships might hold for the future. Of course it could just be a crazy idea that won’t go anywhere.

Over the past 24 hours, Jason Calacanis, Robert Scoble, Loic Lemeur and Michael Arrington have all asked essentially the same question. They are all wondering how they got so many followers on FriendFeed so quickly.

Here at the CenterNetworks Investigation Bureau, we have been investigating this topic since we first reported on it a month ago. Seriously. After the last month of investigation, we are now prepared to share our findings. Please view the video below for the analysis as to why these four people are getting so many followers so quickly. The answer might just surprise you.

So as you can see, FriendFeed has created "defaults" and the four people above are part of the nine-person default set. What this means is that when anyone signs up for a new account on FriendFeed, they are presented with the same nine people every single time. Twitter has no defaults, hence a slower signup rate.

I presented my research to a couple of other top bloggers last week who aren’t included in the default list and their initial response was that Jason and Mike weren’t even participating in FF (they are now which is great). Mack also misses the point when he tries to explain the follower numbers.

Update: two people have emailed me noting that Jason isn’t actively participating, just sharing Mahalo links. They make a good point, he’s only sharing links via the bookmarklet, not actually participating in the conversation (yet I hope).

Defaults don’t just mean more followers, they mean more traffic to the supporting content sites.

When I asked Friendfeed co-founder Paul Buchheit about this, he said, "you are correct however that we should tweak the algorithm to increase diversity when browsing popular feeds such as Scoble’s — FriendFeed has grown by a few orders of magnitude since the algorithm was originally created and so it probably requires some updating." When I spoke with Paul, I hadn’t yet realized that there was this also default nine-person set.

My hope is that FriendFeed will expedite the algorithm change and create more diversity and discovery with their platform. Shouldn’t everyone who uses FriendFeed get a chance to be discovered instead of pushing the same nine people for all of eternity?

Update: Tris at BlogNation has some great event coverage as well.

This post will serve as the final recap for BlogWorldExpo 2007. Let’s first deal with the formalities: I didn’t win the millions so CN shall continue. I learned how to play roulette and won a few dollars but the slot machines killed me. Though Wheel of Fortune made me $50 from $10 which was cool. Craps – I stood there 30 minutes and still had no idea how this is played. Played two hands of blackjack, lost both and that was enough. And I won’t even start on the b5media poker table – lost all 10 hands I played. :)

A big thank you to Jeremy @ b5media for offering me the opportunity to speak at BWE. I look forward to more speaking engagements in 2008. His group of bloggers have such a family feel to them, it was great meeting so many. It’s nice to sit with bloggers who are outside tech and learn about the ways they monetize and build their traffic to what drives them to continue. 

Overall I enjoyed the conference and thought it was similar to SXSW. I was disappointed by Richard Jalichandra from Technorati. I think Justine did a good job as a replacement and I enjoyed meeting so many of the CN readers. The networking was top-notch!

Touching on the Arrington situation briefly. I posted so that anyone who was planning on attending the session would know that Om/Mike wouldn’t be there. The room was at the end and it might give someone a chance to stop and go to another room. As for the details, Andy Beard did some huge investigation and Mike has updated his post about what happened. I am not going to touch on what happened at this point but I absolutely disagree with Mike’s comments about speaking. Mike sees it as a "net negative" and will only speak at his friend’s conferences going forward. This is a mistake. So many want to meet Mike and it’s similar to coming to meet an author you like/have an interest in.

I also believe that his public appearances is a part of why Techcrunch became #1. To turn his back on this, I think is a mistake. Getting out to events for Mike might be a negative, but for his fans and for the conference organizers, I would suggest it’s a positive.

All BlogWorldExpo posts

• Day 1 Recap – b5media/speaking
• New Media Moguls Roundtable
• Exhibit Hall Photos
• Keynote Matt Mullenweg
• Schwag Giveaway Part II
• Schwag Giveaway

Conference concluded.