Ici, leguape

Blog

  • How does Web 2.0 make a profit?

    It’s an important question, one which not enough people are asking. After all, people are in this to make a living, not just because it’s cool, aren’t they?

    I read a great article today called Web 2.0, Revenue Models and Profitability on The Drama 2.0 Show on the subject. It’s well worth sharing because it makes some really strong points questioning the viability of some of the most talked about online businesses out there at the moment.

    The central theme of the article is that

    “Not only are most of the hottest Web 2.0 startups unprofitable, quite a few lack viable revenue models altogether. “

    It’s tough to disagree when it puts them in the context of their Web 1.0 peers such as Google, eBay and Yahoo, all of whom are, and were, profitable within a few years of starting out.

    I remember being party to the dotcom boom and bust of 2000 in the UK when the likes of Clickmango came and went in less time than it takes Royal Mail to deliver a 1st class letter. This was when a savvy operator with a van could asset strip a dotcom of its shiny new iMacs in candy colour on a daily basis and turn a nice gig doing so.

    Everyone talks about Boo.com as the defining failure of the period, which to some extent it was, but at least it was brilliant and now looks to have been way ahead of the curve as both a web site and a shopping experience. I look back now and think that maybe they were right about a lot of things. Certainly there’s lots of functions that other people have adopted that they were one of the first to attempt.

    The rule for business plans in those days seems to be “make sure you’re profitable within the first three years”. Or at the very worst “get them drunk, but make sure they sign”.

    Compare that to the noise of Web 2.0 evangelists and companies who are all about conversation and community and making the web a better place. There’s taking your time to grow a business and then there’s arsing around on the internet pretending that what you are doing can become a business.

    A lot of people seem to be dangerously close to buying into the latter which in my view will lead to a dotcom bust far worse than the last. In 2000 we’d only sacrificed our time and energy as unrecoupable expenditure, this time we may find that sacrificing our personal information is cost we’re not as happy to write off.

  • Paul Mason on the future of journalism

    Paul Mason’s the Economics Editor for Newsnight, an NUJ rep and someone whose journalism I’ve got plenty of time for. He’s also, in my opinion, been one of the best adopters of/adapters to new technology at the BBC. He’s pretty forthright in his views, some of which I personally agree with, in particular on the changing technology and its impact.

    As you’d expect it’s not being agreed with by some:

    I disagree with this man. Journalism needs a better defense than ‘protect the craft’. – Patrick Smith

    See also : BBC’s Paul Mason: Newsrooms offer journalists peer review that ‘pyjama bloggers’ can’t replicate

    I didn’t get the impression that he was using the “protect the craft” defence, which seems to be the current line of the NUJ (feel free to correct me), more that journalism will survive by identifying and focusing on what makes it unique, such as access, although I don’t believe access is necessarily unique or important in some topic areas.

    I’m not entirely convinced by Paul’s views on how important the newsroom is as a form of peer review though. Arguably you are guaranteed a certain degree of assurance about the experience and authority of those around you compared to that on blogs. But as online identification improves, this should become less of an issue. Then again, I can say that, in terms of seeing if it’s got legs, there’s a lot to be said for throwing your idea up in a meeting where you’ve got the immediate reaction from people with a guaranteed wealth of experience.

    On a blog you can run away and hide or just delete if you aren’t happy with the response – it’s rare that you’ll ever meet a blogger who hasn’t deleted a comment for one reason or another. In a newsroom, you’re only option is to tough it out in whichever gathering it is then cry in the toilets later (NB, I have never done the crying bit).

    Online response always appears to follow a pretty clear pattern for me where you have to wait for the initial fury to wear itself out before the quality comment starts to emerge. Sometimes you shouldn’t and don’t need to wade through that to find the story when you have access to it at the next desk.

    Or is this all just a bit of navel-gazing from hacks defending their patch from a new platform, same as weavers, farmers, coalminers and just about every other industry that has experienced the massive impact of new technologies?

  • Facebook vs Google Connect

    Everyone seems to want your identity these days, from crooks to corporates. I’m playing around with Facebook Connect and Google Friend Connect at the moment to see which one offers me most as someone running a piffling little website.

    First up, a completely different topic: I have a problem with Facebook only allowing me to import the one blog. Is it too much to ask to be able to pull in two feeds, this one and my cycling blog?

    Back to the subject, there’s a really helpful analysis of the Facebook Connect vs Google Friend Connect on Mashable which is where I started this morning with it. At the moment it seems to boil down to ease of implementation vs where the social audience is.

    As a mediocre developer who gets a mild fear when I hear people talking code, google won the first round on grounds of fire-and-forget implementation. Let’s face it, if you are a hobbyist web site owner, do you want to sit through an 8-minute video on how to do a basic Facebook Connect login and then have to do the coding yourself; or just go click-click-bang to implement google friend connect?

    That’s why there’s a small Wall widget on each page of the site from Google and not a Facebook one as yet. OK I’ve got the side issue that I’ve only recently started using Disqus for comments and I don’t see how either of them plugs in to that but Google won because I could do it and do it quickly.

  • Why do so many business sites do nothing?

    I was trying to find out more about a company today and in doing so clicked on a link taking me to their website. Which was as useful as a wet fart.

    They are the UK contact for a flashy brand of bicycle component. I know this because the component manufacturer’s website tells me that. In fact I know more about them from that site than their own. The only thing I found out from their site is that if I hit the “contact us” link then I’ll send an email to someone with the same name as one of the big bike brands.

    It’s this sort of thing that really infuriates me. Do businesses really care or value the internet so little that it’s too much trouble to even put up a basic, functional site?

    Of course tomorrow I’ll find that this was a “holding page” while they were getting their site redone. It still doesn’t excuse it in my book. Out-of-date content is bad, but no content is worse.

    How much trouble is it to put up a single page giving your email contact plus postal and phone details alongside a brief summary of what your business does? After all, most of the ones I’ve ever encountered seem to have been able to afford a logo and a hosting deal.

    It really defies belief that any business thinks it can afford not to have a decent online proposition when so many first contacts are likely to come through that route. Are these businesses really unaware of this?

    There are so many tools out there that allow you to build a basic site without resorting the the sort of comic sans hell that blighted the first generation of self-build that I can’t see why anyone wouldn’t want to spend a day or two getting to grips with them.

    Please tell me I’m not alone in feeling like this every time I find myself clicking into a link that is, to all intents, dead. I’m going to stop now before I even start to think about the full horror of flash holding pages and ridiculous De Mille-style epic flash intro movies.

  • Can you Digg it?

    I use three social bookmarking sites at the moment – Delicious, Digg and Reddit – all in slightly different ways. Of the three, Digg is the one that I seems to find the most awkward to post into.

    I thought it might be because, primarily, I use Safari to browse on my mac at home and Google’s Chrome in the office for social stuff. This means I don’t really take advantage of the nice Firefox toolbar or other browser integration.

    Then I thought again and actually what stops me using it as often as the others is the submission process. With Delicious and Reddit the process feels very much “click,click, click, done”; whereas with Digg it feels far more hit and hope that the title and description will appear and that I won’t lose patience before I get to the final step.

    So the answer to that rhetorical question is “sometimes not”. Or to be more specific, sometimes I just can be bothered.