Joho the Blog
An Entry from the Archives

I just went to peruse AlwaysOn just to see what the hubbub was about. Whether or not AlwaysOn is a blog is not the salient issue. What AlwaysOn does demonstrate is affirmation that bloggery represents to journalism what Napster/Morpheus/KaZaa/BitTorrent represent to the RIAA and MPAA - a disruption to what has been considered a stabe and unassailable business model. Moreover, the business of the traditional providers has not been about selling news, music or movies, but about selling newsprint, advertisements and shiny acrylic and aluminum disks (and formerly strips of rust-covered mylar).

Tony Perkins is indeed a smart entrepreneur. He lived through the demise of his newsprint-and-advertising (both with glossy finishes) business, and resurrected Red Herring as AlwaysOn, taking the hottest memes and spinning them into a business whose content looks almost identical to that of the now chopped Herring.

McLuhan said, "If the medium is the message, the user is the content." In this case, the question of whether AlwaysOn is a blog is truly irrelevant; it is pure entrepreneur, pure Perkins.

(Also posted to What is the Message? - http://www.mcluhan.utoronto.ca/blogger/ )

"Think how having your own blog page at AlwaysOn would increase customer loyalty to the site. Win-win! And all it would take is a smidge of software."

The software is already used. They use pmachine (www.pmachine.com). All they have to do is click a button (or throw some php tags in) and it becomes functional...It makes sense. Then they can sell the hosting service and pmachine's software.

Everybody gets to play.

Great points.

When AO was started and we were talking to potential sponsors for the company no one knew what blogging was. Now Goggle bought Blogger, NY Times has web blogs and everyone is looking to the medium as the next big thing. I think this turn around speaks volumes about the early adopters and the community that made it what it is today and we hope that somehow AO helped traditional editorial sites understand that users want more interactivity.

Granted we could have held to the more traditional blog model, but the key aspect of blogging that we were amazed with is the user interaction. Instead of telling people what you think they want to know, let everyone on the web have a say in what the content will be and let their voices be heard. This holds true for our celebrity blogs (I know they are long), as Tony said in the past: "why have some cub reporter tell you what the next wave will be when you can hear it from the people that move business and ask them about their viewpoint".

I am going to add member homepages to our list of new features to cover for our next rev. Thank you for the great input.

Matthew, I can't help but read your posting and think that AO is taking some credit for some of those changes.

"I think this turn around speaks volumes about the early adopters and the community that made it what it is today and we hope that somehow AO helped traditional editorial sites understand that users want more interactivity."

It's not a turnaround, it's a trend. You may join our parade, but please don't try to jump in front of it waving a baton.

Seems to me that if AO executed perfectly and really embraced the weblog format, and if they had a whole bunch of luck and determination, after a few years and a hundreds of thousands of dollars and countless hours of effort, they just might evolve into what Matt Haughey's done with MetaFilter in his spare time with a cheap server.

And they'd still not have been the first to do it.

Matthew:
With all due respect, Bill is right: You seem to be taking credit for something that was around before you -- and before blogs. After usenet came forums and my mainstream media sites have extraordinarily busy forums with extremely loyal audiences. I get about 100 million page views a month in forums alone. It's not just a community. It's frigging New York City online.
Anil:
You're right. But I do wonder one thing: I wonder whether Tony and his supreme salesmanship will one-up weblogs and he'll get the sponsorship money to himself because we webloggers weren't organized enough to (1) prove our audience and audience quality, (2) have standards for selling and serving ads, (3) have standards for reporting stats, and (4) actually sell the damned sponsorships and ads. Any single blog is not big enough but together, quality blogs should be enticing for sponsors. They need a super salesman to sell them.
Perhaps we should engage Tony as our agency.

This has the ringing of Larry Ellison and SQL vs. IBM and their think-tank. Or maybe not.

What I do not like seeing is division. Them and us. Control is no longer the driving force of evolution. Perhaps we should embrace influence and cooperation.

Seems that is where the net draws its strength.

That applies to me and my arrogance in being an early adopter (that is relative. There were people before me that I latched onto as Bill and Jarvis point out).

The same would hold true to any adopters after us. Credit taking use to make for good PR. That was pre-net.

Post net allows for snickering in the back of the room to be heard over-top of the PR spinster. It is called the hyperlink...

Hey dude!
What's up?
Pretty cool ur blog!!!
Come visit me in mine right?
See ya!

Tony is an entreprenuer and AO a startup. They got off on the wrong foot and have had it stepped on. But they have been open and responsive to feedback; incrementaly changing to their site and positioning. Give them time.

AO is bringing blogging to new participants blogspace today doesn't serve. It would be a shame if the culture of our space was too insular and inbred to be open to others if they are open to us.

Dave, do you really believe that "every business failure hurts the Net"? Surely some businesses (present company excluded) *need* to fail in order for the market to evolve?

Every business failure does not hurt the net. We must have business failures to get to the correct business model which then in tern helps the net!

As late as 1905 America was still engaged in praire wars with Indians. In 2005 these battles, as well as the Mexican America War mean little or nothing to most Americans. Given the current state of illegal immigration from Mexico, it is safe to say that anyone who gave their life in the Mexican American War did so for absolutely nothing.

We are being invaded by a group of people who do not have the capacity to build a grand society. They are coming here, not to escape religious prosecution, but to live in the kind of country and they themselves are not capable of producing. As their numbers grow and the number of European Americans shrink; who will be left to produce an economy that innovates, grows and is the envy of the world? The Mexican? I don't think so. We need to put the US military on the border without delay. We are sewing the seeds for generational poverty and massive civil unrest, civil war, and the dislocation of miilions of Mexicans as they are marched back to Mexico sometime in the second half of this century.....

Look, facts are facts. If you do not think that La Raza holds summer camps where it teaches Mexican/American kids that one day the western part of the United States of America will revert back to Mexican control, then you are simply blinded by truth. Go to the University of Texas. Call on the La Raza chapter there and simply see for yourself what is going on. Go to San Diego State University. Go to that La Raza chapter and see for yourself what is going on. It is not scary, it is TREASON. Even Bill Clinton had the sense to suggest that illegal immigration has the potential to unwind our 50 state union. If you neglect to see a major problem with illegal immigration from Mexico, then you are neglecting the USA. Make no mistake about it. A civil confrontation of sorts a few decades from now is not out of the realm of possibilities. I simply do not see how you can let a people of a different race, culture, and language enter your country and create a country within a country and have eveything work out just fine. The Mexicans want so much more than this. They want the the western part of the USA, plus Texas, back in Mexican control. Keep in mind, to understand the deep seeded hatred of the USA by Mexico you need only read the papers in Mexico City. Their cocktail of hatred against the USA is just as toxic as the hatred from Islam.