John Furrier

Transcript of Podcast with Feedster and Bloglines founders

I had a great chat with founders of Bloglines and Feedster at Gnomedex conference.  Two computer scientists turned entrepreneurs.  These guys know their stuff.  Good content.  Thanks Mark and Scott.

Mike Fletcher and Steve Johnson InfoTalk Podcast

John Furrier (JF): Welcome to the PodTech.net InfoTalk Series timeshifted live at the Gnomedex Conference.  We’re here with Mark Fletcher, the founder of Bloglines, recently sold to AskJeeves, and Steve Johnson, the founder of Feedster, one of the leading/growing search engines/feed engines.  Well, guys, welcome to the PodCast! 

Mark Fletcher and Steve Johnson: Thank you very much!

JF: Hey, did I get that right? On the Feedster description? 

Steve Johnson (SJ): Yep, yep.

JF: What’s the soundbite for Feedster these days?

SJ: We’re a search engine and advertising network for feeds.

JF: For feeds, and for blog,s and PodCasts, and what not.  Great.  I’m very familiar.  Great product.  And everyone knows about Bloglines, Mark, that you started, which is an aggregator. 

Mark Fletcher (MF): Yeah, our view was that we wanted to be the universal inbox, so you should be able to subscribe to any sort of content and be notified when anything is updated or new. 

JF: So on Bloglines, which everyone knows about, what’s your market share right now?  Do you have any numbers on how big the user base is?

MF: You know, the market share numbers are all over the map. I’ve seen numbers where we’re between 25-50% of the market, and what the total size of the market is, is anybody’s guess.  It could be a couple million, it could be ten million, I don’t know.

JF: So I was talking to someone and I was like, “Hey, Bloglines is a great product, they just got sold to AskJeeves, which everyone knows is a search engine.”  What’s happening?  What’s the latest thing happening with Bloglines?  What’s coming around the corner?  Any news?

MF: Well, I’m limited in what I can talk about since we’re part of a public company now, but we recently launched package tracking so you can track your FedEx, Postal Service, or UPS package and be notified when they reach weigh points or are delivered.  We also launched weather so you can get weather forecasts daily for any city in the

U.S.

or around the world, actually.  We’ve also talked about adding stock quotes into the system and continue to build out the functionality of Bloglines.  The great thing about the AskJeeves acquisition is that they just want us to continue focusing on the service and just giving us additional resources so that we can execute on our road map, which is basically a mile long, at this point. 

JF: So when you started Bloglines basically what it was, was a great tool for reading RSS feeds and for users to consume content, so it’s really a user interface, isn’t it?

MF: Absolutely.  And that’s one of the things that I don’t think a lot of people, or some people, miss as part of the challenge of dealing with information overload, an important aspect of that is the interface.  There are millions of websites right now, so having an aggregator lets you pull in all of the information that you’re interested in without having to visit all of these websites.  And having a good interface to your aggregator helps even more with your ability to process this ever-increasing amount of information people are seeing.

JF: It’s interesting, too.  There’s been a massive influx of content from people with blogs and producing content, and you’ve really cracked the code in terms of presentation layer. Now you guys are moving with AskJeeves and building robust services like news and weather, so it’s just basically a UI.  It’s the browser’s agnostic… they’re… irrelevant?  Or what’s happening with that as a user consumption piece?

MF: Yeah.  Well, we want you to be able to access your Bloglines feeds from any device, weather that’s your web browser, whether that’s your mobile phone, whether that’s your iPod.  Any device, any time, anywhere.

JF: So if people want to keep up with feeds, I was talking to Robert Scoble at Microsoft.  He was saying that he reads 15,000 blogs a week.  I mean, that’s a shit load of blogs.  That’s a ton of blogs.

MF: He’s an outlier. 

JF: But that’s what it’s all about - it’s about productivity, right?  It’s about consumption productivity for users for users, right?

MF: Absolutely.  He’s at where the average user will be at in ten years, or five years.  So, the first challenge was coming up with a tool that lets you follow 100 or 200 feeds, and that’s what a basic aggregator is.  The next challenge is to be able to expand that to 1000 or 2000 feeds, and there are lots of interesting challenges to that.  The great thing is, you know, I’m a computer science guy, and the real interesting thing is that this is not a solved problem.  This is a completely new problem in computer science that we didn’t have to deal with ten years ago, fifteen years ago, whatever.  So to be able to work on a problem where we don’t have all of the answers is incredibly exciting. 

JF: Let’s talk about that problem.  What in particular are we talking about – the user interface?  The aggregation?  The consumption piece?  What particular?

MF: It’s all of that.  Right now it’s really easy to subscribe to a whole bunch of feeds.  So what happens when I’ve subscribed to four hundred feeds now?  Because it’s been so easy to subscribe to all of these feeds that you end up with a new type of information overload.  Now, what’s the next thing that you need to do in order to whittle that information down?  Part of that is search, part of that is filtering, part of it is changes to the user interface, and part of that is we don’t even know yet.

JF: It’s a good problem to work on, because at the end of the day you want to make it easier for users, right?

MF: Absolutely.  Get what they want, when they want it, and not overwhelm them. 

JF: Let’s talk about the other piece of information overload.  You know, Scott Johnson is with Feedster, which is a great program for people who want to find stuff. So, Scott, on Feedster’s end, it’s really about discovery, right?  People are publishing stuff all of the time.  I mean, barriers to entry for guys like me doing PodCasting or blogs is almost zero. 

SJ: Correct.  So we are…  We monitor the blogosphere on a 24/7 - 365 basis, we’re constantly looking for new feeds, we are indexing every ten minutes.  So, whenever you go to Feedster and do a search for terms that are common like “Microsoft” or “Google,” you’re oldest result is three or four minutes sometimes.  It’s just bang, bang. 

JF: It’s real time web, the classic, just what everyone was talking about, right?  Microsoft’s announcement with RSS is almost an explanation point that this stuff is right now, this stuff’s happening. 

SJ: Correct.  And Microsoft is going to drive it right down into the browser and actually into the operating system API’s level. 

JF: And that’s a big thing I want to ask you about with this whole real time web.  I noticed that it’s great to see what the fresh stuff is, and in fact my show is called “Fresh Voices: The Fresh Voices of Silicon Valley and Technology,” and it’s all about freshness.  But some stuff is enduring.  Some content is actually timely, like we’re at Gnomedex.  But I do InfoTalks with gurus about advice for legal, for entrepreneurs.  That stuff is classic long tail stuff.  What is Feedster doing to that?  Are you guys archiving that?  Or doing like Bloglines with AskJeeves, something like that?

SJ: We maintain our full history, back to the day I started crawling the web, which is March of 2003.  So we have everything back that far up to 300 million posts.  That said, if you look at the problem, I mean, people go to Feedster for the newest and freshest stuff.  If they want stuff that’s sort of the more enduring web, they turn to a Yahoo or a Google, and that’s sort of been the dichotomy in how people use the engines, because right now our customer is very cutting edge, very much wants to know what’s going on.

JF: So do you feed some of that stuff to Google and partners?  Do you share that? 

SJ: We don’t at present.

JF: It would be good for them to come to you and actually work on that.  Let’s talk about the cutting edge stuff that you guys are doing with advertising – big topic here at Gnomedex.  Last controversial session.  But really it’s about consumption.  Advertising is the model (I’m in the ad business), but it’s all about consumption.  If you have consumption, there will be an ad business.  You guys are doing some cutting edge ad stuff, explain some of that.

SJ: That has always been the case, right?  As soon as there has been some mass media, advertising goes out and fills it.  So, what we’ve done, our ad network is in its very early stages, right now we’re working with very selective clients.  So, for example, if you’re getting RSS feeds from SlashDot, we’re the ones actually doing the ads and searches in there.  Feeds from OSTG, we run a hand full of campaigns, we’re in the process of scaling that up and making that a self-service process so that any publisher with an RSS feed will be able to subscribe and get ads inserted into their feeds.

JF: So you guys right now are doing ad insertion and you see that as the cutting edge stuff? 

SJ: Right.  So basically contextualizing. 

JF: It’s highly targeted.  If someone says, “I want to subscribe to something,” or “I’m looking for this particular product,” or information, or whatever, you can match it up.

SJ: Correct.  And bear in mind that we have the history of that publisher.  It’s not just what’s in that feed today, or right this second – the classic Java model for advertising pioneers – but we know what the person does over time, which is a huge different in classical ad targeting.  So we know that this publisher has regularly, for example, hosted things about Nikon digital cameras.  This is a great place to put a digital camera ad.  As opposed to someone who happens to mention in a post, “I bought a camera.”  So it’s very much the being a question of context and being on point.

JF: And some of the companies out there, and I won’t mention the companies’ names, do that.  There is one post, and there’s a key word, they scrape it off, and the next thing you know there are ads on it that are completely irrelevant to what that demographic and what that peer group is, I mean, people cluster, right?

SJ: Right.  We look at this in terms of subscriptions.  A subscription is an ongoing commitment to read something in a consistency.

JF: Right.  And what Bloglines has marked, and your product, has never been advertising driven.  It has always been about providing utility in terms of ease of use and productivity.  Where do you see the ad side going to it from your end?  Obviously AskJeeves is a big ad business with their search. 

MF: We’re in a very fortunate position.  AskJeeves just wants us to focus on building up the service, and we have no revenue expectations right now.  That’s excellent.

JF: That’s great for a computer scientist like you.  You just get to go play and just go do good stuff.

MF: It’s fantastic for us to just build out the service.  So we don’t know what our business model is going to be.  There are several different possible ones.  One is advertising base.  One is that we never end up monetizing the blog service directly, and instead we end up using Bloglines to drive traffic to AskJeeves, and now IEC, which bought AskJeeves just recently, through their various properties as well.  So, there are several different models, and at least for the next year we’re just going to focus on building out the service.

JF: That’s actually a smart move.  When you think about it, Scott, your company is perfectly matched for advertising because you can perfectly match stuff on search, and that’s an expectation users are used to.

SJ: People are used to it.  It’s a little bit different in an RSS context.

JF: Because it’s new.

SJ: Because it’s new.  And right now someone at Gnomedex analogized it to internet 1994 when people were resistant to advertisement and stuff, but the simple fact of it is that you are going to see advertisements and feeds.

JF: And that’s no problem.  I think users won’t balk at that.  And Mark, I think you’re smart because, you know, at the end of the day, if you build a damn good product, you’re going to have longevity in market share, user experience is going to be game number one.  And if you start tinkering with that now, and start to force a business model?  …  You just kind of wait and figure it out.  If you’re building a damn good product, you’ve got AskJeeves behind you to fill in the ad model, when it (ad model) kind of peaks its head up.  Is that your strategy?

MF: Absolutely.  Google did the same thing.  There’s a long line of precedence for actually just concentrating on building out the service for several years, in fact, before you figure out what your business model is going to be.

JF: Well, that’s great.  So I always ask my guests of caliber like you guys, to give me one big prediction.  And it doesn’t have to be related to the company, but in terms of the Gnomedex feel, in terms of the next five years.  Next big, profound, prediction. 

MF: Things are going to get huge.  It’s very easy, certainly, with the early crowd here.  We’re in the first inning of a nine inning game for all of this.  Everybody that uses the internet is going to be exposed to RSS in aggregation over the next five or ten years and it is going to become an important part of their life.  They may not know it yet, but it will happen.

SJ: Your mom will actually care what RSS is. 

JF: Whether she knows that she’s using it or not, it’ll be serving stuff to her right?

SJ: Correct.

JF: So mainstream.

SJ: It will go mainstream.

JF: One of the things that I think is so profound is that this really changes people’s lives.  You allow people to put out good content, whether it’s user generated content.  You’ve got discovery tools and now user interface, and I think that’s huge.  But one of the things I want to chat with you guys about is, aren’t we in this huge perfect storm of innovation?  We have this massive shifting going on in the business front: margins, cost of distribution…  I mean the syndication costs are so low.  On the customer end we’re talking about massive change on the productivity.  And on the technical side we have huge development going on.  In the hallways of Gnomedex we’re talking about a lot of stuff going on in between the sessions.  All three theaters are going through radical shifts.  Isn’t that massive?  Isn’t that a great opportunity for entrepreneurs? 

SJ: It’s a great opportunity.  It’s a huge opportunity.  And you’ll see an awful lot of things launched, some of them aren’t going to hit, and that’s okay.  That’s just the nature of the business.  People have to make experiments and see what works.

JF: And work together.  Like you said, it’s the first inning, so normally it’s a growth business.  Everyone here at Gnomedex is basically a partner.  There’s a lot of beachhead, isn’t there? 

MF: Correct.  I’ve been through really early stage markets before, and the nice thing is that you don’t have to worry about taking market share away from competitors because the whole market is growing faster that the competitors, anyway.  So basically it’s all about organic growth. 

JF: So you guys have just secured funding lately, so you have some gas in the tank, you’re going to do some new things with that rocket fuel, obviously some financing.  And obviously Bloglines, which was a great service that you started basically from scratch with a huge following, you got some rocket fuel with AskJeeves dollars, right?  So, you guys have some big things coming.  Any teasers?  Any hint?  I know you’re public, but you’re private, so you can say anything you want.  Come on, give me something.  One last thing. 

SJ: You’ll see some pretty major customer announcements from us in the next couple weeks.

JF: Mark, can you dare?  Would you want to go there?

MF: Yeah, I really can’t talk about upcoming features.  We’ve announced that we’ve got an upcoming blog search initiative coming.  Sometime this summer we’ll drastically be improving our blog search, but you know, looking forward is just going to be continuing to improve the service and adding features. 

JF: Well thanks so much.  We’re here with Mark Fletcher and Scott Johnson, two great computer scientist guys, doing some great work, and thank you for the PodCast!

MF and SJ: Thanks for the time, thank you.

My Podcast InfoTalk with Steve Rubel

Here is the transcript from the Gnomedex conference where I was doing a PodTech.net InfoTalk Show... Steve is a guru when it comes down to marketing and PR in the blog and podcast scene.  Steve is a great guy. 

Here's the transcript from my conversation with Steve at Gnomedex...

John Furrier, founder of PodTech.net: Welcome to the PodTech.net InfoTalk Series with Steve Rubel.  Very famous marketing expert and great blog Micropersuasions.com.  Steve, welcome to the PodCast.

Steve Rubel: Thank you very much.

JF: Steve, you’ve been doing some amazing work in helping companies understand the blogosphere, also a very famous blogger doing a lot of work, now doing PodCasting, we’re doing PodCasts.  A lot of companies – public relations firms, marketers – are looking at this digital evolution of content distribution.  People are using blogs for marketing.  What are you seeing right now with companies, the challenges they’ve had, the things that you’ve learned, that you can share with the folks out there listening.

SR: I think that a lot of companies are…  I think that for a while there was an awareness factor – there wasn’t a great awareness of this - it was very concentrated in the tech industry for a while, particularly in 2004.  In the beginning of this year started a shift, started to go more mainstream, particularly with moves like GM, with their move getting involved with the blogosphere.  There has also been so much press – the Business Week cover story, Fortune had a cover story.  There is so much interest in it now, but still not a lot of action yet.  But you know what?  I think it’s part of a process that has to take place, because this is a very scary thing for a lot of corporations, to say, “Do we really want to be involved in this conversation, or do we just want to listen to it?”  Because for years corporations have thrived and lived on the controlled message.  We hold on to this for the last moment.  We saw that today with Microsoft.  I mean, it’s been in the works for a long time and it was held until the last minute. 

JF: You refer, obviously, to the fact that we’re at Gnomedex here, time shifted live, and Microsoft just announced their huge support for RSS, handing out great jackets, which, by the way, looks great on you.

SR: Thank you.

JF: How about this control thing, because this is really the big point, because controlled messaging has really been the traditional model for marketing, public relations, messaging.  With the blogosphere it’s not a broadcast and reaction, it’s a conversation.  So if a company is just listening, what does that buy them?  They have to take some actions about sharing, right, isn’t communication important?

SR: Well, at Cooper-Katz, which is my employer, the public relations firm, we have a practice called Micropersuasions now.  Funny story how my blog evolved into a whole business for us. 

JF: A practice.

SR: It’s been an amazing year.  We say that we take a four-fold approach.  We tell companies to find their evangelists and vigilantes.  They’ve gotta know who’s out there, who the players are, where the power networks are, just know.  So, number one is fine.  Two: listen.  Actively.  Really listen to what people are saying, take it seriously.  I wrote recently the ten commandments of public relations in the new era, and I forget which commandment it was, but I said, “All creatures, great and small are holy.”  So it doesn’t matter if it’s The New York Times that’s calling you, or it’s Hacking NetFlix, who’s a popular blogger, or whoever it is that’s calling you, pay attention to it.  So find and listen.  Now, listening takes different approaches.  It could just be hey, we go and subscribe to feeds, or we have a blog and we’re using it like the IE team is to listen to feedback.  The third step is to listen to feedback.  And again, that can be a semi-transparent dialogue when you’re emailing with a blogger, again, but the best case is to get out there and have your own blog, and get into the conversation that way. 

JF: It’s scary, though, to me, that companies just don’t get the facts of life in the classic off line sense, or in the real world.  I mean, people have conversations.  If you say something stupid, you’re stupid.   You say something good, you’re good.  You can’t control what they say. 

SR: I get questions all the time: Steve, what’s the risks?  And I say the greatest risk to you as a corporation is absence. 

JF: Yes.

SR: So actually I want to just finish the last point that it’s fine to listen and engage.  And the last one, and this one is really the golden ring, I think, for companies that choose to grab it, is empower.  And what I mean by that, is empower people, and it can be blogging people or just anybody, to do things they may not have accomplished before.  And I’ll give you some examples.  The State Tourism Board for Pennsylvania – this is actually not one of our projects – but gopa.com.  They found four families from across the country, and they sent them on trips around Pennsylvania , and these folks blogged about their experience of the trip.  It was authentic, it was real, it was empowering to those people.

JF: It’s like their own Zagat’s Guide.

SR: But it wasn’t controlled.  It was empowering in the sense because it empowered people to do something.  When I say empowered I mean empowered in the sense of empowering people to be marketers for you. 

JF: So, in that case of Pennsylvania, this is a really great topic, they felt confident about their own product, hence their state, that they basically rolled the dice and said we want to send these families out there to report on it.

SR: That’s right.

JF: And if it’s good, then they’ll say good things.  So in a way, if you’re good, you shouldn’t be afraid of the blogosphere.  So for me, I almost say to marketers, if you’re not participating, you’re scared.  And that means are either not good….?

SR: It’s not that black and white…

JF: You’re afraid?

SR: It’s not that black and white, though, I’ll say.  In some regards it is, you’re right.  Cream is going to rise to the top.

JF: Why not show off your good products?

SR: Why not show off?  But you have to… what you’re not accounting for, though, is years of an ingrained process and fear and corporate cultures that are predicated on controlling messages.  So, you know, it’s going to take time…  You know, when democracy came a long it took a long time to seep in, and it obviously hasn’t reached all corners of the world yet, and that’s, you know…

JF: Well I want to get the voice out through you – you’re doing great work.  Can you give me an example of a client you’ve worked with or a case that you’ve seen that is a great success story in terms of how they’re approaching it, whether it’s a product marketing example or a consumer marketing example?

SR: Sure.  I’ll give you two, actually, because one we’re going to talk about tomorrow, and that’s why I’m here, and it’s for Weather Bug.  Weather Bug is an online service that streams weather to your desktop.  Great product.  They have 100 broadcast partners around the network they feed their data to, millions of users.  But I’ll be frank, very frank: they have an image problem.  And their image problem is that people think they are SpyWare users because they made one bad move several years ago that they quickly got out of.

JF: But it tainted them.

SR: It’s hanging around their necks.  They now have a blog, and they blog very openly.  You know, “Hey, this is who we are, here’s how we got here, and we’re now going to show you that this is not who we are.  We are not SpyWare.  And what are we doing to show that?”  And the blog is helping them do that – they’ve been invited to speak at this conference in front of a very cynical group here.  So that’s a success story on one front.  Now the other success story that we haven’t quite launched yet, but it’s going to launch next week, is Vespa.  Vespa makes these very popular Italian scooters that everyone covets, they run a few thousand dollars.  In that case we’re doing a full fine listening engagement on a power program, in the sense that we are taking four people who have blogs, who are Vespa owners, and giving them blogs on the Vespa site.  We are not paying them.  We are giving them full access, though, and we’re giving them some goodies, and they are going to blog on different subjects.  They are very excited about it and we are, too.   It’s like a grand experiment. 

JF: It’s like a testimonial.  I mean, people quote customers all of the time in their literature.

SR: But it’s uncontrolled – we’re letting them go.  We’re not telling them: you must blog on these six things a week.  Or, you know, here’s your editorial calendar, you know.  We’re not doing that.  And actually we were very careful to announce this way before we hired the bloggers – well, we didn’t actually hire the bloggers, we recruited them – because we wanted people to know that this was a transparent process.  This is not something like we found these bloggers and we’re faking it.  Very authentic. 

JF: It’s real.

SR: It’s real, and the companies are willing to take a chance and do that because they’re a young company, they’re Italian, they’re not publicly trading here in the U.S. in a very active way, and they can take chances, okay.  I don’t know if a big company with 50,000 employees that have lived a certain way -

JF: They may be public, and we can’t say this…

SR: Exactly, which is a law that governs how companies need to communicate.  So, they’re able to take that risk.  We’re taking on another project: we’re launching another company called Simple Human.  They make – get this – they make $200 garbage cans for your home that people can’t get enough of, because they spend a lot of money to remodel their homes and they don’t want just any old Rubbermaid garbage can.  They want a very nice, elegant –

JF: They want a high-end garbage can.

SR: A high-end garbage can, and literally the lid will close like a Lexus – it’s very silent, the bag doesn’t show the outside.  And if you want any of these home improvement shows you know people go nuts over this stuff. 

JF: Yeah, and hauling all this trash to the curb…

SR: Actually this is all on the inside – kitchen garbage cans and other household accessories.

JF: Oh, yeah, yeah.

SR: So they approached us and said, “You know, we want a blog, and we want feedback for our products.  We’re going to see product out to bloggers to try and use in their own homes and blog about it.” 

JF: Yeah, that’s a good point.  I get approached by marketers all the time with this PodCasting show that’s become really popular, and I’m excited by that, but they say, “John, we want to do this.  What do we do?  What’s the marketing strategy?   And we want to do a blog because we know you, John, that you have a blog.”  Help me talk about that.  What are the major benefits, one, and how do they get started?  How should we advise clients, potential customers who are listening, what do they need to do?

SR: I think that they have to study first.  I think the risk in not studying is that you can fail miserably, and what does failure mean?  Well, failure…  Well, you can look at it one way – people don’t read your blog.  But that’s not failure to me.  Failure to me is you get ridiculed.  So I think you need to take it –

JF: You need to take it seriously.

SR: You need to take it seriously and study it, or have your – and I’m biased to the insanest - or have the smarts of some sort of consultants to help you so you can understand and because you can navigate that more quickly and they have the learning and the resources and also the relationships.  I mean, blogger relationships are really important, as well.

JF: It’s like a whole new business title.

SR: It is a whole new business title, although I do think that it’s something that, in the end, in the best world, is integrated with PR because it’s another media channel.  A very different media channel, but it’s another media channel in the same sense.

JF: We’re on a roll here and I want to talk about a post you wrote which I think is fantastic about the roll of PR.  I think that was your post.  I think you wrote that – about agencies and PR firms?

SR: Yes, yes.

JF: I’ve met with a variety of PR firms in San Francisco, and I agree with you.  I mean, don’t you think this elevates the role of the PR firm?  Because now with real time web they have to be more actively engaged and there’s now media buy in the blogosphere.

SR: Well, there is, and there are people like BlogAds, so I think that there is media in the blogosphere, but I think that’s – it’s almost like there’s two different channels there.  There is almost like a space race going on with the PR firms and the ad agencies, and the ad agencies are kind of saying hey, and they’re doing more kind of fun stuff – and if they’re events, that works – but in the end, this is a communications vehicle.  It’s not uni-directional.  It’s bi-directional.  And PR is also bi-directional, or multi-directional, if you think about it.  It’s client-to-media, media-to-client, it’s public-to-client, it’s public-to-media-to-client.

JF: It’s multi-fold.

SR: Yeah, now that’s the traditional mold.  You know when you look at blogs it’s even worse –

JF: It’s more complex.

SR: It’s more complex: it’s even more fragmented.  So I think that public relations professionals are in a very good place to grab this ring and run with it, in the sense that we understand, and the best practitioners understand, what makes the public tick, what the public wants, what the company wants, what the media wants, and mesh that all together, and that’s another element to that.  Know what bloggers want, know who they are, and why they’re important and take them seriously and figure out, where do you bring them into the process?  We have a client, http://www.topics.net a very popular new site.  They announced a very big deal with Night Raider and some other newspaper chains and we brought bloggers into the process.  Our team briefed the bloggers with the press, and also brought the bloggers into the announcement.  We put them on the same plane.

JF: That’s exactly the way it needs to get done, and I think what you’re saying, too, is that with communication, if we talk about PR for a second, back to that, they are experts at communication.  The good practitioners, as you said, are seeing these new tools, and it’s a channel, so they – all to them is simply a new way and they have to adjust.

SR: But there’s fear.  There’s fear in the sense that these are people who are not trained journalists – some of them are, some of them aren’t – the vast majority are not.  This is their night job, or their fun thing, and I think that’s what’s threatening.  Because, if a journalist wrongs us, there is recourse.  We can write a letter to an editor, we can complain to the editor, we can complain loudly, we can pull advertising in some cases – you know there are many different avenues of recourse and we can get it.  With a blogger, we may not get recourse.  And I tell people to be very careful emailing bloggers because I do believe that a vast majority of them want to do right, they want to tell the truth.  There are some who have agendas.  Years ago my mentor taught me a great bit.  She said, “Never send an email to any reporter you wouldn’t want in The New York Times on the front page the next day.”  So if you’re pissed at a reporter, don’t flame them, because you could end up in the paper the next day. 

JF: Great point.

SR: And that is a great point that was made to me over ten years ago. Now I say the same thing but I have a new way to look at it.  Never send an email to a blogger that you wouldn’t want stamped on your forehead for the rest of your life because a blogger can do copy-paste-publish with your email and that stuff shows up in Google.  You go to get a job, you go to get a girlfriend, whatever, so you need to take the care.  But I think with that, “But, what if?”  Or it comes down to good people skills.  Treat them with respect, listen to what they have to say, take them seriously, listen to what they have to say to you.  And it’s a new world that a lot of PR professionals aren’t trained how to manage, and I can’t necessarily say that I’m trained or my team is trained because we learn every day, too, because it changes.

JF: Get started, learn, study, great point.  Well, we’re coming up on our maximum segment limit.  Steve Rubel, you’ve got a great blog, Micropersuasions, you’re a great practitioner I’ll see in the PR world, and you’re showing a lot of people how to do it, thanks so much for the PodCast!

SR: Thank you for having me!

Steve Rubel Next Generation Web Steve Rubel Podcast Gnomedex Gnomedex Podcast RSSTechnology Podcast Silicon Valley John Furrier RSS Podcasts podcast shows PodTech.net InfoTalk

My InfoTalk transcript with Adam Curry at Gnomedex

At Gnomedex I hung out with Adam Curry and got a chance to have a PodTech.net InfoTalk with one of the founding PodFathers.  The podcast is at PodTech.net

John Furrier (JF): Welcome to the PodTech.net InfoTalk series with the famous Adam Curry, who is here at the Gnomedex Conference and is doing the Key Note on PodCasting, State of the Industry.  Welcome to the PodCast!

Adam Curry (AC): Thank you, good to be here. 

JF: Adam, you’ve got a daily source code PodCast, and now you’re doing the famous PodCast on the Sirus network, how are things going?  What are you up to?  Tell us what’s happening these days, and what’s on your mind!

AC: Well, there’s a lot going on actually.  Well, most importantly, I’m having a lot of fun doing the source code.  It’s not quite daily anymore.  That’s really due to time zones and travel and sleep, but I’m getting all kinds of wonderful feedback continuously on that show, which is really my number one priority above anything is my show, because that’s what I love doing. Of all the things that I do, that’s what I love doing, and I feel a real responsibility to the people who are listening that I continue to do that and keep the quality high.  And by keep the quality high I mean that I actually take time to prep and think about what I’m going to say and don’t do half-assed, just like, “Oh I’ve got to do something just to have something out there,” because I’d rather not.  I’d rather skip a day than do something that’s not working.  But I also try if I’m in a down mood to do the show anyway, because that’s okay if that comes through.  So really, I’m still in just as much of an experimental phase as everybody else, I think, in this, because in the broadcasting background that I have you have very defined sets of feedback.  It used to be postal - people would send you mail - and now, of course, it’s email, but there’s audio comments, and there are people on the street, and I recognize a lot of the types of feedback I’m getting and I think I know how to interpret a lot of that.  But, the immediacy of it is beautiful and just trying new shit out every single day is fantastic. 

JF: Well, you do a great show and you were mentioning to me when we were talking last night that you really focused on getting listeners, and that’s really on the show side.  But what a lot of people don’t know, I mean the insiders know this in the industry, and the PodCasters know this, but you’ve really been a great leader in moving this whole thing forward.   You’re doing a show, you’re also working on some cool things, tools, PodShow, it’s no secret that you’ve talked with Apple and folks about really making this easier so people can do their own shows, and I think what’s unique is that you have that media experience.  Where is this going in terms of effecting mainstream media?  Hey, average guys like me can put out good content, like an InfoTalk show, with no barriers to entry.  Hey, that’s exciting.  Where do you see the media shift happening.  There’s a major shift, and…

AC: Well, you know, I have spoken with my PodCast, the hundred million listener march, and that was mentioned briefly here, though there is a little bit of a misconception on what that really means. It’s, to me, it’s like the web browser.  It took awhile for everyone to have a web browser, but now are there like one hundred million web browsers?  Probably more than that.  That is essentially the platform through which we can distribute information and consume information.  When I look at PodCasting, I kind of see this.  I mean, how many PodCasts are there?  8,000?  20,000?  Growing every day.  I think something like 8,000 registered maybe, and there probably many, many more in all kinds of different fields.  But I kind of view it as all one big station, one big radio station.  And when I was in radio on radio stations what important was how far is our signal reaching - not for my individual show, to how many listeners will I get, but to how many people can we potentially reach?  You know, what is the potential audience out there?  And it’s amazing to see that each show that I do gets just a little south of 100,000 downloads, but still only 25-27% of that is through subscription, and that’s the RSS part, that’s the part that we’re here at the conference talking about, that’s the part that has to be better integrated.  It’s seamless, as well.

JF: It’s an evolution, it’s happening.

AC: It is happening.  So that’s really what I’ve been pushing, and you have to push in a number of ways.  There are a lot of really smart people like Dave Wiener who are pushing it on the technology end, and I’m trying to push more on the media side.

JF: The business front, the media front, educating people.

AC: Sure.  It’s really about…  education is a big part of it.  What the heck is this?  I’d hate for people just to see us as bunch of geeks doing stuff that is geeky and technical.  So, of course with that comes, in my mind, lots of opportunities to do stuff.

JF: Meet new people, getting content from people.  I know that Michael Butler has his Rock and Roll Geek show.  He’s got great content, and guys like me.  There’s good stuff out there.

AC: And there’s an audience for that and PodCasting is a little different from a weblog mainly because it takes a lot of time to create this and if you want to do that for love, fantastic, then power to you.  I think there are people who want to monetize that and I see a fantastic opportunity for commercialization of pieces of PodCasting.  And so all of the ancillary stuff that comes with that you kind of have to take along for the ride.  You have to help make tools or create your own tools to help people get on board because whereas writing, pretty much everyone understands how to write, most people, there’s a lot of technical hurdles in PodCasting that we have to help people get over, and the subscription part still isn’t….

JF: Well, let’s change gears and talk about Apple and the specifics right now.  Everyone knows that Steve Jobs made that big statement at the developer conference about PodCasting.  I know you’re close to a lot of discussions.  How profound is iTunes and PodCasting in this new thing that’s going to be happening.  What’s your view on that?  Is it massive?  I mean, what’s your view of the impact that it’s going to be? 

AC: Well…

JF: A blip on the radar?  Massive? 

AC: I think… here’s what I think is going to be great about it.  If I say to people, “Hey, would you check out my PodCast?”  Well, if they don’t know what a PodCast is then you have to go through a whole bunch of steps to explain it.  God forbid you have to actually explain the RSS part.  So now I can say, “Do you have iTunes?”  “Okay, yeah I have iTunes.”  So, in a week, there will be a thing there that says “PodCasts.”  “So, click on that, and then click on me, and then you’ll get the PodCast.”  That’s what I want to be able to say, but that’s also what I want to be able to say for Windows Media Player, and for Real, and for any other way people will be familiar with an application already.  You know, explaining RSS and downloading…

JF: It’s an ease of use issue. 

AC: That’s all that it is, totally.  So that’s what I think is huge about it.  At the same time they have done a couple of smart things that will be integrated into all iPod-ers.  For instance if you don’t listen to a show that you subscribe to for five episodes it will suspend the downloading.  You know, a lot of bandwidth considerations that…

JF: That helps the PodCasters and what not.

AC:  Yeah, and for yourself, as well.  It’s just a waste.  It’s just minor stuff.  But really the concept that I can say….  Who’s the audience?  My audience, I believe, or potential audience, is people who have mp3 players and iPods.  That’s the audience - those are the people I am after.  I want people to listen to me - when they’re in the car when they used to listen to radio, that’s what I’m interested in.  So, how do I get them there is by saying, “Do you have an iPod?  Do you have an mp3 player?” “Yeah, I’ve got an iPod.”  “Great, so go to iTunes, click on me, and it will automatically go to your iPod.”

JF: And soon it’s not even going to be explained, it’s going to be natural, just like downloading music. 

AC: Yeah.  It will be just like downloading music, in fact. 

JF: Yeah, it will be seamless, and that’s the dream.  I think that’s going to happen pretty quickly.  I know that you have to run, but I just wanted to say that you’re doing a great job and everyone on the inside knows that, in the industry, and a lot of the outside people need to know that, not only are you doing a show but you’re also doing some really good stuff to build this industry. 

On that note, one final prediction from you.  Big prediction for the next couple of years.  What’s your big prediction?  What’s going to be happening?

AC: I’ve learned to be so careful over the years.  Everything I’ve thought would happen took at least five years to happen, if not longer.  There’s going to be, we are going to wake up one day and it will be clear that the rules have changed.  That, I think, is going to be the big thing.  The public that just consumes stuff and loves to watch and read, they are going to say “Hey, wait a minute, something has changed here, and I can do it too.”  There’s a very small group that understands that now.  Maybe it’s the 400 people in this room, maybe it’s 4,000, but it’s not much more than that who understand that “I can be the guy on the radio, I can be the guy on TV, I can be the guy in the newspaper, and you know what?  I want to be, because I have something to say.”  And when people are switched on in that matter, wow.  Who knows what’s going to happen?  Who knows.  I’m just happy to be a part of this.  This is really my third career, my third stage of life.  I’m 40, and to be able to be a part of this, that’s a blessing.

JF: It’s really exciting - you just nailed it. It’s about “fresh voices”, it’s about having a voice and a platform for that.  Adam Curry, thanks so much for the PodCast, great work, and let’s do it again. 

AC: Thanks so much and good luck with your show. 

Adam Curry Next Generation Web Adam Curry Podcast Gnomedex Gnomedex Podcast RSSTechnology Podcast Silicon Valley John Furrier RSS Podcasts podcast shows PodTech.net InfoTalk

Gnomedex Podcasts - Upcoming Shows - Fresh Voices

At Gnomedex I had a chance to sit down with some "Fresh Voices"  here are the upcoming shows from Gnomedex for the PodTech.net InfoTalk Podcast Show. 

Upcoming PodTech.net InfoTalk Conversations with:

Adam Curry - "The Man" who needs no introduction

Steve Rubel - Micropersuasions marketing blogger guru

Mark Fletcher and Scott Johnson - Bloglines and Feedster founders

Greg Stein - Google and Chairman of Apache Software Foundation

JD Lasica - Co-founder of OurMedia.org and author of Dark Nets

Matt Mullenweg - Creator of WordPress

Michael Lehman - Microsoft Ch9 Podcaster

Scott Berkun - Original Microsoft IE3 Program Manager now retired talking about his new book "Art of Project Management" published by O'Rielly.

Plus still to come more InfoTalk Podcasts from:

John Markoff, Keith Benjamin, David Hornik, Mark Radcliffe, John McDowall, and Gordon Cook

Next Generation Web Podcast Gnomedex Gnomedex Podcast RSSTechnology Podcast Silicon Valley John Furrier RSS Podcasts podcast shows

Exclusive Podcast with Microsoft RSS "braintrust" at Gnomedex

This is a great example that open source media works. This is "Real Time" communications from PodTech.net.

www.PodTech.net

Special Announcement: Microsoft announces it's support for RSS - It's an RSS platform in Longhorn

Guests: The Microsoft RSS Team Amr Gandhi, Jane Kim, and Walter Van Koch.

Host: John Furrier, Founder of PodTech.net

I had a chance to sit down with the Microsoft RSS team to have a candid InfoTalk™ on Microsoft's big announcment for RSS Support in Internet Explorer 7

Sound bites:
platform - windows will now have an api that will mantain users subscriptions in one place that any browser or application that can tap into.

The notion of subscribe is how they view the RSS phenomenon - users don't get the multiple formats... all the users need to care about is subscribing. We're in the early days in terms of adoption of RSS. The challenge for the industry is to make the technologies freely available to users.

This announcment is a natural extension of the evolution of the Web. Phase I: browse; Phase II: search; Phase III: subscribe. Once you start subscribing you start sharing. This platform is for personal experiences and knowledge. The amount of creativity that can occur from developers and users will be massive.

more great information on the podcast..... a must listen for anyone interested on where RSS is heading and more importantly where Microsoft is heading.

Listen to the podcast www.PodTech.net

Microsoft RSS Support Next Generation Web Podcast Gnomedex Gnomedex Podcast RSSTechnology Podcast Silicon Valley John Furrier RSS Podcasts podcast shows Microsoft Microsoft Podcast

BitePR Gets Blogs and Podcasting

This is a profound statement from a PR PRO Ken Shuman at bitepr ... What's better is that he has a blog for the firm.  Great Stuff Ken!

"how podcasts are being embraced and the potential they have on the companies we represent on a daily basis. Podcasts are a way for our executives to control the message. Most podcasts are taped live and this prevents misquoting or taking a quote out of context."

Blogging and Podcasting shifts traditional pr mentality - it shift from controlled messages to dynamic conversation.  In the post Enron era customers want honesty and information.  Lets get the word out to marketers... Start blogging and podcasting otherwise they won't be part of the conversation. 

Now up - Supernova 2005 Podcasts on PodTech.net but Scoble brings Supertraffic

I got the following new InfoTalk podcasts up on PodTech.net all from SuperNova 2005

Robert Scoble - Microsoft - This guy can bring the traffic... He is the new slashdot.  I should call it the Scoblization (scoble massive syndicaton).  Robert brought my site over 6k users from 8:30 pm - midnight monday night and then 4k the next day for roughly over 10k users.  Thanks dude.   

Jeremy Allaire - Founder of BrightCove - great guy from Boston and a great entrepreneur.

John Patrick - President of Attitude LLC (www.patrickweb.com) - what can you say...John's seen it all.

Andrew Anker - VP Corp Dev - Six Apart - very sharp and savvy bus dude. 

Suz Charman - premier blogger and contributor of Corante - the best accent of the group and a very knowledgable blogger.

Jesse James Garrett - Founder of Adaptive Path on AJAX - this guys not only survives the down turn but instead turns the world up side down with AJAX.  Great stuff

Cydni Tetro and Tom NextPage.com Execs - on new document management system - From UT - these guys get it on enterprise software

Second Life developer - Linden Lab programmer - Second Life could be the next education platform for computer science.  Hell I'd code in this game.

PodTech InfoTalk Mention on TechCrunch

PodTech.net InfoTalk is featured on the new growing firm called TechCrunch.com - it's an honor to be recognized by the community.  Thanks. 

Here is the link to the TechCrunch profile of PodTech.net

Interview with Robert Scoble Microsoft Blogger

I just interviewed Robert Scoble.  Great guy. Robert Scoble posted on his site a link refering to my interview and to PodTech.net

Sound bites from PodTech.net InfoTalk with Robert Scoble (note with a visit from the famous Marc Canter)

Where is the blog market going?  The impact?

Blogging is like a redwood tree in the forest…trees are different podcasting blogs, the mapping is the root system… It’s about the conversation…it’s about building things and sharing things and it’s about getting customers to tell me what’s works..

{abrupt interruption: Marc Canter enters the room…Mark Canter says  “yo yo yo”… keep these podcasts short, concise, articulate and fully indexed”)

Right now it feels like 1989…if you wanted to share yourself in 1989 you had to buy multiple programs (very disparate) then Bill Gates came out with office …Tools like AudioBlog.com … etc – podcast shows need services – one stop shop

Things will get easier by the big players…packaging it up and making it turnkey.. the aggregators will go through a renaissance…What happens when half the family is blogging?  Too many steps to visit everyone.  You’ll see a better aggregator come along.

Top things happening:  Portable devices…blogs and podcasting on cell phones..Nokia:  will ship over 40 million mp3 players this year in phones.   The future:  Mapping ..Google lays down the first warning shot… wait til you can take a picture of a sushi restaurant and leave a location on a map… 

{interruption by Marc Canter.. banging on the door … “Marc has way to many whiskeys”)

Blogs are efficient but podcasting adds more to blogs..Podcasting allows you to know someone more.. and take them to a new place that you can’t do with text (blogs) … podcasting allows you to listen in your car and places where you don’t normally read.

Big RSS announcement from Microsoft at Gnomedex …

First Podcast in ITunes

Bad Apple is the first podcast to make it into ITunes

All of my podcasts have been compatible with iTunes for awhile... wow this is great news for podcasters....oh yeah it's a plug in --yawn