Tinfinger

Poor old Johnny Hartigan begin again

2009-07-01T16:29:00.002+10:00

Via the Inquisitr and Andrew Bolt's blog comes the transcript of local News Corp boos John Hartigan's Canutian address to the endless waves of the blogosphere crashing over his sandcastle business.

As Duncan points out in the Inq piece, it's now a tired old cliche for journalists to attack the blogosphere for being unprofessional, as if that's the cause of the problem, when the actual issue is the gutting of advertising revenues from the classified rivers of gold. I almost fell asleep writing that, it's such a hoary chestnut of an argument. So old that journos fall into it like a pair of old slippers.

Hartigan is running the new Murdoch line of browbeating the public into paying for journalism, which goes against centuries of tradition.

I believe people will pay for content if it is:
- Original...
- Exclusive...
- Has the authority
- and is relevant to our audiences

Let's look at these four criteria, especially in the context of successful paywall-funded local online enterprises such as Crikey and the various share trading newsletters. Originality is a given, no arguments there. Exclusivity of content is not so important, in my view. In some ways, putting a paywall around content makes it inherently exclusive of those who don't pay. Does a Crikey or a Marcus Padley need to have scoops from a Hillary Bray insider type to sell subscriptions? Not necessarily, though it helps to build the brand. Authority is also overblown, I think. To me, that word is redolent of an elite class sermonising to faithful devotees, a model that just doesn't work in a media environment where the hoi polloi have as much publishing power online as do the journalists. If you set yourself up as the authority on something, how do you deal with a reader who corrects you in the comments on a story? You're just setting yourself up for a fall. A more successful approach is to collaborate with the readership to get the story right, to be accessible. Finally, the word "relevant" also smacks to me of a lack of connection with the audience. Why not use language that indicates you are listening to your readers directly, instead of paying consultants to find out for you?

Hartigan makes a big song and dance about the integration of digital and print functions in the newsroom. I don't know how truthful that is, but it can't be worse than the poisonous atmosphere between Fairfax Digital and the rump of the old guard at their paper premises. News must look like sweetness and light in comparison.

Hartigan goes on later in the speech to list what News is going to do online to halt the rot:

tools that allow you to conduct transactions with our advertisers

The old parish pump reporting on local news will be reinvented as hyperlocal coverage of real time events such as
- Where to find the cheapest petrol
- How to avoid roadworks and traffic jams and
- The best retail offers available in your suburb that day

I see coverage of politics, courts and crime changing dramatically - with less of the adversarial conflict we report now to coverage that gives readers more insight about the issues.

I see changes in the news mix – less of the negative stuff and more content that inspires, surprises and delights readers, more humour, more escapism.

- give them what they need to make decisions
- and equip them to act on those decisions

Very little of this describes actual journalism. As with much of a typical newspaper already these days, it's just public relations and marketing dressed in journalism's still-bloodied hide. The last snippet in particular screams out to me that News is determined to build a new river of gold - or at least pewter - out of cost-per-action and/or affiliate "content", so that instead of relying on classifieds for steady cashflow they will build their revenue streams on the likes of Ben Barren-built truelocal.com.au, which isn't journalism at all. The line between editorial and advertising in such brochureware is shaky at best in print but is functionally non-existent in an online context.

For the last decade or two, newspapers have been stealing shamelessly from the formats of periodical magazines, particularly "lifestyle" mags. Not coincidentally, many of the mags that the News tabloids are aping are owned by ACP, continuing on the battles in days of yore between Murdoch and Packer media properties long past Kerry's death.

It appears to me from the last section of that speech, despite Hartigan's early bluster, that the News Ltd approach is going to continue to be to leave the majority of the serious journalism to the broadsheets, radio and ABC/SBS, with The Australian used less as an instrument of democratic journalistic principles and more of an attack dog to support the editorial staff's rabid political leanings. The Herald-Sun and Daily Telegraph are going to look more and more like bits of ACP magazines stitched together. The front and back pages are going to get more and more shrill in their shouting for eyeballs.

Post 2.0 Web advertising: make it up in volume

2009-03-23T18:02:00.003+11:00

For those wondering what I have been doing in the long periods between posts on this blog, I have been spending just about all my time on FanFooty, my original startup which is now over four years old and finally looking like making a go of it. Traffic is projected at about 2 million page impressions per week for the upcoming AFL season, so I have a lot of ad inventory to fill.

I recently switched ad providers from Google AdSense to Platform 9, a division of ninemsn which runs a video ad platform and an auction-based display ad serving system as well. At the start of this year, as many Web publishers will know, CPMs (cost per thousand page impressions, i.e. the amount of money I make from ads per thousand times a page is viewed) went into the toilet in a huge amount of sectors. The Australian sport sector was no different. I look back at my 2007 CPMs and can only feel depressed about the numbers from all the providers I have tried in 2009.

Of course, the simple economics of supply and demand have dictated much of the collapse of CPMs for Web publishers. Supply of ad inventory has increased markedly in recent times, particularly by social media sites who have destroyed entire sectors by flooding them with low quality inventory. Demand has also dried up, as can be evidenced by looking at my own numbers, which were decimated (under the now-archaic meaning of dropping to 10% of their previous levels) at the turn of the year as new quarterly budgets came into effect with far fewer bids for major keywords.

Today was a big day for FanFooty because we turned on our first ad campaign from Betfair, which is our first major direct advertisement sale. It seems every large or small football-related media site in Australia has developed a partnership with one of the new breed of gambling providers, and we are no different.

I was looking at Duncan Riley's site The Inquisitr today, and couldn't help but feel as if I have been missing out. The Inq had seven ad units on its story pages: three from Google, one from Technorati Media and three that pointed to other servers I didn't recognise. Meanwhile, I have been stuck at FanFooty with the AdSense-encouraged three-unit policy since the site was established. Am I the idiot for not getting with the new program? This is what I was thinking: the obvious solution for publishers who are getting crappier CPMs per ad unit is to spam the units as much as the page will allow, and maybe more. The page looks less classy, and readability suffers, but is that what "pros" like Duncan have realised long before deadshits like me?

I'm not sure I want to be like the Fairfaxes of this world. I have blogged here before about their ridiculously high ad rates, though I suspect they haven't got anywhere near their listed CPMs for a while now. The RealFooty home page has seven ad units also, albeit two of them being tiny ones for BigPond, and their story pages have fully 12 units, including three for their own gambling partner, plus a Google box and two other text link ad boxes. Meanwhile, News Ltd's Superfooty home page has five units, all huge, and just four on its story pages, also including one Google unit.

My instinct has always been primarily as a journalist, whereby I have left room for three standard ads on each page and hoped that the ad agencies could deliver enough CPM that I didn't have to worry about it. In these recessionary times, that is probably not enough, and I should be thinking more like a publisher, not an editor. Do I have to hit the corporate carpets and sell sponsorships myself? Would the dinky little units here and there get in the way of the user experience? Would FanFooty cease to be something the fans enjoy if there were a dozen freakin' ad units on every blog entry?

I believe strongly in the distasteful effect of "kipple", the crap that tends to accumulate on a Web site as it ossifies. I do not want to put 12 ads on a page on FanFooty. Any more than three or four starts my eyebrows twitching as I hear the words of Jakob Nielsen, not to mention Strunk & White. The new desperation of large publishing companies spamming their users with ads seems counter-productive in the long term.

Then again, I do need to eat. :(

Gabe Rivera, Superego 2.0

2009-01-08T00:25:00.006+11:00

I was watching the excellent Shrink Rap show the other day, the episode with Stephen Fry pouring out his life problems to Pamela Connolly. Like many overachievers, he has major father issues, primary among them being that his father has become the internalised voice of the cultural superego inside his head, telling Stephen that he's never good enough compared to great men of years past, and critiquing every second of his existence. Many of us can relate. Like Stephen, many of us are highly productive and well respected by our colleagues and friends, yet that little voice is always reminding us of our helpless inadequacy when faced with a seemingly impossible series of unfair objectives that are the fiendish creations of our unconscious minds.

I feel like Gabe Rivera, creator of Techmeme, has become that voice inside the heads of many of the high profile technology bloggers of the day. Like Stephen with his forbidding father, these bloggers look to Gabe's site for emotional as well as intellectual approval. By extension this need reaches out to Gabe himself, now that he has admitted that he has been keeping a hand on the algorithmic tiller since 2005.

This Freudian effect has caused major angst lately with many of the so-called A-listers, for various reasons. My mate Duncan Riley has a longstanding feud, with Duncan accusing Gabe of being Mike Arrington's stooge so many times that I don't even need to link to any of them, and Gabe accusing Dunc of making up stories. Robert Scoble has started in on Gabe over the last month with a similarly spiteful campaign to convince him to recognise Scoble's shameless whoring of himself all over Friendfeed and Twitter in Techmeme's algorithms. Now Dave Winer has cussed out Gabe for not allowing him the passing frisson of quasi-parental validation.

In the late-and-not-lamented Tinfinger, I built a site which had a lot of Techmeme-like features, including a news aggregator which used a much less complex algorithm, so I feel I have some small amount of credibility to pass comments on these claims. Before I start, let me say that I like Gabe, and understand a lot of what he has been through, and what's more this blog seems to have a decent amount of memejuice on TM so I haven't gone through the frustration that these A-listers have been experiencing. Thus, please take my comments with the requisite grain of salt.

I like Duncan a lot too, and I want his ventures to succeed, as Dunc well knows. I see similarities between Gabe and Dunc, actually. Both have done marvellous things with limited resources and a hell of a lot of smarts, but my personal opinion is that both have stunted their own potential through not pushing themselves to their own limits - Gabe by not extending his business after his initial breakthrough, and Duncan by staying inside the blogging ghetto and not testing himself with what I would (perhaps uncharitably) call a "true" startup. Duncan knows my feelings on this, and I've said the same to Gabe on multiple occasions. (Then again, that may be Stephen Fry's father talking.)

In any case, Duncan's attacks may or may not have merit. From my knowledge of how algorithms work, I would find it perfectly believable that Gabe did not include any anti-Inquisitr code before Duncan's attacks started, nor consciously exclude Inq stories when he did meddle with the rankings. TechCrunch has authority in aggregators for a good reason, which is that everyone links to it and talks about their stories. The Inq started from zero, and building up links and chatter takes time and effort, which Duncan has put in for countless hours and will have to continue. Even if Arrington did activate his Hypno-Ray 2.0 and order Gabe to block Inq stories as petty revenge, in my opinion it does no good to kick against the system. The currency of this debate is authority, and even if Techmeme doesn't acknowledge the authority of your site, I think you can gain authority in non-numeric terms by being the Big Man and taking the high road. PageRank and clickthroughs are all very well, but respect and dignity of your peers and readers are also valuable commodities.

Scoble's concerns are more complex. His view is that news is happening in increasing frequency on Twitter and FriendFeed, and the fact that Techmeme covers only blogs and the links between them is old hat. Scoble is being completely self-serving, but that's par for the course. He's a marketer, not a journalist. It's part of the job description, and he shouldn't be criticised for it. What about his point, though?

My feeling is that Gabe is right not to pander to the Twitter/FriendFeed mafia. News may very well break on Twitter, but do people really want to open up their faux New York Times to see a headline news report that is only 140 characters long? Or, worse, a breaking issue which you have to comb through 50 one-sentence comments to comprehend? No, for the sort of service Techmeme is, it is correct to stay in the blog and news world, because if TM is to be the replacement for the newspaper frontispiece then each headline has to link to a true work of journalism. No, Robert, it's just not possible to commit a mainstream-consumable act of journalism in a single tweet or FriendFeed comment. Stories that are worth reading take longer than that to be told, and should be told in a longer form which allows a coherent narrative to be constructed - not necessarily by a professional journalist of course, but in a medium which allows for a fully-formed thought to be expressed, not just a whim skimmed off the top of the head. Sure, Techmeme might miss out by five minutes on the breathless pronouncement by Scoble or someone else of the latest Steve Jobs mystery illness, but that's a small price to pay for the quality of the product Gabe wants to put out for the masses.

On Dave Winer's whinge... first, let me clear up a common complaint. Gabe has said on multiple times that news items may appear on Techmeme with no accompanying link item, but that doesn't mean there wasn't one that qualified the original to appear on TM - just that the linking site didn't have enough memejuice to appear itself. Items appearing sans linkage doesn't mean that they've been boosted for nefarious means. Gabe has repeated this arcane piece of algorithmic cruft often enough that I feel that accusations of this sort by A-listers now constitute deliberate obfuscation, as they should know better if they had been paying attention to previous scuffles.

Dave kind of gets the superego effect, judging from later comments in the above-linked FriendFeed discussion, but his reaction is to want to kill part of his own brain. Needless to say, this is not psychically healthy. Building a new Techmeme is not a technically difficult thing to do. I did it, for the most part, and I'm no gun programmer. Half a dozen others did the same thing and got no traction. It is futile at this point, more than at any other time.

After all of that, I have to admit that I don't visit Techmeme any more, and haven't done so consistently for a year or so. I don't find tech news to be relevant to my day, immersed as I am in the sporting niche. For those to whom it is relevant, I don't see that the site has changed all that much since it began. For better or worse, Gabe has made it quite clear that this is the Techmeme we're getting, and he's not prepared to do anything drastic at all to change a winning formula. His intransigence is frustrating for a lot of people, but that's just the way he is, so better to leave him alone and focus on yourselves.

It is perhaps no coincidence that all this Freudian sturm und drang is caused by men fighting over the ownership of the cultural superego, something usually associated with the founding fathers of a society. Arrington is a founding father of Web 2.0, so Duncan is fighting The Man, literally. Scoble and Winer were their own sort of founding fathers in their time, though evidently they are sensitive about their influence waning. Gabe stands in the middle, with his hand ever so slightly guiding the Techmeme tiller, trying to sail to the other side of the teacup. Let us hope he does not succumb to what Sigmund used to call the "primal horde".

The Long-Burning Hack

2008-12-26T18:37:00.003+11:00

I was turned on today to the 2009: Year of the Hacker article by Kevin Kelleher on GigaOm by one of Ben Barren's rants, which itself riffs off a Chris Anderson piece for Wired Blogs, which references a Clay Shirky speech, and on and on in curlicues of hyperextension.

The point is that the Time Of Doom Is Upon Us, meaning a bunch of bored techs with more time on their hands, and you know what they say about idle hands. Good movie, woke us up to the potential of poor old Heath Ledger.

Anyway, my thoughts on the matter are coloured by my own experiences, being as they are ahead of the curve in that the recession came for me many years ago, hasn't let up, and has taught me how to burn slowly. All that I'll see of the next recession is lower petrol prices and less parties to wish I'd gone to (or maybe more?).

Tinfinger has been and gone, now mouldering in some squatter's squalid outhouse. FanFooty, while a solid business, pays the hosting bill and no more in non-football months, thus money's too tight to mention, as the old song went. Various little lurks prop up the cashtrickle to something approaching a lifestream.

The point! Yes, the point. My thoughts are that a certain type of hacker, who was only ever working at a startup or corporate for the paycheck, may end up joining the freeware community in the spirit of ESR and such like, but I think Mr Kelleher is poking his silver Supras down the wrong path. For such hackers, much of the motivation for any work they do of their own time may not be to pad their CVs, or to raise their standing in the biz... but to fuck with their former employers. Be that specifically the company that retrenched them, or some other zaibatsu which personifies all they hate about their formerly safe life, revenge is a dish best served like cooled ramen.

Specifically, these spurned spawns of the spluttering economy will have intimate knowledge of just how vulnerable certain companies' revenue streams are, and will be able to come up with ways to use current and future technologies to divert these rivers of gold into others' pockets, even if not their own.

Such labours of hate will not require venture capital backing. Many of them would be better off without it, leaving them free to bend the law to whatever nefarious purpose they feel necessary to undermine the multinationals whose revenue streams they are targeting.

Most of these ventures will be net losses for the economy, too. Like Google advertising being an order of magnitude cheaper than advertising on mainstream media sites, these vengeful hackers won't care that they're destroying fattened cash cows whose teats the old companies have spent decades sucking. They will rejoice in turning billion-dollar industries into million-earners. Millionaire factories will be squashed into sectors where a handful of people can make a living at a time.

Why will this happen? Because these people have been inside the old companies, and they hate how they work. They hate the bullshit hierarchies, the Peter Principle, the management gridlock. Geeks have always hated suits, and if there's a way they can control their pet industry to the extent that they can do away with whole swathes of suits, then all the better.

What can the suits do to stop it? They can buy the geeks out early, maybe. That's if they don't wake up one morning to realise that like Russian black ice in a Gibson novel, the virus that the geek ex-employee has left inside the building has already expanded and turned the company into mush.

Me at Google Sydney

2008-11-28T15:49:00.005+11:00

Yesterday I spent the day at Google's Sydney office at Darling Park, the guest of the wonderful Mel Ann Chen. I was there to be interviewed by A Current Affair for a story about Google AdSense, with FanFooty being nominated by Google as one of their major publishers in the sport sector. (Just the one photo I'm afraid, they don't allow cameras inside the offices.)

I have heard anecdotally that being featured positively on ACA does wondrous things for your traffic. Here's hoping!

I can has new Web experience

2008-08-19T17:16:00.002+10:00

I find myself skimming more and more through my NetVibes these days. Not that I'm losing interest in 2.0, far from it, but there doesn't seem to be a whole lot new happening. Maybe I just need to freshen up my blog mix. Nevertheless, TechCrunch delivered today with an interview with Ben Huh, who is now making a living out of a rollup of sites that steal 4chan memes.

You can tell who the journo is in this interview... hint, it's not the dude asking the questions and getting major details wrong. Anyway, there were a couple of key things that I took away from this interview, the main one being that it's that truly Internet-native publishers treat the Internet as a medium all of its own. You can have your Gawker-style blog networks that try too hard to be like the New Yorker. You can have your Hulus which walk the tightrope between Hollywood and Guangdong without ever impressing either the studios or the pirates. Ben seems to get that there is an opportunity to create and/or buy unique media properties which advance the medium... and by the by, engender the kind of "cultural phenomenon" he talks about.

I've had some experience with this myself with FanFooty, which has evolved into a completely different direction that where I thought it was going. These days FanFooty is less like a publication and more like performance art. The live-blogging aspect, combined with live user chat and an intricate series of news update techniques complete with iconic flashes of starbursts, hearts, stars, garbage bins, guns and tombstones, has led to my participation during games being a required part of the process. Where I thought initially that the business was going to run itself after the programming work was done, now I can't visualise FanFooty being successful without someone there at the helm stamping their emotional authority over the user experience.

That's one other aspect that I think Icanhascheezburger shares with FanFooty - the essential goodness of the community, which is a function of how the site has been constructed from the get go. Maybe I'm just turning into a maudlin old man, but I think it's sweet how, once the swearing trolls are banned, the genuine footy fans enjoy themselves so much in an environment where they know they're surrounded by like-minded friends. Much as cat lovers band together, sports fans can achieve a camaraderie and jocularity through online chat that makes the experience fun for not only the community, but also the founder. Many's the time I have found myself laughing along with things that the chat have said, and this is one of the most rewarding parts of running the site. It also warms the cockles of the heart when users thank you unexpectedly. :)

Successful dealings with users are far more pleasing to the soul, in my opinion, which is why I'm still puzzled as to why so many entrepreneurs still focus on business-to-business as their main strategy... sure, you might earn more money that way if the cards fall right, but isn't the main reason you became an entrepreneur was that you hated corporate soullessness and you didn't want to have to kiss the arses of men in suits? Communicating directly with the public should be both the most important and the most soul-nourishing part of a Web start-up.

The substantive bits from Steve Gillmor's TechCrunch articles

2008-06-22T19:47:00.003+10:00

Whozat cheeky lot?

2008-05-31T23:12:00.002+10:00

The logo of my recently shelved "people omnibus" startup Tinfinger, drawn by professional illustrator Ray Frenden based on my concept:

The logo of Whozat, people search engine startup based in California headed up by an Italian and an Argentine:

Anyone see the similarity? Yes, the colouring on both sets of lettering is based on skin tones of people from around the world. I don't know how long ago Whozat thought up their logo, since the Wayback Machine is not cooperating, but I'm tipping theirs was done later than October 2005 because their site lists their inception date as 2006.

It's just not cricket.

Some points on live video

2008-05-08T00:25:00.002+10:00

I've been using a goodly number of live video services over the last month or two. They seem to have sprung up like topsy recently, evidently due to innovations made by Adobe with their Flash Media Server 3 and ancillary products, not to mention support by Akamai et al. Those very few of you who remember my Table vs Jetski startup idea will know that I have some interest in this area, and I have a few thoughts about the nascent industry.

I have used Stickam, Yahoo Live, LiveVideo.com, and even an Aussie site which was in painful alpha (someone remind me what the name of it was!) which was populated by lots of screaming Germans. I'm going to concentrate here on the services which allow multiple live video streams on screen at once, including the ability to join the conversation yourself. That knocks out places like Ustream and Seesmic, which are otherwise worthy of discussion but not in this post.

I'm not auditioning for Duncan Riley's job at TechCrunch so this will be somewhat half-arsed. Lets' go with point form.

- Flash has always remained a dark mystery to me, so I would love to know why some services decide to go with four of the smaller "viewer" windows, like LiveVideo and Yahoo Live, whereas Stickam goes with six. What's the upper limit, if any?

- Any developers out there in this space should be following the Watch KATG Live thread on the Keith & The Girl forums. There is some interesting stuff there about KATG's previous video streaming partner, PalTalk, and how paid-up subscribers of PalTalk have had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the Web-based client era, not just due to the financial investment they made in PalTalk accounts but also the technical limitations of the new delivery platform, i.e. Flash, and the move away from an intimate micro-community to a wide open free-for-all.

- It strikes me that the interfaces to all of these applications could do with a dose of modularity. What if a user wants a 3x3 wall of 9 mini-screens? What if a user just wants to view the main screen and maximise the text chat window? What if a publisher wants to show their own video but only accept audio from the crowd, in a call-in environment? Maybe I'm spoiled by NetVibes. These things should be possible, surely? They would be pretty difficult in Flash, I bet, but it will come.

- I suppose you have to recognise that Silverlight is coming round the mountain when she comes, but Flash is dominant in this area. Does it occur to anyone else that this is a tad weird? Why hasn't a startup taken this obvious opportunity to develop a competing solution? Have the days of new proprietary Web client apps gone forever? I remember the days when every week would see the announcement of some new "rich media" downloadable thingumabob for Netscape, complete with its own file format and brand new entry to a standards body. That doesn't seem to happen any more: Flash gets bundled with every browser and that's pretty much it. Good for Adobe, I guess.

- Is there an industry here? I mean, one that allows profits? It hasn't immediately been smothered by the tough love of the RSS/podcasting crowd, which means that it hasn't been infected with the Californian hippy bullshit about it being "all about the community, man". However, is it going to be possible to sell TV-style interstitial commercials into live streaming video? Would the audience wear it? I suspect it has a better chance of happening than with audio podcasting, if only for cultural reasons. It would take a startup with a lot of connections to make it happen, nevertheless. One wonders if anyone other than Google could pull off a video advertising business.

I am a firm believer in live events being an underexploited opportunity for Internet startups. It is what my only successful business so far has been based on. Live events, especially those that go for hours with constantly updating content, deliver a startup huge amounts of page views even if the audience isn't very broad. Live video should be the next huge thing on the Internet. I only hope some of the little guys can get on board before the GEMAYA giants gobble up all the gold.

Steeeeee-rike one

2008-05-02T01:54:00.003+10:00

I coffeed with Ben Barren today in the comfy surrounds of Errol St - or perhaps it is more accurate to say that I became immersed in the Ben Barren Experience. More than anyone else in my travels meeting the best and brightest of the Australian Web 2.0 scene over the past four years, Ben embodies the entrepreneur in my mind: gregarious, inquisitive, disarming, irrepressible... a creative mind so rich with imagination that he can't stop talking for fear of the spigot in his brain drying up. It is exhilarating to talk shop with him.

It struck me, as we swapped war stories of pitched PowerPoint battles across parched McCubbinite business landscapes, that it is a tragedy that the current Australian industry is not structured in such a way that people like Ben and myself, and others like us, can find an easy way to work together towards a common goal. Like the spinifex tussocks that my dad and I (mostly Dad!) used to have to attack year after year on our 20 acres outside Seymour in my childhood, Australian Web startup founders have to grow resilient and spiky to avoid getting consumed by the inexorable hunger of our oligopoly-dominated economy.

Many of us strive individually, feebly watered in various tenuous hierarchies by money men, activated actuaries and impatient investors. While it is true that startup founders need money, founders also need a creative environment in which to flourish. Something Keith Malley of Keith & The Girl said the other day about relationships is pertinent, even in a business sense: when you start dreading the knock on the door by your partner [personal/business/whatever], then you should know that it's not working and you should get out.

Thus we come to the subject of this post: my co-founder Tai Tran and I have decided to dissolve our partnership. This means no more Tinfinger, and it also means that I'll be the sole operator of FanFooty in future (handshake deal, a la Joe Wilson and the Galletly brothers). Yes, Tinfinger has joined the deadpool, become epic fail, et cetera: write its obituary up for your blogs if you care to. I feel confident enough to confront that fact head on, unlike some recent ex-founders, because I can hold my head up high and say that I have already had one success with FanFooty, so a failure doesn't mean I'm worthless. As I've said before, I'm following the Hitwise template of the cash cow followed by the home run play. I guess I didn't hit a home run this time, but I hear they give you three strikes before you're out. ;)

I should also say that I will be proud to have Tinfinger on my CV. It is a fine application in a technical sense: it works, there aren't any major bugs, and it had a rather high degree of difficulty to build. I learnt a lot in building it, and it contains a lot of elements that may prove useful in future efforts, like proprietary spidering scripts. It could even prove useful if someone bought the code off us (email me for inquiries/offers at m0nty dot au at gmail dot com) and put the elbow grease into it that we can't.

I have to admit, though, that I got a number of assumptions on the business/marketing side of the project wrong. The first of these was that the virality of Wikipedia would just "happen" for us too. I'm sure both Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger would tell you that it requires a lot of work from a lot of people to become that viral, and we're just two guys in a house in Geelong. (I'll try not to use that excuse too much.) Our second mistake was that we entered a market in which, apart from the unstoppable juggernaut that is Wikipedia, we were competing with Squidoo, Spock and Mahalo, all of whom have major venture capital backing and roomfuls of employees. The industry, such as it was, evolved over the length of Tinfinger's development time into a fairly blatant Google SERPS spamming subculture, Frankensteined by more cash than we could shoot our popgun at. In particular, this Valleywag comment by Mahalo founder Jason Calacanis rang warning bells in my mind. Jason's back-of-napkin calculations meant that to keep up with his pace of bootstrapping, Tinfinger or any other small startup in this new ego-arbitrage space would have to be even more unscrupulous about middlemanning the barricades of constantly updated content that we didn't own.

And we were just two blokes in Geelong. (Sorry.)

So it's back onto FanFooty, and whatever else the future may hold. I don't really know what is next. I have a few crazy ideas at the back of my head, but they all require knowledge I don't have and resources I can't tap. I'll have to be satisfied with milking the cash cow for now, and looking for the next opportunity to step up to the plate and swing for the fences again. Hopefully next time I'll get a bigger piece of the ball.

Just to say I blogged this month

2008-04-15T20:51:00.002+10:00

Let's keep this short and snappy. I haven't got the personal bandwidth to compose the sort of 1000-word essay that my usual blogging style requires.

I don't visit Techmeme any more, haven't for months and months. I get my news from NetVibes and Twitter. Haven't got the energy to keep up with the melodrama. Important memes have a way of percolating through.

One of those is the mystic rediscovery that AdSense isn't the Alpha and the Omega (linked because of comment #5). Well, maybe it's the Alpha. The Omega, apparently, is becoming your own advertising network. We've at least got past the Alpha stage with FanFooty, having ditched AdSense in favour of a local agency which uses DoubleClick. Still part of the GOOG family, I guess. What would you call this stage... Mu? The cow analogy works, the eatin' is good.

It's interesting that we were headhunted by this agency to replace another company in our space which just graduated to Omega status, leaving a big hole in their inventory. We're still just two blokes in a garage, operationally, while the Omega-bound competitor rents a North Melbourne hothouse with more than a dozen employees.

Tai doesn't like me lifting the skirt like this, but I think no harm done. Now, how long before I blog next time?

Twitter and IRC: meet the twain

2008-02-20T19:42:00.002+11:00

As Richard Giles has already blogged, the Australian Twitterati have been gathering for the past little bit at the #twitter channel on the Freenode IRC network. This caused some interesting discussion on today's edition of the 2Web Crew, starring Richard himself.

Like Richard, I can't see much conceptual difference between IRC and Twitter. Twitter has a 140 character limit, IRC has about a 410 character limit before it inserts linebreaks. Twitter has a gateway to SMS and IM, but there is no insurmountable technical hurdle for anyone who wanted to do either of those for IRC. Similarly, it would be trivial to write an IRC bot to convert links into tinyurl URLs. Twitter has canonical identity, but IRC bots can enforce unique nicks with password-protected logins.

Then you come to the advantages IRC has over Twitter. Twitter is only now catching up on the idea of channels, and it's even stealing the # prefix from IRC. Most importantly, IRC has already encountered and solved the scaling problem many times over, with multiple servers all feeding the same chat space and netsplits handling server failovers.

You could pretty much replicate Twitter in a distributed format by setting up a tightly-securified global network of IRC servers, writing some AJAX/Java/Flash/Silverlight/whatever to pump it through, and then putting a Web front end on it all. If architected correctly, the Web site wouldn't fall over nearly so much as Twitter because the bottleneck would be on the IRC end, which would naturally have many backups. Server outages would be handled as IRC netsplits, which would (hopefully) be invisible to the user. The whole thing could be handled without relational databases given some tricky work with flat text log files.

Does anyone have the smarts these days to do that and make it work? Or would they rather roll their own db and architecture and not have to rely on a clunky 90s-era technology? IRC is like a library of reliable code, IMO. It would be foolish to not at least consider retrofitting it for a new application which is, at its heart, just a redeployment of the original IRC concept with a few more bells and whistles. I wonder if the Dave Winers of this world, who have been agitating for a distributed Twitter alternative, are capable of delivering (or funding) this sort of system.

Time for Aussie 2.0ers to Hitwise up

2008-02-14T17:37:00.004+11:00

Ben Barren broke a blogging silence of three months today with an uncharacteristically lucid mini-essay detailing his thoughts going into the fourth year of Feedcorp, the business he started with consiglieri Michael Corleone but which is now headed by Pete Burley. Ben pledges to concentrate more on Gnoos, something which I have been urging him to do for some time now (perhaps too pushily?). Judging from the numbers he mentions obliquely in his post he seems to be doing okay with Feedcorp's hired goons strategy.

The Australian corner of the industry is doing just fine. We're in our fourth year (first lines of code on 27 October 04) as is Feedcorp, and Cameron Reilly noted that The Podcast Network officially turns 3 today too. TPN is going gangbusters according to all reports. Norg Media is expanding to new cities, Scouta TV is doing deals, Tangler is growing with a new CEO as well, etc etc. We're already running at over 100% year-on-year growth on last year's stellar traffic figures for FanFooty, and with yesterday's launch of a $5,000 fantasy competition (using all our own money) called Lethal League we should have an awesome 2008 where the growth of Tinfinger will be gravy, not our staple diet.

Notwithstanding the recent bad news about Omnidrive, there doesn't seem to be a lot of negativity in the Australian Web 2.0 community. It's all systems go from my perspective. So is the gentle backhander that Ben delivers to his peers warranted?

Knowing how hard it is to do (build a valuable company that creates more dividends individually than a job/freelancing etc or is acquired etc + being able to scale/keep your site up/pay bills/keep investors happy etc) I only feel empathy for the other Aussie startups trying to do it locally, but I wouldn't say I'm too optimistic on the likely 'home runs' with far too many consumer only/google ads/low cost plays, that are still pet projects not scaleable businesses.

This is a longstanding, if cheerful, debate that I've had with Ben: me on the side of sacrificing short-term profitability to spend long hours of drudgery building your own IP, him on the side of getting some B2B moolah while the getting is good from dumbshit oligarchs who need Remora 2.0s to sandblast the barnacles off their rotting underbellies. At this stage I don't doubt his numbers would most likely trump anyone else's in pure turnover terms (save for Atlassian, but they shouldn't really count in this context as they're on another plane already).

When it comes down to it, I don't see any approach as being "wrong" unless you fail, as it appears (from admittedly second-hand hearsay) that Nik Cubrilovic has done, sadly. From the sounds of it Nik just ran out of money, which is a win in my book for the "low cost play". Some business concepts have a greater ceiling than others, but then again the higher the ceiling the greater the potential for a GEMAYA player to lay the smack down, as Google recently did to Topix (and maybe Gnoos as well?) by adding local search to Google News.

I remember sitting down with Ben after a speech he gave last year and discussing the Hitwise model, which is to build a limited-growth business first and then use the solid cashflow to fund the slow-burning development of the "home run" concept. That is what Ben has done with Feedcorp, where his outsourcing work is the Sinewave equivalent and Gnoos is his Hitwise. In my case, FanFooty is the cash cow and Tinfinger is the home run, although FanFooty is obviously on a different level to Feedcorp in terms of revenue. I think this is the most likely strategy for successful Australian Web 2.0 ventures, because the first business not only gives you funding, but also the experience and confidence which are invaluable in making the second, harder concept work.

I look forward to seeing what Ben does with Gnoos in 08, and after launching Lethal League yesterday I will now be getting back to Tinfinger. I've given myself and Tai until October to make a living out of it. Next one to run out of money is a rotten egg! ;)

All your browsers are belong to X-UA-Compatible

2008-01-24T09:06:00.000+11:00

An article this week on the Web design bible A List Apart lets us know the latest plans by Microsoft to embrace and extend the way HTML is rendered in Web browsers. Apparently in consultation with ALA boffins, Microsoft has agreed to implement a new meta declaration in the head section of HTML documents in their forthcoming Internet Explorer 8 release.

Using a simple meta declaration, we can specify the rendering engine we would like IE8 to use. For example, inserting this:
<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=8" />
into the head of a document would make IE8 render the page using the new standards mode. This syntax could be easily expanded to incorporate other browsers as well:
<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=8;FF=3;OtherUA=4" />

This is a great idea for developers, because they get to write once and then never have to edit their code again, no matter what new browsers are released. Never again will a new version of IE or Safari break their lovely site. Unfortunately, it sucks for users, mainly because participating browsers will have to bloat out to humungous sizes because they will have to include the rendering engines of all previous browser versions in order to be compatible with this new system. It also sucks for Mozilla, because part of their marketing message is that Firefox is the cleanest, smallest browser out on the market, and the inevitable bloat will blow that claim out if Firefox implements this system.

Microsoft caused this problem in the first place by not adhering to Web standards in previous versions of IE. Now they are trying to apply another band-aid over the suppurating wound, and they have enlisted a surprisingly self-serving ally in the ALA crowd. I would have thought ALA would be better than that. Developers should focus on developing standards-based code, minimising their use of browser hacks, and lobbying Microsoft to adhere to standards, not to cover their arses.

Flickr CC-BY attribution

2008-01-21T11:32:00.000+11:00

I have fixed a problem on Tinfinger relating to photos uploaded from Flickr which are marked as Creative Commons licensed requiring attribution. As per the Flickr community guidelines, Tinfinger now links to the photo page instead of the source URL. Thanks Stuart Hamilton for putting me on the straight and narrow!

Picks and shovels of the semantic Web want to be free

2008-01-20T07:25:00.000+11:00

A lot of people have been asking me over the past week or so, during the beta launch of Tinfinger, what it is about and why we are doing it at all. At the same time, I have been watching a few strands of conversation across the blogosphere which have crystallised my answer to that question. So here it is.

The first hint came with the news the day before we launched that MetaWeb raised US$42 million in Series B funding, making a total investment of US$57 million and causing some industry incredulity. MetaWeb's Freebase is doing something that I hope to do with Tinfinger: creating a freely available semantic Web database of all the world's information (although with Tinfinger we're sticking to the people vertical).

MetaWeb's business model for their flagship product Freebase, stated as somewhat of a vague afterthought in their FAQ, is to charge large corporate users for access to that database, which is licensed as CC-BY meaning that it's free to use with attribution back to the source. Using CC-BY is sensible for some uses - indeed, Tinfinger will do the same for its data and 150-word profile articles - but to me it seems strange for MetaWeb because the economics are all wrong. It makes perfect sense for Wikipedia to use CC-BY, because although they don't allow money to change hands for the production of any of their content, the currency they operate in is PageRank, and CC-BY is arguably the finest PageRank-building mechanism known to man. If you are wondering why Wikipedia is in the top 10 results for just about every search term in Google, look no further than the CC-BY license, because they get links back from every page on the Web which reprints Wikipedia content, of which there are legion. But what does PageRank mean for MetaWeb and Freebase? Freebase is not a destination site. They have not shown the slightest inclination to build landing pages. They display no knowledge of SEO techniques. CC-BY is useless to them.

It is an old cliche that the people who make money out of gold rushes are those selling the picks and shovels. MetaWeb is endeavouring to be the goldpanning equipment vendor for the semantic Web, which is a respectable goal. But how can you turn a dime if there is a place next door which is giving away dynamite for free? Let us be honest about the origins of Freebase, Tinfinger, Google Base, Twine, Spock et al. All such attempts to build the semantic Web have used as the core of their proprietary/licensed database the freely available (or at least freely scrapeable) databases such as dbpedia, ISBNdb, IMDb, IBDb, ITDb, BASE, Cricinfo, all the way to Project Gutenberg. It is my opinion that the economics of the database industry are such that, eventually, most of the important databases will be made available for free online. After a somewhat moribund period in the 90s, storage hardware has been undergoing some very rapid Moore's-Law-style advancements this decade and it will not be long before we have highly affordable solid state drives which are Internet-ready. Cost will not be an issue. It's probably not really an issue right now anyway, it's just a matter of the politics of shoveling huge data silos like SEC filings out from behind corporate paywalls.

To my mind, on one side you have MetaWeb, LexisNexis, EDGAR Online and the rest of the cabal who are relying on siphoning micropaid profits from licensing of data when the semantic Web takes off. On the other side, you have... the entire Internet. How can the semantic Web take off when Big Companies are standing in its way? The Internet finds a way around. In this case, it finds how to create its own semantic database, which might not be perfectly crafted or 100% reliable, but in the words of Rich Skrenta "the cheap rickety thing wins in the end".

You may still ask, "But isn't that what Wikipedia is for too?" Wikipedia is a fabulous resource for prose text, but in the area of tagging, MediaWiki was not really built from the ground up to handle it to the extent that a fully-fledged semantic Web application would require. Wikipedia's tag system is ad hoc, bootstrapped and too prone to user error.

This is where I hope Tinfinger can help. I didn't talk up our tagging features very much at launch because the tag data in our system now is mostly adapted from Wikipedia and thus not of the greatest quality - as was rightly pointed out already - but I think that's where the eventual power of Tinfinger will lie, once we implement the full system.

I think it's only fitting that a site such as Tinfinger which builds on top of public domain data sources contributes back to the public domain to the extent that economics allow. We will try to publish as much of our structured data as possible in ways that can help you with your own projects, the same way as Wikipedia allows you to add instant content to your Web pages. With attribution, of course. ;)

Geelong Advertiser story on Tinfinger

2008-01-19T08:57:00.000+11:00

Apparently their Web site dude is a TechCrunch reader and he alerted one of their journos to our existence. Who knew!

The picture was very nice, the Addy have some excellent photographers. It's quite a good article, considering I was a but rushed during the interview and didn't get all I wanted to say out of my mouth. I guess I underestimated the tech savvy of our local rag!

An open letter to Andrey Golub, Spock's #1 user

2008-01-17T15:04:00.000+11:00

Andrey Golub, an ~~Italian sysadmin~~ Belarusian business analyst who is apparently the #1 user contributor to Spock, saw fit to engage me in a comment on the TechCrunch story on the Tinfinger launch. I presume he wasn't put up to it by the Spock boys, so I won't go hard, but I feel I need to defend myself and Tinfinger.

to Paul Montgomery

1) a general question- why it wasn’t enough Wikipedia? the project with proven record as a Web Encyclopedia, at least for those known and famous… It wasn’t enough Wikipedia for the NORMAL people, so here has arrived Spock. but nobody had problems I believe with the celebrities’ stories on the Web :)

2) about Spock:
- why did you decide that Spock searches ONLY on Social Networks? (as from your response to “Jason and antje”)
I think it was clear for everyone that Spock checks Web 2.0 for the Web 2.0 people, and of course it looks at the normal Web for the non Web 2.0 people!
so:
a) as far as I know, wikipedia, the world’s largest DB about all known and famous people, have been already processed by Spock- that means Spock already has everyone listed on Wikipedia.

do you wanna say us Tinfinger will beat wikipedia first of all?

- you say this new Who’s Who can search the Blogs and so on- well, Spock can search everything that’s on the Web. If Google “knows something”- so also Spock will :)

do you wanna say us Tinfinger will beat Google after it beats Wikipedia?

hm… I have a doubt sincerely. About the mission first of all- it was probably enough Wikipedia for us + it was really needed to add the Web 2.0 part that has been done by Spock…

Well, good luck however!
Kind Regards,
Andrey Golub- find me on Spock
http://www.spock.com/Andrey-Golub

Okay Andrey, I sense that English is not your first language so I hope I understand your arguments correctly. I'll take your points in turn.

1. Why start Tinfinger when Wikipedia exists? You might as well ask why anyone would start any sort of publishing business. You might as well ask why start Spock when Google exists?! Just because there is a page about someone or something on Wikipedia doesn't mean it's the best possible page that anyone can write about that subject. In fact, many pages about people on Wikipedia are incomplete, inaccurate, stale or of poor general quality. I think it is possible to create an alternative which focuses more on quality, but still retains that openness for anyone to contribute. Plus, Wikipedia restricts itself to neutral encylopaedic articles, whereas Tinfinger will host many types of opinion articles, which makes the profile pages dynamic and worth visiting more than once over time.

2. I'm sure you know a lot more about Spock's systems than I do so I apologise for not acknowledging that Spock also has a general Web crawl. I read the other day that Spock has over 3 billion people data records. I didn't know that many people were on the Web... are there? ;)

2a. Okay, so Spock has incorporated Wikipedia data, as Tinfinger has. However, we have not and will not allow any Wikipedia articles to appear on our pages - we only used the names and some of the tags. I note that Spock includes the full Wikipedia articles about people on their relevant pages. That surprises me, because as I am sure the Spock boys know, that really kills a page's ranking in Google, because they mark PageRank down sharply for duplicated content. That leads me to believe that Spock doesn't care at all about ranking highly in Google - understandably so if the idea is to compete with Google - which leads to the question: how does Spock expect to grow traffic?

As for Tinfinger "beating" Wikipedia, yes, I would like for Tinfinger to eventually start beating Wikipedia in Google rankings for certain keywords, specifically names, and thus start beating them in traffic to those kinds of pages. It's a long-term goal of ours, but I think it's achievable if we concentrate on quality.

On Tinfinger beating Google: no. That's not our strategy at all, we say up front that we are not a search engine. Tinfinger is a human omnibus, a collection of articles from everywhere. People will find out about those articles through search engines like Google, and whatever comes after Google. We are a firm Google partner.

Finally, on the subject of the relative power of our search functions, I freely admit that our news and blog search is nowhere near as comprehensive and powerful as Spock's sounds like, from your words. However, neither is Techmeme's, and Gabe Rivera does alright with Techmeme. Our news and blog search powers 650 Techmeme-like headline pages, and that's all we need it for: a specialised product for a specialised use.

I wish you and the Spock boys luck in your efforts, Andrey. I appreciate your fervour in advancing the Spock bandwagon. I only hope that our users can become as passionate about Tinfinger.

Media coverage of Tinfinger beta launch

2008-01-15T04:54:00.000+11:00

First off, the ones I did interviews for:

TechCrunch: Tinfinger: A User Generated Who’s Who
iTWire: Putting the (Tin)finger on the famous
A podcast with myself, co-founder Tai Tran and Cameron Reilly: G’Day World #309 - Tinfinger

And the blogs which were kind enough to write about us:

India PR Blog: Looking for advocates for your campaigns; Tinfinger comes to the rescue
Phil Bradley: Tinfinger (a review, focusing on the tag content and how it doesn't look perfectly professional)
Geekets: TinFinger, el quien es quien de internet (in Spanish... hope it's positive!)
ceslava.com/blog: Tinfinger | La Wiki social de los famosos (Spanish)
Depth Reporting: Tinfinger famous people search
LagrangePoint - Brad Howarth: Aussie web 2.0: Tangler, Tinfinger and WasabiTV update
web2null: Tinfinger (German)
EKIVE: My Faves for Monday, January 14, 2008
Squash (Phil Sim): Tinfinger now in the wild
Socialmedia.jp: Tinfinger (Japanese)
Donatello Arts: Tinfinger (Portuguese)
KillerStartups - Tinfinger.com - Find Your Favorite Famous Person
Inspiratie 2.0: Tinfinger.com - op zoek naar beroemde personen (Dutch)
SassaFrassin: Who’s Who Goes Wiki
Simply Free 4 You: Another free resource, if you like Famous People
Beertjes: Thinfinger
Voofox Blog: 「公眾回憶」：最適合做成Web 2.0的皇牌素材？ (Japanese)

Tinfinger beta starts today

2008-01-15T03:54:00.000+11:00

Today marks the beta launch of Tinfinger, after two years of off and on development by myself and Tai Tran. It's a very exciting day, if a bit sleepy because we timed it for 9am Californian time, so it's 4am local time here in Geelong! The launch press release:

STARTS

Tinfinger changes the rules of Web creation

Human omnibus launches with user-debt strategy breaking new ground between Wikipedia and Squidoo/Mahalo/Knol

(Geelong, Australia, 15 January 2008) -- Fans of famous people will have a new place to share their fandom with today's beta launch of Tinfinger.com, a human omnibus. The site combines user-authored encyclopaedic profile pages of famous people with a news and blog search engine based around mentions of those peoples' names, which are aggregated into frequently-updated front pages for 650 categories. Tinfinger is intended by its two Australian co-founders, Paul Montgomery and Tai Tran, to become the primary resource for information about famous people on the Web.

"Tinfinger will be to the Who's Who what Wikipedia was to the Encyclopaedia Britannica," said Montgomery. "The Web is ready to move beyond the hyperlink as the only way to cluster and rank Web content, and we're going to try using names instead."

Tinfinger has not taken funding, which led Paul and Tai to devise a new business model: going into debt to its users. Contributions to Tinfinger will be paid for not with cash but with Google AdSense impressions (AIs), so that Google pays Tinfinger users for ads that Google puts on the Tinfinger site. It is expected that the rate of page production and AI payments will outstrip ad inventory at first as traffic to the site builds gradually, so that Tinfinger will start with a debt owed to its users, payable out of its future page views. More on the AI system below.

"This is an innovative business model built on necessity. We hope those who choose to participate develop a sense of ownership not only over their own contributions, but over Tinfinger as a partner in an ongoing contract," said Montgomery. "There are plenty of people out there who would like to meet other fans of their favourite people, and we hope to create a way for them to share their passions."

FEATURE BREAKDOWN

1. A database of famous people - famous meaning that they are mentioned in news or blogs related to a newsworthy issue - which classifies people both via a top-down category structure and a flat tag structure. Tags on Tinfinger will be expressible as RDF triples (subject-predicate-object, as opposed to subject-object). At beta launch time, existing people and their tags are not editable by users, but registered users can submit new people.

2. Profile pages about famous people, featuring articles and pictures submitted by users using WYSIWYG content authoring software. A collaboratively-authored profile article of around 150 words for each person, similar in function to a stub profile on Wikipedia, will be released by Tinfinger under the Creative Commons license. Each profile page can also include many other types of copyrighted single-author articles: biography, review, interview, encounter, comparison, praise, criticism, etc.

3. Clustered news aggregation with "front pages" for 650 categories, with a design familiar to readers of Google News, Topix or Techmeme. Tinfinger operates its own news and blog search engines, and snippets from these sources are collated into clusters based on mentions of each famous person's name. Tinfinger does not use links or semantic connections to cluster; just names, using a publicly available algorithm called tinscore. Higher-level category news pages include people from lower level categories, so that for instance the Africa category contains stories about people from all African countries, and the Internet category contains stories about people from Search Engines, Web 2.0, Web Advertising, Voice Over IP, Broadband and so on. Users can submit new sites, and the list of sites indexed for each category is available as an OPML reading list. The news and blog searches (as well as articles and pictures) each have their own RSS feeds and also can be published to other sites using a widget.

4. Social networking software from PeopleAggregator to enable user interaction and feedback. There are Tinfinger-controlled groups for each category, and users can create their own groups.

AI SYSTEM DETAILS

In the AI system, users will be rewarded for writing articles by their AdSense publisher IDs being put on Tinfinger pages. This is not a new thing by itself, but existing systems involve giving users a percentage of page impressions next to their articles. Tinfinger will debit the user's account with a fixed number of AIs for each article, which will then be gradually paid out of traffic on Tinfinger pages - not next to their articles, but from general site ad inventory. (The category headline and profile pages will be reserved for Tinfinger.) The starting rate for articles will be 10,000 AI. It is unknown what CPM rates that ads on Tinfinger pages will attract, but Tinfinger is aiming for at least US$1 CPM, implying a base payment per article of US$10. The AI figure each article actually earns will be highly changeable based on various quality and editorial factors, which are determined by Tinfinger based on published rules, and can also be boosted if Tinfinger places temporary "bounties" on articles about particular types of people. This approach will likely lead to a significant AI debt which Tinfinger will owe for many months. That will be part of our partnership with users.

FURTHER INFORMATION

- The co-founders and only employees are Paul Montgomery, a former technology journalist, and Tai Tran, a former corporate programmer. Both live in the Australian city of Geelong, which is 100km southwest of Melbourne. Paul blogs at http://tinfinger.blogspot.com and has blogged quietly about many Tinfinger features already.
- Development of Tinfinger began more than two years ago.
- Tinfinger has taken no funding, and is not currently in the market for funding. It will effectively be funded through debt owed to its users.
- To discourage spam, the social network portion and external links from profile pages will be labelled with nofollow.
- Tinfinger will consume OpenID logins.
- Database figures at launch: 404,000 people, 395,000 snippets, 2,700 pictures, 612,000 tags, 820 sites... 10 articles. Most people records were adapted from dbpedia and IMDb; most tags were from dbpedia. The people database is lumpy, with some categories containing very few people as yet.
- Tinfinger's mascot is a robot called Ned, who bears a worrying resemblance to Sidney Nolan paintings of the Australian bushranger Ned Kelly.
- The Tinfinger news algorithm, called tinscore, is detailed at http://tinfinger.blogspot.com/2005/12/tinscore-and-other-ways-to-clone.html

EXAMPLE PAGES

http://www.tinfinger.com/profile/Paul-Montgomery
http://www.tinfinger.com/headlines/Web-2.0
http://www.tinfinger.com/news/human/Britney-Spears
http://www.tinfinger.com/article/nation/Australia
http://www.tinfinger.com/picture/tag/Nobel-Prize
What to do at Tinfinger

ENDS

Links to media coverage
TechCrunch: Tinfinger: A User Generated Who’s Who

Tinfinger beta launch date

2008-01-03T01:07:00.000+11:00

AEDT: Tuesday 15 January, 4am.
US PST: Monday 14 January, 9am.

Stephen Conroy storms into censorship teacup

2007-12-31T19:23:00.000+11:00

If there was any question about whether the incoming Labor government in Australia - in the form of Stephen Conroy, the new minister for geeks - had any more clue about IT than the last lot, it has just been answered with the news of the latest Australian Internet censorship hoo-hah. Last time this issue was raised in .au several years ago there were demonstrations in the streets, much uproar, weeks of press coverage... and when we got a look at it in action once the bureaucrats had actually implemented it, we realised that it was pretty much like a DMCA takedown system but just for child porn, and everyone forgot about it as a bad joke.

The plan announced by Conroy goes further, according to the ABC, by involving Internet service providers in their plan to provide "clean" feeds at the ISP level. Notable by their absence from the announcement, however, was any appearances by representatives from the Australian ISP industry. To my mind, this makes this pretty much stillborn regardless of the substance of the proposals. If you haven't got the Internet Industry Association rep standing next to you when making such an announcement, you haven't got the support of the industry, and you're just pissing in the wind.

The IIA did release an interesting document just before Christmas, however, entitled New Rules for Restricting Access to 18+ Content and Commercial MA15+ Internet, Mobile or Fixed Phone. The ABC article is short on detail, but I wonder if today's falderol is just a public airing of this minor regulatory change. These changes were "developed following extensive consultation with carriage service providers, industry associations, content service providers from across a range of media, private individuals, privacy advocacy organisations, consumer organisations and regulatory bodies"... but by the previous Liberal government, not Conroy and the ALP, which would make it rather disingenuous of him!

If this is the content of the hot air being expelled today by Conroy, there are enough holes to suggest that this is going to be another damp squib, but there is also enough FUD for newspaper journalists who have dreams of transferring to the general news desk to big-note themselves by beating the story up into another maelstrom of uninformed, divisive rabble-rousing. I hope the Australian industry will be once bitten, twice shy.

An open letter to Marc Canter re OpenID

2007-12-27T21:38:00.000+11:00

Dear Marc Canter,

G'day mate... hey, wake up! Crikey, you fall asleep at the slightest chance. Okay, I want to ask you about OpenID: specifically why someone like me, who is building a Web site which incorporates a turnkey social networking app (which happens to be yours, but that's not the crux of it), should enable users to log in to my system using OpenID. I know you're one of the champions of OpenID, so perhaps you can address some issues I still haven't had answered to my satisfaction yet.

My concerns are more fully expressed on episode #2 of the On The Pod podcast with Duncan Riley, with the OpenID stuff starting about 13 minutes in and going for seven or eight minutes. I'll list the concerns raised in order:

Big social networks aren't leading adoption. Kevin Rose promised in February to allow OpenID logins by the end of the year... wassup? Chris Messina puts NetVibes, Last.fm, PBWiki, MyBlogLog, Technorati and Wikipedia on his shitlist for breaking similar promises. This was Duncan's point, but I'm not so fussed about it from my own POV. I don't mind being a bleeding edge user of open technologies... if I was worried about that I wouldn't be integrating PeepAgg! :) However, I'm sure it worries a lot of other people in my position, so I guess it's part of the problem.

If big networks do finally get on board, small networks could be swamped by their users. As I said in the podcast: why would I want Facebook users (or users from AOL, one of the few existing implementors) to come in to my system and ruin the community I have set up with my own network of Tinfinger-specific users, when I am not going to get any benefit from them from a customer relationship management point of view? Building a distinct community is one of the fundamental tasks of starting a new social network. If everyone who is on Tinfinger is also on Twitter, and uses the same login, isn't it fairly difficult to forge a new identity for the collective userbase?

It's hard to build a business around a database of users, as most publishers do traditionally, when you don't own a distinct user database. I come from a niche magazine publishing background, where a lot of effort is put into building and maintaining a highly targeted user base, periodically culled to protect quality of readership so that advertisers can be delivered the best audience of potential buyers for their products. I understand that this mode of thinking has to be modified somewhat for the online environment, but it works bloody well for magazines, so I would need to hear a compelling argument as to why it can't be redeployed in some form for Web sites, particularly ones targeting a specific niche. OpenID seems to me to undermine that whole business plan.

So, there it is Marc. I've given you a little prior warning on this one and you said you'd get back to me in a day or so. I look forward to your reply.

Cheers,
Monty.

Epic Knolz

2007-12-14T17:19:00.000+11:00

You don't need me to tell you what Google Knol is. Here's why it will fail, according to what we have been told about it so far.

It's Wikipedia minus organised human oversight... which means it's just Blogger with a MediaWiki theme. You don't see Blogger sites dominating SERPs - not any more, anyway.
If claiming a Knol page is first-in-best-dressed, on its official opening there will be a hugely distasteful DNS-style land grab, mostly won by spammers.
Knol processes which are likely to fail without firmly directed human oversight: metapages like categories; page ownership; copyright violations; verbal abuse; racial content; anything else normally handled by Wikipedia's ArbCom.
Udi Manber says "The key idea behind the knol project is to highlight authors." Wrong approach. Wikipedia is all about the editors, truth be told. If you remove editors and leave it up to the authors, the project lacks focus.
Squidoo and Mahalo welcome spammers and SEO agents because they work cheap, but try to keep them on short leashes. Knol will be just as accommodating to these enemies of quality, but it does not sound like Google will provide the whip hand necessary to keep their excesses in check.

As it stands, if Knol succeeds, it will hurt Google. They have not explained why it is necessary to recreate Wikipedia. Someone other than Udi Manber needs to give valid reasons as to why Knol is at all needed, and why it is not a blatant attack on existing knowledge aggregators.

Crazy Uncle Dave vs striking writers

2007-12-01T15:44:00.000+11:00

Dave Winer is obviously trolling in his piece today entitled The Hollywood writer's strike, but what the hell, it's a slow Saturday arvo and I don't feel like seeing Beowulf right now.

Dave takes the position that if he can make money without charging for his creative works, then no one should demand to be paid for being creative, at least where their content is delivered over the Internet. He claims that chances to make money off online content do not exist, which is completely ridiculous. One billion chances from Viacom's suit against YouTube alone, Dave. I see a lot of employers of striking writers on comScore's video traffic rankings. There must be money to be made there somewhere.

Dave invalidates his own argument by pointing to the fact that he got angry in the 90s about how as he claims, "creative work won't be directly paid for in the future". Let me see, what has changed since the mid-90s? Oh yes, back in the mid-90s Dave had created an intellectual asset (Frontier) and was still in the midst of trying to make it succeed. He felt the financial pressures of running a business, of paying wages, of setting himself up for the future. He is now independently wealthy from selling off his previous creative works, and is semi-retired. He has the luxury of treating his creative work as charity that he donates to the world. He no longer has to strive to succeed.

Dave, there are those of us who are not rich, who still have to work to earn a living. Please don't insult us by telling us that we should work for free, or accept anything less than an honest day's pay for an honest day's work.

The system is not going to "break", as Dave predicts. The system is capitalism, that's not going to get broken. Capitalism adapts. Capitalism wins. Individual workers lose when they don't stand up for their rights, which is why the writers' strike should be supported. Unless you're on the side of the executives.

Actually, I think I will go and see Beowulf. It is a fine example of technology and creativity being merged together, so that left-brain and right-brain types can work on the same project, and both get fairly compensated.