Today was the big day we finally put out a 12 page special report built around the idea that its 10 years since internet companies like Amazon, eBay and MSN started, and 10 years since Netscape’s IPO brought internet stocks into the public domain.

Excuse the shameless plug, but in addition to the joy of publishing a package of stories that’s been hanging over my/our head since early July, it was fun to get some air time on radio to talk about it.

Chris Smith, afternoon announcer at 2GB invited me on to his show today to talk about the Internet (thanks Chris!). There was a great buzz in their studios at Pyrmont, just west of Sydney’s central business district. They were really excited about the package, and of course wanted to dive into the consumer end of the discussion.

But one of the things that continually amazes me, after spending so much time writing for IT trade press, is the layers of complexity and jargon we live with every day. Get on radio, and you’ve got to boil it down into very clear, uncomplicated terms. "Linda from Camden" called in at the end of the show with a very basic complaint - she finds the web too hard to navigate, and can’t find what she’s looking for on the search engines. It was amusing at first, but she’s got a good point that mapped very well against one of the themes in the package today.

Search engine companies are really only just getting moving with the search business. We’ve been fooled into thinking that just because Google has a nice clean homepage that the web is simple. In fact, it is hard to find content. The only way I get around many search problems is using a few tricks, like appending ".au" to my searches, or using keywords I know will feature highly in search results. Try explaining all that to Linda from Camden in 5 seconds. We’ve come a long way on the Internet, but from your average consumer’s perspective, it’s still the stuff of magic and wonder.

Here’s the (2.4MB) file Download 2gb_mark_jones_231.08.05.wma , supplied to the AFR by Media Monitors.

Oh yeah, and the irony of writing about Web 2.0 for print and talking about it today on "old media" like radio didn’t escape me. ; )

I’m up to my eyeballs in content for a special report we’re producing for the Fin on Tuesday (make sure you go buy a copy!).

Anyway, I just came across this article in Red Herring It’s from back in April, but it does a great job of articulating where we are as a country and technology industry in comparison to our friends over the other side of the Pacific Ocean.

Australia’s economy is booming, its IPO market is surging, and there has never been more money available for private equity. Things look good—unless you’re in early-stage IT or biotech.

While the United States is shaking off its post-boom wounds and carefully heading back to early-stage investment, Australia is a case study in caution, clinging to latter-stage investments and corporate buyouts. Yet new Silicon Valley friends may help to convince early-stage investors to enter the market.

Nothing stirs the emotions in the technology community quite like Microsoft when it comes to so-called open discussions about how it should develop certain technologies.

In the case of RSS (Really Simple Syndication), Microsoft is now looking to integrate it into the forthcoming version of IE. But in reading this InfoWorld article by former CRN US journo Elizabeth Montalbano, reading between the lines you can almost hear Microsoft wrestling with its conscience.

To paraphrase and put words in Microsoft’s mouth: "RSS is great, but the trouble is we didn’t invent it. It was developed by Dave Winer and Netscape, a company we’ve all but wiped off the Internet. It’s a little distasteful. So internet users, can you help us find a way to rename this important syndication technology? We just don’t think you poor people will understand what "RSS" means. Oh, now in renaming this technology, we don’t want you to think this means we will change its technical specs. We’ll just "embrace and extend" it when you’re not looking, so that in the future there will be this more advanced version of RSS that will be credited to Microsoft."

PodShow, a company started by the so-called "podfather" Adam Curry, has scored an impressive US$8.85 million from some big US VC industry types who also funded little companies like Google. News reported by PE Week and CBS.

It’s obviously early days in terms of understanding exactly how the podcast business model will evolve. But in case you’ve missed the significance, this is the first major VC funding of a podcasting company. Here’s to the innovators.

Crazy Johns salesman [calling to upsell my wife on our joint mobile phone package]: "Can I speak to [my wife] please?"

Me: "No. One of your salespeople just called me an hour ago. I gave her my wife’s mobile number even though we are your customers."

Crazy Johns salesman: "Ok."

Me [agitated and on news deadline]: "Can I just say, your CRM system sucks. You have called me four times over the last two months about this. I’ve already sorted out my package."

Crazy Johns salesman: "I’m sorry about that. I’ll make a note here not to call you again."

Me [already thinking about how to end my contract]: click

Where I come from, eliciting this kind of response from Google (or any large company) is cause for a few high-fives in the office.

Given that CNet and Google compete for the same ad dollar, I wonder whether Google’s hoping the decision will have a financial impact since negotiated scoops will be hard/impossible to get and CNet’s traffic will suffer.

This story would be funny, if it wasn’t so bewilderingly wrong in its approach. In attempting to understand and capitalise on the blogosphere, Factiva believes conversations are something you can analyze, dissect and control.

The message from them to CEOs: Markets are not conversations, conversations are markets! Ah, no, sorry guys. How about you participate in the conversation and ask people to tell you in person what they think?

Clips from press release that crossed my desk today, emphasis mine:

Sydney (August 5, 2005) – Factiva, a Dow Jones and Reuters Company, today announced the availability of Factiva Insight: Reputation Intelligence, a powerful new tool that for the first time empowers executives to monitor known issues and discover emerging opportunities and threats from across the mainstream media, radio and television transcripts and consumer-generated content, including blogs and message boards, in one solution. It also enables executives to create effective reputation and brand management strategies that tie to business objectives and drive competitive advantage.

"There are millions of blogs and message boards worldwide and any one of them can affect your organisation or brand. To fully manage corporate reputation, companies need to pay close attention to what is being said not only in the media but in blogs, message boards and online media too," said Alan Scott, chief marketing officer, Factiva. "The sheer volume of information makes it impossible to read and analyse its impact on your business - until now. Factiva Insight: Reputation Intelligence provides the sophisticated tools to sift though millions of pages of information, and visualise potential threats as well as hard to spot opportunities. It all adds up to tremendous competitive advantage."

…

Recognising the crucial needs of today’s corporate executives, the tool provides communicators, CEOs and brand managers with compelling evidence of both the effectiveness of their strategies on their corporate reputation as well as unseen threats to their reputation.  This information can be analysed in conjunction with share price, sales revenues, and other internal data, including lead generation and customer calls, as a means of measuring media impact on the company’s key performance indicators.

Travel does strange things to your mind. At once you’re in Stanford listening to the IT industry’s leading lights espouse the doctrine of the internet age: The individual rules supreme and all content must subsequently be segmented and Long Tailed up the wazoo.

And the alumni of Stanford University startups together with their venture capital partners in business rightly perceive that we have entered an age where it’s only free media content on demand that will satisfy the masses.

Fast forward two weeks, and I’ve been too busy talking, listening, reading, organising and networking to blog, much less digest what all that means for the Australian media. Off a plane and bleary-eyed, I’m back on the job behind the firewall and filtering out bad PR pitches to my heart’s content. But the echoes of American conversations are still fresh in the mind.

I’ve heard a lot of talk about the value of eyeballs on web sites. It’s one of those dot-com themes that’s back with a vengance. So to is the "build it and they will come" ethos to building businesses. It’s the stuff that dreams, and hopefully business, is made of. But will this time be any different?

Reconciling the web and the print publication value proposition feels like one of those intractable arguments. Both sides violently disagree, and so I start thinking that perhaps we’re arguing about the wrong thing. Rather than look at differences, look at the parallels. You don’t get good newspapers without a very clear sense of mission and purpose. That means some form of gatekeeper model must remain, otherwise you dilute focus and readers get confused, if not bored. Ironically almost every niche online business from blogs to podcasts and portals employs some form of gatekeeper function. By that I mean target audience, set of shared beliefs and so on. They just move the gatekeeper from the traditional editor role to reader community, who now become active rather than passive participants.

So it’s interesting to think about what the future publishing business will look like in the mass niche world. Speaking of which, this Fortune piece is worth a read. I suspect companies like Yahoo and Google are reinventing the media business simply to satisfy the needs of marketers who want their customers more neatly segmented on the web. And speaking as a journalist, satisfying marketers as a primarly goal is at best short-term thinking, and at worst a betrayal of one of publishing’s core tenants.