May 30th, 2008 by mhjones

When US tech entrepreneur Jason Calacanis flew into Sydney for CeBIT this month, I joined the queue of Aussie journalists who wanted to meet the man who sold a blogging company to AOL for US$25 million (yes, we’d ALL like to do that…).

Here’s the result of our chat - part 1 and part 2 - on the new-look, big-screen tv.afr.com that my colleague at Fairfax Business Media, Marc Tewksbury, has been working on for months (btw, nice work Marc!). You can also watch it over at misaustralia.com.

Tagged: MISaustralia.com, Social media, Tech news, The Australian Financial Review, Weblogs
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May 23rd, 2008 by mhjones

Facebook CEO Marc Zuckerberg has stressed his desire to keep the company an independent operation.

“You can tell, from our history and what we’ve done, that we really wanted to keep the company independent, by focusing on building and focusing on the long-term,” Zuckerberg told Reuters while in Japan to launch a Japanese language version of Facebook.

Well, he’s right in one sense. You might recall his famous US$1B Yahoo! snub that made the cover of Fast Company.

But really, what else was he going to say? Microsoft is already an investor in the business and he doesn’t want to upset the facebook community (again) by appearing to blatantly chasing the dollar.

I got thinking about this because of a conversation I had with Jason Calacanis this week. He was in Sydney to attend and speak at CeBIT, and I recorded a video interview with him for misaustralia.com (stay tuned for that).

And we got talking about social media business models, as you do with someone like Jason. His point was that the only real way to make big money from social networking is to sell it to a bigger internet player. There’s little money to be made from the ads wrapped around social media - which is what free email services like Yahoo! Mail and Gmail are. You need to take them and dump them into a larger bucket where you can charge for different, higher value services, Jason said.

I don’t completely agree with his assessment because Yahoo! Mail is one of the biggest traffic generators among Yahoo!’s web properties. There has to be a very nice income stream from associated traffic on that site alone.

But yet there is clearly merit in the sell-out idea from Mr Zuckerberg’s selfish perspective. And Jason would know, he made about US$25million from selling Weblogs, Inc. to AOL.

Tagged: Random musings, Social media, Tech news
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May 18th, 2008 by mhjones

Hey everyone, have you heard of weblin? I came across the service over at mashable and I’ve been playing around with it over the weekend.

No idea what I’m talking about? Think Second Life avatars bust out of the portal and start visiting the real web. Technically speaking, you download a small piece of software, create an avatar which follows you around the web on sites that support weblin, and you chat with people. You can even set your status, or presence, in the same fashion as IM & Skype.

The concept is bizzare, but at the same time makes sense as a logical evolution of what many now think of as the “live web.” At any given moment in time there have to be other people looking at the same web page as you - particularly when you’re on popular blogs, news sites, Google etc. So why not talk about what you’re all looking at? Gives new contextual meaning to the well-worn phrase “social media is all about conversations.”

But so far I’ve only seen one little Aussie flag next to a bunch of weblin avatars that popped up and started walking around at the bottom of the screen while I was using Gmail. (Which, btw, is a really bizzare experience. You’re reading email and there’s all these avatars on your screen. I’m presuming they can’t read my mail… ???)

Anyway, I tried to talk to the Aussie avatar but he disappeared before reading my IM chat. So, I’d like to know if anyone in Australia using weblin? What do you think about it? If not, visit weblin.com, get an avatar and look me up. I’m going by the name of “Ozman.”

Tagged: Social media
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May 14th, 2008 by mhjones

Media and tech industry veteran Mark Hollands is the new PANPA chief executive. SMH story here.

For those unfamiliar with PANPA, it’s the Pacific Area Newspaper Publishers’ Association - think of any newspaper in the country and there’s a very good chance it’s a PANPA member.

Mark is of course well known for his roles at News Ltd., Gartner and Dow Jones. But of course, we all know the one that made him most famous was regular appearances on The Scoop. Right? Heh.

One of the biggest challenges facing Mark, and PANPA, is the Big Story in the media business - navigating a way through the disruption caused by a boom in online media spending.

But Mark’s seen the media business from just about every angle so he’s an inspired choice. And I’m not just saying that cos we’re mates either :).

Tagged: Aussie media
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May 13th, 2008 by mhjones

South Park on the real impact of the Internet…

Tagged: Random musings
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May 12th, 2008 by mhjones

So I was half-watching the 7.30 Report tonight. Health Minister Nicola Roxon found herself responding to Kerry O’Brien’s taunts about the Government’s spate of pre-budget leaks.

Kerry was rightly suggesting that the Government was being too blatant in it’s time-honoured strategy of strategically leaking news to the media in order to get the electorate on side. His question was code for “you guys don’t seem to be playing the media game very well.” That is, we’re all supposed to pretend these leaks are real leaks and not tools to manipulate the masses.

Roxon responds (to the best of my memory): “Media management is like sausage making. You don’t really want to know what goes on behind the scenes.”

Funniest thing I’ve heard on current affairs TV for a long time.

Tagged: Aussie media
Comments: 3 Comments »