http://www.odeo.com/channels/103179-Carsonified-%C2%BB-Blog no Carsonified's blog for web designers, developers and entrepreneurs Carsonified's blog for web designers, developers and entrepreneurs Carsonified's blog for web designers, developers and entrepreneurs en 40 Mon, 12 Oct 2009 05:31:08 -0700 Mon, 12 Oct 2009 05:31:08 -0700 http://www.odeo.com/episodes/25272260-Now-is-the-Time-to-Cash-in-on-Your-Passion-by-Gary-Vaynerchuk Gary Vaynerchuk delivered this passionate and powerful speech at FOWA London 09 and it rocked the house. If you need a bit of inspiration (and a slight kick in the ass) don’t miss this one. Warning: Strong language You can also listen to just the audio here or subscribe to the audio podcast of all the talks. Just announced: Gary will be speaking at FOWA Miami 2010. There are only three Super Early Bird passes left (save 29%). Hope to see you there! Gary Vaynerchuk delivered this passionate and powerful speech at FOWA London 09 and it rocked the house. If you need a bit of inspiration (and a slight kick in the ass) don’t miss this one. Warning: Strong language You can also listen to just the audio here or subscribe to the audio podcast of all the talks. Just announced: Gary will be speaking at FOWA Miami 2010. There are only three Super Early Bird passes left (save 29%). Hope to see you there! Gary Vaynerchuk delivered this passionate and powerful speech at FOWA London 09 and it rocked the house. If you need a bit of inspiration (and a slight kick in the ass) don’t miss this one. Warning: Strong language You can also listen to just the audio here or subscribe to the audio podcast of all the talks. Just announced: Gary will be speaking at FOWA Miami 2010. There are only three Super Early Bird passes left (save 29%). Hope to see you there! tag:odeo.com,2009-10-12,25272260 Mon, 12 Oct 2009 05:31:08 -0700 no Carsonified » Blog Web Apps, marketing, fowa-london-09, Work Smarter http://www.odeo.com/episodes/25252745-Start-up-Metrics-that-Matter Dave McClure gave a killer talk at FOWA London that gave some great advice for web start-ups. If that’s you, make sure not to miss this talk. You can also view the slides or download the audio. Enjoy! Also, we’ve just launched FOWA Miami! There are only 7 early bird tickets left (after just one day on sale), so they’re going to go quick. The Video The slides The Audio You can download the complete audio from the talk here or subscribe to the podcast of all the audio. Dave McClure gave a killer talk at FOWA London that gave some great advice for web start-ups. If that’s you, make sure not to miss this talk. You can also view the slides or download the audio. Enjoy! Also, we’ve just launched FOWA Miami! There are only 7 early bird tickets left (after just one day on sale), so they’re going to go quick. The Video The slides The Audio You can download the complete audio from the talk here or subscribe to the podcast of all the audio. Dave McClure gave a killer talk at FOWA London that gave some great advice for web start-ups. If that’s you, make sure not to miss this talk. You can also view the slides or download the audio. Enjoy! Also, we’ve just launched FOWA Miami! There are only 7 early bird tickets left (after just one day on sale), so they’re going to go quick. The Video The slides The Audio You can download the complete audio from the talk here or subscribe to the podcast of all the audio. tag:odeo.com,2009-10-08,25252745 Thu, 08 Oct 2009 01:45:26 -0700 no Carsonified » Blog Web Apps, fowa-london-09 http://www.odeo.com/episodes/25247047-9-Ways-to-Take-Your-Site-from-One-to-One-Million-Users In this video from The Future of Web Apps London (FOWA), Kevin Rose, founder of Digg, WeFollow and Revision3, shares 9 things he did to increase his users to 1,000,000 and beyond. Here’s a quick bullet-point summary. You can watch the video, view the presentation slides or download the audio. Editor’s Note: We’re bringing The Future of Web Apps to Miami on Feb 22-24th 2010. Speakers include: Alex Payne (Twitter), Aaron Patzer (Mint.com), John Resig (jQuery), Steve Huffman (Reddit) and more. Mega Early Bird tickets go on sale on Wednesday and they’ll sell out immediately (only 20 tickets at $200, which is 56% off). #1. Ego Ask yourself: Does this feature increase the users self-worth or stoke the ego? If a user is contributing to my system, what emotional rewards do they walk away with? What (visible) rewards will they receive? #2. Simplicity Stop over building features Pick 2-3 things to focus on Ask yourself: Is there anything I can take out of this feature?... In this video from The Future of Web Apps London (FOWA), Kevin Rose, founder of Digg, WeFollow and Revision3, shares 9 things he did to increase his users to 1,000,000 and beyond. Here’s a quick bullet-point summary. You can watch the video, view the presentation slides or download the audio. Editor’s Note: We’re bringing The Future of Web Apps to Miami on Feb 22-24th 2010. Speakers include: Alex Payne (Twitter), Aaron Patzer (Mint.com), John Resig (jQuery), Steve Huffman (Reddit) and more. Mega Early Bird tickets go on sale on Wednesday and they’ll sell out immediately (only 20 tickets at $200, which is 56% off). #1. Ego Ask yourself: Does this feature increase the users self-worth or stoke the ego? If a user is contributing to my system, what emotional rewards do they walk away with? What (visible) rewards will they receive? #2. Simplicity Stop over building features Pick 2-3 things to focus on Ask yourself: Is there anything I can take out of this feature? #3. Build & Release Stop thinking you understand your users Learn from what they’re actually doing on your site, not what you think they’ll do Decide on what you’re going to build… and build it (avoid analysis paralysis) Build, release, iterate, and repeat #4. Hack The Press Invite only system (Pownce, Digg v3) Talk to the junior bloggers Attend parties for events you can’t afford – network w/influencers, bring a demo #5. Connect with your community Start a podcast (it’s OK if not everyone listens) Throw a launch party, then yearly/quarterly  events – invite the press/influencers personally – don’t tell the bar Engage w/the community, be an active participant your own ecosystem #6. Advisors What technical problems are you going to have? Advisors can be helpful in a whole slew of areas (marketing/hiring/bizdev) Stock compensation, typically not a board seat, solid advisors help during fund raising #7. Leverage your userbase to spread the word #8. Does your product provide value for 3rd party sites? #9. Analyze your traffic Install Google analytics Entrance sources (search?) Paths through site Top exit pages The Video In this video from The Future of Web Apps London (FOWA), Kevin Rose, founder of Digg, WeFollow and Revision3, shares 9 things he did to increase his users to 1,000,000 and beyond. Here’s a quick bullet-point summary. You can watch the video, view the presentation slides or download the audio. Editor’s Note: We’re bringing The Future of Web Apps to Miami on Feb 22-24th 2010. Speakers include: Alex Payne (Twitter), Aaron Patzer (Mint.com), John Resig (jQuery), Steve Huffman (Reddit) and more. Mega Early Bird tickets go on sale on Wednesday and they’ll sell out immediately (only 20 tickets at $200, which is 56% off). #1. Ego Ask yourself: Does this feature increase the users self-worth or stoke the ego? If a user is contributing to my system, what emotional rewards do they walk away with? What (visible) rewards will they receive? #2. Simplicity Stop over building features Pick 2-3 things to focus on Ask yourself: Is there anything I can take out of this feature? #3. Build & Release Stop thinking you understand your users Learn from what they’re actually doing on your site, not what you think they’ll do Decide on what you’re going to build… and build it (avoid analysis paralysis) Build, release, iterate, and repeat #4. Hack The Press Invite only system (Pownce, Digg v3) Talk to the junior bloggers Attend parties for events you can’t afford – network w/influencers, bring a demo #5. Connect with your community Start a podcast (it’s OK if not everyone listens) Throw a launch party, then yearly/quarterly  events – invite the press/influencers personally – don’t tell the bar Engage w/the community, be an active participant your own ecosystem #6. Advisors What technical problems are you going to have? Advisors can be helpful in a whole slew of areas (marketing/hiring/bizdev) Stock compensation, typically not a board seat, solid advisors help during fund raising #7. Leverage your userbase to spread the word #8. Does your product provide value for 3rd party sites? #9. Analyze your traffic Install Google analytics Entrance sources (search?) Paths through site Top exit pages The Video tag:odeo.com,2009-10-05,25247047 Mon, 05 Oct 2009 11:25:39 -0700 no Carsonified » Blog Web Apps, fowa-london-09 http://www.odeo.com/episodes/24907673-How-to-Choose-a-Business-Model In this 30 minute video from the FOWA Tour, you’ll learn the key points you need to consider when deciding on the business model for your product or service. Topics include … Finding your niche Should you charge or go ‘Freemium’? Understanding the psychology of free Agile business development [Update: You can watch the video, download the MP3, subscribe to the audio or view the slides.] utmx_section("Editors Note")[Editor's Note: We'll be covering topics like How to Build a Web App from A-Z and Kick-ass Online Marketing Techniques at FOWA London.] The Video Presentation slides You can also view Roan’s slides below … Photo Credit: flickr.com/photos/kimberlyg In this 30 minute video from the FOWA Tour, you’ll learn the key points you need to consider when deciding on the business model for your product or service. Topics include … Finding your niche Should you charge or go ‘Freemium’? Understanding the psychology of free Agile business development [Update: You can watch the video, download the MP3, subscribe to the audio or view the slides.] utmx_section("Editors Note")[Editor's Note: We'll be covering topics like How to Build a Web App from A-Z and Kick-ass Online Marketing Techniques at FOWA London.] The Video Presentation slides You can also view Roan’s slides below … Photo Credit: flickr.com/photos/kimberlyg In this 30 minute video from the FOWA Tour, you’ll learn the key points you need to consider when deciding on the business model for your product or service. Topics include … Finding your niche Should you charge or go ‘Freemium’? Understanding the psychology of free Agile business development [Update: You can watch the video, download the MP3, subscribe to the audio or view the slides.] utmx_section("Editors Note")[Editor's Note: We'll be covering topics like How to Build a Web App from A-Z and Kick-ass Online Marketing Techniques at FOWA London.] The Video Presentation slides You can also view Roan’s slides below … Photo Credit: flickr.com/photos/kimberlyg tag:odeo.com,2009-08-02,24907673 Sun, 02 Aug 2009 22:51:38 -0700 no Carsonified » Blog Web Apps, learn, pricing http://www.odeo.com/episodes/24798821-Free-is-the-Future-of-Failure “There will always be a company that replaces you. At some point your BlackSwan competitor will appear and they will kick your ass. Their product will be better or more interesting or just better marketed than yours, and it also will be free. They will be Facebook to your Myspace, or Myspace to your Friendster or Google to your Yahoo. You get the point. Someone out there with a better idea will raise a bunch of money, give it away for free, build scale and charge less to reach the audience. Or will be differentiated enough, and important enough to the audience to maybe even charge more. Who knows. But they will kick your ass and you will be in trouble.” - Mark Cuban We’re not completely against the Freemium model for web apps (heck, that’s what made DropSend really succeed for us) but there are some important things to consider before taking this route. Here are a few great resources to checkout when deciding on your web app pricing model: Freemium did not wo... “There will always be a company that replaces you. At some point your BlackSwan competitor will appear and they will kick your ass. Their product will be better or more interesting or just better marketed than yours, and it also will be free. They will be Facebook to your Myspace, or Myspace to your Friendster or Google to your Yahoo. You get the point. Someone out there with a better idea will raise a bunch of money, give it away for free, build scale and charge less to reach the audience. Or will be differentiated enough, and important enough to the audience to maybe even charge more. Who knows. But they will kick your ass and you will be in trouble.” - Mark Cuban We’re not completely against the Freemium model for web apps (heck, that’s what made DropSend really succeed for us) but there are some important things to consider before taking this route. Here are a few great resources to checkout when deciding on your web app pricing model: Freemium did not work for Phanfare When you succeed with Free, you are going to die by Free by Mark Cuban Jason Fried on why Free is the Future of Failure. Jump to minute 9:15 on the video or audio. “There will always be a company that replaces you. At some point your BlackSwan competitor will appear and they will kick your ass. Their product will be better or more interesting or just better marketed than yours, and it also will be free. They will be Facebook to your Myspace, or Myspace to your Friendster or Google to your Yahoo. You get the point. Someone out there with a better idea will raise a bunch of money, give it away for free, build scale and charge less to reach the audience. Or will be differentiated enough, and important enough to the audience to maybe even charge more. Who knows. But they will kick your ass and you will be in trouble.” - Mark Cuban We’re not completely against the Freemium model for web apps (heck, that’s what made DropSend really succeed for us) but there are some important things to consider before taking this route. Here are a few great resources to checkout when deciding on your web app pricing model: Freemium did not work for Phanfare When you succeed with Free, you are going to die by Free by Mark Cuban Jason Fried on why Free is the Future of Failure. Jump to minute 9:15 on the video or audio. tag:odeo.com,2009-07-13,24798821 Mon, 13 Jul 2009 22:22:44 -0700 no Carsonified » Blog Business, Web Apps, pricing http://www.odeo.com/episodes/24774624-Get-Clients-to-Say-%E2%80%98Yes-%E2%80%99 Editor’s note: This article is a summary of Paul Boag’s talk at our event The Future of Web Design. You can also listen to the audio or watch the video of the talk, which is below the article. I’ve been thinking recently about the relationship between clients and designers. And about how we get clients to the point of saying yes. Yes to what, you might ask? Well, that might be yes to the design, that might be yes to your wireframe, some feature or just your approach. But it’s the way that we present ourselves to clients and the way that we interact with them that I want to look at. Let me first introduce you to the ‘man from Del Monte’. For those of you who don’t know, the man from Del Monte appeared in an advertising campaign in the UK for Del Monte, makers of fruit juice. The advert consisted of a man dressed in an immaculate white suit and a trilby. He had a very colonial look about him and would visit various fruit farms around South Ame... Editor’s note: This article is a summary of Paul Boag’s talk at our event The Future of Web Design. You can also listen to the audio or watch the video of the talk, which is below the article. I’ve been thinking recently about the relationship between clients and designers. And about how we get clients to the point of saying yes. Yes to what, you might ask? Well, that might be yes to the design, that might be yes to your wireframe, some feature or just your approach. But it’s the way that we present ourselves to clients and the way that we interact with them that I want to look at. Let me first introduce you to the ‘man from Del Monte’. For those of you who don’t know, the man from Del Monte appeared in an advertising campaign in the UK for Del Monte, makers of fruit juice. The advert consisted of a man dressed in an immaculate white suit and a trilby. He had a very colonial look about him and would visit various fruit farms around South America. Each time there would be a groveling peasant farmer who would present his oranges with fear and trepidation to the man in the white suit. And then there would be this moment of hush. And the man from Del Monte would pronounce judgement on the quality of the oranges that were being presented to him. Then when the answer came – ‘the man from Del Monte, he says yes!’ – there would be immense celebration, cheering and dancing. The farmer was very happy that his oranges were good enough quality to be included in the Del Monte range. Apart from the fact that it’s impractical to be wearing a white suit in an orchard, the point that I took away from the advert is this; That in the web industry our relationships with our clients are sometimes like that. We present something to them and then we wait on tenterhooks for their answer. Wrong Relationship At the heart of all of this is a wrong relationship between designer and client that is fundamentally flawed. It’s not something that we talk about very much but a big part of our job is our relationship with our client. So I want to concentrate on fixing that relationship. In many ways we treat our clients like they are royalty. They’re the people who you have to bow and scrape to. Often we can blindly follow the client’s lead and we can end up being quite submissive in the relationship. We’re afraid to express our opinions, nor do we effectively communicate our opinion when we try to. What happens is we get so frustrated that we give up on projects and effectively kill them. We get to the, ‘yeah, yeah you can have whatever you want,’ stage and we give up. Or, we swing to the other extreme and we become the person is constantly saying no to everything. We turn into the difficult and argumentative person. Time to Change It’s time for a revolution in the designer / client relationship. It’s time to go from a master / servant relationship to a peer / peer relationship. It’s time to change the relationship so that we, as designers, are the experts, providing an expert service and the client perceives us in that way. How do we change it? Designers need to become the expert in the relationship. Designers also need to be more positive and move away from that negative mentality that ruins so many projects. Negativity can rear its head when we say no to clients but also in the way that we view our clients. Become the Expert Have a methodology. It puts you in control. It enables you to set expectations with your clients and let them know what’s coming. Nobody likes uncertainty and they certainly don’t like uncertainty when they’re paying a lot of money for something. Clients like to have a sense of what’s coming next and what they can expect from the project. Sit your client down at the beginning of the project and tell them what’s going to happen. Show them the stages that you’re going to work through before you end up at your final deliverable. Maybe even beyond that if you plan to evolve their site over time. By doing this you’re setting yourself up as the person who is in control of the relationship. You’re also reassuring the client and setting their expectations at a reasonable level. Gather information. Everyone works differently and so your methodology may be different to mine. But whatever yours is like, make sure to include a big section on ‘information gathering’. So we’re talking about things like; success criteria, business objectives, competitive analysis, priorities, mood boards, user personas and user expectations. The reason why this information is so important is not only so that you can deliver a better solution but it’s immensely important when it comes to justifying why you have done something a certain way. This is a really important part of the process. It’s unfair of you to expect a client to accept it because you’re the expert. You need to prove that you’re the expert by justifying your decisions in a way that they can understand and associate with. Use third party data. You don’t necessarily need to use the information that you gathered from the client to justify your decisions, you can use data from third parties if you like, such as research institutes etc. Write down anything that’s agreed. Whatever you’re discussing with a client, either over the phone, on e-mail or IM, if something is agreed upon then you need to record that. Be Positive We need to take a leaf out of President Obama’s book and live by the mantra, ‘yes we can’. We need to stop blocking ideas that our clients have and stop being negative in our communication with them. Say yes. As part of my quest to have my clients see me as the expert I try to say yes to them as much as possible. However, as part of saying yes I also explain the consequences to them at the same time. “Of course we can do that, but if we do then this, this and this will happen.” Suggest an alternative. Instead of leaving the discussion on a negative note try to suggest an alternative. You can still say yes, present the consequences and when the consequences are not desirable then suggest an alternative. Be enthusiastic and caring. When you suggest an alternative do it with enthusiasm for the project. Give the impression that you give a shit. Obviously, this has to be sincere. Be positive about your relationship with your client. Clients are not stupid. I hear designers talking like their clients are stupid all the time and it annoys me so much. “They just don’t get it”, is a favorite phrase a lot of people use. Clients aren’t stupid, they’re clever, intelligent people. They just happen to be good at something other than design. And just because they don’t understand the Web doesn’t mean they’re not clever. There’s more to life than the Web. Your client will pick up your condescending, patronizing attitude and so we need to be very careful to keep that under control. Give your clients credit for what they’re good at. They know their target audience, they know their business, they know their strategy. They might have trouble communicating that in a way that you can understand but they do have a lot of knowledge. Don’t forget that they have to live with the sites we build. So listen to them when they give you information. Show your work little and often. As designers we don’t like to include clients in the design process if we can avoid it. We don’t like to show work that isn’t finished. Whether it be wireframes, sketches or designs you need to show it to the client as you work on it. By getting them involved they are becoming committed to the process. They’re a part of it and they feel valued. They’re much more likely to approve a design if they have seen it early on and been part of producing it. Shape the Roll of the Client Explain what’s required of the client. At the kick-off meeting you need to set out and explain what’s required of the client. You may have designed hundreds of websites, one after another, but they haven’t. This may be the first time for them. So it’s really important for them to know what their roll is not only to help them but to constrain them as well. Focus the client on the problem, not the solution. If a client comes to you and says, ‘I really hate that blue, I want it be pink.’ You don’t know why he or she wants that, or what the background to the request is. If you just do it then you’re just a pixel pusher. What you need to do is to refocus them on the problem. Why do they dislike that blue? In this situation a more useful statement would be, ‘I’m unsure that the blue will appeal to my teenage girl demographic.’ Now, you know what the problem is and you can work on it. Focus the client on the business. Try to get them to concentrate on the business objectives of the new site. So often clients get caught up with the detail. They worry about the names of sections or the white space on the design. What they should be concentrating on is the question, ‘does the new design help achieve their call to action?’. ‘Does the design communicate the unique selling points of this particular organization?’. Focus the client on users. It’s no use to you if your client tells you what they don’t like and what they do like. What’s important is what the users like and don’t like. Never, never ask a client, ‘what do you think?’. Ask them, ‘how do you think your users will react to this?’. Managing Feedback Everything is fine when the designer is talking but once our clients start to give us feedback, that’s when the issues start. So we need to manage the way in which our clients give us feedback. Talk to everyone involved in the decision. Clients consult other people. Even if you’re working with a very small business and your point of contact is the business owner himself, you can bet he’ll show his wife the design (or vice versa). If you’re dealing with a bigger client then there could be a whole group of people who will see your design. Try to talk directly to those people too if possible. If you can make them feel wanted and listened to then they are more likely to come on board. Meet with people individually. Have you ever been in a meeting where one person says, ‘I think the blue is too dark.’ And someone else says, ‘I think the blue should be light.’ And what you end up with is a lighter shade of the existing blue. That’s design-on-the-fly. This can be avoided by meeting with each person separately. If needed, issue a questionnaire in order to really control the kind of feedback you’re getting. So to recap. You need to turn your relationship with your client into a peer / peer relationship. You need to become the expert and be more positive. You also need to mould the roll of your client and manage feedback carefully. Listen or Watch You can listen to the audio of the talk, or subscribe to the podcast. Like this article? If you enjoyed, this article, feel free to re-tweet it to let others know. Thanks, we appreciate it! :) // Photo credit: flickr.com/photos/jonchristopher Editor’s note: This article is a summary of Paul Boag’s talk at our event The Future of Web Design. You can also listen to the audio or watch the video of the talk, which is below the article. I’ve been thinking recently about the relationship between clients and designers. And about how we get clients to the point of saying yes. Yes to what, you might ask? Well, that might be yes to the design, that might be yes to your wireframe, some feature or just your approach. But it’s the way that we present ourselves to clients and the way that we interact with them that I want to look at. Let me first introduce you to the ‘man from Del Monte’. For those of you who don’t know, the man from Del Monte appeared in an advertising campaign in the UK for Del Monte, makers of fruit juice. The advert consisted of a man dressed in an immaculate white suit and a trilby. He had a very colonial look about him and would visit various fruit farms around South America. Each time there would be a groveling peasant farmer who would present his oranges with fear and trepidation to the man in the white suit. And then there would be this moment of hush. And the man from Del Monte would pronounce judgement on the quality of the oranges that were being presented to him. Then when the answer came – ‘the man from Del Monte, he says yes!’ – there would be immense celebration, cheering and dancing. The farmer was very happy that his oranges were good enough quality to be included in the Del Monte range. Apart from the fact that it’s impractical to be wearing a white suit in an orchard, the point that I took away from the advert is this; That in the web industry our relationships with our clients are sometimes like that. We present something to them and then we wait on tenterhooks for their answer. Wrong Relationship At the heart of all of this is a wrong relationship between designer and client that is fundamentally flawed. It’s not something that we talk about very much but a big part of our job is our relationship with our client. So I want to concentrate on fixing that relationship. In many ways we treat our clients like they are royalty. They’re the people who you have to bow and scrape to. Often we can blindly follow the client’s lead and we can end up being quite submissive in the relationship. We’re afraid to express our opinions, nor do we effectively communicate our opinion when we try to. What happens is we get so frustrated that we give up on projects and effectively kill them. We get to the, ‘yeah, yeah you can have whatever you want,’ stage and we give up. Or, we swing to the other extreme and we become the person is constantly saying no to everything. We turn into the difficult and argumentative person. Time to Change It’s time for a revolution in the designer / client relationship. It’s time to go from a master / servant relationship to a peer / peer relationship. It’s time to change the relationship so that we, as designers, are the experts, providing an expert service and the client perceives us in that way. How do we change it? Designers need to become the expert in the relationship. Designers also need to be more positive and move away from that negative mentality that ruins so many projects. Negativity can rear its head when we say no to clients but also in the way that we view our clients. Become the Expert Have a methodology. It puts you in control. It enables you to set expectations with your clients and let them know what’s coming. Nobody likes uncertainty and they certainly don’t like uncertainty when they’re paying a lot of money for something. Clients like to have a sense of what’s coming next and what they can expect from the project. Sit your client down at the beginning of the project and tell them what’s going to happen. Show them the stages that you’re going to work through before you end up at your final deliverable. Maybe even beyond that if you plan to evolve their site over time. By doing this you’re setting yourself up as the person who is in control of the relationship. You’re also reassuring the client and setting their expectations at a reasonable level. Gather information. Everyone works differently and so your methodology may be different to mine. But whatever yours is like, make sure to include a big section on ‘information gathering’. So we’re talking about things like; success criteria, business objectives, competitive analysis, priorities, mood boards, user personas and user expectations. The reason why this information is so important is not only so that you can deliver a better solution but it’s immensely important when it comes to justifying why you have done something a certain way. This is a really important part of the process. It’s unfair of you to expect a client to accept it because you’re the expert. You need to prove that you’re the expert by justifying your decisions in a way that they can understand and associate with. Use third party data. You don’t necessarily need to use the information that you gathered from the client to justify your decisions, you can use data from third parties if you like, such as research institutes etc. Write down anything that’s agreed. Whatever you’re discussing with a client, either over the phone, on e-mail or IM, if something is agreed upon then you need to record that. Be Positive We need to take a leaf out of President Obama’s book and live by the mantra, ‘yes we can’. We need to stop blocking ideas that our clients have and stop being negative in our communication with them. Say yes. As part of my quest to have my clients see me as the expert I try to say yes to them as much as possible. However, as part of saying yes I also explain the consequences to them at the same time. “Of course we can do that, but if we do then this, this and this will happen.” Suggest an alternative. Instead of leaving the discussion on a negative note try to suggest an alternative. You can still say yes, present the consequences and when the consequences are not desirable then suggest an alternative. Be enthusiastic and caring. When you suggest an alternative do it with enthusiasm for the project. Give the impression that you give a shit. Obviously, this has to be sincere. Be positive about your relationship with your client. Clients are not stupid. I hear designers talking like their clients are stupid all the time and it annoys me so much. “They just don’t get it”, is a favorite phrase a lot of people use. Clients aren’t stupid, they’re clever, intelligent people. They just happen to be good at something other than design. And just because they don’t understand the Web doesn’t mean they’re not clever. There’s more to life than the Web. Your client will pick up your condescending, patronizing attitude and so we need to be very careful to keep that under control. Give your clients credit for what they’re good at. They know their target audience, they know their business, they know their strategy. They might have trouble communicating that in a way that you can understand but they do have a lot of knowledge. Don’t forget that they have to live with the sites we build. So listen to them when they give you information. Show your work little and often. As designers we don’t like to include clients in the design process if we can avoid it. We don’t like to show work that isn’t finished. Whether it be wireframes, sketches or designs you need to show it to the client as you work on it. By getting them involved they are becoming committed to the process. They’re a part of it and they feel valued. They’re much more likely to approve a design if they have seen it early on and been part of producing it. Shape the Roll of the Client Explain what’s required of the client. At the kick-off meeting you need to set out and explain what’s required of the client. You may have designed hundreds of websites, one after another, but they haven’t. This may be the first time for them. So it’s really important for them to know what their roll is not only to help them but to constrain them as well. Focus the client on the problem, not the solution. If a client comes to you and says, ‘I really hate that blue, I want it be pink.’ You don’t know why he or she wants that, or what the background to the request is. If you just do it then you’re just a pixel pusher. What you need to do is to refocus them on the problem. Why do they dislike that blue? In this situation a more useful statement would be, ‘I’m unsure that the blue will appeal to my teenage girl demographic.’ Now, you know what the problem is and you can work on it. Focus the client on the business. Try to get them to concentrate on the business objectives of the new site. So often clients get caught up with the detail. They worry about the names of sections or the white space on the design. What they should be concentrating on is the question, ‘does the new design help achieve their call to action?’. ‘Does the design communicate the unique selling points of this particular organization?’. Focus the client on users. It’s no use to you if your client tells you what they don’t like and what they do like. What’s important is what the users like and don’t like. Never, never ask a client, ‘what do you think?’. Ask them, ‘how do you think your users will react to this?’. Managing Feedback Everything is fine when the designer is talking but once our clients start to give us feedback, that’s when the issues start. So we need to manage the way in which our clients give us feedback. Talk to everyone involved in the decision. Clients consult other people. Even if you’re working with a very small business and your point of contact is the business owner himself, you can bet he’ll show his wife the design (or vice versa). If you’re dealing with a bigger client then there could be a whole group of people who will see your design. Try to talk directly to those people too if possible. If you can make them feel wanted and listened to then they are more likely to come on board. Meet with people individually. Have you ever been in a meeting where one person says, ‘I think the blue is too dark.’ And someone else says, ‘I think the blue should be light.’ And what you end up with is a lighter shade of the existing blue. That’s design-on-the-fly. This can be avoided by meeting with each person separately. If needed, issue a questionnaire in order to really control the kind of feedback you’re getting. So to recap. You need to turn your relationship with your client into a peer / peer relationship. You need to become the expert and be more positive. You also need to mould the roll of your client and manage feedback carefully. Listen or Watch You can listen to the audio of the talk, or subscribe to the podcast. Like this article? If you enjoyed, this article, feel free to re-tweet it to let others know. Thanks, we appreciate it! :) // Photo credit: flickr.com/photos/jonchristopher tag:odeo.com,2009-07-08,24774624 Wed, 08 Jul 2009 06:33:42 -0700 no Carsonified » Blog Business, Design, learn, clients, dev, fowd-nyc-2008 http://www.odeo.com/episodes/24774625-Make-Money-off-Your-By-Products Editor’s note: This article is a summary of Jason Fried’s talk at our event The Future of Web Apps. You can also listen to the audio or watch the video of the talk, which is below the article. I think the future of web apps is more about business models then it is about technology or design. It’s not that those things aren’t important, but I feel that we’ve figured out a lot of that already. I believe the area where we need a lot of work is on the business side of things. I want to start out by talking about the lumber industry. When saw mills were first created, they didn’t use their waste products such as sawdust. However, after a period of time, they realized they could package this waste into products and sell them at a profit. Things like mulch for gardens, fuel pellets and kindling turned out to be big business. The lesson we can learn from the lumber industry is this: Whenever you make something, you create valuable by-products that you can... Editor’s note: This article is a summary of Jason Fried’s talk at our event The Future of Web Apps. You can also listen to the audio or watch the video of the talk, which is below the article. I think the future of web apps is more about business models then it is about technology or design. It’s not that those things aren’t important, but I feel that we’ve figured out a lot of that already. I believe the area where we need a lot of work is on the business side of things. I want to start out by talking about the lumber industry. When saw mills were first created, they didn’t use their waste products such as sawdust. However, after a period of time, they realized they could package this waste into products and sell them at a profit. Things like mulch for gardens, fuel pellets and kindling turned out to be big business. The lesson we can learn from the lumber industry is this: Whenever you make something, you create valuable by-products that you can sell. So what by-products are we creating in the web industry? Wisdom, Experience and Information We didn’t even realize we were writing a book when we wrote Getting Real. All the material came from ideas we were blogging about that were the result of simply doing business. Just like cutting wood produces sawdust, for us, building software and a company produced information and experience. We just started blogging about the experience and information we gained and it was only after a year that we realized we had created valuable content we could sell. We launched a book, a conference and a workshop off the back of this information, and in just a few years, it generated over $1,000,000 in revenue for us. Another example of this is Ruby on Rails, which came out of building Basecamp. The crazy thing is that we were creating all this valuable ‘wastage’ on the side, without even knowing it. Design Screencasts I think a great opportunity for designers to generate revenue off of ‘waste products’ is to record their screen while they design. Whenever they’re in Photoshop, just hit the record button, and at the end, package up the video and sell it to other designers. That, I’m telling you, is a by-product that is worth money. Looking to @garyvee Gary Vaynerchuk is great example of packaging and selling by-products of your business. As the owner of a shop that sells wine, he has to do a certain amount of wine tasting to expand his palate. He just decided to turn the camera onto himself as he did this tasting and the product, WineLibrary.tv has rocketed him to fame and success. “Whatever you’re doing, you’re creating valuable by-products that you could be selling.” Learning from Chefs I think successful chefs do a great job of harnessing by-products and generating revenue off of them. They write cook books, host cooking TV programs and create their own line of cookware. What they figured out is that instead of keeping these things to themselves, they should share as much as they possibly can. Chefs with large business empires share more and more as they grow. Most business are the exact opposite of this. Instead of sharing more and more as they grow, they become increasingly closed and secretive. They’re robbing themselves of the value of their own by-products – all because they’re afraid of the competition. Free is the Future of Failure The next subject I’d like to talk about is the idea of “Free”. I’m not a big fan of free. It’s the wrong direction for this industry. I think that Chris Anderson’s new book Free: The Future of a Radical Price contains bad advice. I think we should be focusing on how we can charge for our products, not give them away for free. “Free isn’t the future of business, it’s the future of failure.” Why is our industry so obsessed with free? The food industry charges for meals, hotels charge for their rooms and cab drivers charge for giving you a ride. People are used to paying for things they find valuable, and every time we release something for free, we’re hurting ourselves. “The bulk of our paying customers, started out on a paying plan.” I’ve noticed that quite a few of the web apps that have gone under are the ones that weren’t charging for their product. Of course this isn’t always the case, and charging for your product doesn’t mean you’ll survive, but there seems to be a correlation with web apps that have gone out of business and those that are giving away things for free. As it becomes more common for web apps to go out of business, it causes a lack of trust in new applications. People are afraid to commit to a web app that may be gone tomorrow. I Want Sandy is a great example of this. A lot of folks trusted them with their data and then they were bought by Twitter and shut down. If they charged for the product, they probably wouldn’t have shut down as they have revenue to support the business and an obligation to customers. “When your users aren’t paying for the product, you don’t have an obligation to them. I think that’s bad.” I’ve noticed that even Google, a company with billions of dollars in cash, has begun to pull back on their free products. If one of the most valuable companies in the world, with some of the brightest minds in the industry, has decided that some things aren’t worth giving away for free, then I’m not sure how smaller companies are going to make that model work. Failure Isn’t Cool One of the things that has really been bothering me lately is how it’s become cool to fail. In a lot of entrepreneurial circles there has been talk about “failing early and failing often.” It’s as if everyone thinks that failure is a good thing – a way to get better at business. What is that? Can you imagine someone walking up to a farmer and say “You should fail often. I hope your crops die every year”? It just doesn’t make any sense. “No. We should be focusing on succeeding early and succeeding often.” Another quote that’s thrown around a lot is “Nine out of ten business fail.” That may be true, but what the hell does that have to do with you? Just because someone else doesn’t know how to market or price their products, or how to lead their team, doesn’t mean you should focus on failure. Don’t be intimidated by all this talk about failure. Learn from Your Successes I think we should all make a concerted effort to not focus on learning from failure, but instead, learning from our successes. When you learn from your mistakes, all your learn is what not to do next time. What is this? A process of elimination where you’ve got to get a million things wrong, until there’s nothing else that can go wrong before you know what to do right? That’s what it means when you learn from your mistakes. I’d rather learn from the things that I’m doing right, and do those again. In Summary … Here’s a quick list of the things we’ve covered today: Look for your by-products. Identify what you’re already creating that you can sell. Stop focusing on failure and identify what is working. Please start charging for your products. Listen or Watch You can listen to the audio of the talk, or subscribe to the podcast. Like this article? If you enjoyed, this article, feel free to re-tweet it to let others know. Thanks, we appreciate it! :) // Photo credit: flickr.com/photos/seanosh Editor’s note: This article is a summary of Jason Fried’s talk at our event The Future of Web Apps. You can also listen to the audio or watch the video of the talk, which is below the article. I think the future of web apps is more about business models then it is about technology or design. It’s not that those things aren’t important, but I feel that we’ve figured out a lot of that already. I believe the area where we need a lot of work is on the business side of things. I want to start out by talking about the lumber industry. When saw mills were first created, they didn’t use their waste products such as sawdust. However, after a period of time, they realized they could package this waste into products and sell them at a profit. Things like mulch for gardens, fuel pellets and kindling turned out to be big business. The lesson we can learn from the lumber industry is this: Whenever you make something, you create valuable by-products that you can sell. So what by-products are we creating in the web industry? Wisdom, Experience and Information We didn’t even realize we were writing a book when we wrote Getting Real. All the material came from ideas we were blogging about that were the result of simply doing business. Just like cutting wood produces sawdust, for us, building software and a company produced information and experience. We just started blogging about the experience and information we gained and it was only after a year that we realized we had created valuable content we could sell. We launched a book, a conference and a workshop off the back of this information, and in just a few years, it generated over $1,000,000 in revenue for us. Another example of this is Ruby on Rails, which came out of building Basecamp. The crazy thing is that we were creating all this valuable ‘wastage’ on the side, without even knowing it. Design Screencasts I think a great opportunity for designers to generate revenue off of ‘waste products’ is to record their screen while they design. Whenever they’re in Photoshop, just hit the record button, and at the end, package up the video and sell it to other designers. That, I’m telling you, is a by-product that is worth money. Looking to @garyvee Gary Vaynerchuk is great example of packaging and selling by-products of your business. As the owner of a shop that sells wine, he has to do a certain amount of wine tasting to expand his palate. He just decided to turn the camera onto himself as he did this tasting and the product, WineLibrary.tv has rocketed him to fame and success. “Whatever you’re doing, you’re creating valuable by-products that you could be selling.” Learning from Chefs I think successful chefs do a great job of harnessing by-products and generating revenue off of them. They write cook books, host cooking TV programs and create their own line of cookware. What they figured out is that instead of keeping these things to themselves, they should share as much as they possibly can. Chefs with large business empires share more and more as they grow. Most business are the exact opposite of this. Instead of sharing more and more as they grow, they become increasingly closed and secretive. They’re robbing themselves of the value of their own by-products – all because they’re afraid of the competition. Free is the Future of Failure The next subject I’d like to talk about is the idea of “Free”. I’m not a big fan of free. It’s the wrong direction for this industry. I think that Chris Anderson’s new book Free: The Future of a Radical Price contains bad advice. I think we should be focusing on how we can charge for our products, not give them away for free. “Free isn’t the future of business, it’s the future of failure.” Why is our industry so obsessed with free? The food industry charges for meals, hotels charge for their rooms and cab drivers charge for giving you a ride. People are used to paying for things they find valuable, and every time we release something for free, we’re hurting ourselves. “The bulk of our paying customers, started out on a paying plan.” I’ve noticed that quite a few of the web apps that have gone under are the ones that weren’t charging for their product. Of course this isn’t always the case, and charging for your product doesn’t mean you’ll survive, but there seems to be a correlation with web apps that have gone out of business and those that are giving away things for free. As it becomes more common for web apps to go out of business, it causes a lack of trust in new applications. People are afraid to commit to a web app that may be gone tomorrow. I Want Sandy is a great example of this. A lot of folks trusted them with their data and then they were bought by Twitter and shut down. If they charged for the product, they probably wouldn’t have shut down as they have revenue to support the business and an obligation to customers. “When your users aren’t paying for the product, you don’t have an obligation to them. I think that’s bad.” I’ve noticed that even Google, a company with billions of dollars in cash, has begun to pull back on their free products. If one of the most valuable companies in the world, with some of the brightest minds in the industry, has decided that some things aren’t worth giving away for free, then I’m not sure how smaller companies are going to make that model work. Failure Isn’t Cool One of the things that has really been bothering me lately is how it’s become cool to fail. In a lot of entrepreneurial circles there has been talk about “failing early and failing often.” It’s as if everyone thinks that failure is a good thing – a way to get better at business. What is that? Can you imagine someone walking up to a farmer and say “You should fail often. I hope your crops die every year”? It just doesn’t make any sense. “No. We should be focusing on succeeding early and succeeding often.” Another quote that’s thrown around a lot is “Nine out of ten business fail.” That may be true, but what the hell does that have to do with you? Just because someone else doesn’t know how to market or price their products, or how to lead their team, doesn’t mean you should focus on failure. Don’t be intimidated by all this talk about failure. Learn from Your Successes I think we should all make a concerted effort to not focus on learning from failure, but instead, learning from our successes. When you learn from your mistakes, all your learn is what not to do next time. What is this? A process of elimination where you’ve got to get a million things wrong, until there’s nothing else that can go wrong before you know what to do right? That’s what it means when you learn from your mistakes. I’d rather learn from the things that I’m doing right, and do those again. In Summary … Here’s a quick list of the things we’ve covered today: Look for your by-products. Identify what you’re already creating that you can sell. Stop focusing on failure and identify what is working. Please start charging for your products. Listen or Watch You can listen to the audio of the talk, or subscribe to the podcast. Like this article? If you enjoyed, this article, feel free to re-tweet it to let others know. Thanks, we appreciate it! :) // Photo credit: flickr.com/photos/seanosh tag:odeo.com,2009-07-08,24774625 Wed, 08 Jul 2009 05:02:22 -0700 no Carsonified » Blog Business, Web Apps, marketing, learn, fowa-miami-2009 http://www.odeo.com/episodes/10405263-Interview-Ted-Rheingold tag:odeo.com,2007-03-11,10405263 Sun, 11 Mar 2007 21:50:32 -0700 no Carsonified » Blog http://www.odeo.com/episodes/23616820-Ted-Rheingold Download the MP3 (10.8 MB) This interview was recorded after the Future of Web Apps in San Francisco, what follows is a full transcript. SD: This is Sarah Drew with Vitamin, and I’m sitting here with Ted Rheingold from Dogster and Catster who just gave a wonderful speech on the passion-centric communities and websites that he’s seeing as part of the future here. First, just to give a little bit of background you term yourself sometimes as an ‘accidental entrepreneur’, can you tell us a little bit about that? TR: I didn’t expect Dogster to be a self-reliant business. I guess I was a entrepreneur in a way before, because I was making websites for clients, but I really never expected myself to be a CEO. I never saw that in my future, to be running a business and dealing with banking and legal issues. I think though I was very uncomfortable working for other people so maybe it was destined even though I didn’t see it clearly at the time. SD: What was ... Download the MP3 (10.8 MB) This interview was recorded after the Future of Web Apps in San Francisco, what follows is a full transcript. SD: This is Sarah Drew with Vitamin, and I’m sitting here with Ted Rheingold from Dogster and Catster who just gave a wonderful speech on the passion-centric communities and websites that he’s seeing as part of the future here. First, just to give a little bit of background you term yourself sometimes as an ‘accidental entrepreneur’, can you tell us a little bit about that? TR: I didn’t expect Dogster to be a self-reliant business. I guess I was a entrepreneur in a way before, because I was making websites for clients, but I really never expected myself to be a CEO. I never saw that in my future, to be running a business and dealing with banking and legal issues. I think though I was very uncomfortable working for other people so maybe it was destined even though I didn’t see it clearly at the time. SD: What was the ‘aha’ moment for you with Dogster? TR: There was a day where my girlfriend (my wife now) posted a very brief message on a Craigslist pets area about this new site where people can make web pages for their dogs and there were a hundred new dogs added the next day! (There’s never been less that a hundred dogs added from that day, actually) And the Craigslist forums blew up. Within a week later Craig himself had to go on and say, “It’s okay, Dogster is a nice community service,” but it just created such excitement and emotion on Craigslist that I realised that this was so much bigger than I had imagined. SD: What was the emotion that was happening at that time? TR: On Craigslist some people were so annoyed that everyone was talking about nothing but Dogster that they were just like, “Can we just talk about something else?!” But so many people were just so crazy to be able to look at each other’s dog photos easily and share them that they refused to stop talking about it and I realised, “Wow, this is big.” SD: So, the ‘…ster’, part of how you were using it was as kind of a tag line for the individualised passion-centred site. Is that something that’s come to use in the general lexicon? TR: Yeah, well, y’know it already was - mobster, spinster, etc, and so when we were having a really hard time finding a good name, I spoke to the person who owned Dogster and he thought that what I was doing was a great idea and he’d sell it to me for what then was just barely within my budget! I thought, “Well, y’know what, everyone will know what this name means.” SD: Have you become an evangelist for passion-centred sites - do you see that as something that you’re going to be doing a lot more of in the future? TR: I think I have. I didn’t really plan on it, but what I just look at it every day and whenever I see it I’m really inspired. I love personal creativity and individual approaches to the same problem and every day I see a different approach to the problem of creating community, that is creating community that’s dedicated to just one group of people’s interests. SD: What are some of the key points for really deepening the experience for users as a website creator? TR: Well, people would say to me in the beginning, “Ted, why would I want to use your website when I can just go to the dog park and be with dogs?” And I thought, “You don’t want to use my website. You want to go to the dog park.” So really this site is for people who can’t be where they want to be, but still want to share that passion. So, that’s kinda my way of answering you question about allowing people to get deeper with their passions because they’re either stuck at work, or they’re at their grandmother’s and can be with their dog, or they stay up late and no-one understands their love for their Chihuahuas. SD: Yeah, is it the ‘like mind’, it’s one of the great things of the net - that you’re again able to kind of aggregate and commune with beings… TR: …and people will find each other. They’re out there, they don’t even know they’re looking for each other and when they find something they go, “Ah! How did I not even think I’d want to do this?” SD: Have you taken Dogster to Japan? TR: No. Really, since day one I was like, “Uh, maybe if this gets big I could drop out and be the Dogster Japan guy”. I think it would have to be different, it’s really harder to have a dog in Japan because of the expenses… SD: Maybe Catster? TR: Yeah. Or Grashopperster. Or maybe Dogster in Japan would be ‘adopt a dog from Dogster America’ and then that’s your avatar on the site for people, but it would need to be … even just the language barrier, it’s just so hard to change one web site’s language into another. You’ve got to take everything apart and put it back together. We’re still not there. SD: Are you thinking about writing a book on passion-centred website creation? TR: As I was preparing this presentation I was thinking, “That’s the kind of thing that would turn into a book,” and then I thought, “Uh, I don’t wanna!” I’m already so maxed out just trying to make great things happen with Dogster and Catster and still enjoying my life that I just don’t think I could do a book. SD: You probably have most of the outline already down there from your speech. TR: That’s what the editor always says. I look forward to doing so when I retire! SD: What advice do you have to our listeners in terms of really following your passion and making it into a business and what are some of the … pitfalls is maybe not the right word - but some of the things to watch along the way? TR: Well, Vitamin’s great and there’s a great community there, so it’s a pleasure to get to answer this question. I think one think that’s difficult for engineers or designers is that you’re often thinking about, “What problems do I have? What problems to I see people on blogs talking about that I could solve?” Before Dogster I made a site called FleetingImage.org, where anyone could upload an interesting image and that was important to me because before Flickr or photosharing I knew that people had really great images on their desktops and I wanted to see them. So I made this site that made it easy to see them but hard to copy them, so you just had to go there and experience them. And then I thought, when that was done, well, you know what else people like clicking on, they like clicking on pictures of dogs, they like looking at dogs. So, and it was mostly because I saw my wife was going to rescue sites just to look at pictures of dogs and people were showing me on cellphones the pictures of their dogs and cats so I thought I could make this for them. The interesting image site is still live and I think there may be nine hundred images on it, but doing something that other people wanted which I stumbled into, I’d no idea how many people there were, but I think it’s really important to not focus on what geeks or engineers or designers want to do and look for problems that grandmothers or brothers or sisters are having. SD: When hearing I was going to be speaking to you a friend of mind said “My cat made number one on Catster”. What’s that about?! TR: We can make anyone Cat of the Day, and it’s just great! Like right now if someone sends an email and says, “Oh, thanks so much for making this site”, they can be Cat of the Day. Or if someone’s in the forums and there’s a little argument going on and someone chimes in and says, “Oh, I don’t think you need to be fighting about that, lets look at this cute picture over here,” that person is Cat of the Day and then maybe twenty thousand cat lovers are seeing that cat photo and they’re giving him cat fish treats, and they’re giving him rosettes and it’s just, like, I had no idea how wonderful that could be and it’s so neat to be able to just dish it out everyday. SD: So you have Catster and Dogster, without maybe giving away what might be your next thing, in the mind of Ted Rheingold what are some of your other pet passions? TR: (We like puns!) We’ll probably do more pets. It’s just so natural for us and it seems so obvious. People say “haven’t you done them already?” but we just haven’t had the architecture - well, we haven’t had the server support, the financial support, or the community support to simply branch out. We could have done them, we could have gotten them live, but we wouldn’t have maintained them right, so we really want to make a place for everyone who’s a pet lover online because we see passions everywhere and you don’t need fifty million people having a passion, you really just need one or two million and so we’d like to branch out into offering more passion-centric services for people who aren’t getting them currently. SD: In your presentation today you talked a little bit about the advertising, how in-house you were going and soliciting advertising, what sort of advertising model given your user base, given your context, do you find is working? You mentioned sponsorship? TR: Yeah, sponsorship and big advertisers are making everything happen. You know, sponsorship is amazing because any site, no matter how small, could probably find someone who thinks it’s worth a certain amount of money to put their logo on every single page. If you have a thousand people coming to your site, but you’re writing about yarn types or something, there’s probably a yarn maker out there who you can convince to give you a thousand dollars to be a sponsor, or five thousand dollars and the minute you get one, you can go to the next one, and you can say well, that’s what this is, now it costs more, now it’s fifty thousand, and the sponsor is a whole different mindset, they’re looking at it from a strategic commitment, not a tactical ad buy. So sponsorship is excellent and there are lots of young companies who are looking to get their name out, and if you’re an exciting web site that’s talking to an exciting crowd for them, it’s really reasonable that they could write a check for ten thousand dollars for a year. Advertising is more difficult, but much more common. We do everything from letting small advertisers auto-upload their ads for a hundred and sixty-five dollars for three months. They get low impressions, relatively, and if they need favors, we’re going to have to charge them for the time we spend fixing their ads or something. Then we go all the way up to the PetsMarts or Nintendos, or Targets or Old Navys, who want to do ad buys, they want to be on our homepage, in our newsletter and each one of those gets priced out and that’s why you really need the inside ad sales because it’s a lot of back and forth, it could take three months to get a deal that may turn into a quarterly deal… so that that’s what’s made all the difference for us. SD: Thanks for giving our listeners that insight. Do you have any other jewels, any other little doggie bones? TR: Adsense or other third party ad schemes never really made any money for us. Affiliate programs never really made money for us. We thought okay, if we put a dog bed on the homepage and it’s half price and there’s free shipping right now, a lot of people buy it, and we’ll get a dollar for every one. Well, we sold two. All week long on the home page, turns out people who are coming to look at dogs aren’t really into buying a dog bed. Turns out just because you’re a dog lover, doesn’t mean you want a third dog bed, just because it’s half price and free shipping. You probably want to feel it and make sure your dog likes it, so affiliate programs are hard, bounty programs are hard, referral programs are hard … Some people do amazing with them - Plentyoffish made nine hundred and forty thousand dollars in two months on just Adsense ads doing a free dating site, but for the rest of us it’s very elusive. We made the mistake of assuming that we’d be making a lot of money just by selling third party ads. Never came close to materializing! SD: Ted, really appreciate your time. I wish all of you that are listening here have the chance to meet Ted, he’s a blast and you should check out Dogster and Catster! TR: Thank you very much for having me. If anyone wants to say hello, I’m at ted at dogster.com Like this article? Digg it! Download the MP3 (10.8 MB) This interview was recorded after the Future of Web Apps in San Francisco, what follows is a full transcript. SD: This is Sarah Drew with Vitamin, and I’m sitting here with Ted Rheingold from Dogster and Catster who just gave a wonderful speech on the passion-centric communities and websites that he’s seeing as part of the future here. First, just to give a little bit of background you term yourself sometimes as an ‘accidental entrepreneur’, can you tell us a little bit about that? TR: I didn’t expect Dogster to be a self-reliant business. I guess I was a entrepreneur in a way before, because I was making websites for clients, but I really never expected myself to be a CEO. I never saw that in my future, to be running a business and dealing with banking and legal issues. I think though I was very uncomfortable working for other people so maybe it was destined even though I didn’t see it clearly at the time. SD: What was the ‘aha’ moment for you with Dogster? TR: There was a day where my girlfriend (my wife now) posted a very brief message on a Craigslist pets area about this new site where people can make web pages for their dogs and there were a hundred new dogs added the next day! (There’s never been less that a hundred dogs added from that day, actually) And the Craigslist forums blew up. Within a week later Craig himself had to go on and say, “It’s okay, Dogster is a nice community service,” but it just created such excitement and emotion on Craigslist that I realised that this was so much bigger than I had imagined. SD: What was the emotion that was happening at that time? TR: On Craigslist some people were so annoyed that everyone was talking about nothing but Dogster that they were just like, “Can we just talk about something else?!” But so many people were just so crazy to be able to look at each other’s dog photos easily and share them that they refused to stop talking about it and I realised, “Wow, this is big.” SD: So, the ‘…ster’, part of how you were using it was as kind of a tag line for the individualised passion-centred site. Is that something that’s come to use in the general lexicon? TR: Yeah, well, y’know it already was - mobster, spinster, etc, and so when we were having a really hard time finding a good name, I spoke to the person who owned Dogster and he thought that what I was doing was a great idea and he’d sell it to me for what then was just barely within my budget! I thought, “Well, y’know what, everyone will know what this name means.” SD: Have you become an evangelist for passion-centred sites - do you see that as something that you’re going to be doing a lot more of in the future? TR: I think I have. I didn’t really plan on it, but what I just look at it every day and whenever I see it I’m really inspired. I love personal creativity and individual approaches to the same problem and every day I see a different approach to the problem of creating community, that is creating community that’s dedicated to just one group of people’s interests. SD: What are some of the key points for really deepening the experience for users as a website creator? TR: Well, people would say to me in the beginning, “Ted, why would I want to use your website when I can just go to the dog park and be with dogs?” And I thought, “You don’t want to use my website. You want to go to the dog park.” So really this site is for people who can’t be where they want to be, but still want to share that passion. So, that’s kinda my way of answering you question about allowing people to get deeper with their passions because they’re either stuck at work, or they’re at their grandmother’s and can be with their dog, or they stay up late and no-one understands their love for their Chihuahuas. SD: Yeah, is it the ‘like mind’, it’s one of the great things of the net - that you’re again able to kind of aggregate and commune with beings… TR: …and people will find each other. They’re out there, they don’t even know they’re looking for each other and when they find something they go, “Ah! How did I not even think I’d want to do this?” SD: Have you taken Dogster to Japan? TR: No. Really, since day one I was like, “Uh, maybe if this gets big I could drop out and be the Dogster Japan guy”. I think it would have to be different, it’s really harder to have a dog in Japan because of the expenses… SD: Maybe Catster? TR: Yeah. Or Grashopperster. Or maybe Dogster in Japan would be ‘adopt a dog from Dogster America’ and then that’s your avatar on the site for people, but it would need to be … even just the language barrier, it’s just so hard to change one web site’s language into another. You’ve got to take everything apart and put it back together. We’re still not there. SD: Are you thinking about writing a book on passion-centred website creation? TR: As I was preparing this presentation I was thinking, “That’s the kind of thing that would turn into a book,” and then I thought, “Uh, I don’t wanna!” I’m already so maxed out just trying to make great things happen with Dogster and Catster and still enjoying my life that I just don’t think I could do a book. SD: You probably have most of the outline already down there from your speech. TR: That’s what the editor always says. I look forward to doing so when I retire! SD: What advice do you have to our listeners in terms of really following your passion and making it into a business and what are some of the … pitfalls is maybe not the right word - but some of the things to watch along the way? TR: Well, Vitamin’s great and there’s a great community there, so it’s a pleasure to get to answer this question. I think one think that’s difficult for engineers or designers is that you’re often thinking about, “What problems do I have? What problems to I see people on blogs talking about that I could solve?” Before Dogster I made a site called FleetingImage.org, where anyone could upload an interesting image and that was important to me because before Flickr or photosharing I knew that people had really great images on their desktops and I wanted to see them. So I made this site that made it easy to see them but hard to copy them, so you just had to go there and experience them. And then I thought, when that was done, well, you know what else people like clicking on, they like clicking on pictures of dogs, they like looking at dogs. So, and it was mostly because I saw my wife was going to rescue sites just to look at pictures of dogs and people were showing me on cellphones the pictures of their dogs and cats so I thought I could make this for them. The interesting image site is still live and I think there may be nine hundred images on it, but doing something that other people wanted which I stumbled into, I’d no idea how many people there were, but I think it’s really important to not focus on what geeks or engineers or designers want to do and look for problems that grandmothers or brothers or sisters are having. SD: When hearing I was going to be speaking to you a friend of mind said “My cat made number one on Catster”. What’s that about?! TR: We can make anyone Cat of the Day, and it’s just great! Like right now if someone sends an email and says, “Oh, thanks so much for making this site”, they can be Cat of the Day. Or if someone’s in the forums and there’s a little argument going on and someone chimes in and says, “Oh, I don’t think you need to be fighting about that, lets look at this cute picture over here,” that person is Cat of the Day and then maybe twenty thousand cat lovers are seeing that cat photo and they’re giving him cat fish treats, and they’re giving him rosettes and it’s just, like, I had no idea how wonderful that could be and it’s so neat to be able to just dish it out everyday. SD: So you have Catster and Dogster, without maybe giving away what might be your next thing, in the mind of Ted Rheingold what are some of your other pet passions? TR: (We like puns!) We’ll probably do more pets. It’s just so natural for us and it seems so obvious. People say “haven’t you done them already?” but we just haven’t had the architecture - well, we haven’t had the server support, the financial support, or the community support to simply branch out. We could have done them, we could have gotten them live, but we wouldn’t have maintained them right, so we really want to make a place for everyone who’s a pet lover online because we see passions everywhere and you don’t need fifty million people having a passion, you really just need one or two million and so we’d like to branch out into offering more passion-centric services for people who aren’t getting them currently. SD: In your presentation today you talked a little bit about the advertising, how in-house you were going and soliciting advertising, what sort of advertising model given your user base, given your context, do you find is working? You mentioned sponsorship? TR: Yeah, sponsorship and big advertisers are making everything happen. You know, sponsorship is amazing because any site, no matter how small, could probably find someone who thinks it’s worth a certain amount of money to put their logo on every single page. If you have a thousand people coming to your site, but you’re writing about yarn types or something, there’s probably a yarn maker out there who you can convince to give you a thousand dollars to be a sponsor, or five thousand dollars and the minute you get one, you can go to the next one, and you can say well, that’s what this is, now it costs more, now it’s fifty thousand, and the sponsor is a whole different mindset, they’re looking at it from a strategic commitment, not a tactical ad buy. So sponsorship is excellent and there are lots of young companies who are looking to get their name out, and if you’re an exciting web site that’s talking to an exciting crowd for them, it’s really reasonable that they could write a check for ten thousand dollars for a year. Advertising is more difficult, but much more common. We do everything from letting small advertisers auto-upload their ads for a hundred and sixty-five dollars for three months. They get low impressions, relatively, and if they need favors, we’re going to have to charge them for the time we spend fixing their ads or something. Then we go all the way up to the PetsMarts or Nintendos, or Targets or Old Navys, who want to do ad buys, they want to be on our homepage, in our newsletter and each one of those gets priced out and that’s why you really need the inside ad sales because it’s a lot of back and forth, it could take three months to get a deal that may turn into a quarterly deal… so that that’s what’s made all the difference for us. SD: Thanks for giving our listeners that insight. Do you have any other jewels, any other little doggie bones? TR: Adsense or other third party ad schemes never really made any money for us. Affiliate programs never really made money for us. We thought okay, if we put a dog bed on the homepage and it’s half price and there’s free shipping right now, a lot of people buy it, and we’ll get a dollar for every one. Well, we sold two. All week long on the home page, turns out people who are coming to look at dogs aren’t really into buying a dog bed. Turns out just because you’re a dog lover, doesn’t mean you want a third dog bed, just because it’s half price and free shipping. You probably want to feel it and make sure your dog likes it, so affiliate programs are hard, bounty programs are hard, referral programs are hard … Some people do amazing with them - Plentyoffish made nine hundred and forty thousand dollars in two months on just Adsense ads doing a free dating site, but for the rest of us it’s very elusive. We made the mistake of assuming that we’d be making a lot of money just by selling third party ads. Never came close to materializing! SD: Ted, really appreciate your time. I wish all of you that are listening here have the chance to meet Ted, he’s a blast and you should check out Dogster and Catster! TR: Thank you very much for having me. If anyone wants to say hello, I’m at ted at dogster.com Like this article? Digg it! tag:odeo.com,2007-03-11,23616820 Sun, 11 Mar 2007 14:50:32 -0700 no Carsonified » Blog http://www.odeo.com/episodes/22017595-Ted-Rheingold Download the MP3 (10.8 MB) This interview was recorded after the Future of Web Apps in San Francisco, what follows is a full transcript. SD: This is Sarah Drew with Vitamin, and I’m sitting here with Ted Rheingold from Dogster and Catster who just gave a wonderful speech on the passion-centric communities and websites that he’s seeing as part of the future here. First, just to give a little bit of background you term yourself sometimes as an ‘accidental entrepreneur’, can you tell us a little bit about that? TR: I didn’t expect Dogster to be a self-reliant business. I guess I was a entrepreneur in a way before, because I was making websites for clients, but I really never expected myself to be a CEO. I never saw that in my future, to be running a business and dealing with banking and legal issues. I think though I was very uncomfortable working for other people so maybe it was destined even though I didn’t see it clearly at the time. SD: What was ... Download the MP3 (10.8 MB) This interview was recorded after the Future of Web Apps in San Francisco, what follows is a full transcript. SD: This is Sarah Drew with Vitamin, and I’m sitting here with Ted Rheingold from Dogster and Catster who just gave a wonderful speech on the passion-centric communities and websites that he’s seeing as part of the future here. First, just to give a little bit of background you term yourself sometimes as an ‘accidental entrepreneur’, can you tell us a little bit about that? TR: I didn’t expect Dogster to be a self-reliant business. I guess I was a entrepreneur in a way before, because I was making websites for clients, but I really never expected myself to be a CEO. I never saw that in my future, to be running a business and dealing with banking and legal issues. I think though I was very uncomfortable working for other people so maybe it was destined even though I didn’t see it clearly at the time. SD: What was the ‘aha’ moment for you with Dogster? TR: There was a day where my girlfriend (my wife now) posted a very brief message on a Craigslist pets area about this new site where people can make web pages for their dogs and there were a hundred new dogs added the next day! (There’s never been less that a hundred dogs added from that day, actually) And the Craigslist forums blew up. Within a week later Craig himself had to go on and say, “It’s okay, Dogster is a nice community service,” but it just created such excitement and emotion on Craigslist that I realised that this was so much bigger than I had imagined. SD: What was the emotion that was happening at that time? TR: On Craigslist some people were so annoyed that everyone was talking about nothing but Dogster that they were just like, “Can we just talk about something else?!” But so many people were just so crazy to be able to look at each other’s dog photos easily and share them that they refused to stop talking about it and I realised, “Wow, this is big.” SD: So, the ‘…ster’, part of how you were using it was as kind of a tag line for the individualised passion-centred site. Is that something that’s come to use in the general lexicon? TR: Yeah, well, y’know it already was - mobster, spinster, etc, and so when we were having a really hard time finding a good name, I spoke to the person who owned Dogster and he thought that what I was doing was a great idea and he’d sell it to me for what then was just barely within my budget! I thought, “Well, y’know what, everyone will know what this name means.” SD: Have you become an evangelist for passion-centred sites - do you see that as something that you’re going to be doing a lot more of in the future? TR: I think I have. I didn’t really plan on it, but what I just look at it every day and whenever I see it I’m really inspired. I love personal creativity and individual approaches to the same problem and every day I see a different approach to the problem of creating community, that is creating community that’s dedicated to just one group of people’s interests. SD: What are some of the key points for really deepening the experience for users as a website creator? TR: Well, people would say to me in the beginning, “Ted, why would I want to use your website when I can just go to the dog park and be with dogs?” And I thought, “You don’t want to use my website. You want to go to the dog park.” So really this site is for people who can’t be where they want to be, but still want to share that passion. So, that’s kinda my way of answering you question about allowing people to get deeper with their passions because they’re either stuck at work, or they’re at their grandmother’s and can be with their dog, or they stay up late and no-one understands their love for their Chihuahuas. SD: Yeah, is it the ‘like mind’, it’s one of the great things of the net - that you’re again able to kind of aggregate and commune with beings… TR: …and people will find each other. They’re out there, they don’t even know they’re looking for each other and when they find something they go, “Ah! How did I not even think I’d want to do this?” SD: Have you taken Dogster to Japan? TR: No. Really, since day one I was like, “Uh, maybe if this gets big I could drop out and be the Dogster Japan guy”. I think it would have to be different, it’s really harder to have a dog in Japan because of the expenses… SD: Maybe Catster? TR: Yeah. Or Grashopperster. Or maybe Dogster in Japan would be ‘adopt a dog from Dogster America’ and then that’s your avatar on the site for people, but it would need to be … even just the language barrier, it’s just so hard to change one web site’s language into another. You’ve got to take everything apart and put it back together. We’re still not there. SD: Are you thinking about writing a book on passion-centred website creation? TR: As I was preparing this presentation I was thinking, “That’s the kind of thing that would turn into a book,” and then I thought, “Uh, I don’t wanna!” I’m already so maxed out just trying to make great things happen with Dogster and Catster and still enjoying my life that I just don’t think I could do a book. SD: You probably have most of the outline already down there from your speech. TR: That’s what the editor always says. I look forward to doing so when I retire! SD: What advice do you have to our listeners in terms of really following your passion and making it into a business and what are some of the … pitfalls is maybe not the right word - but some of the things to watch along the way? TR: Well, Vitamin’s great and there’s a great community there, so it’s a pleasure to get to answer this question. I think one think that’s difficult for engineers or designers is that you’re often thinking about, “What problems do I have? What problems to I see people on blogs talking about that I could solve?” Before Dogster I made a site called FleetingImage.org, where anyone could upload an interesting image and that was important to me because before Flickr or photosharing I knew that people had really great images on their desktops and I wanted to see them. So I made this site that made it easy to see them but hard to copy them, so you just had to go there and experience them. And then I thought, when that was done, well, you know what else people like clicking on, they like clicking on pictures of dogs, they like looking at dogs. So, and it was mostly because I saw my wife was going to rescue sites just to look at pictures of dogs and people were showing me on cellphones the pictures of their dogs and cats so I thought I could make this for them. The interesting image site is still live and I think there may be nine hundred images on it, but doing something that other people wanted which I stumbled into, I’d no idea how many people there were, but I think it’s really important to not focus on what geeks or engineers or designers want to do and look for problems that grandmothers or brothers or sisters are having. SD: When hearing I was going to be speaking to you a friend of mind said “My cat made number one on Catster”. What’s that about?! TR: We can make anyone Cat of the Day, and it’s just great! Like right now if someone sends an email and says, “Oh, thanks so much for making this site”, they can be Cat of the Day. Or if someone’s in the forums and there’s a little argument going on and someone chimes in and says, “Oh, I don’t think you need to be fighting about that, lets look at this cute picture over here,” that person is Cat of the Day and then maybe twenty thousand cat lovers are seeing that cat photo and they’re giving him cat fish treats, and they’re giving him rosettes and it’s just, like, I had no idea how wonderful that could be and it’s so neat to be able to just dish it out everyday. SD: So you have Catster and Dogster, without maybe giving away what might be your next thing, in the mind of Ted Rheingold what are some of your other pet passions? TR: (We like puns!) We’ll probably do more pets. It’s just so natural for us and it seems so obvious. People say “haven’t you done them already?” but we just haven’t had the architecture - well, we haven’t had the server support, the financial support, or the community support to simply branch out. We could have done them, we could have gotten them live, but we wouldn’t have maintained them right, so we really want to make a place for everyone who’s a pet lover online because we see passions everywhere and you don’t need fifty million people having a passion, you really just need one or two million and so we’d like to branch out into offering more passion-centric services for people who aren’t getting them currently. SD: In your presentation today you talked a little bit about the advertising, how in-house you were going and soliciting advertising, what sort of advertising model given your user base, given your context, do you find is working? You mentioned sponsorship? TR: Yeah, sponsorship and big advertisers are making everything happen. You know, sponsorship is amazing because any site, no matter how small, could probably find someone who thinks it’s worth a certain amount of money to put their logo on every single page. If you have a thousand people coming to your site, but you’re writing about yarn types or something, there’s probably a yarn maker out there who you can convince to give you a thousand dollars to be a sponsor, or five thousand dollars and the minute you get one, you can go to the next one, and you can say well, that’s what this is, now it costs more, now it’s fifty thousand, and the sponsor is a whole different mindset, they’re looking at it from a strategic commitment, not a tactical ad buy. So sponsorship is excellent and there are lots of young companies who are looking to get their name out, and if you’re an exciting web site that’s talking to an exciting crowd for them, it’s really reasonable that they could write a check for ten thousand dollars for a year. Advertising is more difficult, but much more common. We do everything from letting small advertisers auto-upload their ads for a hundred and sixty-five dollars for three months. They get low impressions, relatively, and if they need favors, we’re going to have to charge them for the time we spend fixing their ads or something. Then we go all the way up to the PetsMarts or Nintendos, or Targets or Old Navys, who want to do ad buys, they want to be on our homepage, in our newsletter and each one of those gets priced out and that’s why you really need the inside ad sales because it’s a lot of back and forth, it could take three months to get a deal that may turn into a quarterly deal… so that that’s what’s made all the difference for us. SD: Thanks for giving our listeners that insight. Do you have any other jewels, any other little doggie bones? TR: Adsense or other third party ad schemes never really made any money for us. Affiliate programs never really made money for us. We thought okay, if we put a dog bed on the homepage and it’s half price and there’s free shipping right now, a lot of people buy it, and we’ll get a dollar for every one. Well, we sold two. All week long on the home page, turns out people who are coming to look at dogs aren’t really into buying a dog bed. Turns out just because you’re a dog lover, doesn’t mean you want a third dog bed, just because it’s half price and free shipping. You probably want to feel it and make sure your dog likes it, so affiliate programs are hard, bounty programs are hard, referral programs are hard … Some people do amazing with them - Plentyoffish made nine hundred and forty thousand dollars in two months on just Adsense ads doing a free dating site, but for the rest of us it’s very elusive. We made the mistake of assuming that we’d be making a lot of money just by selling third party ads. Never came close to materializing! SD: Ted, really appreciate your time. I wish all of you that are listening here have the chance to meet Ted, he’s a blast and you should check out Dogster and Catster! TR: Thank you very much for having me. If anyone wants to say hello, I’m at ted at dogster.com Like this article? Digg it! Download the MP3 (10.8 MB) This interview was recorded after the Future of Web Apps in San Francisco, what follows is a full transcript. SD: This is Sarah Drew with Vitamin, and I’m sitting here with Ted Rheingold from Dogster and Catster who just gave a wonderful speech on the passion-centric communities and websites that he’s seeing as part of the future here. First, just to give a little bit of background you term yourself sometimes as an ‘accidental entrepreneur’, can you tell us a little bit about that? TR: I didn’t expect Dogster to be a self-reliant business. I guess I was a entrepreneur in a way before, because I was making websites for clients, but I really never expected myself to be a CEO. I never saw that in my future, to be running a business and dealing with banking and legal issues. I think though I was very uncomfortable working for other people so maybe it was destined even though I didn’t see it clearly at the time. SD: What was the ‘aha’ moment for you with Dogster? TR: There was a day where my girlfriend (my wife now) posted a very brief message on a Craigslist pets area about this new site where people can make web pages for their dogs and there were a hundred new dogs added the next day! (There’s never been less that a hundred dogs added from that day, actually) And the Craigslist forums blew up. Within a week later Craig himself had to go on and say, “It’s okay, Dogster is a nice community service,” but it just created such excitement and emotion on Craigslist that I realised that this was so much bigger than I had imagined. SD: What was the emotion that was happening at that time? TR: On Craigslist some people were so annoyed that everyone was talking about nothing but Dogster that they were just like, “Can we just talk about something else?!” But so many people were just so crazy to be able to look at each other’s dog photos easily and share them that they refused to stop talking about it and I realised, “Wow, this is big.” SD: So, the ‘…ster’, part of how you were using it was as kind of a tag line for the individualised passion-centred site. Is that something that’s come to use in the general lexicon? TR: Yeah, well, y’know it already was - mobster, spinster, etc, and so when we were having a really hard time finding a good name, I spoke to the person who owned Dogster and he thought that what I was doing was a great idea and he’d sell it to me for what then was just barely within my budget! I thought, “Well, y’know what, everyone will know what this name means.” SD: Have you become an evangelist for passion-centred sites - do you see that as something that you’re going to be doing a lot more of in the future? TR: I think I have. I didn’t really plan on it, but what I just look at it every day and whenever I see it I’m really inspired. I love personal creativity and individual approaches to the same problem and every day I see a different approach to the problem of creating community, that is creating community that’s dedicated to just one group of people’s interests. SD: What are some of the key points for really deepening the experience for users as a website creator? TR: Well, people would say to me in the beginning, “Ted, why would I want to use your website when I can just go to the dog park and be with dogs?” And I thought, “You don’t want to use my website. You want to go to the dog park.” So really this site is for people who can’t be where they want to be, but still want to share that passion. So, that’s kinda my way of answering you question about allowing people to get deeper with their passions because they’re either stuck at work, or they’re at their grandmother’s and can be with their dog, or they stay up late and no-one understands their love for their Chihuahuas. SD: Yeah, is it the ‘like mind’, it’s one of the great things of the net - that you’re again able to kind of aggregate and commune with beings… TR: …and people will find each other. They’re out there, they don’t even know they’re looking for each other and when they find something they go, “Ah! How did I not even think I’d want to do this?” SD: Have you taken Dogster to Japan? TR: No. Really, since day one I was like, “Uh, maybe if this gets big I could drop out and be the Dogster Japan guy”. I think it would have to be different, it’s really harder to have a dog in Japan because of the expenses… SD: Maybe Catster? TR: Yeah. Or Grashopperster. Or maybe Dogster in Japan would be ‘adopt a dog from Dogster America’ and then that’s your avatar on the site for people, but it would need to be … even just the language barrier, it’s just so hard to change one web site’s language into another. You’ve got to take everything apart and put it back together. We’re still not there. SD: Are you thinking about writing a book on passion-centred website creation? TR: As I was preparing this presentation I was thinking, “That’s the kind of thing that would turn into a book,” and then I thought, “Uh, I don’t wanna!” I’m already so maxed out just trying to make great things happen with Dogster and Catster and still enjoying my life that I just don’t think I could do a book. SD: You probably have most of the outline already down there from your speech. TR: That’s what the editor always says. I look forward to doing so when I retire! SD: What advice do you have to our listeners in terms of really following your passion and making it into a business and what are some of the … pitfalls is maybe not the right word - but some of the things to watch along the way? TR: Well, Vitamin’s great and there’s a great community there, so it’s a pleasure to get to answer this question. I think one think that’s difficult for engineers or designers is that you’re often thinking about, “What problems do I have? What problems to I see people on blogs talking about that I could solve?” Before Dogster I made a site called FleetingImage.org, where anyone could upload an interesting image and that was important to me because before Flickr or photosharing I knew that people had really great images on their desktops and I wanted to see them. So I made this site that made it easy to see them but hard to copy them, so you just had to go there and experience them. And then I thought, when that was done, well, you know what else people like clicking on, they like clicking on pictures of dogs, they like looking at dogs. So, and it was mostly because I saw my wife was going to rescue sites just to look at pictures of dogs and people were showing me on cellphones the pictures of their dogs and cats so I thought I could make this for them. The interesting image site is still live and I think there may be nine hundred images on it, but doing something that other people wanted which I stumbled into, I’d no idea how many people there were, but I think it’s really important to not focus on what geeks or engineers or designers want to do and look for problems that grandmothers or brothers or sisters are having. SD: When hearing I was going to be speaking to you a friend of mind said “My cat made number one on Catster”. What’s that about?! TR: We can make anyone Cat of the Day, and it’s just great! Like right now if someone sends an email and says, “Oh, thanks so much for making this site”, they can be Cat of the Day. Or if someone’s in the forums and there’s a little argument going on and someone chimes in and says, “Oh, I don’t think you need to be fighting about that, lets look at this cute picture over here,” that person is Cat of the Day and then maybe twenty thousand cat lovers are seeing that cat photo and they’re giving him cat fish treats, and they’re giving him rosettes and it’s just, like, I had no idea how wonderful that could be and it’s so neat to be able to just dish it out everyday. SD: So you have Catster and Dogster, without maybe giving away what might be your next thing, in the mind of Ted Rheingold what are some of your other pet passions? TR: (We like puns!) We’ll probably do more pets. It’s just so natural for us and it seems so obvious. People say “haven’t you done them already?” but we just haven’t had the architecture - well, we haven’t had the server support, the financial support, or the community support to simply branch out. We could have done them, we could have gotten them live, but we wouldn’t have maintained them right, so we really want to make a place for everyone who’s a pet lover online because we see passions everywhere and you don’t need fifty million people having a passion, you really just need one or two million and so we’d like to branch out into offering more passion-centric services for people who aren’t getting them currently. SD: In your presentation today you talked a little bit about the advertising, how in-house you were going and soliciting advertising, what sort of advertising model given your user base, given your context, do you find is working? You mentioned sponsorship? TR: Yeah, sponsorship and big advertisers are making everything happen. You know, sponsorship is amazing because any site, no matter how small, could probably find someone who thinks it’s worth a certain amount of money to put their logo on every single page. If you have a thousand people coming to your site, but you’re writing about yarn types or something, there’s probably a yarn maker out there who you can convince to give you a thousand dollars to be a sponsor, or five thousand dollars and the minute you get one, you can go to the next one, and you can say well, that’s what this is, now it costs more, now it’s fifty thousand, and the sponsor is a whole different mindset, they’re looking at it from a strategic commitment, not a tactical ad buy. So sponsorship is excellent and there are lots of young companies who are looking to get their name out, and if you’re an exciting web site that’s talking to an exciting crowd for them, it’s really reasonable that they could write a check for ten thousand dollars for a year. Advertising is more difficult, but much more common. We do everything from letting small advertisers auto-upload their ads for a hundred and sixty-five dollars for three months. They get low impressions, relatively, and if they need favors, we’re going to have to charge them for the time we spend fixing their ads or something. Then we go all the way up to the PetsMarts or Nintendos, or Targets or Old Navys, who want to do ad buys, they want to be on our homepage, in our newsletter and each one of those gets priced out and that’s why you really need the inside ad sales because it’s a lot of back and forth, it could take three months to get a deal that may turn into a quarterly deal… so that that’s what’s made all the difference for us. SD: Thanks for giving our listeners that insight. Do you have any other jewels, any other little doggie bones? TR: Adsense or other third party ad schemes never really made any money for us. Affiliate programs never really made money for us. We thought okay, if we put a dog bed on the homepage and it’s half price and there’s free shipping right now, a lot of people buy it, and we’ll get a dollar for every one. Well, we sold two. All week long on the home page, turns out people who are coming to look at dogs aren’t really into buying a dog bed. Turns out just because you’re a dog lover, doesn’t mean you want a third dog bed, just because it’s half price and free shipping. You probably want to feel it and make sure your dog likes it, so affiliate programs are hard, bounty programs are hard, referral programs are hard … Some people do amazing with them - Plentyoffish made nine hundred and forty thousand dollars in two months on just Adsense ads doing a free dating site, but for the rest of us it’s very elusive. We made the mistake of assuming that we’d be making a lot of money just by selling third party ads. Never came close to materializing! SD: Ted, really appreciate your time. I wish all of you that are listening here have the chance to meet Ted, he’s a blast and you should check out Dogster and Catster! TR: Thank you very much for having me. If anyone wants to say hello, I’m at ted at dogster.com Like this article? Digg it! tag:odeo.com,2007-03-11,22017595 Sun, 11 Mar 2007 14:50:32 -0700 no Carsonified » Blog http://www.odeo.com/episodes/3478293-Interview-Steve-Olechowski tag:odeo.com,2006-11-30,3478293 Thu, 30 Nov 2006 07:00:52 -0800 no Carsonified » Blog http://www.odeo.com/episodes/23616821-Steve-Olechowski Download the MP3 (10.8 MB) Topics we cover in the interview How is FeedBurner impacting on the way we understand media? What kind of information about their readers do media and advertisers want? RSS and television, what’s the relationship? How can RSS be developed? Full transcription of the interview SD: I’m speaking with Steve Olechowski, one of FeedBurner’s co-founders. It seems to me that the impact that FeedBurner could have on how we understand media and how media is going in a bilateral way is quite profound. Would you care to speak on that a bit? SO: We totally agree: I think that’s part of the value that we offer to all of our publishers and part of the reason that we find most of the major media companies around the world using Feedburner. What really attracts them is that we help them understand their audiences in this changing world of media - where their audience is going as far as blogs and RSS feeds and everything else. SD: So, would you see yo... Download the MP3 (10.8 MB) Topics we cover in the interview How is FeedBurner impacting on the way we understand media? What kind of information about their readers do media and advertisers want? RSS and television, what’s the relationship? How can RSS be developed? Full transcription of the interview SD: I’m speaking with Steve Olechowski, one of FeedBurner’s co-founders. It seems to me that the impact that FeedBurner could have on how we understand media and how media is going in a bilateral way is quite profound. Would you care to speak on that a bit? SO: We totally agree: I think that’s part of the value that we offer to all of our publishers and part of the reason that we find most of the major media companies around the world using Feedburner. What really attracts them is that we help them understand their audiences in this changing world of media - where their audience is going as far as blogs and RSS feeds and everything else. SD: So, would you see yourself as a presenter of aggregated information or data? SO: It’s something we certainly have in our network, lots of great data, but that’s not really what our mission is. Our mission is to help publishers understand their data. Something that they ask us a lot is “Where do we fit in the entire landscape here?” but we’ve been a little careful about privacy - it’s something that you really want to make very important on a network like this. In order for publishers to use us, privacy is very, very important, so we try to uphold our privacy policy for our publishers. That’s number one, but in the aggregate there certainly is interesting data we can provide that we think helps the community at large as far as understanding that this is a totally separate medium from what we’ve seen in the Web in the past and that it is something that needs to be paid attention to, as the numbers continue to grow. We can provide aggregate data that can prove that to people - that hey, this is something that’s really growing, it’s something you need to pay attention to - but we’ll do that carefully. SD: Talking about that changing landscape, from what you’ve been seeing, what’s the weight of a story that runs in USA Today as opposed to - and I know there’s all different tiers of bloggers, but how do you weight those, or how are they being weighted, by the numbers that you see? SO: Well, I think it’s changed quite a bit over the last couple of years. USA Today is one example that was using feeds very early on so they were one of the early entrants into using RSS and I think in general those early entrants are doing very, very well. It’s all over the map, certainly when we look at the long tail that exists of feed subscribers the head is made up of some of the very large blogs, so a lot of the largest blogs in the world are leading the pack as far as RSS subscribers and because they were early entrants and they’ve been doing this a couple of years they’ve had a head start to really grow their audience, but I would say that major media is catching up at an alarming pace if not eclipsing it right about now, so we’re starting to see those lines cross, where commercial media companies like USA Today, Reuters and some of the other major media companies that we represent, have very large subscriber numbers and we think that’s a good thing, it’ll continue to grow. SD: I think you answered some of this in the Q&A after your session at the Future of Web Apps, but how about advertising agencies, how are they approaching the data that you’re providing? SO: Well, the agencies are really interested in figuring out how to reach the audience that’s consuming blogs, I mean that’s extremely interesting to them right now. So, we go to them with data that shows the reach that RSS and blogs have and they want to know how they can reach and tailor their message. The large brand advertisers are always concerned about making sure it’s being presented with content that upholds their brand so that’s always a concern, but more often than not they’re now more interested in reaching this audience. SD: So, RSS. Television. What’s the relationship at this point in time and where will it be in the future? SO: Right now I’m not sure there’s a huge relationship beyond a lot of the media companies are starting to use RSS as a way to make awareness of their television programmes known, new episodes and things like that. I think certainly what we’ve seen with the iTunes store and Yahoo and some of the other large podcasting engines are that they’re starting to do deals with some of these large media companies to actually distribute television shows via RSS and I certainly see that as something that’ll happen very soon, that there will be feeds of TV shows that people can subscribe to instead of having to go sit in front of their TV at 9PM on Tuesday night, they’d rather “give me the feed, I expect at Tuesday night 9PM there’s going to be another thing here, I know I can either watch it then or I can watch it later.” SD: Is Tivo obsolete? SO: No, Tivo’s not obsolete. Tivo is fed by a feed, it may not be RSS format, but in the future I wouldn’t be surprised if it is fed by RSS feeds and that’s how content providers are distributing their content to people instead of over a cable network, over the lines. Certainly there’s IPTV as well, that’s starting to become popular in mainland Europe, and something that I think the networks there are looking at very, very closely, in terms of how that’ll change how things are measured, and certainly RSS will play a big part of that I think over the next few years. SD: What are you offering right now that no other company is offering? SO: Well, we’re offering, we think, top notch statistics of who’s consuming, presenting publishers with who their feed audience is, so we’re helping them analyse their data and provide analytics. We’re helping them really promote and distribute their syndicated content in ways that we don’t think they could do by themselves, and then we’re helping them monetise that in ways that we don’t think they can do by themselves, so those three things are what makes Feedburner unique. Part of what we bring to the table is a) the scale of our network, it’s huge. It’s so much larger than anything else out there and that allows us to do a lot of things that maybe other companies couldn’t do by themselves. SD: Where do you see the development of RSS? where do you see that evolving, because you’ve been helping to really shape how it’s used? SO: Again, I think it’s going to develop more and more to deal with things like rich media. I think it’s already done a pretty good job of dealing with that but it’s going to continue to grow in that facet. One of the things I think will have to be solved by someone, if not us, is how authenticated feeds can work. Right now it’s very difficult to have private data propelled via feed because it’s just shareable and things like that, so I think that’s something that’s going to have to be solved and hopefully we can play a part in working with all the major parties to make sure it’s done the right way and can be presented to people. SD: In the larger context, what is the focus for you over the next couple of years? SO: We want to continue to grow what we’re doing today. We think we’re doing a great job today of dealing with serving the needs of publishers and advertisers but we don’t think we’re doing a good enough job. We think we still have a list about a mile long of things we think we could do better. So we’re going to prove out what we’re doing and help optimise it as much as we can, but on top of that we really deal today with media publishers and advertisers that follow along those suites, but feeds are going to be coming out of all other sorts of other places so we need to make sure we can cater for those publishers as well. As an example there are all sorts of retail companies like Target, very large retailer that’s here, which is starting to have feeds of daily offers, so the circulars that they normally would put in the paper every week are available over RSS feeds. That’s not a publisher that we cater to very easily. We don’t do a lot for them today but I think that’s something that we’re working very, very hard on, in making sure that we can deal with RSS feeds no matter where they come from. SD: Do you have any advice for individuals who are going through the start-up entrepreneurial process for the first time? SO: This is the third company I’ve started and I’ve learned something every time. The most important thing is to understand who your customers are, and make sure you’re listening to and serving to them in a very controlled, but almost rabid manner, and build your business around that. You may have some great technical ideas that are the foundation of what you’re building but you really have to look at your customers and your audience and make sure you’re serving them. That’s been the biggest key to our success over the companies that we’ve developed. So that’s number one. From a development side of things, don’t over-engineer up front. Basically, do what you need to do to get your product to market quickly and iterate very quickly, spend a lot of time optimising and be able to deal with that scale that’s going to come on the next level, but if you spend all of your time up front thinking about that, you’re just going to spin your wheels and somebody will pass you up, so get to market quickly, always be very, very conscious about optimizing what you’re building, but don’t spend too much time on it up front. Those are my biggest pointers. SD: Thank you so much, wonderful. Transcribed by Scott Morris Like this article? Digg it! Download the MP3 (10.8 MB) Topics we cover in the interview How is FeedBurner impacting on the way we understand media? What kind of information about their readers do media and advertisers want? RSS and television, what’s the relationship? How can RSS be developed? Full transcription of the interview SD: I’m speaking with Steve Olechowski, one of FeedBurner’s co-founders. It seems to me that the impact that FeedBurner could have on how we understand media and how media is going in a bilateral way is quite profound. Would you care to speak on that a bit? SO: We totally agree: I think that’s part of the value that we offer to all of our publishers and part of the reason that we find most of the major media companies around the world using Feedburner. What really attracts them is that we help them understand their audiences in this changing world of media - where their audience is going as far as blogs and RSS feeds and everything else. SD: So, would you see yourself as a presenter of aggregated information or data? SO: It’s something we certainly have in our network, lots of great data, but that’s not really what our mission is. Our mission is to help publishers understand their data. Something that they ask us a lot is “Where do we fit in the entire landscape here?” but we’ve been a little careful about privacy - it’s something that you really want to make very important on a network like this. In order for publishers to use us, privacy is very, very important, so we try to uphold our privacy policy for our publishers. That’s number one, but in the aggregate there certainly is interesting data we can provide that we think helps the community at large as far as understanding that this is a totally separate medium from what we’ve seen in the Web in the past and that it is something that needs to be paid attention to, as the numbers continue to grow. We can provide aggregate data that can prove that to people - that hey, this is something that’s really growing, it’s something you need to pay attention to - but we’ll do that carefully. SD: Talking about that changing landscape, from what you’ve been seeing, what’s the weight of a story that runs in USA Today as opposed to - and I know there’s all different tiers of bloggers, but how do you weight those, or how are they being weighted, by the numbers that you see? SO: Well, I think it’s changed quite a bit over the last couple of years. USA Today is one example that was using feeds very early on so they were one of the early entrants into using RSS and I think in general those early entrants are doing very, very well. It’s all over the map, certainly when we look at the long tail that exists of feed subscribers the head is made up of some of the very large blogs, so a lot of the largest blogs in the world are leading the pack as far as RSS subscribers and because they were early entrants and they’ve been doing this a couple of years they’ve had a head start to really grow their audience, but I would say that major media is catching up at an alarming pace if not eclipsing it right about now, so we’re starting to see those lines cross, where commercial media companies like USA Today, Reuters and some of the other major media companies that we represent, have very large subscriber numbers and we think that’s a good thing, it’ll continue to grow. SD: I think you answered some of this in the Q&A after your session at the Future of Web Apps, but how about advertising agencies, how are they approaching the data that you’re providing? SO: Well, the agencies are really interested in figuring out how to reach the audience that’s consuming blogs, I mean that’s extremely interesting to them right now. So, we go to them with data that shows the reach that RSS and blogs have and they want to know how they can reach and tailor their message. The large brand advertisers are always concerned about making sure it’s being presented with content that upholds their brand so that’s always a concern, but more often than not they’re now more interested in reaching this audience. SD: So, RSS. Television. What’s the relationship at this point in time and where will it be in the future? SO: Right now I’m not sure there’s a huge relationship beyond a lot of the media companies are starting to use RSS as a way to make awareness of their television programmes known, new episodes and things like that. I think certainly what we’ve seen with the iTunes store and Yahoo and some of the other large podcasting engines are that they’re starting to do deals with some of these large media companies to actually distribute television shows via RSS and I certainly see that as something that’ll happen very soon, that there will be feeds of TV shows that people can subscribe to instead of having to go sit in front of their TV at 9PM on Tuesday night, they’d rather “give me the feed, I expect at Tuesday night 9PM there’s going to be another thing here, I know I can either watch it then or I can watch it later.” SD: Is Tivo obsolete? SO: No, Tivo’s not obsolete. Tivo is fed by a feed, it may not be RSS format, but in the future I wouldn’t be surprised if it is fed by RSS feeds and that’s how content providers are distributing their content to people instead of over a cable network, over the lines. Certainly there’s IPTV as well, that’s starting to become popular in mainland Europe, and something that I think the networks there are looking at very, very closely, in terms of how that’ll change how things are measured, and certainly RSS will play a big part of that I think over the next few years. SD: What are you offering right now that no other company is offering? SO: Well, we’re offering, we think, top notch statistics of who’s consuming, presenting publishers with who their feed audience is, so we’re helping them analyse their data and provide analytics. We’re helping them really promote and distribute their syndicated content in ways that we don’t think they could do by themselves, and then we’re helping them monetise that in ways that we don’t think they can do by themselves, so those three things are what makes Feedburner unique. Part of what we bring to the table is a) the scale of our network, it’s huge. It’s so much larger than anything else out there and that allows us to do a lot of things that maybe other companies couldn’t do by themselves. SD: Where do you see the development of RSS? where do you see that evolving, because you’ve been helping to really shape how it’s used? SO: Again, I think it’s going to develop more and more to deal with things like rich media. I think it’s already done a pretty good job of dealing with that but it’s going to continue to grow in that facet. One of the things I think will have to be solved by someone, if not us, is how authenticated feeds can work. Right now it’s very difficult to have private data propelled via feed because it’s just shareable and things like that, so I think that’s something that’s going to have to be solved and hopefully we can play a part in working with all the major parties to make sure it’s done the right way and can be presented to people. SD: In the larger context, what is the focus for you over the next couple of years? SO: We want to continue to grow what we’re doing today. We think we’re doing a great job today of dealing with serving the needs of publishers and advertisers but we don’t think we’re doing a good enough job. We think we still have a list about a mile long of things we think we could do better. So we’re going to prove out what we’re doing and help optimise it as much as we can, but on top of that we really deal today with media publishers and advertisers that follow along those suites, but feeds are going to be coming out of all other sorts of other places so we need to make sure we can cater for those publishers as well. As an example there are all sorts of retail companies like Target, very large retailer that’s here, which is starting to have feeds of daily offers, so the circulars that they normally would put in the paper every week are available over RSS feeds. That’s not a publisher that we cater to very easily. We don’t do a lot for them today but I think that’s something that we’re working very, very hard on, in making sure that we can deal with RSS feeds no matter where they come from. SD: Do you have any advice for individuals who are going through the start-up entrepreneurial process for the first time? SO: This is the third company I’ve started and I’ve learned something every time. The most important thing is to understand who your customers are, and make sure you’re listening to and serving to them in a very controlled, but almost rabid manner, and build your business around that. You may have some great technical ideas that are the foundation of what you’re building but you really have to look at your customers and your audience and make sure you’re serving them. That’s been the biggest key to our success over the companies that we’ve developed. So that’s number one. From a development side of things, don’t over-engineer up front. Basically, do what you need to do to get your product to market quickly and iterate very quickly, spend a lot of time optimising and be able to deal with that scale that’s going to come on the next level, but if you spend all of your time up front thinking about that, you’re just going to spin your wheels and somebody will pass you up, so get to market quickly, always be very, very conscious about optimizing what you’re building, but don’t spend too much time on it up front. Those are my biggest pointers. SD: Thank you so much, wonderful. Transcribed by Scott Morris Like this article? Digg it! tag:odeo.com,2006-11-30,23616821 Thu, 30 Nov 2006 00:00:52 -0800 no Carsonified » Blog Web Apps http://www.odeo.com/episodes/22017599-Steve-Olechowski Download the MP3 (10.8 MB) Topics we cover in the interview How is FeedBurner impacting on the way we understand media? What kind of information about their readers do media and advertisers want? RSS and television, what’s the relationship? How can RSS be developed? Full transcription of the interview SD: I’m speaking with Steve Olechowski, one of FeedBurner’s co-founders. It seems to me that the impact that FeedBurner could have on how we understand media and how media is going in a bilateral way is quite profound. Would you care to speak on that a bit? SO: We totally agree: I think that’s part of the value that we offer to all of our publishers and part of the reason that we find most of the major media companies around the world using Feedburner. What really attracts them is that we help them understand their audiences in this changing world of media - where their audience is going as far as blogs and RSS feeds and everything else. SD: So, would you see yo... Download the MP3 (10.8 MB) Topics we cover in the interview How is FeedBurner impacting on the way we understand media? What kind of information about their readers do media and advertisers want? RSS and television, what’s the relationship? How can RSS be developed? Full transcription of the interview SD: I’m speaking with Steve Olechowski, one of FeedBurner’s co-founders. It seems to me that the impact that FeedBurner could have on how we understand media and how media is going in a bilateral way is quite profound. Would you care to speak on that a bit? SO: We totally agree: I think that’s part of the value that we offer to all of our publishers and part of the reason that we find most of the major media companies around the world using Feedburner. What really attracts them is that we help them understand their audiences in this changing world of media - where their audience is going as far as blogs and RSS feeds and everything else. SD: So, would you see yourself as a presenter of aggregated information or data? SO: It’s something we certainly have in our network, lots of great data, but that’s not really what our mission is. Our mission is to help publishers understand their data. Something that they ask us a lot is “Where do we fit in the entire landscape here?” but we’ve been a little careful about privacy - it’s something that you really want to make very important on a network like this. In order for publishers to use us, privacy is very, very important, so we try to uphold our privacy policy for our publishers. That’s number one, but in the aggregate there certainly is interesting data we can provide that we think helps the community at large as far as understanding that this is a totally separate medium from what we’ve seen in the Web in the past and that it is something that needs to be paid attention to, as the numbers continue to grow. We can provide aggregate data that can prove that to people - that hey, this is something that’s really growing, it’s something you need to pay attention to - but we’ll do that carefully. SD: Talking about that changing landscape, from what you’ve been seeing, what’s the weight of a story that runs in USA Today as opposed to - and I know there’s all different tiers of bloggers, but how do you weight those, or how are they being weighted, by the numbers that you see? SO: Well, I think it’s changed quite a bit over the last couple of years. USA Today is one example that was using feeds very early on so they were one of the early entrants into using RSS and I think in general those early entrants are doing very, very well. It’s all over the map, certainly when we look at the long tail that exists of feed subscribers the head is made up of some of the very large blogs, so a lot of the largest blogs in the world are leading the pack as far as RSS subscribers and because they were early entrants and they’ve been doing this a couple of years they’ve had a head start to really grow their audience, but I would say that major media is catching up at an alarming pace if not eclipsing it right about now, so we’re starting to see those lines cross, where commercial media companies like USA Today, Reuters and some of the other major media companies that we represent, have very large subscriber numbers and we think that’s a good thing, it’ll continue to grow. SD: I think you answered some of this in the Q&A after your session at the Future of Web Apps, but how about advertising agencies, how are they approaching the data that you’re providing? SO: Well, the agencies are really interested in figuring out how to reach the audience that’s consuming blogs, I mean that’s extremely interesting to them right now. So, we go to them with data that shows the reach that RSS and blogs have and they want to know how they can reach and tailor their message. The large brand advertisers are always concerned about making sure it’s being presented with content that upholds their brand so that’s always a concern, but more often than not they’re now more interested in reaching this audience. SD: So, RSS. Television. What’s the relationship at this point in time and where will it be in the future? SO: Right now I’m not sure there’s a huge relationship beyond a lot of the media companies are starting to use RSS as a way to make awareness of their television programmes known, new episodes and things like that. I think certainly what we’ve seen with the iTunes store and Yahoo and some of the other large podcasting engines are that they’re starting to do deals with some of these large media companies to actually distribute television shows via RSS and I certainly see that as something that’ll happen very soon, that there will be feeds of TV shows that people can subscribe to instead of having to go sit in front of their TV at 9PM on Tuesday night, they’d rather “give me the feed, I expect at Tuesday night 9PM there’s going to be another thing here, I know I can either watch it then or I can watch it later.” SD: Is Tivo obsolete? SO: No, Tivo’s not obsolete. Tivo is fed by a feed, it may not be RSS format, but in the future I wouldn’t be surprised if it is fed by RSS feeds and that’s how content providers are distributing their content to people instead of over a cable network, over the lines. Certainly there’s IPTV as well, that’s starting to become popular in mainland Europe, and something that I think the networks there are looking at very, very closely, in terms of how that’ll change how things are measured, and certainly RSS will play a big part of that I think over the next few years. SD: What are you offering right now that no other company is offering? SO: Well, we’re offering, we think, top notch statistics of who’s consuming, presenting publishers with who their feed audience is, so we’re helping them analyse their data and provide analytics. We’re helping them really promote and distribute their syndicated content in ways that we don’t think they could do by themselves, and then we’re helping them monetise that in ways that we don’t think they can do by themselves, so those three things are what makes Feedburner unique. Part of what we bring to the table is a) the scale of our network, it’s huge. It’s so much larger than anything else out there and that allows us to do a lot of things that maybe other companies couldn’t do by themselves. SD: Where do you see the development of RSS? where do you see that evolving, because you’ve been helping to really shape how it’s used? SO: Again, I think it’s going to develop more and more to deal with things like rich media. I think it’s already done a pretty good job of dealing with that but it’s going to continue to grow in that facet. One of the things I think will have to be solved by someone, if not us, is how authenticated feeds can work. Right now it’s very difficult to have private data propelled via feed because it’s just shareable and things like that, so I think that’s something that’s going to have to be solved and hopefully we can play a part in working with all the major parties to make sure it’s done the right way and can be presented to people. SD: In the larger context, what is the focus for you over the next couple of years? SO: We want to continue to grow what we’re doing today. We think we’re doing a great job today of dealing with serving the needs of publishers and advertisers but we don’t think we’re doing a good enough job. We think we still have a list about a mile long of things we think we could do better. So we’re going to prove out what we’re doing and help optimise it as much as we can, but on top of that we really deal today with media publishers and advertisers that follow along those suites, but feeds are going to be coming out of all other sorts of other places so we need to make sure we can cater for those publishers as well. As an example there are all sorts of retail companies like Target, very large retailer that’s here, which is starting to have feeds of daily offers, so the circulars that they normally would put in the paper every week are available over RSS feeds. That’s not a publisher that we cater to very easily. We don’t do a lot for them today but I think that’s something that we’re working very, very hard on, in making sure that we can deal with RSS feeds no matter where they come from. SD: Do you have any advice for individuals who are going through the start-up entrepreneurial process for the first time? SO: This is the third company I’ve started and I’ve learned something every time. The most important thing is to understand who your customers are, and make sure you’re listening to and serving to them in a very controlled, but almost rabid manner, and build your business around that. You may have some great technical ideas that are the foundation of what you’re building but you really have to look at your customers and your audience and make sure you’re serving them. That’s been the biggest key to our success over the companies that we’ve developed. So that’s number one. From a development side of things, don’t over-engineer up front. Basically, do what you need to do to get your product to market quickly and iterate very quickly, spend a lot of time optimising and be able to deal with that scale that’s going to come on the next level, but if you spend all of your time up front thinking about that, you’re just going to spin your wheels and somebody will pass you up, so get to market quickly, always be very, very conscious about optimizing what you’re building, but don’t spend too much time on it up front. Those are my biggest pointers. SD: Thank you so much, wonderful. Transcribed by Scott Morris Like this article? Digg it! Download the MP3 (10.8 MB) Topics we cover in the interview How is FeedBurner impacting on the way we understand media? What kind of information about their readers do media and advertisers want? RSS and television, what’s the relationship? How can RSS be developed? Full transcription of the interview SD: I’m speaking with Steve Olechowski, one of FeedBurner’s co-founders. It seems to me that the impact that FeedBurner could have on how we understand media and how media is going in a bilateral way is quite profound. Would you care to speak on that a bit? SO: We totally agree: I think that’s part of the value that we offer to all of our publishers and part of the reason that we find most of the major media companies around the world using Feedburner. What really attracts them is that we help them understand their audiences in this changing world of media - where their audience is going as far as blogs and RSS feeds and everything else. SD: So, would you see yourself as a presenter of aggregated information or data? SO: It’s something we certainly have in our network, lots of great data, but that’s not really what our mission is. Our mission is to help publishers understand their data. Something that they ask us a lot is “Where do we fit in the entire landscape here?” but we’ve been a little careful about privacy - it’s something that you really want to make very important on a network like this. In order for publishers to use us, privacy is very, very important, so we try to uphold our privacy policy for our publishers. That’s number one, but in the aggregate there certainly is interesting data we can provide that we think helps the community at large as far as understanding that this is a totally separate medium from what we’ve seen in the Web in the past and that it is something that needs to be paid attention to, as the numbers continue to grow. We can provide aggregate data that can prove that to people - that hey, this is something that’s really growing, it’s something you need to pay attention to - but we’ll do that carefully. SD: Talking about that changing landscape, from what you’ve been seeing, what’s the weight of a story that runs in USA Today as opposed to - and I know there’s all different tiers of bloggers, but how do you weight those, or how are they being weighted, by the numbers that you see? SO: Well, I think it’s changed quite a bit over the last couple of years. USA Today is one example that was using feeds very early on so they were one of the early entrants into using RSS and I think in general those early entrants are doing very, very well. It’s all over the map, certainly when we look at the long tail that exists of feed subscribers the head is made up of some of the very large blogs, so a lot of the largest blogs in the world are leading the pack as far as RSS subscribers and because they were early entrants and they’ve been doing this a couple of years they’ve had a head start to really grow their audience, but I would say that major media is catching up at an alarming pace if not eclipsing it right about now, so we’re starting to see those lines cross, where commercial media companies like USA Today, Reuters and some of the other major media companies that we represent, have very large subscriber numbers and we think that’s a good thing, it’ll continue to grow. SD: I think you answered some of this in the Q&A after your session at the Future of Web Apps, but how about advertising agencies, how are they approaching the data that you’re providing? SO: Well, the agencies are really interested in figuring out how to reach the audience that’s consuming blogs, I mean that’s extremely interesting to them right now. So, we go to them with data that shows the reach that RSS and blogs have and they want to know how they can reach and tailor their message. The large brand advertisers are always concerned about making sure it’s being presented with content that upholds their brand so that’s always a concern, but more often than not they’re now more interested in reaching this audience. SD: So, RSS. Television. What’s the relationship at this point in time and where will it be in the future? SO: Right now I’m not sure there’s a huge relationship beyond a lot of the media companies are starting to use RSS as a way to make awareness of their television programmes known, new episodes and things like that. I think certainly what we’ve seen with the iTunes store and Yahoo and some of the other large podcasting engines are that they’re starting to do deals with some of these large media companies to actually distribute television shows via RSS and I certainly see that as something that’ll happen very soon, that there will be feeds of TV shows that people can subscribe to instead of having to go sit in front of their TV at 9PM on Tuesday night, they’d rather “give me the feed, I expect at Tuesday night 9PM there’s going to be another thing here, I know I can either watch it then or I can watch it later.” SD: Is Tivo obsolete? SO: No, Tivo’s not obsolete. Tivo is fed by a feed, it may not be RSS format, but in the future I wouldn’t be surprised if it is fed by RSS feeds and that’s how content providers are distributing their content to people instead of over a cable network, over the lines. Certainly there’s IPTV as well, that’s starting to become popular in mainland Europe, and something that I think the networks there are looking at very, very closely, in terms of how that’ll change how things are measured, and certainly RSS will play a big part of that I think over the next few years. SD: What are you offering right now that no other company is offering? SO: Well, we’re offering, we think, top notch statistics of who’s consuming, presenting publishers with who their feed audience is, so we’re helping them analyse their data and provide analytics. We’re helping them really promote and distribute their syndicated content in ways that we don’t think they could do by themselves, and then we’re helping them monetise that in ways that we don’t think they can do by themselves, so those three things are what makes Feedburner unique. Part of what we bring to the table is a) the scale of our network, it’s huge. It’s so much larger than anything else out there and that allows us to do a lot of things that maybe other companies couldn’t do by themselves. SD: Where do you see the development of RSS? where do you see that evolving, because you’ve been helping to really shape how it’s used? SO: Again, I think it’s going to develop more and more to deal with things like rich media. I think it’s already done a pretty good job of dealing with that but it’s going to continue to grow in that facet. One of the things I think will have to be solved by someone, if not us, is how authenticated feeds can work. Right now it’s very difficult to have private data propelled via feed because it’s just shareable and things like that, so I think that’s something that’s going to have to be solved and hopefully we can play a part in working with all the major parties to make sure it’s done the right way and can be presented to people. SD: In the larger context, what is the focus for you over the next couple of years? SO: We want to continue to grow what we’re doing today. We think we’re doing a great job today of dealing with serving the needs of publishers and advertisers but we don’t think we’re doing a good enough job. We think we still have a list about a mile long of things we think we could do better. So we’re going to prove out what we’re doing and help optimise it as much as we can, but on top of that we really deal today with media publishers and advertisers that follow along those suites, but feeds are going to be coming out of all other sorts of other places so we need to make sure we can cater for those publishers as well. As an example there are all sorts of retail companies like Target, very large retailer that’s here, which is starting to have feeds of daily offers, so the circulars that they normally would put in the paper every week are available over RSS feeds. That’s not a publisher that we cater to very easily. We don’t do a lot for them today but I think that’s something that we’re working very, very hard on, in making sure that we can deal with RSS feeds no matter where they come from. SD: Do you have any advice for individuals who are going through the start-up entrepreneurial process for the first time? SO: This is the third company I’ve started and I’ve learned something every time. The most important thing is to understand who your customers are, and make sure you’re listening to and serving to them in a very controlled, but almost rabid manner, and build your business around that. You may have some great technical ideas that are the foundation of what you’re building but you really have to look at your customers and your audience and make sure you’re serving them. That’s been the biggest key to our success over the companies that we’ve developed. So that’s number one. From a development side of things, don’t over-engineer up front. Basically, do what you need to do to get your product to market quickly and iterate very quickly, spend a lot of time optimising and be able to deal with that scale that’s going to come on the next level, but if you spend all of your time up front thinking about that, you’re just going to spin your wheels and somebody will pass you up, so get to market quickly, always be very, very conscious about optimizing what you’re building, but don’t spend too much time on it up front. Those are my biggest pointers. SD: Thank you so much, wonderful. Transcribed by Scott Morris Like this article? Digg it! tag:odeo.com,2006-11-30,22017599 Thu, 30 Nov 2006 00:00:52 -0800 no Carsonified » Blog Web Apps http://www.odeo.com/episodes/2711173-Interview-Kevin-Rose tag:odeo.com,2006-11-13,2711173 Mon, 13 Nov 2006 07:00:35 -0800 no Carsonified » Blog http://www.odeo.com/episodes/23616822-Kevin-Rose Download the MP3 (10.63 MB) Topics we cover in the interview What’s the creative process behind digg? How do you think up new features? Do you use a digg-like consensus approach to them? How have you seen digg affect traditional media? How will digg-spawned sites and web apps be in the future? Full transcription of the interview SD: Do you do programming as well as design or are you one of the individuals who’s able to see the big picture and how the pieces fit together? KR: As far as my daily activities on the site, working for digg, it’s all about creating new features for the site, so it’s all about working with the graphic designer, Daniel Burka to come up with these features. So basically I’ll draw them up on a piece of paper and they look really ugly, and then I pass them to someone that knows how to make them look pretty, so that’s kind of how it’s been working for the last couple of years. SD: Can you tell us a little bit about your ... Download the MP3 (10.63 MB) Topics we cover in the interview What’s the creative process behind digg? How do you think up new features? Do you use a digg-like consensus approach to them? How have you seen digg affect traditional media? How will digg-spawned sites and web apps be in the future? Full transcription of the interview SD: Do you do programming as well as design or are you one of the individuals who’s able to see the big picture and how the pieces fit together? KR: As far as my daily activities on the site, working for digg, it’s all about creating new features for the site, so it’s all about working with the graphic designer, Daniel Burka to come up with these features. So basically I’ll draw them up on a piece of paper and they look really ugly, and then I pass them to someone that knows how to make them look pretty, so that’s kind of how it’s been working for the last couple of years. SD: Can you tell us a little bit about your creative process? KR: Well, it’s a very strange one in that most of it is done almost randomly, just driving around or whatever it may be, and I’ll just think of a feature and how it might impact the users and how they might use it. I’m constantly thinking about the site and so it doesn’t feel like work, more like a way to figure out how users want to communicate and share information with each other. We’ve come up with dozens of different features, a lot of them that we’ve thrown away because we don’t think they’re a good fit, or features that we just haven’t time to build, create and roll them out yet, so it’s really looking at how the users are expressing themselves on the site and seeing what they are doing with the site, what are the pitfalls? Where do they get lost in the navigation? Can they not discover stories because of one reason another? Is there a story that falls through the cracks because it wasn’t highlighted in a certain way, and how can we draw out the best information presented to the users and then give them the tools that they need to be able to share it with all of their friends using digg? And so we keep that in mind and think about - I know this sounds really strange and basic - but what would be cool and useful, what people would really like to do, and what would keep them coming back and really finding the information they want to find. SD: Do you use something that’s parallel to digg, where it’s kind of a consensus vote into what you feel will actually work? Do you take that into your in-house creative process? KR: Well, it’s really myself and Daniel, and so we sit down and we come up with different things and eventually we’ll turn them into mockups. So after there’s a design that’s been on a piece of scratchpaper it’s handed off to him and he’ll come up with a series of different mockups and different layouts for that particular feature or design. We’ll take a look at it, then present it to the rest of the staff and let them play around with it, see what they think about the feature, take their feedback and then ultimately we’ll just make the decision on whether we should push it out or not. SD: Do you have demographics on your core users? Who are the people that are sitting and spending large chunks of time to vote the stories up? KR: It typically tends to be your standard eighteen to thirty-four year old male user for the most part, but there’s different types of users on the site, and we’ve really seen that split and fragment when we rolled out the new sections in digg version three. For the longest time we were a technology news site, so it was all about the tech fans and tech enthusiasts, but right after we launched version three we saw a huge explosion in user registration and it was from a lot of users that don’t fit our typical demographic because they’re interested in other types of news online. So the number two most popular section on our site today is our political section - those are very hot topics, and then actually followed by videos, so videos is our first stab at content outside of just news and has been extremely popular for us, and it’s been a great way to expose users to a lot of cool videos around the web. SD: Are you finding that larger news agencies or advertising agencies are starting to use digg as a poll factor? KR: You know, it’s really shortening the length of the feedback loop. It’s one of those things where they are using it to find out what is hot at any given moment in time, especially as you can sort most diggs in any given section and you can see what people are talking about, where they’re gathering around, what stories are very interesting for a given day, etc. I’ve gotten a lot of feedback from writers that said, hey, y’know what, I pulled up on the day that Apple announced all of their new products, and looked up a digg swarm (which is basically a Flash visualisation of all the users as they’re swarming around the different stories), and they were able to watch that over the course of a few hours and see where the most attention was [and work out] which product did they want to focus their article on. They found out that it was the iTV, the little set-top box, that was an extremely popular story that day and so they created content around that because they knew that that was going to be a hot topic. So it’s helping journalists and writers in that way, in that they can find out in real-time what the pulse is of the community is online. SD: And how about advertising agencies - are they referencing back to digg to see how to shape their next story or campaign? KR: You know, we haven’t had a ton of ad agencies contact us, other than the fact that they’ve said they would like to have their ads diggable, and I don’t know if our users want to digg advertisements! So that’s one of those things where I was like, “Can we get back to you on that one?! But not really at this time, not that I know of! SD: What do you think are the long-term implications for social content? If we look two or three years down the line, what is the digg universe going to look like, what are the digg-spawned applications and websites going to look like? KR: Well, I think that digg is a great tool for sharing your interests with others, and I think that there has never really been a tool online where there’s - I’m trying to think of what I can say and what I can’t say! We really want to build out a profile of users’ interests and be able to group these together and get recommendations on different things based on people that you trust. So whether that be your news, or other different types of content online, it’s really about not only getting recommendations but suggestions and also introducing you to new things that you might not know of through people that you’re connected with, and people that you’ve never met. So one of the things that we’re doing at digg right now that’s very exciting to us (that we haven’t launched yet) is we’re learning a lot about what individual people are digging on the site and so what we really want to do is allow the users - I mean, we should do everything in our power to give back to the users based upon what they’re giving us. So they’re giving us history and they’re sharing their history with everyone based on what they’re digging. What we can do is, on the back end, do the math to make comparisons to other users and say, ok, based on what you’re into, I know you love sports cars and I know you love oolong tea, I can make a connection there with other types of stories, and I can also make a connection with people that you haven’t met before, so it’s going to be really interesting when social networking sites are no longer based on just, “I think this person is attractive and I want to meet them,” but more along the lines of, “I know I have a connection with this person in one way or another because we digg the same comments, we like the same stories, and we might even live close to each other and might want to meet up,” so there’s going to be a whole nice range of tools that we’ll be providing to the community over the next year that are going to allow them to explore these relationships in ways that they never thought possible. SD: Very cool. What is the relationship between, say, digg and Flickr? Is something like that a possibility? KR: Well, y’know, it’s one of those things where we really want to give users the power to digg and share whatever is important to them and we’re not limiting that to any one particular type of content online so whether it’s pictures or you name it, anything where there is an abundance of information that needs a large collaborative filter applied to it to sift through that, we’ll be going. As long as it’s relevant too, I mean there’s certain things that you really wouldn’t want to dig - you couldn’t really apply digg to an online dating service because you wouldn’t want to digg someone that you’re interested in because then everyone else would want to go out with them! So we know there’s limitations to the concept, but there are a lot of really cool areas that we can apply the concept to, so you’ll see that rolled out, definitely some new areas in the next few months. SD: Any last comments? KR: Thanks for having me, and just thought I’d let you know that I’m huge fan of the site and I digg your stories all of the time. It’s awesome! SD: Thanks Kevin. Transcribed by Scott Morris Like this article? Digg it! Download the MP3 (10.63 MB) Topics we cover in the interview What’s the creative process behind digg? How do you think up new features? Do you use a digg-like consensus approach to them? How have you seen digg affect traditional media? How will digg-spawned sites and web apps be in the future? Full transcription of the interview SD: Do you do programming as well as design or are you one of the individuals who’s able to see the big picture and how the pieces fit together? KR: As far as my daily activities on the site, working for digg, it’s all about creating new features for the site, so it’s all about working with the graphic designer, Daniel Burka to come up with these features. So basically I’ll draw them up on a piece of paper and they look really ugly, and then I pass them to someone that knows how to make them look pretty, so that’s kind of how it’s been working for the last couple of years. SD: Can you tell us a little bit about your creative process? KR: Well, it’s a very strange one in that most of it is done almost randomly, just driving around or whatever it may be, and I’ll just think of a feature and how it might impact the users and how they might use it. I’m constantly thinking about the site and so it doesn’t feel like work, more like a way to figure out how users want to communicate and share information with each other. We’ve come up with dozens of different features, a lot of them that we’ve thrown away because we don’t think they’re a good fit, or features that we just haven’t time to build, create and roll them out yet, so it’s really looking at how the users are expressing themselves on the site and seeing what they are doing with the site, what are the pitfalls? Where do they get lost in the navigation? Can they not discover stories because of one reason another? Is there a story that falls through the cracks because it wasn’t highlighted in a certain way, and how can we draw out the best information presented to the users and then give them the tools that they need to be able to share it with all of their friends using digg? And so we keep that in mind and think about - I know this sounds really strange and basic - but what would be cool and useful, what people would really like to do, and what would keep them coming back and really finding the information they want to find. SD: Do you use something that’s parallel to digg, where it’s kind of a consensus vote into what you feel will actually work? Do you take that into your in-house creative process? KR: Well, it’s really myself and Daniel, and so we sit down and we come up with different things and eventually we’ll turn them into mockups. So after there’s a design that’s been on a piece of scratchpaper it’s handed off to him and he’ll come up with a series of different mockups and different layouts for that particular feature or design. We’ll take a look at it, then present it to the rest of the staff and let them play around with it, see what they think about the feature, take their feedback and then ultimately we’ll just make the decision on whether we should push it out or not. SD: Do you have demographics on your core users? Who are the people that are sitting and spending large chunks of time to vote the stories up? KR: It typically tends to be your standard eighteen to thirty-four year old male user for the most part, but there’s different types of users on the site, and we’ve really seen that split and fragment when we rolled out the new sections in digg version three. For the longest time we were a technology news site, so it was all about the tech fans and tech enthusiasts, but right after we launched version three we saw a huge explosion in user registration and it was from a lot of users that don’t fit our typical demographic because they’re interested in other types of news online. So the number two most popular section on our site today is our political section - those are very hot topics, and then actually followed by videos, so videos is our first stab at content outside of just news and has been extremely popular for us, and it’s been a great way to expose users to a lot of cool videos around the web. SD: Are you finding that larger news agencies or advertising agencies are starting to use digg as a poll factor? KR: You know, it’s really shortening the length of the feedback loop. It’s one of those things where they are using it to find out what is hot at any given moment in time, especially as you can sort most diggs in any given section and you can see what people are talking about, where they’re gathering around, what stories are very interesting for a given day, etc. I’ve gotten a lot of feedback from writers that said, hey, y’know what, I pulled up on the day that Apple announced all of their new products, and looked up a digg swarm (which is basically a Flash visualisation of all the users as they’re swarming around the different stories), and they were able to watch that over the course of a few hours and see where the most attention was [and work out] which product did they want to focus their article on. They found out that it was the iTV, the little set-top box, that was an extremely popular story that day and so they created content around that because they knew that that was going to be a hot topic. So it’s helping journalists and writers in that way, in that they can find out in real-time what the pulse is of the community is online. SD: And how about advertising agencies - are they referencing back to digg to see how to shape their next story or campaign? KR: You know, we haven’t had a ton of ad agencies contact us, other than the fact that they’ve said they would like to have their ads diggable, and I don’t know if our users want to digg advertisements! So that’s one of those things where I was like, “Can we get back to you on that one?! But not really at this time, not that I know of! SD: What do you think are the long-term implications for social content? If we look two or three years down the line, what is the digg universe going to look like, what are the digg-spawned applications and websites going to look like? KR: Well, I think that digg is a great tool for sharing your interests with others, and I think that there has never really been a tool online where there’s - I’m trying to think of what I can say and what I can’t say! We really want to build out a profile of users’ interests and be able to group these together and get recommendations on different things based on people that you trust. So whether that be your news, or other different types of content online, it’s really about not only getting recommendations but suggestions and also introducing you to new things that you might not know of through people that you’re connected with, and people that you’ve never met. So one of the things that we’re doing at digg right now that’s very exciting to us (that we haven’t launched yet) is we’re learning a lot about what individual people are digging on the site and so what we really want to do is allow the users - I mean, we should do everything in our power to give back to the users based upon what they’re giving us. So they’re giving us history and they’re sharing their history with everyone based on what they’re digging. What we can do is, on the back end, do the math to make comparisons to other users and say, ok, based on what you’re into, I know you love sports cars and I know you love oolong tea, I can make a connection there with other types of stories, and I can also make a connection with people that you haven’t met before, so it’s going to be really interesting when social networking sites are no longer based on just, “I think this person is attractive and I want to meet them,” but more along the lines of, “I know I have a connection with this person in one way or another because we digg the same comments, we like the same stories, and we might even live close to each other and might want to meet up,” so there’s going to be a whole nice range of tools that we’ll be providing to the community over the next year that are going to allow them to explore these relationships in ways that they never thought possible. SD: Very cool. What is the relationship between, say, digg and Flickr? Is something like that a possibility? KR: Well, y’know, it’s one of those things where we really want to give users the power to digg and share whatever is important to them and we’re not limiting that to any one particular type of content online so whether it’s pictures or you name it, anything where there is an abundance of information that needs a large collaborative filter applied to it to sift through that, we’ll be going. As long as it’s relevant too, I mean there’s certain things that you really wouldn’t want to dig - you couldn’t really apply digg to an online dating service because you wouldn’t want to digg someone that you’re interested in because then everyone else would want to go out with them! So we know there’s limitations to the concept, but there are a lot of really cool areas that we can apply the concept to, so you’ll see that rolled out, definitely some new areas in the next few months. SD: Any last comments? KR: Thanks for having me, and just thought I’d let you know that I’m huge fan of the site and I digg your stories all of the time. It’s awesome! SD: Thanks Kevin. Transcribed by Scott Morris Like this article? Digg it! tag:odeo.com,2006-11-13,23616822 Mon, 13 Nov 2006 00:00:35 -0800 no Carsonified » Blog Web Apps http://www.odeo.com/episodes/22017605-Kevin-Rose Download the MP3 (10.63 MB) Topics we cover in the interview What’s the creative process behind digg? How do you think up new features? Do you use a digg-like consensus approach to them? How have you seen digg affect traditional media? How will digg-spawned sites and web apps be in the future? Full transcription of the interview SD: Do you do programming as well as design or are you one of the individuals who’s able to see the big picture and how the pieces fit together? KR: As far as my daily activities on the site, working for digg, it’s all about creating new features for the site, so it’s all about working with the graphic designer, Daniel Burka to come up with these features. So basically I’ll draw them up on a piece of paper and they look really ugly, and then I pass them to someone that knows how to make them look pretty, so that’s kind of how it’s been working for the last couple of years. SD: Can you tell us a little bit about your ... Download the MP3 (10.63 MB) Topics we cover in the interview What’s the creative process behind digg? How do you think up new features? Do you use a digg-like consensus approach to them? How have you seen digg affect traditional media? How will digg-spawned sites and web apps be in the future? Full transcription of the interview SD: Do you do programming as well as design or are you one of the individuals who’s able to see the big picture and how the pieces fit together? KR: As far as my daily activities on the site, working for digg, it’s all about creating new features for the site, so it’s all about working with the graphic designer, Daniel Burka to come up with these features. So basically I’ll draw them up on a piece of paper and they look really ugly, and then I pass them to someone that knows how to make them look pretty, so that’s kind of how it’s been working for the last couple of years. SD: Can you tell us a little bit about your creative process? KR: Well, it’s a very strange one in that most of it is done almost randomly, just driving around or whatever it may be, and I’ll just think of a feature and how it might impact the users and how they might use it. I’m constantly thinking about the site and so it doesn’t feel like work, more like a way to figure out how users want to communicate and share information with each other. We’ve come up with dozens of different features, a lot of them that we’ve thrown away because we don’t think they’re a good fit, or features that we just haven’t time to build, create and roll them out yet, so it’s really looking at how the users are expressing themselves on the site and seeing what they are doing with the site, what are the pitfalls? Where do they get lost in the navigation? Can they not discover stories because of one reason another? Is there a story that falls through the cracks because it wasn’t highlighted in a certain way, and how can we draw out the best information presented to the users and then give them the tools that they need to be able to share it with all of their friends using digg? And so we keep that in mind and think about - I know this sounds really strange and basic - but what would be cool and useful, what people would really like to do, and what would keep them coming back and really finding the information they want to find. SD: Do you use something that’s parallel to digg, where it’s kind of a consensus vote into what you feel will actually work? Do you take that into your in-house creative process? KR: Well, it’s really myself and Daniel, and so we sit down and we come up with different things and eventually we’ll turn them into mockups. So after there’s a design that’s been on a piece of scratchpaper it’s handed off to him and he’ll come up with a series of different mockups and different layouts for that particular feature or design. We’ll take a look at it, then present it to the rest of the staff and let them play around with it, see what they think about the feature, take their feedback and then ultimately we’ll just make the decision on whether we should push it out or not. SD: Do you have demographics on your core users? Who are the people that are sitting and spending large chunks of time to vote the stories up? KR: It typically tends to be your standard eighteen to thirty-four year old male user for the most part, but there’s different types of users on the site, and we’ve really seen that split and fragment when we rolled out the new sections in digg version three. For the longest time we were a technology news site, so it was all about the tech fans and tech enthusiasts, but right after we launched version three we saw a huge explosion in user registration and it was from a lot of users that don’t fit our typical demographic because they’re interested in other types of news online. So the number two most popular section on our site today is our political section - those are very hot topics, and then actually followed by videos, so videos is our first stab at content outside of just news and has been extremely popular for us, and it’s been a great way to expose users to a lot of cool videos around the web. SD: Are you finding that larger news agencies or advertising agencies are starting to use digg as a poll factor? KR: You know, it’s really shortening the length of the feedback loop. It’s one of those things where they are using it to find out what is hot at any given moment in time, especially as you can sort most diggs in any given section and you can see what people are talking about, where they’re gathering around, what stories are very interesting for a given day, etc. I’ve gotten a lot of feedback from writers that said, hey, y’know what, I pulled up on the day that Apple announced all of their new products, and looked up a digg swarm (which is basically a Flash visualisation of all the users as they’re swarming around the different stories), and they were able to watch that over the course of a few hours and see where the most attention was [and work out] which product did they want to focus their article on. They found out that it was the iTV, the little set-top box, that was an extremely popular story that day and so they created content around that because they knew that that was going to be a hot topic. So it’s helping journalists and writers in that way, in that they can find out in real-time what the pulse is of the community is online. SD: And how about advertising agencies - are they referencing back to digg to see how to shape their next story or campaign? KR: You know, we haven’t had a ton of ad agencies contact us, other than the fact that they’ve said they would like to have their ads diggable, and I don’t know if our users want to digg advertisements! So that’s one of those things where I was like, “Can we get back to you on that one?! But not really at this time, not that I know of! SD: What do you think are the long-term implications for social content? If we look two or three years down the line, what is the digg universe going to look like, what are the digg-spawned applications and websites going to look like? KR: Well, I think that digg is a great tool for sharing your interests with others, and I think that there has never really been a tool online where there’s - I’m trying to think of what I can say and what I can’t say! We really want to build out a profile of users’ interests and be able to group these together and get recommendations on different things based on people that you trust. So whether that be your news, or other different types of content online, it’s really about not only getting recommendations but suggestions and also introducing you to new things that you might not know of through people that you’re connected with, and people that you’ve never met. So one of the things that we’re doing at digg right now that’s very exciting to us (that we haven’t launched yet) is we’re learning a lot about what individual people are digging on the site and so what we really want to do is allow the users - I mean, we should do everything in our power to give back to the users based upon what they’re giving us. So they’re giving us history and they’re sharing their history with everyone based on what they’re digging. What we can do is, on the back end, do the math to make comparisons to other users and say, ok, based on what you’re into, I know you love sports cars and I know you love oolong tea, I can make a connection there with other types of stories, and I can also make a connection with people that you haven’t met before, so it’s going to be really interesting when social networking sites are no longer based on just, “I think this person is attractive and I want to meet them,” but more along the lines of, “I know I have a connection with this person in one way or another because we digg the same comments, we like the same stories, and we might even live close to each other and might want to meet up,” so there’s going to be a whole nice range of tools that we’ll be providing to the community over the next year that are going to allow them to explore these relationships in ways that they never thought possible. SD: Very cool. What is the relationship between, say, digg and Flickr? Is something like that a possibility? KR: Well, y’know, it’s one of those things where we really want to give users the power to digg and share whatever is important to them and we’re not limiting that to any one particular type of content online so whether it’s pictures or you name it, anything where there is an abundance of information that needs a large collaborative filter applied to it to sift through that, we’ll be going. As long as it’s relevant too, I mean there’s certain things that you really wouldn’t want to dig - you couldn’t really apply digg to an online dating service because you wouldn’t want to digg someone that you’re interested in because then everyone else would want to go out with them! So we know there’s limitations to the concept, but there are a lot of really cool areas that we can apply the concept to, so you’ll see that rolled out, definitely some new areas in the next few months. SD: Any last comments? KR: Thanks for having me, and just thought I’d let you know that I’m huge fan of the site and I digg your stories all of the time. It’s awesome! SD: Thanks Kevin. Transcribed by Scott Morris Like this article? Digg it! Download the MP3 (10.63 MB) Topics we cover in the interview What’s the creative process behind digg? How do you think up new features? Do you use a digg-like consensus approach to them? How have you seen digg affect traditional media? How will digg-spawned sites and web apps be in the future? Full transcription of the interview SD: Do you do programming as well as design or are you one of the individuals who’s able to see the big picture and how the pieces fit together? KR: As far as my daily activities on the site, working for digg, it’s all about creating new features for the site, so it’s all about working with the graphic designer, Daniel Burka to come up with these features. So basically I’ll draw them up on a piece of paper and they look really ugly, and then I pass them to someone that knows how to make them look pretty, so that’s kind of how it’s been working for the last couple of years. SD: Can you tell us a little bit about your creative process? KR: Well, it’s a very strange one in that most of it is done almost randomly, just driving around or whatever it may be, and I’ll just think of a feature and how it might impact the users and how they might use it. I’m constantly thinking about the site and so it doesn’t feel like work, more like a way to figure out how users want to communicate and share information with each other. We’ve come up with dozens of different features, a lot of them that we’ve thrown away because we don’t think they’re a good fit, or features that we just haven’t time to build, create and roll them out yet, so it’s really looking at how the users are expressing themselves on the site and seeing what they are doing with the site, what are the pitfalls? Where do they get lost in the navigation? Can they not discover stories because of one reason another? Is there a story that falls through the cracks because it wasn’t highlighted in a certain way, and how can we draw out the best information presented to the users and then give them the tools that they need to be able to share it with all of their friends using digg? And so we keep that in mind and think about - I know this sounds really strange and basic - but what would be cool and useful, what people would really like to do, and what would keep them coming back and really finding the information they want to find. SD: Do you use something that’s parallel to digg, where it’s kind of a consensus vote into what you feel will actually work? Do you take that into your in-house creative process? KR: Well, it’s really myself and Daniel, and so we sit down and we come up with different things and eventually we’ll turn them into mockups. So after there’s a design that’s been on a piece of scratchpaper it’s handed off to him and he’ll come up with a series of different mockups and different layouts for that particular feature or design. We’ll take a look at it, then present it to the rest of the staff and let them play around with it, see what they think about the feature, take their feedback and then ultimately we’ll just make the decision on whether we should push it out or not. SD: Do you have demographics on your core users? Who are the people that are sitting and spending large chunks of time to vote the stories up? KR: It typically tends to be your standard eighteen to thirty-four year old male user for the most part, but there’s different types of users on the site, and we’ve really seen that split and fragment when we rolled out the new sections in digg version three. For the longest time we were a technology news site, so it was all about the tech fans and tech enthusiasts, but right after we launched version three we saw a huge explosion in user registration and it was from a lot of users that don’t fit our typical demographic because they’re interested in other types of news online. So the number two most popular section on our site today is our political section - those are very hot topics, and then actually followed by videos, so videos is our first stab at content outside of just news and has been extremely popular for us, and it’s been a great way to expose users to a lot of cool videos around the web. SD: Are you finding that larger news agencies or advertising agencies are starting to use digg as a poll factor? KR: You know, it’s really shortening the length of the feedback loop. It’s one of those things where they are using it to find out what is hot at any given moment in time, especially as you can sort most diggs in any given section and you can see what people are talking about, where they’re gathering around, what stories are very interesting for a given day, etc. I’ve gotten a lot of feedback from writers that said, hey, y’know what, I pulled up on the day that Apple announced all of their new products, and looked up a digg swarm (which is basically a Flash visualisation of all the users as they’re swarming around the different stories), and they were able to watch that over the course of a few hours and see where the most attention was [and work out] which product did they want to focus their article on. They found out that it was the iTV, the little set-top box, that was an extremely popular story that day and so they created content around that because they knew that that was going to be a hot topic. So it’s helping journalists and writers in that way, in that they can find out in real-time what the pulse is of the community is online. SD: And how about advertising agencies - are they referencing back to digg to see how to shape their next story or campaign? KR: You know, we haven’t had a ton of ad agencies contact us, other than the fact that they’ve said they would like to have their ads diggable, and I don’t know if our users want to digg advertisements! So that’s one of those things where I was like, “Can we get back to you on that one?! But not really at this time, not that I know of! SD: What do you think are the long-term implications for social content? If we look two or three years down the line, what is the digg universe going to look like, what are the digg-spawned applications and websites going to look like? KR: Well, I think that digg is a great tool for sharing your interests with others, and I think that there has never really been a tool online where there’s - I’m trying to think of what I can say and what I can’t say! We really want to build out a profile of users’ interests and be able to group these together and get recommendations on different things based on people that you trust. So whether that be your news, or other different types of content online, it’s really about not only getting recommendations but suggestions and also introducing you to new things that you might not know of through people that you’re connected with, and people that you’ve never met. So one of the things that we’re doing at digg right now that’s very exciting to us (that we haven’t launched yet) is we’re learning a lot about what individual people are digging on the site and so what we really want to do is allow the users - I mean, we should do everything in our power to give back to the users based upon what they’re giving us. So they’re giving us history and they’re sharing their history with everyone based on what they’re digging. What we can do is, on the back end, do the math to make comparisons to other users and say, ok, based on what you’re into, I know you love sports cars and I know you love oolong tea, I can make a connection there with other types of stories, and I can also make a connection with people that you haven’t met before, so it’s going to be really interesting when social networking sites are no longer based on just, “I think this person is attractive and I want to meet them,” but more along the lines of, “I know I have a connection with this person in one way or another because we digg the same comments, we like the same stories, and we might even live close to each other and might want to meet up,” so there’s going to be a whole nice range of tools that we’ll be providing to the community over the next year that are going to allow them to explore these relationships in ways that they never thought possible. SD: Very cool. What is the relationship between, say, digg and Flickr? Is something like that a possibility? KR: Well, y’know, it’s one of those things where we really want to give users the power to digg and share whatever is important to them and we’re not limiting that to any one particular type of content online so whether it’s pictures or you name it, anything where there is an abundance of information that needs a large collaborative filter applied to it to sift through that, we’ll be going. As long as it’s relevant too, I mean there’s certain things that you really wouldn’t want to dig - you couldn’t really apply digg to an online dating service because you wouldn’t want to digg someone that you’re interested in because then everyone else would want to go out with them! So we know there’s limitations to the concept, but there are a lot of really cool areas that we can apply the concept to, so you’ll see that rolled out, definitely some new areas in the next few months. SD: Any last comments? KR: Thanks for having me, and just thought I’d let you know that I’m huge fan of the site and I digg your stories all of the time. It’s awesome! SD: Thanks Kevin. Transcribed by Scott Morris Like this article? Digg it! tag:odeo.com,2006-11-13,22017605 Mon, 13 Nov 2006 00:00:35 -0800 no Carsonified » Blog Web Apps http://www.odeo.com/episodes/2358210-Interview-Jeff-Veen tag:odeo.com,2006-11-07,2358210 Tue, 07 Nov 2006 07:54:29 -0800 no Carsonified » Blog http://www.odeo.com/episodes/23616824-Jeff-Veen Download the MP3 (9.02 MB) Topics we cover in the interview How designing for the web has changed How to measure the impact of usability checks Life at Google - and how Measure Map is playing out The state of the industry URLS Mentioned Measure Map The blog analytics tool Adaptive Path Full transcription of the interview SD: This is Sarah Drew for Vitamin and I’m sitting here with Jeff Veen, who’s had a long and illustrious history and is at this moment in time at Google. I’d like to start with design and what you see as the evolution of design that may be happening, and understanding design in a much larger context than what we’ve maybe traditionally understood it. JV: Yeah, I think that’s true. Even if you look at the past couple of decades it’s changed phenomenally from the print-based, what-you-see-is-what-you-get design to being much more interactive. There’s a lack of control that’s going on in a lot of the design that we’r... Download the MP3 (9.02 MB) Topics we cover in the interview How designing for the web has changed How to measure the impact of usability checks Life at Google - and how Measure Map is playing out The state of the industry URLS Mentioned Measure Map The blog analytics tool Adaptive Path Full transcription of the interview SD: This is Sarah Drew for Vitamin and I’m sitting here with Jeff Veen, who’s had a long and illustrious history and is at this moment in time at Google. I’d like to start with design and what you see as the evolution of design that may be happening, and understanding design in a much larger context than what we’ve maybe traditionally understood it. JV: Yeah, I think that’s true. Even if you look at the past couple of decades it’s changed phenomenally from the print-based, what-you-see-is-what-you-get design to being much more interactive. There’s a lack of control that’s going on in a lot of the design that we’re doing and I think that has historically been kind of difficult for a lot of designers to make that shift, but what’s really interesting now is I’m seeing designers who have come up only having ever designed for the web and while they may lack some of the finer nuances of typography or things like that, what they’re really good at is thinking about what the web is good at, what the web has in terms of constraint and working with that, and being really native to the web. So yeah, that’s changing an awful lot. SD: Do you see a wider application of how we understand design, I mean in the sense that design is applicable to genomes, to architecture, to graphics, to language, to urban design, to maybe even companies, and as a [web’ designer do you find yourself using a wider application of design…? JV: Well, I find myself doing design a lot differently. In the past I don’t think we had to think as much about use, and what people are trying to do with our design, and that’s an interesting set of disciplines. I think that product designers in the past have thought about those things, ergonomics and things like that, but people who are working with documents, graphics, layouts, that sort of thing, they never really had to consider that. A book was a book, and you knew what the constraint was and you designed to it. That’s so different now, so I spend far more of my time now understanding technology, doing user research, doing basic ethnography, anthropology, stuff like that which I never considered was going to be part of my career. That takes up probably more time than the actual design process itself, the actual arranging things on a screen that makes sense to people (…) is trying to build that level of empathy for what people are trying to do and try to embody that when we sit do to do that design. So, yeah, it changes a lot. SD: A lot of your work has been in the areas of both UI design and usability - how to track that, how to quantify that, how to communicate that, how to design and optimise that… JV: Well, usability is a little piece of that. Usability is a little bit like spell checking, like just making sure that the decisions we’ve already made, we’ve made correctly. I think a lot of people got on this usability bandwagon and put a little bit too much faith into it, to try to use usability to help them decide what to do rather than whether or not they’ve done things right. Deciding what to do, that’s the job of design, right? That’s where you have to figure out what people are trying to get done here, how can I help them do that, what are the expectations people have, what are the conventions that they already understand. Usability doesn’t help us with any of that, but it does help us understand whether or not I did it right, and so there’s an awful lot of different techniques. We try to go out and talk to people all the time, I do telephone interviews with potential users, I demo the thing that I’m working on to anybody who’ll take a look at it. I just want to make sure that I understand the kinds of things they’re trying to do, and that I can help them do that. SD: Do you find that when you’re showing a product to someone that general patterns tend to come up or is there a unique user experience that you’re seeing when you’re showing it? JV: There’s definitely patterns. Humans are wired to work a certain way, especially when you have everybody looking at a screen, everybody using a mouse, there’s certainly patterns there. There are also differences in those patterns based on the different types of audiences that we’re working with. I created an application for people who have weblogs. Those are people who have a desire to publish on the web, have a little bit of technical understanding, they’ve maybe edited a template before,so there’s some assumptions that I can make about that audience as opposed to an audience that’s trying to get information about their healthcare. That’s a much broader set of expectations that people have, perhaps a lot [of] different backgrounds in the kinds of experience they have with technology so we can’t just necessarily take for granted that people are going to understand all of this unless we have a really good understanding of who those audience segments really are. SD: I would imagine at Google that you have a lot of time for really researching your user base, right? JV: There’s no time! There’s no time for it. That’s the terrible irony about what we do. First, I don’t think that a lot of people understand the value of the research because it take time, and it’s time when people aren’t writing code or designing pages. It is all very qualitative, almost nebulous - I mean, you can create a research plan and you can follow the plan and everything, but it takes time and it’s kind of expensive when time is very expensive. So a lot of the research we do on the fly, really ad hoc, and I think that’s totally fine because a little research is always better than no research at all. But Google is the kind of company that really wants to invest in user experience, understands the importance of research - but even so we’re all doing a million things at once and we still want to get out ahead of the competition, so it’s always this balance between those things. SD: It was interesting to me in your talk how you contextualize Web 2.0, and I think we’re very much creatures of story: tell us a story and we will often as a group follow it or aggregate towards it, if you will. What do you think is the new story is for us? JV: I studied history when I was in school, it was my major, actually; ironically, here all I feel I do is work in the future now, but in the presentation I gave today at this workshop I started with a bunch of stories about how this cycle has happened in the past, how there’s been some sort of technological innovation that nobody expected. That’s happened throughout history, whether it was the steam engine or the Model T or the web browser, and a tremendous amount of capital tends to flow towards those technological innovations, so a bunch of people get really rich and it changes the way we do something, typically business - that certainly happened in the late nineties. There was this innovation and suddenly every business changed, some of them subtly, but some of them fundamentally, in the way in which they did their business because of web technologies and a tremendous amount of money went into funding and financing that, and a bunch of people got rich, and people thought this would continue forever. Of course it doesn’t, there isn’t an unlimited supply of capital. Eventually something has to pay off and everybody got scared and there was a big bust. Well, that’s going to happen again, inevitably. I don’t know if it will necessarily happen in this industry with these Web 2.0 companies that are getting funded now. Perhaps it won’t, perhaps it’ll shake out and things will level off and that will be good, but even if it does happen again there’s a lot that we can learn this time around: right, there’s these design techniques, there’s this way about thinking about our audiences, there’s this openness that these new companies have that old companies, traditional companies, never had before, and that’s the kind of stuff I try to tease out of these stories that I look for. SD: I also think just in talking with people and watching it seems that there’s definitely is a sense of people really building their foundations at this round in a way that was maybe not there before, I mean understanding that incremental growth and smaller, strong foundation, kind of lean and mean instead of bloated… JV: I wonder about that. Maybe I’m skeptical because I went through it before and certainly there aren’t people going out saying, “I am going to change way people buy groceries and I’m taking this company public and we are going to be a two billion dollar company next year.” That’s not happening, thank God that’s not happening, because that was exhausting. At the same time this idea of keeping things very small, trying to build a business first and then take the funding, like, those are great principles. I don’t think those principles, while they may be spoken a lot, are held by a lot of these companies to be honest, and again I might just be cynical about this, but I think everybody is doing this for the American Dream, right, well, not everybody, but a fair amount of people are getting into this thinking “I can build a web app, I can sell it, I can get rich”, and that’s not going to happen to most people, but I think a lot of people have the potential to think, “I can create a web app, I can build a community of users that like it, I can make a good living off of that”. Ryan Carson is inspiring to me, the way they have done their little web apps, that they are turning it into a business, it’s a great lifestyle for them, things like that and I’m sure there’s a potential reward out of all of that but perhaps y’know, making a living off of a web application, not a terrible thing, so we’ll see. SD: I appreciate that you have both the wide, the long, and also the deep view. Can you talk a little bit about the company you were at before Google? JV: Sure, about five years ago, 2001, at the worst possible time in the industry, the absolute bottom of the bust, I started a company with six of my friends, all peers in the industry, all designers in various fields of design, we started a company called Adaptive Path. It was a great time, frankly, to start a company, it was a really bad business environment but still there was projects going on and were able to find the little projects to get started and we sort of grew up out of that. We followed this rebirth of the industry and it’s been an absolutely fantastic experience to have because we tried to embody a lot of the principles of good design in our company and I think we’ve followed through on that pretty well. I miss it a lot, I mean I’m down at Google now, we did a product inside of Adaptive Path called Measure Map which we sold to Google and I went with that, to bring that over but I absolutely miss Adaptive Path as well, it continues to be a fantastic group of people doing really, really important work. SD: Measure Map, can you tell me a little bit about how that’s playing out as people are starting to use it? JV: Well, Measure Map was kind of interesting to me in that, much like Evan Williams who started Blogger and now is doing Odeo, he said in his talk today that he needed to make applications that he wanted to use. That’s what Measure Map was for me. I had had a blog for three or four years, I knew it was doing well because I got email, and people would leave comments, but I had no idea how well. I looked at all these analytics tools that were out there, the stat counters and so on, and I couldn’t figure them out. I thought, “I’m kind of a smart guy, what’s going on here?”, and it turns out that most of them were either enterprise level or very powerful open source tools for sysadmins that were managing servers. There was nothing to help people understand what impact they were having with a blog. So I said well let’s do a web analytics tool just for blogs, specific to that kind of traffic, to that kind of web site, and instead of measuring hits or advertising conversions or any of that stuff why don’t we just measure participation, how the blog is doing, and what you can you learn from that. We tried to make it as simple as possible. When you log into Measure Map, there’s just four numbers - how many people came today, and what did they do, did they link to you, did they leave a comment, how many posts did they read… Four simple things - you can drill into that, get a little more detail, but we really just wanted to show cause and effect. It’s like a garden, you pay attention to it and it will grow. SD: Within Google are you being asked to work on the next generation of the visual UIs for the display of data? JV: Well, I’m taking a variety of approaches to working in a giant company like that. I really have no intent on redesigning Google. I don’t even want the opportunity. We’re taking Measure Map and they have a Google Analytics product and we’re working with those guys to bring best practices together and help people understand how their traffic is doing and stuff like that. There’s a lot of amazing design work that’s happening at Google right now and we’re sort of looking at what the best practices are for this kind of audience, for these kinds of applications, and seeing how there’s all these points of integration and that’s kind of the work we’re doing so I think there’s going to be an awful lot coming out of all of this. SD: So, for our listeners, any last jewels you’d like to give? What would be your advice, from your professional career? JV: One of the things that I’ve always told designers is to go make stuff. Always be making stuff, and frankly it could not be easier now. It doesn’t matter if you’re a designer, a developer or what, the risk in building web application or frankly in visualising your ideas is so much lower now. Ten years ago it cost millions of dollars to try to visualise something. You had to buy very expensive servers, you had to get very expensive software to run on those servers, you had to pay for very expensive advertising before you could even get started. Now we have cost per click advertising for pennies, servers that are dirt cheap, software’s all free now, and the software is so good now. We developed Measure Map on Ruby on Rails and it was remarkable how little effort it took for us to iterate and change our ideas and to visualise stuff as quickly as possible. So that’s my thing, if you have an idea it’s a lot easier now to just go try, and that’s what I encourage everybody to do. Yeah, absolutely. SD: Well, thank you, really wonderful interview. Thanks. Transcribed by Scott Morris Like this article? Digg it! Download the MP3 (9.02 MB) Topics we cover in the interview How designing for the web has changed How to measure the impact of usability checks Life at Google - and how Measure Map is playing out The state of the industry URLS Mentioned Measure Map The blog analytics tool Adaptive Path Full transcription of the interview SD: This is Sarah Drew for Vitamin and I’m sitting here with Jeff Veen, who’s had a long and illustrious history and is at this moment in time at Google. I’d like to start with design and what you see as the evolution of design that may be happening, and understanding design in a much larger context than what we’ve maybe traditionally understood it. JV: Yeah, I think that’s true. Even if you look at the past couple of decades it’s changed phenomenally from the print-based, what-you-see-is-what-you-get design to being much more interactive. There’s a lack of control that’s going on in a lot of the design that we’re doing and I think that has historically been kind of difficult for a lot of designers to make that shift, but what’s really interesting now is I’m seeing designers who have come up only having ever designed for the web and while they may lack some of the finer nuances of typography or things like that, what they’re really good at is thinking about what the web is good at, what the web has in terms of constraint and working with that, and being really native to the web. So yeah, that’s changing an awful lot. SD: Do you see a wider application of how we understand design, I mean in the sense that design is applicable to genomes, to architecture, to graphics, to language, to urban design, to maybe even companies, and as a [web’ designer do you find yourself using a wider application of design…? JV: Well, I find myself doing design a lot differently. In the past I don’t think we had to think as much about use, and what people are trying to do with our design, and that’s an interesting set of disciplines. I think that product designers in the past have thought about those things, ergonomics and things like that, but people who are working with documents, graphics, layouts, that sort of thing, they never really had to consider that. A book was a book, and you knew what the constraint was and you designed to it. That’s so different now, so I spend far more of my time now understanding technology, doing user research, doing basic ethnography, anthropology, stuff like that which I never considered was going to be part of my career. That takes up probably more time than the actual design process itself, the actual arranging things on a screen that makes sense to people (…) is trying to build that level of empathy for what people are trying to do and try to embody that when we sit do to do that design. So, yeah, it changes a lot. SD: A lot of your work has been in the areas of both UI design and usability - how to track that, how to quantify that, how to communicate that, how to design and optimise that… JV: Well, usability is a little piece of that. Usability is a little bit like spell checking, like just making sure that the decisions we’ve already made, we’ve made correctly. I think a lot of people got on this usability bandwagon and put a little bit too much faith into it, to try to use usability to help them decide what to do rather than whether or not they’ve done things right. Deciding what to do, that’s the job of design, right? That’s where you have to figure out what people are trying to get done here, how can I help them do that, what are the expectations people have, what are the conventions that they already understand. Usability doesn’t help us with any of that, but it does help us understand whether or not I did it right, and so there’s an awful lot of different techniques. We try to go out and talk to people all the time, I do telephone interviews with potential users, I demo the thing that I’m working on to anybody who’ll take a look at it. I just want to make sure that I understand the kinds of things they’re trying to do, and that I can help them do that. SD: Do you find that when you’re showing a product to someone that general patterns tend to come up or is there a unique user experience that you’re seeing when you’re showing it? JV: There’s definitely patterns. Humans are wired to work a certain way, especially when you have everybody looking at a screen, everybody using a mouse, there’s certainly patterns there. There are also differences in those patterns based on the different types of audiences that we’re working with. I created an application for people who have weblogs. Those are people who have a desire to publish on the web, have a little bit of technical understanding, they’ve maybe edited a template before,so there’s some assumptions that I can make about that audience as opposed to an audience that’s trying to get information about their healthcare. That’s a much broader set of expectations that people have, perhaps a lot [of] different backgrounds in the kinds of experience they have with technology so we can’t just necessarily take for granted that people are going to understand all of this unless we have a really good understanding of who those audience segments really are. SD: I would imagine at Google that you have a lot of time for really researching your user base, right? JV: There’s no time! There’s no time for it. That’s the terrible irony about what we do. First, I don’t think that a lot of people understand the value of the research because it take time, and it’s time when people aren’t writing code or designing pages. It is all very qualitative, almost nebulous - I mean, you can create a research plan and you can follow the plan and everything, but it takes time and it’s kind of expensive when time is very expensive. So a lot of the research we do on the fly, really ad hoc, and I think that’s totally fine because a little research is always better than no research at all. But Google is the kind of company that really wants to invest in user experience, understands the importance of research - but even so we’re all doing a million things at once and we still want to get out ahead of the competition, so it’s always this balance between those things. SD: It was interesting to me in your talk how you contextualize Web 2.0, and I think we’re very much creatures of story: tell us a story and we will often as a group follow it or aggregate towards it, if you will. What do you think is the new story is for us? JV: I studied history when I was in school, it was my major, actually; ironically, here all I feel I do is work in the future now, but in the presentation I gave today at this workshop I started with a bunch of stories about how this cycle has happened in the past, how there’s been some sort of technological innovation that nobody expected. That’s happened throughout history, whether it was the steam engine or the Model T or the web browser, and a tremendous amount of capital tends to flow towards those technological innovations, so a bunch of people get really rich and it changes the way we do something, typically business - that certainly happened in the late nineties. There was this innovation and suddenly every business changed, some of them subtly, but some of them fundamentally, in the way in which they did their business because of web technologies and a tremendous amount of money went into funding and financing that, and a bunch of people got rich, and people thought this would continue forever. Of course it doesn’t, there isn’t an unlimited supply of capital. Eventually something has to pay off and everybody got scared and there was a big bust. Well, that’s going to happen again, inevitably. I don’t know if it will necessarily happen in this industry with these Web 2.0 companies that are getting funded now. Perhaps it won’t, perhaps it’ll shake out and things will level off and that will be good, but even if it does happen again there’s a lot that we can learn this time around: right, there’s these design techniques, there’s this way about thinking about our audiences, there’s this openness that these new companies have that old companies, traditional companies, never had before, and that’s the kind of stuff I try to tease out of these stories that I look for. SD: I also think just in talking with people and watching it seems that there’s definitely is a sense of people really building their foundations at this round in a way that was maybe not there before, I mean understanding that incremental growth and smaller, strong foundation, kind of lean and mean instead of bloated… JV: I wonder about that. Maybe I’m skeptical because I went through it before and certainly there aren’t people going out saying, “I am going to change way people buy groceries and I’m taking this company public and we are going to be a two billion dollar company next year.” That’s not happening, thank God that’s not happening, because that was exhausting. At the same time this idea of keeping things very small, trying to build a business first and then take the funding, like, those are great principles. I don’t think those principles, while they may be spoken a lot, are held by a lot of these companies to be honest, and again I might just be cynical about this, but I think everybody is doing this for the American Dream, right, well, not everybody, but a fair amount of people are getting into this thinking “I can build a web app, I can sell it, I can get rich”, and that’s not going to happen to most people, but I think a lot of people have the potential to think, “I can create a web app, I can build a community of users that like it, I can make a good living off of that”. Ryan Carson is inspiring to me, the way they have done their little web apps, that they are turning it into a business, it’s a great lifestyle for them, things like that and I’m sure there’s a potential reward out of all of that but perhaps y’know, making a living off of a web application, not a terrible thing, so we’ll see. SD: I appreciate that you have both the wide, the long, and also the deep view. Can you talk a little bit about the company you were at before Google? JV: Sure, about five years ago, 2001, at the worst possible time in the industry, the absolute bottom of the bust, I started a company with six of my friends, all peers in the industry, all designers in various fields of design, we started a company called Adaptive Path. It was a great time, frankly, to start a company, it was a really bad business environment but still there was projects going on and were able to find the little projects to get started and we sort of grew up out of that. We followed this rebirth of the industry and it’s been an absolutely fantastic experience to have because we tried to embody a lot of the principles of good design in our company and I think we’ve followed through on that pretty well. I miss it a lot, I mean I’m down at Google now, we did a product inside of Adaptive Path called Measure Map which we sold to Google and I went with that, to bring that over but I absolutely miss Adaptive Path as well, it continues to be a fantastic group of people doing really, really important work. SD: Measure Map, can you tell me a little bit about how that’s playing out as people are starting to use it? JV: Well, Measure Map was kind of interesting to me in that, much like Evan Williams who started Blogger and now is doing Odeo, he said in his talk today that he needed to make applications that he wanted to use. That’s what Measure Map was for me. I had had a blog for three or four years, I knew it was doing well because I got email, and people would leave comments, but I had no idea how well. I looked at all these analytics tools that were out there, the stat counters and so on, and I couldn’t figure them out. I thought, “I’m kind of a smart guy, what’s going on here?”, and it turns out that most of them were either enterprise level or very powerful open source tools for sysadmins that were managing servers. There was nothing to help people understand what impact they were having with a blog. So I said well let’s do a web analytics tool just for blogs, specific to that kind of traffic, to that kind of web site, and instead of measuring hits or advertising conversions or any of that stuff why don’t we just measure participation, how the blog is doing, and what you can you learn from that. We tried to make it as simple as possible. When you log into Measure Map, there’s just four numbers - how many people came today, and what did they do, did they link to you, did they leave a comment, how many posts did they read… Four simple things - you can drill into that, get a little more detail, but we really just wanted to show cause and effect. It’s like a garden, you pay attention to it and it will grow. SD: Within Google are you being asked to work on the next generation of the visual UIs for the display of data? JV: Well, I’m taking a variety of approaches to working in a giant company like that. I really have no intent on redesigning Google. I don’t even want the opportunity. We’re taking Measure Map and they have a Google Analytics product and we’re working with those guys to bring best practices together and help people understand how their traffic is doing and stuff like that. There’s a lot of amazing design work that’s happening at Google right now and we’re sort of looking at what the best practices are for this kind of audience, for these kinds of applications, and seeing how there’s all these points of integration and that’s kind of the work we’re doing so I think there’s going to be an awful lot coming out of all of this. SD: So, for our listeners, any last jewels you’d like to give? What would be your advice, from your professional career? JV: One of the things that I’ve always told designers is to go make stuff. Always be making stuff, and frankly it could not be easier now. It doesn’t matter if you’re a designer, a developer or what, the risk in building web application or frankly in visualising your ideas is so much lower now. Ten years ago it cost millions of dollars to try to visualise something. You had to buy very expensive servers, you had to get very expensive software to run on those servers, you had to pay for very expensive advertising before you could even get started. Now we have cost per click advertising for pennies, servers that are dirt cheap, software’s all free now, and the software is so good now. We developed Measure Map on Ruby on Rails and it was remarkable how little effort it took for us to iterate and change our ideas and to visualise stuff as quickly as possible. So that’s my thing, if you have an idea it’s a lot easier now to just go try, and that’s what I encourage everybody to do. Yeah, absolutely. SD: Well, thank you, really wonderful interview. Thanks. Transcribed by Scott Morris Like this article? Digg it! tag:odeo.com,2006-11-07,23616824 Tue, 07 Nov 2006 00:54:29 -0800 no Carsonified » Blog Web Apps http://www.odeo.com/episodes/22017635-Jeff-Veen Download the MP3 (9.02 MB) Topics we cover in the interview How designing for the web has changed How to measure the impact of usability checks Life at Google - and how Measure Map is playing out The state of the industry URLS Mentioned Measure Map The blog analytics tool Adaptive Path Full transcription of the interview SD: This is Sarah Drew for Vitamin and I’m sitting here with Jeff Veen, who’s had a long and illustrious history and is at this moment in time at Google. I’d like to start with design and what you see as the evolution of design that may be happening, and understanding design in a much larger context than what we’ve maybe traditionally understood it. JV: Yeah, I think that’s true. Even if you look at the past couple of decades it’s changed phenomenally from the print-based, what-you-see-is-what-you-get design to being much more interactive. There’s a lack of control that’s going on in a lot of the design that we’r... Download the MP3 (9.02 MB) Topics we cover in the interview How designing for the web has changed How to measure the impact of usability checks Life at Google - and how Measure Map is playing out The state of the industry URLS Mentioned Measure Map The blog analytics tool Adaptive Path Full transcription of the interview SD: This is Sarah Drew for Vitamin and I’m sitting here with Jeff Veen, who’s had a long and illustrious history and is at this moment in time at Google. I’d like to start with design and what you see as the evolution of design that may be happening, and understanding design in a much larger context than what we’ve maybe traditionally understood it. JV: Yeah, I think that’s true. Even if you look at the past couple of decades it’s changed phenomenally from the print-based, what-you-see-is-what-you-get design to being much more interactive. There’s a lack of control that’s going on in a lot of the design that we’re doing and I think that has historically been kind of difficult for a lot of designers to make that shift, but what’s really interesting now is I’m seeing designers who have come up only having ever designed for the web and while they may lack some of the finer nuances of typography or things like that, what they’re really good at is thinking about what the web is good at, what the web has in terms of constraint and working with that, and being really native to the web. So yeah, that’s changing an awful lot. SD: Do you see a wider application of how we understand design, I mean in the sense that design is applicable to genomes, to architecture, to graphics, to language, to urban design, to maybe even companies, and as a [web’ designer do you find yourself using a wider application of design…? JV: Well, I find myself doing design a lot differently. In the past I don’t think we had to think as much about use, and what people are trying to do with our design, and that’s an interesting set of disciplines. I think that product designers in the past have thought about those things, ergonomics and things like that, but people who are working with documents, graphics, layouts, that sort of thing, they never really had to consider that. A book was a book, and you knew what the constraint was and you designed to it. That’s so different now, so I spend far more of my time now understanding technology, doing user research, doing basic ethnography, anthropology, stuff like that which I never considered was going to be part of my career. That takes up probably more time than the actual design process itself, the actual arranging things on a screen that makes sense to people (…) is trying to build that level of empathy for what people are trying to do and try to embody that when we sit do to do that design. So, yeah, it changes a lot. SD: A lot of your work has been in the areas of both UI design and usability - how to track that, how to quantify that, how to communicate that, how to design and optimise that… JV: Well, usability is a little piece of that. Usability is a little bit like spell checking, like just making sure that the decisions we’ve already made, we’ve made correctly. I think a lot of people got on this usability bandwagon and put a little bit too much faith into it, to try to use usability to help them decide what to do rather than whether or not they’ve done things right. Deciding what to do, that’s the job of design, right? That’s where you have to figure out what people are trying to get done here, how can I help them do that, what are the expectations people have, what are the conventions that they already understand. Usability doesn’t help us with any of that, but it does help us understand whether or not I did it right, and so there’s an awful lot of different techniques. We try to go out and talk to people all the time, I do telephone interviews with potential users, I demo the thing that I’m working on to anybody who’ll take a look at it. I just want to make sure that I understand the kinds of things they’re trying to do, and that I can help them do that. SD: Do you find that when you’re showing a product to someone that general patterns tend to come up or is there a unique user experience that you’re seeing when you’re showing it? JV: There’s definitely patterns. Humans are wired to work a certain way, especially when you have everybody looking at a screen, everybody using a mouse, there’s certainly patterns there. There are also differences in those patterns based on the different types of audiences that we’re working with. I created an application for people who have weblogs. Those are people who have a desire to publish on the web, have a little bit of technical understanding, they’ve maybe edited a template before,so there’s some assumptions that I can make about that audience as opposed to an audience that’s trying to get information about their healthcare. That’s a much broader set of expectations that people have, perhaps a lot [of] different backgrounds in the kinds of experience they have with technology so we can’t just necessarily take for granted that people are going to understand all of this unless we have a really good understanding of who those audience segments really are. SD: I would imagine at Google that you have a lot of time for really researching your user base, right? JV: There’s no time! There’s no time for it. That’s the terrible irony about what we do. First, I don’t think that a lot of people understand the value of the research because it take time, and it’s time when people aren’t writing code or designing pages. It is all very qualitative, almost nebulous - I mean, you can create a research plan and you can follow the plan and everything, but it takes time and it’s kind of expensive when time is very expensive. So a lot of the research we do on the fly, really ad hoc, and I think that’s totally fine because a little research is always better than no research at all. But Google is the kind of company that really wants to invest in user experience, understands the importance of research - but even so we’re all doing a million things at once and we still want to get out ahead of the competition, so it’s always this balance between those things. SD: It was interesting to me in your talk how you contextualize Web 2.0, and I think we’re very much creatures of story: tell us a story and we will often as a group follow it or aggregate towards it, if you will. What do you think is the new story is for us? JV: I studied history when I was in school, it was my major, actually; ironically, here all I feel I do is work in the future now, but in the presentation I gave today at this workshop I started with a bunch of stories about how this cycle has happened in the past, how there’s been some sort of technological innovation that nobody expected. That’s happened throughout history, whether it was the steam engine or the Model T or the web browser, and a tremendous amount of capital tends to flow towards those technological innovations, so a bunch of people get really rich and it changes the way we do something, typically business - that certainly happened in the late nineties. There was this innovation and suddenly every business changed, some of them subtly, but some of them fundamentally, in the way in which they did their business because of web technologies and a tremendous amount of money went into funding and financing that, and a bunch of people got rich, and people thought this would continue forever. Of course it doesn’t, there isn’t an unlimited supply of capital. Eventually something has to pay off and everybody got scared and there was a big bust. Well, that’s going to happen again, inevitably. I don’t know if it will necessarily happen in this industry with these Web 2.0 companies that are getting funded now. Perhaps it won’t, perhaps it’ll shake out and things will level off and that will be good, but even if it does happen again there’s a lot that we can learn this time around: right, there’s these design techniques, there’s this way about thinking about our audiences, there’s this openness that these new companies have that old companies, traditional companies, never had before, and that’s the kind of stuff I try to tease out of these stories that I look for. SD: I also think just in talking with people and watching it seems that there’s definitely is a sense of people really building their foundations at this round in a way that was maybe not there before, I mean understanding that incremental growth and smaller, strong foundation, kind of lean and mean instead of bloated… JV: I wonder about that. Maybe I’m skeptical because I went through it before and certainly there aren’t people going out saying, “I am going to change way people buy groceries and I’m taking this company public and we are going to be a two billion dollar company next year.” That’s not happening, thank God that’s not happening, because that was exhausting. At the same time this idea of keeping things very small, trying to build a business first and then take the funding, like, those are great principles. I don’t think those principles, while they may be spoken a lot, are held by a lot of these companies to be honest, and again I might just be cynical about this, but I think everybody is doing this for the American Dream, right, well, not everybody, but a fair amount of people are getting into this thinking “I can build a web app, I can sell it, I can get rich”, and that’s not going to happen to most people, but I think a lot of people have the potential to think, “I can create a web app, I can build a community of users that like it, I can make a good living off of that”. Ryan Carson is inspiring to me, the way they have done their little web apps, that they are turning it into a business, it’s a great lifestyle for them, things like that and I’m sure there’s a potential reward out of all of that but perhaps y’know, making a living off of a web application, not a terrible thing, so we’ll see. SD: I appreciate that you have both the wide, the long, and also the deep view. Can you talk a little bit about the company you were at before Google? JV: Sure, about five years ago, 2001, at the worst possible time in the industry, the absolute bottom of the bust, I started a company with six of my friends, all peers in the industry, all designers in various fields of design, we started a company called Adaptive Path. It was a great time, frankly, to start a company, it was a really bad business environment but still there was projects going on and were able to find the little projects to get started and we sort of grew up out of that. We followed this rebirth of the industry and it’s been an absolutely fantastic experience to have because we tried to embody a lot of the principles of good design in our company and I think we’ve followed through on that pretty well. I miss it a lot, I mean I’m down at Google now, we did a product inside of Adaptive Path called Measure Map which we sold to Google and I went with that, to bring that over but I absolutely miss Adaptive Path as well, it continues to be a fantastic group of people doing really, really important work. SD: Measure Map, can you tell me a little bit about how that’s playing out as people are starting to use it? JV: Well, Measure Map was kind of interesting to me in that, much like Evan Williams who started Blogger and now is doing Odeo, he said in his talk today that he needed to make applications that he wanted to use. That’s what Measure Map was for me. I had had a blog for three or four years, I knew it was doing well because I got email, and people would leave comments, but I had no idea how well. I looked at all these analytics tools that were out there, the stat counters and so on, and I couldn’t figure them out. I thought, “I’m kind of a smart guy, what’s going on here?”, and it turns out that most of them were either enterprise level or very powerful open source tools for sysadmins that were managing servers. There was nothing to help people understand what impact they were having with a blog. So I said well let’s do a web analytics tool just for blogs, specific to that kind of traffic, to that kind of web site, and instead of measuring hits or advertising conversions or any of that stuff why don’t we just measure participation, how the blog is doing, and what you can you learn from that. We tried to make it as simple as possible. When you log into Measure Map, there’s just four numbers - how many people came today, and what did they do, did they link to you, did they leave a comment, how many posts did they read… Four simple things - you can drill into that, get a little more detail, but we really just wanted to show cause and effect. It’s like a garden, you pay attention to it and it will grow. SD: Within Google are you being asked to work on the next generation of the visual UIs for the display of data? JV: Well, I’m taking a variety of approaches to working in a giant company like that. I really have no intent on redesigning Google. I don’t even want the opportunity. We’re taking Measure Map and they have a Google Analytics product and we’re working with those guys to bring best practices together and help people understand how their traffic is doing and stuff like that. There’s a lot of amazing design work that’s happening at Google right now and we’re sort of looking at what the best practices are for this kind of audience, for these kinds of applications, and seeing how there’s all these points of integration and that’s kind of the work we’re doing so I think there’s going to be an awful lot coming out of all of this. SD: So, for our listeners, any last jewels you’d like to give? What would be your advice, from your professional career? JV: One of the things that I’ve always told designers is to go make stuff. Always be making stuff, and frankly it could not be easier now. It doesn’t matter if you’re a designer, a developer or what, the risk in building web application or frankly in visualising your ideas is so much lower now. Ten years ago it cost millions of dollars to try to visualise something. You had to buy very expensive servers, you had to get very expensive software to run on those servers, you had to pay for very expensive advertising before you could even get started. Now we have cost per click advertising for pennies, servers that are dirt cheap, software’s all free now, and the software is so good now. We developed Measure Map on Ruby on Rails and it was remarkable how little effort it took for us to iterate and change our ideas and to visualise stuff as quickly as possible. So that’s my thing, if you have an idea it’s a lot easier now to just go try, and that’s what I encourage everybody to do. Yeah, absolutely. SD: Well, thank you, really wonderful interview. Thanks. Transcribed by Scott Morris Like this article? Digg it! Download the MP3 (9.02 MB) Topics we cover in the interview How designing for the web has changed How to measure the impact of usability checks Life at Google - and how Measure Map is playing out The state of the industry URLS Mentioned Measure Map The blog analytics tool Adaptive Path Full transcription of the interview SD: This is Sarah Drew for Vitamin and I’m sitting here with Jeff Veen, who’s had a long and illustrious history and is at this moment in time at Google. I’d like to start with design and what you see as the evolution of design that may be happening, and understanding design in a much larger context than what we’ve maybe traditionally understood it. JV: Yeah, I think that’s true. Even if you look at the past couple of decades it’s changed phenomenally from the print-based, what-you-see-is-what-you-get design to being much more interactive. There’s a lack of control that’s going on in a lot of the design that we’re doing and I think that has historically been kind of difficult for a lot of designers to make that shift, but what’s really interesting now is I’m seeing designers who have come up only having ever designed for the web and while they may lack some of the finer nuances of typography or things like that, what they’re really good at is thinking about what the web is good at, what the web has in terms of constraint and working with that, and being really native to the web. So yeah, that’s changing an awful lot. SD: Do you see a wider application of how we understand design, I mean in the sense that design is applicable to genomes, to architecture, to graphics, to language, to urban design, to maybe even companies, and as a [web’ designer do you find yourself using a wider application of design…? JV: Well, I find myself doing design a lot differently. In the past I don’t think we had to think as much about use, and what people are trying to do with our design, and that’s an interesting set of disciplines. I think that product designers in the past have thought about those things, ergonomics and things like that, but people who are working with documents, graphics, layouts, that sort of thing, they never really had to consider that. A book was a book, and you knew what the constraint was and you designed to it. That’s so different now, so I spend far more of my time now understanding technology, doing user research, doing basic ethnography, anthropology, stuff like that which I never considered was going to be part of my career. That takes up probably more time than the actual design process itself, the actual arranging things on a screen that makes sense to people (…) is trying to build that level of empathy for what people are trying to do and try to embody that when we sit do to do that design. So, yeah, it changes a lot. SD: A lot of your work has been in the areas of both UI design and usability - how to track that, how to quantify that, how to communicate that, how to design and optimise that… JV: Well, usability is a little piece of that. Usability is a little bit like spell checking, like just making sure that the decisions we’ve already made, we’ve made correctly. I think a lot of people got on this usability bandwagon and put a little bit too much faith into it, to try to use usability to help them decide what to do rather than whether or not they’ve done things right. Deciding what to do, that’s the job of design, right? That’s where you have to figure out what people are trying to get done here, how can I help them do that, what are the expectations people have, what are the conventions that they already understand. Usability doesn’t help us with any of that, but it does help us understand whether or not I did it right, and so there’s an awful lot of different techniques. We try to go out and talk to people all the time, I do telephone interviews with potential users, I demo the thing that I’m working on to anybody who’ll take a look at it. I just want to make sure that I understand the kinds of things they’re trying to do, and that I can help them do that. SD: Do you find that when you’re showing a product to someone that general patterns tend to come up or is there a unique user experience that you’re seeing when you’re showing it? JV: There’s definitely patterns. Humans are wired to work a certain way, especially when you have everybody looking at a screen, everybody using a mouse, there’s certainly patterns there. There are also differences in those patterns based on the different types of audiences that we’re working with. I created an application for people who have weblogs. Those are people who have a desire to publish on the web, have a little bit of technical understanding, they’ve maybe edited a template before,so there’s some assumptions that I can make about that audience as opposed to an audience that’s trying to get information about their healthcare. That’s a much broader set of expectations that people have, perhaps a lot [of] different backgrounds in the kinds of experience they have with technology so we can’t just necessarily take for granted that people are going to understand all of this unless we have a really good understanding of who those audience segments really are. SD: I would imagine at Google that you have a lot of time for really researching your user base, right? JV: There’s no time! There’s no time for it. That’s the terrible irony about what we do. First, I don’t think that a lot of people understand the value of the research because it take time, and it’s time when people aren’t writing code or designing pages. It is all very qualitative, almost nebulous - I mean, you can create a research plan and you can follow the plan and everything, but it takes time and it’s kind of expensive when time is very expensive. So a lot of the research we do on the fly, really ad hoc, and I think that’s totally fine because a little research is always better than no research at all. But Google is the kind of company that really wants to invest in user experience, understands the importance of research - but even so we’re all doing a million things at once and we still want to get out ahead of the competition, so it’s always this balance between those things. SD: It was interesting to me in your talk how you contextualize Web 2.0, and I think we’re very much creatures of story: tell us a story and we will often as a group follow it or aggregate towards it, if you will. What do you think is the new story is for us? JV: I studied history when I was in school, it was my major, actually; ironically, here all I feel I do is work in the future now, but in the presentation I gave today at this workshop I started with a bunch of stories about how this cycle has happened in the past, how there’s been some sort of technological innovation that nobody expected. That’s happened throughout history, whether it was the steam engine or the Model T or the web browser, and a tremendous amount of capital tends to flow towards those technological innovations, so a bunch of people get really rich and it changes the way we do something, typically business - that certainly happened in the late nineties. There was this innovation and suddenly every business changed, some of them subtly, but some of them fundamentally, in the way in which they did their business because of web technologies and a tremendous amount of money went into funding and financing that, and a bunch of people got rich, and people thought this would continue forever. Of course it doesn’t, there isn’t an unlimited supply of capital. Eventually something has to pay off and everybody got scared and there was a big bust. Well, that’s going to happen again, inevitably. I don’t know if it will necessarily happen in this industry with these Web 2.0 companies that are getting funded now. Perhaps it won’t, perhaps it’ll shake out and things will level off and that will be good, but even if it does happen again there’s a lot that we can learn this time around: right, there’s these design techniques, there’s this way about thinking about our audiences, there’s this openness that these new companies have that old companies, traditional companies, never had before, and that’s the kind of stuff I try to tease out of these stories that I look for. SD: I also think just in talking with people and watching it seems that there’s definitely is a sense of people really building their foundations at this round in a way that was maybe not there before, I mean understanding that incremental growth and smaller, strong foundation, kind of lean and mean instead of bloated… JV: I wonder about that. Maybe I’m skeptical because I went through it before and certainly there aren’t people going out saying, “I am going to change way people buy groceries and I’m taking this company public and we are going to be a two billion dollar company next year.” That’s not happening, thank God that’s not happening, because that was exhausting. At the same time this idea of keeping things very small, trying to build a business first and then take the funding, like, those are great principles. I don’t think those principles, while they may be spoken a lot, are held by a lot of these companies to be honest, and again I might just be cynical about this, but I think everybody is doing this for the American Dream, right, well, not everybody, but a fair amount of people are getting into this thinking “I can build a web app, I can sell it, I can get rich”, and that’s not going to happen to most people, but I think a lot of people have the potential to think, “I can create a web app, I can build a community of users that like it, I can make a good living off of that”. Ryan Carson is inspiring to me, the way they have done their little web apps, that they are turning it into a business, it’s a great lifestyle for them, things like that and I’m sure there’s a potential reward out of all of that but perhaps y’know, making a living off of a web application, not a terrible thing, so we’ll see. SD: I appreciate that you have both the wide, the long, and also the deep view. Can you talk a little bit about the company you were at before Google? JV: Sure, about five years ago, 2001, at the worst possible time in the industry, the absolute bottom of the bust, I started a company with six of my friends, all peers in the industry, all designers in various fields of design, we started a company called Adaptive Path. It was a great time, frankly, to start a company, it was a really bad business environment but still there was projects going on and were able to find the little projects to get started and we sort of grew up out of that. We followed this rebirth of the industry and it’s been an absolutely fantastic experience to have because we tried to embody a lot of the principles of good design in our company and I think we’ve followed through on that pretty well. I miss it a lot, I mean I’m down at Google now, we did a product inside of Adaptive Path called Measure Map which we sold to Google and I went with that, to bring that over but I absolutely miss Adaptive Path as well, it continues to be a fantastic group of people doing really, really important work. SD: Measure Map, can you tell me a little bit about how that’s playing out as people are starting to use it? JV: Well, Measure Map was kind of interesting to me in that, much like Evan Williams who started Blogger and now is doing Odeo, he said in his talk today that he needed to make applications that he wanted to use. That’s what Measure Map was for me. I had had a blog for three or four years, I knew it was doing well because I got email, and people would leave comments, but I had no idea how well. I looked at all these analytics tools that were out there, the stat counters and so on, and I couldn’t figure them out. I thought, “I’m kind of a smart guy, what’s going on here?”, and it turns out that most of them were either enterprise level or very powerful open source tools for sysadmins that were managing servers. There was nothing to help people understand what impact they were having with a blog. So I said well let’s do a web analytics tool just for blogs, specific to that kind of traffic, to that kind of web site, and instead of measuring hits or advertising conversions or any of that stuff why don’t we just measure participation, how the blog is doing, and what you can you learn from that. We tried to make it as simple as possible. When you log into Measure Map, there’s just four numbers - how many people came today, and what did they do, did they link to you, did they leave a comment, how many posts did they read… Four simple things - you can drill into that, get a little more detail, but we really just wanted to show cause and effect. It’s like a garden, you pay attention to it and it will grow. SD: Within Google are you being asked to work on the next generation of the visual UIs for the display of data? JV: Well, I’m taking a variety of approaches to working in a giant company like that. I really have no intent on redesigning Google. I don’t even want the opportunity. We’re taking Measure Map and they have a Google Analytics product and we’re working with those guys to bring best practices together and help people understand how their traffic is doing and stuff like that. There’s a lot of amazing design work that’s happening at Google right now and we’re sort of looking at what the best practices are for this kind of audience, for these kinds of applications, and seeing how there’s all these points of integration and that’s kind of the work we’re doing so I think there’s going to be an awful lot coming out of all of this. SD: So, for our listeners, any last jewels you’d like to give? What would be your advice, from your professional career? JV: One of the things that I’ve always told designers is to go make stuff. Always be making stuff, and frankly it could not be easier now. It doesn’t matter if you’re a designer, a developer or what, the risk in building web application or frankly in visualising your ideas is so much lower now. Ten years ago it cost millions of dollars to try to visualise something. You had to buy very expensive servers, you had to get very expensive software to run on those servers, you had to pay for very expensive advertising before you could even get started. Now we have cost per click advertising for pennies, servers that are dirt cheap, software’s all free now, and the software is so good now. We developed Measure Map on Ruby on Rails and it was remarkable how little effort it took for us to iterate and change our ideas and to visualise stuff as quickly as possible. So that’s my thing, if you have an idea it’s a lot easier now to just go try, and that’s what I encourage everybody to do. Yeah, absolutely. SD: Well, thank you, really wonderful interview. Thanks. Transcribed by Scott Morris Like this article? Digg it! tag:odeo.com,2006-11-07,22017635 Tue, 07 Nov 2006 00:54:29 -0800 no Carsonified » Blog Web Apps http://www.odeo.com/episodes/2134620-Interview-Mike-Arrington tag:odeo.com,2006-10-11,2134620 Wed, 11 Oct 2006 06:10:24 -0700 no Carsonified » Blog http://www.odeo.com/episodes/23616826-Mike-Arrington Download the MP3 (9.02 MB) Questions and topics we cover in the interview What’s it like to have your opinions create movements in the industry? How has your background shaped how you analyse new products? What’s next for TechCrunch? What do you think about developments in India and China? URLS Mentioned TechCrunch Mike’s blog about the industry MobileCrunch UK edition of the popular blog ZoHo Full transcription of the interview SD: What is it like to be the centre of the zeitgeist and to have opinions that you’re putting forth creating movements in the industry? MA: So, y’know I just started off doing this as a hobby, and so no-one cared or listened to my opinions when I first started and so I was very cavalier with them and sometimes didn’t think through [them more controversial] and I’ve noticed over the last, y’know, few months that it’s important that I not do that as much anymore. Being controversial’s fine, as long a... Download the MP3 (9.02 MB) Questions and topics we cover in the interview What’s it like to have your opinions create movements in the industry? How has your background shaped how you analyse new products? What’s next for TechCrunch? What do you think about developments in India and China? URLS Mentioned TechCrunch Mike’s blog about the industry MobileCrunch UK edition of the popular blog ZoHo Full transcription of the interview SD: What is it like to be the centre of the zeitgeist and to have opinions that you’re putting forth creating movements in the industry? MA: So, y’know I just started off doing this as a hobby, and so no-one cared or listened to my opinions when I first started and so I was very cavalier with them and sometimes didn’t think through [them more controversial] and I’ve noticed over the last, y’know, few months that it’s important that I not do that as much anymore. Being controversial’s fine, as long as I’ve thought through my opinions because, people are listening more and I have to, y’know, I have to be fair. So, the biggest shock has been that I have to really think through what I say as opposed to just ‘Ready, Fire, Aim’ right? But it’s fun, it certainly is exciting and I just like being in the middle of things because I love start-ups and entrepreneurialism and so I’m doing what I love and it’s good to be a part of it. SD: So you’re handling things with a little more equanimity? Yeah, I’m just, I need to be careful before I start y’know, spouting off opinions, but it’s nice because I also have a platform to say what I think, and I like doing that. But the biggest thing, I mean the stars here are the entrepreneurs, the ones who could go out and make a good living but decide to forego that, and ignore the risk to return ratio and do something that they love and they need to be the centre of attention as much as possible. SD: It seems that from your background that your criteria would y’know, that you would, y’know, because you have a law background, you have a starting up tech [y’know and then?] from a lot of different levels of the industry, it seems that like when you’re analysing something and whatever may be the quick analysis of the moment there’s a lot of different datastreams that are going in. MA: Yeah, I mean that without really thinking it through I look at a company from just a user perspective, do I love using it? I look at it from a business model perspective, um, working with VCs a lot and being one myself for a short period of time, I, think about return on investment for stockholders so you have to kind of factor all that in and I think my experience helps with that, but it really all just comes down to the fact that when I was a lawyer I represented companies, I represented Netscape when they were pretty young and got to know them and I was always more fascinated with their business model and the deals they were doing than with the legal work itself and so I think it was sort of inevitable that I would get to this point. SD: Where do you see the future of TechCrunch? MA: So, I think my readers want to read about things other than start-ups. They want to read about mobile applications, they want to read about gadgets. Of course they have other interests as well, but in the technology space, y’know, maybe video games is a big area for them and so I want to cover those areas but I don’t want to write about them, because those aren’t things that I love and I want to find people who do love them and have them write about them. So I have a mobile blog and a guy that loves mobile stuff. I have CrunchGear, which is a gadget blog. I want to expand into ten or fifteen blogs, covering different things and find people who love that stuff and have them write about it every day. SD: With TechCruch you run an advertising/subscriber model… MA: Yup, it’s free content of course, and we take advertisers and we’ve been experimenting with different formats for quite a while and we also have a job board where companies can post jobs that they have and that’s doing quite well also, so we’re going to continue to tweak the model and see what the best way to move forward is. Somebody in the audience asked about advertising and I do get feedback from readers that say that they don’t necessarily love the advertising and that maybe there’s too much of it and things like that so we need to tweak that and make sure we keep people happy. SD: As long as it’s interesting advertising right? MA: The funny thing is that I only take advertisers where I approve of their products, so we have turned people down. We’ve been fortunate enough to be able to do that, so I’ve turned companies down for products that we don’t approve of and so hopefully that helps a little bit. SD: Do you see yourself expanding into the Chinese or Indian market in where, y’know, tech is going there - I mean, there’s outsourcing that’s happening there, particularly in India, but where their start-up environments will be happening over the next ten years. MA: Yeah, absolutely. So I have a Japanese blog now, and a French blog, and I think China and India, probably India first because it’s largely English speaking, and that’s probably where I’ll go next. It would certainly be an English blog and focus not on translating TechCrunch because it’ll be in English but focusing on Indian startups, and that’s what I’ve done with TechCrunch UK, it’s focusing on UK start-ups so I think I’ll absolutely be doing that. It’s really just a matter of finding the right person, so it’s not like, “I’m going to launch India in two months”, it’s, “I’m going to launch India when I find the right person to partner with on it.” SD: Do you have any opinion right now on the Indian start-up market? MA: There’s a lot going on there. A company I’ve been following is ZoHo, they have a presence there but they also have I believe all of their development back in India. I think they’re attacking the US market, they’re going head on with Microsoft right now and it’s good to see that. When it comes to local Indian start-ups that only are in India, I don’t know of any, because I don’t follow the space, but I’ll tell you there’s some really smart and very educated people there and the fact that the cost of labour there is significantly less than the US means that you can have different kind of experiments than you could have here so I’m looking forward to doing that. SD: How have you seen the success ratio for companies that have a majority of their programs outsourced over in some place like in India and having it as part of the integrated company, do you find that from what you’re tracking that’s a successful model? MA: Mixed results. Generally speaking, if you have a long time relationship, you’re hiring there, full-time people for a long term, people are more likely to have a positive experience than hiring teams for short-term projects, is what I’ve seen. But totally mixed results. SD: Just for our listeners, twenty years ago what did you envision yourself doing at this point in time, and how has your professional trajectory been, and do you have any salient points of advice that you would give? MA: Twenty years ago I was sixteen years old and I don’t think I had a thought in my head about what I wanted to do for a career. I liked sports and debate at that point, but I’ll say that five years ago I could have never have guessed that I’d be a blogger and loving it, and proud of it, and moving from a very well-known law firm into doing this and being much happier doing this, so I think that the key thing is that we live in a world in the US where most people don’t have to worry about putting food on the table, so it’s not just a matter of going out and providing for your family for most of us, and we’re very lucky because of that, so we can do things that we love as opposed to things that we have to do and since you’re in that position the piece of advice that I gave in my [FOWA] presentation and that I give to people is do something that you really love, and don’t do something because you think you’re going to make more money doing it. If you do something you really, really love you’ll probably end up making more money anyway but you’ll certainly end up being happier. SD: Are there any final little gems that you’d like to leave with us? MA: No, although it’ll be fun to hear the presentation I gave on the podcast because when you’re up there speaking of course you don’t have any idea… so I’m looking forward to hearing that, and I appreciate your time. Thanks. SD: Yours too. Thanks. Transcribed by Scott Morris Like this article? Digg it! Download the MP3 (9.02 MB) Questions and topics we cover in the interview What’s it like to have your opinions create movements in the industry? How has your background shaped how you analyse new products? What’s next for TechCrunch? What do you think about developments in India and China? URLS Mentioned TechCrunch Mike’s blog about the industry MobileCrunch UK edition of the popular blog ZoHo Full transcription of the interview SD: What is it like to be the centre of the zeitgeist and to have opinions that you’re putting forth creating movements in the industry? MA: So, y’know I just started off doing this as a hobby, and so no-one cared or listened to my opinions when I first started and so I was very cavalier with them and sometimes didn’t think through [them more controversial] and I’ve noticed over the last, y’know, few months that it’s important that I not do that as much anymore. Being controversial’s fine, as long as I’ve thought through my opinions because, people are listening more and I have to, y’know, I have to be fair. So, the biggest shock has been that I have to really think through what I say as opposed to just ‘Ready, Fire, Aim’ right? But it’s fun, it certainly is exciting and I just like being in the middle of things because I love start-ups and entrepreneurialism and so I’m doing what I love and it’s good to be a part of it. SD: So you’re handling things with a little more equanimity? Yeah, I’m just, I need to be careful before I start y’know, spouting off opinions, but it’s nice because I also have a platform to say what I think, and I like doing that. But the biggest thing, I mean the stars here are the entrepreneurs, the ones who could go out and make a good living but decide to forego that, and ignore the risk to return ratio and do something that they love and they need to be the centre of attention as much as possible. SD: It seems that from your background that your criteria would y’know, that you would, y’know, because you have a law background, you have a starting up tech [y’know and then?] from a lot of different levels of the industry, it seems that like when you’re analysing something and whatever may be the quick analysis of the moment there’s a lot of different datastreams that are going in. MA: Yeah, I mean that without really thinking it through I look at a company from just a user perspective, do I love using it? I look at it from a business model perspective, um, working with VCs a lot and being one myself for a short period of time, I, think about return on investment for stockholders so you have to kind of factor all that in and I think my experience helps with that, but it really all just comes down to the fact that when I was a lawyer I represented companies, I represented Netscape when they were pretty young and got to know them and I was always more fascinated with their business model and the deals they were doing than with the legal work itself and so I think it was sort of inevitable that I would get to this point. SD: Where do you see the future of TechCrunch? MA: So, I think my readers want to read about things other than start-ups. They want to read about mobile applications, they want to read about gadgets. Of course they have other interests as well, but in the technology space, y’know, maybe video games is a big area for them and so I want to cover those areas but I don’t want to write about them, because those aren’t things that I love and I want to find people who do love them and have them write about them. So I have a mobile blog and a guy that loves mobile stuff. I have CrunchGear, which is a gadget blog. I want to expand into ten or fifteen blogs, covering different things and find people who love that stuff and have them write about it every day. SD: With TechCruch you run an advertising/subscriber model… MA: Yup, it’s free content of course, and we take advertisers and we’ve been experimenting with different formats for quite a while and we also have a job board where companies can post jobs that they have and that’s doing quite well also, so we’re going to continue to tweak the model and see what the best way to move forward is. Somebody in the audience asked about advertising and I do get feedback from readers that say that they don’t necessarily love the advertising and that maybe there’s too much of it and things like that so we need to tweak that and make sure we keep people happy. SD: As long as it’s interesting advertising right? MA: The funny thing is that I only take advertisers where I approve of their products, so we have turned people down. We’ve been fortunate enough to be able to do that, so I’ve turned companies down for products that we don’t approve of and so hopefully that helps a little bit. SD: Do you see yourself expanding into the Chinese or Indian market in where, y’know, tech is going there - I mean, there’s outsourcing that’s happening there, particularly in India, but where their start-up environments will be happening over the next ten years. MA: Yeah, absolutely. So I have a Japanese blog now, and a French blog, and I think China and India, probably India first because it’s largely English speaking, and that’s probably where I’ll go next. It would certainly be an English blog and focus not on translating TechCrunch because it’ll be in English but focusing on Indian startups, and that’s what I’ve done with TechCrunch UK, it’s focusing on UK start-ups so I think I’ll absolutely be doing that. It’s really just a matter of finding the right person, so it’s not like, “I’m going to launch India in two months”, it’s, “I’m going to launch India when I find the right person to partner with on it.” SD: Do you have any opinion right now on the Indian start-up market? MA: There’s a lot going on there. A company I’ve been following is ZoHo, they have a presence there but they also have I believe all of their development back in India. I think they’re attacking the US market, they’re going head on with Microsoft right now and it’s good to see that. When it comes to local Indian start-ups that only are in India, I don’t know of any, because I don’t follow the space, but I’ll tell you there’s some really smart and very educated people there and the fact that the cost of labour there is significantly less than the US means that you can have different kind of experiments than you could have here so I’m looking forward to doing that. SD: How have you seen the success ratio for companies that have a majority of their programs outsourced over in some place like in India and having it as part of the integrated company, do you find that from what you’re tracking that’s a successful model? MA: Mixed results. Generally speaking, if you have a long time relationship, you’re hiring there, full-time people for a long term, people are more likely to have a positive experience than hiring teams for short-term projects, is what I’ve seen. But totally mixed results. SD: Just for our listeners, twenty years ago what did you envision yourself doing at this point in time, and how has your professional trajectory been, and do you have any salient points of advice that you would give? MA: Twenty years ago I was sixteen years old and I don’t think I had a thought in my head about what I wanted to do for a career. I liked sports and debate at that point, but I’ll say that five years ago I could have never have guessed that I’d be a blogger and loving it, and proud of it, and moving from a very well-known law firm into doing this and being much happier doing this, so I think that the key thing is that we live in a world in the US where most people don’t have to worry about putting food on the table, so it’s not just a matter of going out and providing for your family for most of us, and we’re very lucky because of that, so we can do things that we love as opposed to things that we have to do and since you’re in that position the piece of advice that I gave in my [FOWA] presentation and that I give to people is do something that you really love, and don’t do something because you think you’re going to make more money doing it. If you do something you really, really love you’ll probably end up making more money anyway but you’ll certainly end up being happier. SD: Are there any final little gems that you’d like to leave with us? MA: No, although it’ll be fun to hear the presentation I gave on the podcast because when you’re up there speaking of course you don’t have any idea… so I’m looking forward to hearing that, and I appreciate your time. Thanks. SD: Yours too. Thanks. Transcribed by Scott Morris Like this article? Digg it! tag:odeo.com,2006-10-11,23616826 Wed, 11 Oct 2006 01:10:24 -0700 no Carsonified » Blog http://www.odeo.com/episodes/22017651-Mike-Arrington Download the MP3 (9.02 MB) Questions and topics we cover in the interview What’s it like to have your opinions create movements in the industry? How has your background shaped how you analyse new products? What’s next for TechCrunch? What do you think about developments in India and China? URLS Mentioned TechCrunch Mike’s blog about the industry MobileCrunch UK edition of the popular blog ZoHo Full transcription of the interview SD: What is it like to be the centre of the zeitgeist and to have opinions that you’re putting forth creating movements in the industry? MA: So, y’know I just started off doing this as a hobby, and so no-one cared or listened to my opinions when I first started and so I was very cavalier with them and sometimes didn’t think through [them more controversial] and I’ve noticed over the last, y’know, few months that it’s important that I not do that as much anymore. Being controversial’s fine, as long a... Download the MP3 (9.02 MB) Questions and topics we cover in the interview What’s it like to have your opinions create movements in the industry? How has your background shaped how you analyse new products? What’s next for TechCrunch? What do you think about developments in India and China? URLS Mentioned TechCrunch Mike’s blog about the industry MobileCrunch UK edition of the popular blog ZoHo Full transcription of the interview SD: What is it like to be the centre of the zeitgeist and to have opinions that you’re putting forth creating movements in the industry? MA: So, y’know I just started off doing this as a hobby, and so no-one cared or listened to my opinions when I first started and so I was very cavalier with them and sometimes didn’t think through [them more controversial] and I’ve noticed over the last, y’know, few months that it’s important that I not do that as much anymore. Being controversial’s fine, as long as I’ve thought through my opinions because, people are listening more and I have to, y’know, I have to be fair. So, the biggest shock has been that I have to really think through what I say as opposed to just ‘Ready, Fire, Aim’ right? But it’s fun, it certainly is exciting and I just like being in the middle of things because I love start-ups and entrepreneurialism and so I’m doing what I love and it’s good to be a part of it. SD: So you’re handling things with a little more equanimity? Yeah, I’m just, I need to be careful before I start y’know, spouting off opinions, but it’s nice because I also have a platform to say what I think, and I like doing that. But the biggest thing, I mean the stars here are the entrepreneurs, the ones who could go out and make a good living but decide to forego that, and ignore the risk to return ratio and do something that they love and they need to be the centre of attention as much as possible. SD: It seems that from your background that your criteria would y’know, that you would, y’know, because you have a law background, you have a starting up tech [y’know and then?] from a lot of different levels of the industry, it seems that like when you’re analysing something and whatever may be the quick analysis of the moment there’s a lot of different datastreams that are going in. MA: Yeah, I mean that without really thinking it through I look at a company from just a user perspective, do I love using it? I look at it from a business model perspective, um, working with VCs a lot and being one myself for a short period of time, I, think about return on investment for stockholders so you have to kind of factor all that in and I think my experience helps with that, but it really all just comes down to the fact that when I was a lawyer I represented companies, I represented Netscape when they were pretty young and got to know them and I was always more fascinated with their business model and the deals they were doing than with the legal work itself and so I think it was sort of inevitable that I would get to this point. SD: Where do you see the future of TechCrunch? MA: So, I think my readers want to read about things other than start-ups. They want to read about mobile applications, they want to read about gadgets. Of course they have other interests as well, but in the technology space, y’know, maybe video games is a big area for them and so I want to cover those areas but I don’t want to write about them, because those aren’t things that I love and I want to find people who do love them and have them write about them. So I have a mobile blog and a guy that loves mobile stuff. I have CrunchGear, which is a gadget blog. I want to expand into ten or fifteen blogs, covering different things and find people who love that stuff and have them write about it every day. SD: With TechCruch you run an advertising/subscriber model… MA: Yup, it’s free content of course, and we take advertisers and we’ve been experimenting with different formats for quite a while and we also have a job board where companies can post jobs that they have and that’s doing quite well also, so we’re going to continue to tweak the model and see what the best way to move forward is. Somebody in the audience asked about advertising and I do get feedback from readers that say that they don’t necessarily love the advertising and that maybe there’s too much of it and things like that so we need to tweak that and make sure we keep people happy. SD: As long as it’s interesting advertising right? MA: The funny thing is that I only take advertisers where I approve of their products, so we have turned people down. We’ve been fortunate enough to be able to do that, so I’ve turned companies down for products that we don’t approve of and so hopefully that helps a little bit. SD: Do you see yourself expanding into the Chinese or Indian market in where, y’know, tech is going there - I mean, there’s outsourcing that’s happening there, particularly in India, but where their start-up environments will be happening over the next ten years. MA: Yeah, absolutely. So I have a Japanese blog now, and a French blog, and I think China and India, probably India first because it’s largely English speaking, and that’s probably where I’ll go next. It would certainly be an English blog and focus not on translating TechCrunch because it’ll be in English but focusing on Indian startups, and that’s what I’ve done with TechCrunch UK, it’s focusing on UK start-ups so I think I’ll absolutely be doing that. It’s really just a matter of finding the right person, so it’s not like, “I’m going to launch India in two months”, it’s, “I’m going to launch India when I find the right person to partner with on it.” SD: Do you have any opinion right now on the Indian start-up market? MA: There’s a lot going on there. A company I’ve been following is ZoHo, they have a presence there but they also have I believe all of their development back in India. I think they’re attacking the US market, they’re going head on with Microsoft right now and it’s good to see that. When it comes to local Indian start-ups that only are in India, I don’t know of any, because I don’t follow the space, but I’ll tell you there’s some really smart and very educated people there and the fact that the cost of labour there is significantly less than the US means that you can have different kind of experiments than you could have here so I’m looking forward to doing that. SD: How have you seen the success ratio for companies that have a majority of their programs outsourced over in some place like in India and having it as part of the integrated company, do you find that from what you’re tracking that’s a successful model? MA: Mixed results. Generally speaking, if you have a long time relationship, you’re hiring there, full-time people for a long term, people are more likely to have a positive experience than hiring teams for short-term projects, is what I’ve seen. But totally mixed results. SD: Just for our listeners, twenty years ago what did you envision yourself doing at this point in time, and how has your professional trajectory been, and do you have any salient points of advice that you would give? MA: Twenty years ago I was sixteen years old and I don’t think I had a thought in my head about what I wanted to do for a career. I liked sports and debate at that point, but I’ll say that five years ago I could have never have guessed that I’d be a blogger and loving it, and proud of it, and moving from a very well-known law firm into doing this and being much happier doing this, so I think that the key thing is that we live in a world in the US where most people don’t have to worry about putting food on the table, so it’s not just a matter of going out and providing for your family for most of us, and we’re very lucky because of that, so we can do things that we love as opposed to things that we have to do and since you’re in that position the piece of advice that I gave in my [FOWA] presentation and that I give to people is do something that you really love, and don’t do something because you think you’re going to make more money doing it. If you do something you really, really love you’ll probably end up making more money anyway but you’ll certainly end up being happier. SD: Are there any final little gems that you’d like to leave with us? MA: No, although it’ll be fun to hear the presentation I gave on the podcast because when you’re up there speaking of course you don’t have any idea… so I’m looking forward to hearing that, and I appreciate your time. Thanks. SD: Yours too. Thanks. Transcribed by Scott Morris Like this article? Digg it! Download the MP3 (9.02 MB) Questions and topics we cover in the interview What’s it like to have your opinions create movements in the industry? How has your background shaped how you analyse new products? What’s next for TechCrunch? What do you think about developments in India and China? URLS Mentioned TechCrunch Mike’s blog about the industry MobileCrunch UK edition of the popular blog ZoHo Full transcription of the interview SD: What is it like to be the centre of the zeitgeist and to have opinions that you’re putting forth creating movements in the industry? MA: So, y’know I just started off doing this as a hobby, and so no-one cared or listened to my opinions when I first started and so I was very cavalier with them and sometimes didn’t think through [them more controversial] and I’ve noticed over the last, y’know, few months that it’s important that I not do that as much anymore. Being controversial’s fine, as long as I’ve thought through my opinions because, people are listening more and I have to, y’know, I have to be fair. So, the biggest shock has been that I have to really think through what I say as opposed to just ‘Ready, Fire, Aim’ right? But it’s fun, it certainly is exciting and I just like being in the middle of things because I love start-ups and entrepreneurialism and so I’m doing what I love and it’s good to be a part of it. SD: So you’re handling things with a little more equanimity? Yeah, I’m just, I need to be careful before I start y’know, spouting off opinions, but it’s nice because I also have a platform to say what I think, and I like doing that. But the biggest thing, I mean the stars here are the entrepreneurs, the ones who could go out and make a good living but decide to forego that, and ignore the risk to return ratio and do something that they love and they need to be the centre of attention as much as possible. SD: It seems that from your background that your criteria would y’know, that you would, y’know, because you have a law background, you have a starting up tech [y’know and then?] from a lot of different levels of the industry, it seems that like when you’re analysing something and whatever may be the quick analysis of the moment there’s a lot of different datastreams that are going in. MA: Yeah, I mean that without really thinking it through I look at a company from just a user perspective, do I love using it? I look at it from a business model perspective, um, working with VCs a lot and being one myself for a short period of time, I, think about return on investment for stockholders so you have to kind of factor all that in and I think my experience helps with that, but it really all just comes down to the fact that when I was a lawyer I represented companies, I represented Netscape when they were pretty young and got to know them and I was always more fascinated with their business model and the deals they were doing than with the legal work itself and so I think it was sort of inevitable that I would get to this point. SD: Where do you see the future of TechCrunch? MA: So, I think my readers want to read about things other than start-ups. They want to read about mobile applications, they want to read about gadgets. Of course they have other interests as well, but in the technology space, y’know, maybe video games is a big area for them and so I want to cover those areas but I don’t want to write about them, because those aren’t things that I love and I want to find people who do love them and have them write about them. So I have a mobile blog and a guy that loves mobile stuff. I have CrunchGear, which is a gadget blog. I want to expand into ten or fifteen blogs, covering different things and find people who love that stuff and have them write about it every day. SD: With TechCruch you run an advertising/subscriber model… MA: Yup, it’s free content of course, and we take advertisers and we’ve been experimenting with different formats for quite a while and we also have a job board where companies can post jobs that they have and that’s doing quite well also, so we’re going to continue to tweak the model and see what the best way to move forward is. Somebody in the audience asked about advertising and I do get feedback from readers that say that they don’t necessarily love the advertising and that maybe there’s too much of it and things like that so we need to tweak that and make sure we keep people happy. SD: As long as it’s interesting advertising right? MA: The funny thing is that I only take advertisers where I approve of their products, so we have turned people down. We’ve been fortunate enough to be able to do that, so I’ve turned companies down for products that we don’t approve of and so hopefully that helps a little bit. SD: Do you see yourself expanding into the Chinese or Indian market in where, y’know, tech is going there - I mean, there’s outsourcing that’s happening there, particularly in India, but where their start-up environments will be happening over the next ten years. MA: Yeah, absolutely. So I have a Japanese blog now, and a French blog, and I think China and India, probably India first because it’s largely English speaking, and that’s probably where I’ll go next. It would certainly be an English blog and focus not on translating TechCrunch because it’ll be in English but focusing on Indian startups, and that’s what I’ve done with TechCrunch UK, it’s focusing on UK start-ups so I think I’ll absolutely be doing that. It’s really just a matter of finding the right person, so it’s not like, “I’m going to launch India in two months”, it’s, “I’m going to launch India when I find the right person to partner with on it.” SD: Do you have any opinion right now on the Indian start-up market? MA: There’s a lot going on there. A company I’ve been following is ZoHo, they have a presence there but they also have I believe all of their development back in India. I think they’re attacking the US market, they’re going head on with Microsoft right now and it’s good to see that. When it comes to local Indian start-ups that only are in India, I don’t know of any, because I don’t follow the space, but I’ll tell you there’s some really smart and very educated people there and the fact that the cost of labour there is significantly less than the US means that you can have different kind of experiments than you could have here so I’m looking forward to doing that. SD: How have you seen the success ratio for companies that have a majority of their programs outsourced over in some place like in India and having it as part of the integrated company, do you find that from what you’re tracking that’s a successful model? MA: Mixed results. Generally speaking, if you have a long time relationship, you’re hiring there, full-time people for a long term, people are more likely to have a positive experience than hiring teams for short-term projects, is what I’ve seen. But totally mixed results. SD: Just for our listeners, twenty years ago what did you envision yourself doing at this point in time, and how has your professional trajectory been, and do you have any salient points of advice that you would give? MA: Twenty years ago I was sixteen years old and I don’t think I had a thought in my head about what I wanted to do for a career. I liked sports and debate at that point, but I’ll say that five years ago I could have never have guessed that I’d be a blogger and loving it, and proud of it, and moving from a very well-known law firm into doing this and being much happier doing this, so I think that the key thing is that we live in a world in the US where most people don’t have to worry about putting food on the table, so it’s not just a matter of going out and providing for your family for most of us, and we’re very lucky because of that, so we can do things that we love as opposed to things that we have to do and since you’re in that position the piece of advice that I gave in my [FOWA] presentation and that I give to people is do something that you really love, and don’t do something because you think you’re going to make more money doing it. If you do something you really, really love you’ll probably end up making more money anyway but you’ll certainly end up being happier. SD: Are there any final little gems that you’d like to leave with us? MA: No, although it’ll be fun to hear the presentation I gave on the podcast because when you’re up there speaking of course you don’t have any idea… so I’m looking forward to hearing that, and I appreciate your time. Thanks. SD: Yours too. Thanks. Transcribed by Scott Morris Like this article? Digg it! tag:odeo.com,2006-10-11,22017651 Wed, 11 Oct 2006 01:10:24 -0700 no Carsonified » Blog http://www.odeo.com/episodes/1733453-Interview-Dan-Cederholm tag:odeo.com,2006-08-13,1733453 Sun, 13 Aug 2006 06:22:53 -0700 no Carsonified » Blog http://www.odeo.com/episodes/23616827-Dan-Cederholm Download the MP3 (5.17 MB) Questions and topics we cover in the interview What’s the story behind Cork’d? How did you manage to grow your user numbers? What’s better - working for yourself or working for clients? What are your plans for the future? URLS Mentioned Cork’d Hivelogic.com Dan Benjamin’s blog (co-developer of Cork’d) Flickr Netflix SVNOpen source version control software Full transcription of the interview RC: We’re here in London with Dan Cederholm and I’m just going to ask him a couple of quick questions. So Dan, why don’t you introduce yourself real quick and then we’ll get started? DC: Yeah, thanks Ryan. I run a site/business called SimpleBits which is basically myself! I’ve been doing client work for the last couple of years. I enjoy writing about CSS-based design and web standards and all that kind of stuff, and uh, that’s me. RC: Sounds good. So the first question I have is about Cork’d. You ... Download the MP3 (5.17 MB) Questions and topics we cover in the interview What’s the story behind Cork’d? How did you manage to grow your user numbers? What’s better - working for yourself or working for clients? What are your plans for the future? URLS Mentioned Cork’d Hivelogic.com Dan Benjamin’s blog (co-developer of Cork’d) Flickr Netflix SVNOpen source version control software Full transcription of the interview RC: We’re here in London with Dan Cederholm and I’m just going to ask him a couple of quick questions. So Dan, why don’t you introduce yourself real quick and then we’ll get started? DC: Yeah, thanks Ryan. I run a site/business called SimpleBits which is basically myself! I’ve been doing client work for the last couple of years. I enjoy writing about CSS-based design and web standards and all that kind of stuff, and uh, that’s me. RC: Sounds good. So the first question I have is about Cork’d. You just launched it, can you tell us what it is and why you built it, and the URL? DC: Yeah, so it’s Corkd.com, which is essentially a wine community site. It originated with a friend of mine, Dan Benjamin, who’s a well-known developer in the Ruby on Rails scene and has a site called Hive Logic that’s been well read over the last few years. So we’ve been chatting back and forth about wine and how we like wine but we’re certainly not wine experts and we’d occasionally trade bottles and say ‘Oh yeah, so what did you have last night?’ and ‘Oh yeah, this was really good’ and maybe using Flickr to post the bottle and make a comment on it and started thinking you could really turn a site into this… Create a site that’s sort of - and this was sort of tongue in cheek at first - sort of like Flickr, that lets people enter wines, keep track of their cellars and make shopping lists like Netflix. And so we had all these community site features that we wanted to apply to wine, which seems almost like silly at first but as we started building it we realised that this is pretty cool and we’re going to use this, so at least two people will use it! We just wanted to keep track of what we’d tasted and what we thought about it, and as we were building it we thought, this is pretty cool, maybe people will use it, and there’s a lot of different directions we can go with wine. So we took several months on our spare time to build it because it was just the two of us, and we didn’t think of it as a legitimate company per se, but it sort of tuned into this neat thing that a lot of people are using now and sort of opened the doors for the other sites as well, so that’s the quick, or not so quick introduction! RC: So, how is it going? Do you mind sharing how many users you have and what the revenue model is, and if it’s going to become a pretty big part of your business and life? DC: So we launched, and in about a month’s time we’ve had 6500 members sign up and about 5000 wines were added by users, which is great. We started with just 1200 wines from Wine.com, actually, an affiliate thing with them just to see the database but now that users are adding wines there’s tons added each day, and we have a lot of members, so I think that, y’know, the revenue model, there’s a couple of different ways we could go. Right now there’s a lot of vineyards that are contacting us, and wine sites and wine companies and we’ve been on a lot of phone calls with wine people, which is sort of weird because we weren’t in the wine world before this, we like to drink wine but all of a sudden ‘wine people’ are taking notice and saying ‘Wow, this is a cool way of discovering wine’ so there’s some advertising opportunities there. Because it’s so targeted I think that’s why it’s attractive to all these wine people, so there’s that, we could create a ‘Cork’d Deluxe’, where signing up, having a fee that offers extra features beyond what the free Cork’d does, that’s a possibility. Secretly, or not so secretly I guess, we’ve been thinking about other sites, I won’t go into detail right now, but there are other beverages beside wine, so we’ll see what happens. RC: So, it’s pretty amazing that you’ve got 6,500 users already, would you say that’s largely because SimpleBits is a popular site, or did you guys do something saucy and magical to make that happen? DC: I think part of it is the way we were able to announce it and the blog community certainly was helpful in spreading the word about the site when we launched it, but based on the feedback we’re getting from people I think it spread quickly to the wine people - the people that really love wine. You know there’s this whole other world of wine put there that we didn’t really know about, wine blogs and wine podcasts. There’s a strange connection, I think, between wine or maybe alcohol in general and geeks and web people, so I think it helped in that we could announce this on our blogs and knew that the web design community would sort of look at it. But they’re not necessarily the target, so I think somehow we tapped into this other wine world so we hope the sign ups continue. RC: Sweet. It’s so cool to hear about people like you building, essentially a web app. I know you’re calling it a site, but, you know, a full on app that’s attracting users and I don’t know about you but I came from client work, building sites for people and so on, as we started building web apps for ourselves it was just so much better, so why don’t you talk about that real quick? What’s your preference, working for clients or working for yourself? I think I know the answer but maybe it’s not, and also if that’s the plan for the future? DC: A really good question. It’s so much more satisfying working on something for yourself. I’m looking forward to and writing about that more. I come from the client world too, working for clients and it was really fun building this with another person, Dan Benjamin, and we use, well he set up Ruby on Rails, and we had something called SVN, which is sort of a code repository and it really allowed us to collaboratively work on this. You can work on your own, commit changes, send a message with that change, I’m totally hooked on this way of working on web apps. Yeah, it’s so much fun working on something of your own. You feel more invested and you don’t feel like you’re on the clock so you put more detail, more attention to detail, and you’re just more excited about it. It’s fun. With a lot of the client work I do, because I’m focused on the UI a lot of times I’m handing off what I did to someone else, they’re implementing it, it usually gets messed up, that’s sort of par for the course and it’s rare when it doesn’t. Working on something yourself with somebody else when you’re both in tune with what this product is, it’s so much fun and it’s far superior. So in terms of the future, I think largely it depends on how well something like Cork’d does, and if it leads to other sites. I’d love to continue to do that. I think that to pay the bills I’d have to do some client work at this point still. I shouldn’t say I don’t enjoy client work as I need to do that at this point, and it’s fun working with different people and working on cool projects and stuff. RC: Thanks Dan and thanks so much for taking time. I hope you enjoy your time in London and we look forward to hearing more from you later. DC: Thanks a lot Ryan. Cheers. Transcribed by Scott Morris Download the MP3 (5.17 MB) Questions and topics we cover in the interview What’s the story behind Cork’d? How did you manage to grow your user numbers? What’s better - working for yourself or working for clients? What are your plans for the future? URLS Mentioned Cork’d Hivelogic.com Dan Benjamin’s blog (co-developer of Cork’d) Flickr Netflix SVNOpen source version control software Full transcription of the interview RC: We’re here in London with Dan Cederholm and I’m just going to ask him a couple of quick questions. So Dan, why don’t you introduce yourself real quick and then we’ll get started? DC: Yeah, thanks Ryan. I run a site/business called SimpleBits which is basically myself! I’ve been doing client work for the last couple of years. I enjoy writing about CSS-based design and web standards and all that kind of stuff, and uh, that’s me. RC: Sounds good. So the first question I have is about Cork’d. You just launched it, can you tell us what it is and why you built it, and the URL? DC: Yeah, so it’s Corkd.com, which is essentially a wine community site. It originated with a friend of mine, Dan Benjamin, who’s a well-known developer in the Ruby on Rails scene and has a site called Hive Logic that’s been well read over the last few years. So we’ve been chatting back and forth about wine and how we like wine but we’re certainly not wine experts and we’d occasionally trade bottles and say ‘Oh yeah, so what did you have last night?’ and ‘Oh yeah, this was really good’ and maybe using Flickr to post the bottle and make a comment on it and started thinking you could really turn a site into this… Create a site that’s sort of - and this was sort of tongue in cheek at first - sort of like Flickr, that lets people enter wines, keep track of their cellars and make shopping lists like Netflix. And so we had all these community site features that we wanted to apply to wine, which seems almost like silly at first but as we started building it we realised that this is pretty cool and we’re going to use this, so at least two people will use it! We just wanted to keep track of what we’d tasted and what we thought about it, and as we were building it we thought, this is pretty cool, maybe people will use it, and there’s a lot of different directions we can go with wine. So we took several months on our spare time to build it because it was just the two of us, and we didn’t think of it as a legitimate company per se, but it sort of tuned into this neat thing that a lot of people are using now and sort of opened the doors for the other sites as well, so that’s the quick, or not so quick introduction! RC: So, how is it going? Do you mind sharing how many users you have and what the revenue model is, and if it’s going to become a pretty big part of your business and life? DC: So we launched, and in about a month’s time we’ve had 6500 members sign up and about 5000 wines were added by users, which is great. We started with just 1200 wines from Wine.com, actually, an affiliate thing with them just to see the database but now that users are adding wines there’s tons added each day, and we have a lot of members, so I think that, y’know, the revenue model, there’s a couple of different ways we could go. Right now there’s a lot of vineyards that are contacting us, and wine sites and wine companies and we’ve been on a lot of phone calls with wine people, which is sort of weird because we weren’t in the wine world before this, we like to drink wine but all of a sudden ‘wine people’ are taking notice and saying ‘Wow, this is a cool way of discovering wine’ so there’s some advertising opportunities there. Because it’s so targeted I think that’s why it’s attractive to all these wine people, so there’s that, we could create a ‘Cork’d Deluxe’, where signing up, having a fee that offers extra features beyond what the free Cork’d does, that’s a possibility. Secretly, or not so secretly I guess, we’ve been thinking about other sites, I won’t go into detail right now, but there are other beverages beside wine, so we’ll see what happens. RC: So, it’s pretty amazing that you’ve got 6,500 users already, would you say that’s largely because SimpleBits is a popular site, or did you guys do something saucy and magical to make that happen? DC: I think part of it is the way we were able to announce it and the blog community certainly was helpful in spreading the word about the site when we launched it, but based on the feedback we’re getting from people I think it spread quickly to the wine people - the people that really love wine. You know there’s this whole other world of wine put there that we didn’t really know about, wine blogs and wine podcasts. There’s a strange connection, I think, between wine or maybe alcohol in general and geeks and web people, so I think it helped in that we could announce this on our blogs and knew that the web design community would sort of look at it. But they’re not necessarily the target, so I think somehow we tapped into this other wine world so we hope the sign ups continue. RC: Sweet. It’s so cool to hear about people like you building, essentially a web app. I know you’re calling it a site, but, you know, a full on app that’s attracting users and I don’t know about you but I came from client work, building sites for people and so on, as we started building web apps for ourselves it was just so much better, so why don’t you talk about that real quick? What’s your preference, working for clients or working for yourself? I think I know the answer but maybe it’s not, and also if that’s the plan for the future? DC: A really good question. It’s so much more satisfying working on something for yourself. I’m looking forward to and writing about that more. I come from the client world too, working for clients and it was really fun building this with another person, Dan Benjamin, and we use, well he set up Ruby on Rails, and we had something called SVN, which is sort of a code repository and it really allowed us to collaboratively work on this. You can work on your own, commit changes, send a message with that change, I’m totally hooked on this way of working on web apps. Yeah, it’s so much fun working on something of your own. You feel more invested and you don’t feel like you’re on the clock so you put more detail, more attention to detail, and you’re just more excited about it. It’s fun. With a lot of the client work I do, because I’m focused on the UI a lot of times I’m handing off what I did to someone else, they’re implementing it, it usually gets messed up, that’s sort of par for the course and it’s rare when it doesn’t. Working on something yourself with somebody else when you’re both in tune with what this product is, it’s so much fun and it’s far superior. So in terms of the future, I think largely it depends on how well something like Cork’d does, and if it leads to other sites. I’d love to continue to do that. I think that to pay the bills I’d have to do some client work at this point still. I shouldn’t say I don’t enjoy client work as I need to do that at this point, and it’s fun working with different people and working on cool projects and stuff. RC: Thanks Dan and thanks so much for taking time. I hope you enjoy your time in London and we look forward to hearing more from you later. DC: Thanks a lot Ryan. Cheers. Transcribed by Scott Morris tag:odeo.com,2006-08-13,23616827 Sun, 13 Aug 2006 01:22:53 -0700 no Carsonified » Blog http://www.odeo.com/episodes/22017690-Dan-Cederholm Download the MP3 (5.17 MB) Questions and topics we cover in the interview What’s the story behind Cork’d? How did you manage to grow your user numbers? What’s better - working for yourself or working for clients? What are your plans for the future? URLS Mentioned Cork’d Hivelogic.com Dan Benjamin’s blog (co-developer of Cork’d) Flickr Netflix SVNOpen source version control software Full transcription of the interview RC: We’re here in London with Dan Cederholm and I’m just going to ask him a couple of quick questions. So Dan, why don’t you introduce yourself real quick and then we’ll get started? DC: Yeah, thanks Ryan. I run a site/business called SimpleBits which is basically myself! I’ve been doing client work for the last couple of years. I enjoy writing about CSS-based design and web standards and all that kind of stuff, and uh, that’s me. RC: Sounds good. So the first question I have is about Cork’d. You ju... Download the MP3 (5.17 MB) Questions and topics we cover in the interview What’s the story behind Cork’d? How did you manage to grow your user numbers? What’s better - working for yourself or working for clients? What are your plans for the future? URLS Mentioned Cork’d Hivelogic.com Dan Benjamin’s blog (co-developer of Cork’d) Flickr Netflix SVNOpen source version control software Full transcription of the interview RC: We’re here in London with Dan Cederholm and I’m just going to ask him a couple of quick questions. So Dan, why don’t you introduce yourself real quick and then we’ll get started? DC: Yeah, thanks Ryan. I run a site/business called SimpleBits which is basically myself! I’ve been doing client work for the last couple of years. I enjoy writing about CSS-based design and web standards and all that kind of stuff, and uh, that’s me. RC: Sounds good. So the first question I have is about Cork’d. You just launched it, can you tell us what it is and why you built it, and the URL? DC: Yeah, so it’s Corkd.com, which is essentially a wine community site. It originated with a friend of mine, Dan Benjamin, who’s a well-known developer in the Ruby on Rails scene and has a site called Hive Logic that’s been well read over the last few years. So we’ve been chatting back and forth about wine and how we like wine but we’re certainly not wine experts and we’d occasionally trade bottles and say ‘Oh yeah, so what did you have last night?’ and ‘Oh yeah, this was really good’ and maybe using Flickr to post the bottle and make a comment on it and started thinking you could really turn a site into this… Create a site that’s sort of - and this was sort of tongue in cheek at first - sort of like Flickr, that lets people enter wines, keep track of their cellars and make shopping lists like Netflix. And so we had all these community site features that we wanted to apply to wine, which seems almost like silly at first but as we started building it we realised that this is pretty cool and we’re going to use this, so at least two people will use it! We just wanted to keep track of what we’d tasted and what we thought about it, and as we were building it we thought, this is pretty cool, maybe people will use it, and there’s a lot of different directions we can go with wine. So we took several months on our spare time to build it because it was just the two of us, and we didn’t think of it as a legitimate company per se, but it sort of tuned into this neat thing that a lot of people are using now and sort of opened the doors for the other sites as well, so that’s the quick, or not so quick introduction! RC: So, how is it going? Do you mind sharing how many users you have and what the revenue model is, and if it’s going to become a pretty big part of your business and life? DC: So we launched, and in about a month’s time we’ve had 6500 members sign up and about 5000 wines were added by users, which is great. We started with just 1200 wines from Wine.com, actually, an affiliate thing with them just to see the database but now that users are adding wines there’s tons added each day, and we have a lot of members, so I think that, y’know, the revenue model, there’s a couple of different ways we could go. Right now there’s a lot of vineyards that are contacting us, and wine sites and wine companies and we’ve been on a lot of phone calls with wine people, which is sort of weird because we weren’t in the wine world before this, we like to drink wine but all of a sudden ‘wine people’ are taking notice and saying ‘Wow, this is a cool way of discovering wine’ so there’s some advertising opportunities there. Because it’s so targeted I think that’s why it’s attractive to all these wine people, so there’s that, we could create a ‘Cork’d Deluxe’, where signing up, having a fee that offers extra features beyond what the free Cork’d does, that’s a possibility. Secretly, or not so secretly I guess, we’ve been thinking about other sites, I won’t go into detail right now, but there are other beverages beside wine, so we’ll see what happens. RC: So, it’s pretty amazing that you’ve got 6,500 users already, would you say that’s largely because SimpleBits is a popular site, or did you guys do something saucy and magical to make that happen? DC: I think part of it is the way we were able to announce it and the blog community certainly was helpful in spreading the word about the site when we launched it, but based on the feedback we’re getting from people I think it spread quickly to the wine people - the people that really love wine. You know there’s this whole other world of wine put there that we didn’t really know about, wine blogs and wine podcasts. There’s a strange connection, I think, between wine or maybe alcohol in general and geeks and web people, so I think it helped in that we could announce this on our blogs and knew that the web design community would sort of look at it. But they’re not necessarily the target, so I think somehow we tapped into this other wine world so we hope the sign ups continue. RC: Sweet. It’s so cool to hear about people like you building, essentially a web app. I know you’re calling it a site, but, you know, a full on app that’s attracting users and I don’t know about you but I came from client work, building sites for people and so on, as we started building web apps for ourselves it was just so much better, so why don’t you talk about that real quick? What’s your preference, working for clients or working for yourself? I think I know the answer but maybe it’s not, and also if that’s the plan for the future? DC: A really good question. It’s so much more satisfying working on something for yourself. I’m looking forward to and writing about that more. I come from the client world too, working for clients and it was really fun building this with another person, Dan Benjamin, and we use, well he set up Ruby on Rails, and we had something called SVN, which is sort of a code repository and it really allowed us to collaboratively work on this. You can work on your own, commit changes, send a message with that change, I’m totally hooked on this way of working on web apps. Yeah, it’s so much fun working on something of your own. You feel more invested and you don’t feel like you’re on the clock so you put more detail, more attention to detail, and you’re just more excited about it. It’s fun. With a lot of the client work I do, because I’m focused on the UI a lot of times I’m handing off what I did to someone else, they’re implementing it, it usually gets messed up, that’s sort of par for the course and it’s rare when it doesn’t. Working on something yourself with somebody else when you’re both in tune with what this product is, it’s so much fun and it’s far superior. So in terms of the future, I think largely it depends on how well something like Cork’d does, and if it leads to other sites. I’d love to continue to do that. I think that to pay the bills I’d have to do some client work at this point still. I shouldn’t say I don’t enjoy client work as I need to do that at this point, and it’s fun working with different people and working on cool projects and stuff. RC: Thanks Dan and thanks so much for taking time. I hope you enjoy your time in London and we look forward to hearing more from you later. DC: Thanks a lot Ryan. Cheers. Transcribed by Scott Morris Download the MP3 (5.17 MB) Questions and topics we cover in the interview What’s the story behind Cork’d? How did you manage to grow your user numbers? What’s better - working for yourself or working for clients? What are your plans for the future? URLS Mentioned Cork’d Hivelogic.com Dan Benjamin’s blog (co-developer of Cork’d) Flickr Netflix SVNOpen source version control software Full transcription of the interview RC: We’re here in London with Dan Cederholm and I’m just going to ask him a couple of quick questions. So Dan, why don’t you introduce yourself real quick and then we’ll get started? DC: Yeah, thanks Ryan. I run a site/business called SimpleBits which is basically myself! I’ve been doing client work for the last couple of years. I enjoy writing about CSS-based design and web standards and all that kind of stuff, and uh, that’s me. RC: Sounds good. So the first question I have is about Cork’d. You just launched it, can you tell us what it is and why you built it, and the URL? DC: Yeah, so it’s Corkd.com, which is essentially a wine community site. It originated with a friend of mine, Dan Benjamin, who’s a well-known developer in the Ruby on Rails scene and has a site called Hive Logic that’s been well read over the last few years. So we’ve been chatting back and forth about wine and how we like wine but we’re certainly not wine experts and we’d occasionally trade bottles and say ‘Oh yeah, so what did you have last night?’ and ‘Oh yeah, this was really good’ and maybe using Flickr to post the bottle and make a comment on it and started thinking you could really turn a site into this… Create a site that’s sort of - and this was sort of tongue in cheek at first - sort of like Flickr, that lets people enter wines, keep track of their cellars and make shopping lists like Netflix. And so we had all these community site features that we wanted to apply to wine, which seems almost like silly at first but as we started building it we realised that this is pretty cool and we’re going to use this, so at least two people will use it! We just wanted to keep track of what we’d tasted and what we thought about it, and as we were building it we thought, this is pretty cool, maybe people will use it, and there’s a lot of different directions we can go with wine. So we took several months on our spare time to build it because it was just the two of us, and we didn’t think of it as a legitimate company per se, but it sort of tuned into this neat thing that a lot of people are using now and sort of opened the doors for the other sites as well, so that’s the quick, or not so quick introduction! RC: So, how is it going? Do you mind sharing how many users you have and what the revenue model is, and if it’s going to become a pretty big part of your business and life? DC: So we launched, and in about a month’s time we’ve had 6500 members sign up and about 5000 wines were added by users, which is great. We started with just 1200 wines from Wine.com, actually, an affiliate thing with them just to see the database but now that users are adding wines there’s tons added each day, and we have a lot of members, so I think that, y’know, the revenue model, there’s a couple of different ways we could go. Right now there’s a lot of vineyards that are contacting us, and wine sites and wine companies and we’ve been on a lot of phone calls with wine people, which is sort of weird because we weren’t in the wine world before this, we like to drink wine but all of a sudden ‘wine people’ are taking notice and saying ‘Wow, this is a cool way of discovering wine’ so there’s some advertising opportunities there. Because it’s so targeted I think that’s why it’s attractive to all these wine people, so there’s that, we could create a ‘Cork’d Deluxe’, where signing up, having a fee that offers extra features beyond what the free Cork’d does, that’s a possibility. Secretly, or not so secretly I guess, we’ve been thinking about other sites, I won’t go into detail right now, but there are other beverages beside wine, so we’ll see what happens. RC: So, it’s pretty amazing that you’ve got 6,500 users already, would you say that’s largely because SimpleBits is a popular site, or did you guys do something saucy and magical to make that happen? DC: I think part of it is the way we were able to announce it and the blog community certainly was helpful in spreading the word about the site when we launched it, but based on the feedback we’re getting from people I think it spread quickly to the wine people - the people that really love wine. You know there’s this whole other world of wine put there that we didn’t really know about, wine blogs and wine podcasts. There’s a strange connection, I think, between wine or maybe alcohol in general and geeks and web people, so I think it helped in that we could announce this on our blogs and knew that the web design community would sort of look at it. But they’re not necessarily the target, so I think somehow we tapped into this other wine world so we hope the sign ups continue. RC: Sweet. It’s so cool to hear about people like you building, essentially a web app. I know you’re calling it a site, but, you know, a full on app that’s attracting users and I don’t know about you but I came from client work, building sites for people and so on, as we started building web apps for ourselves it was just so much better, so why don’t you talk about that real quick? What’s your preference, working for clients or working for yourself? I think I know the answer but maybe it’s not, and also if that’s the plan for the future? DC: A really good question. It’s so much more satisfying working on something for yourself. I’m looking forward to and writing about that more. I come from the client world too, working for clients and it was really fun building this with another person, Dan Benjamin, and we use, well he set up Ruby on Rails, and we had something called SVN, which is sort of a code repository and it really allowed us to collaboratively work on this. You can work on your own, commit changes, send a message with that change, I’m totally hooked on this way of working on web apps. Yeah, it’s so much fun working on something of your own. You feel more invested and you don’t feel like you’re on the clock so you put more detail, more attention to detail, and you’re just more excited about it. It’s fun. With a lot of the client work I do, because I’m focused on the UI a lot of times I’m handing off what I did to someone else, they’re implementing it, it usually gets messed up, that’s sort of par for the course and it’s rare when it doesn’t. Working on something yourself with somebody else when you’re both in tune with what this product is, it’s so much fun and it’s far superior. So in terms of the future, I think largely it depends on how well something like Cork’d does, and if it leads to other sites. I’d love to continue to do that. I think that to pay the bills I’d have to do some client work at this point still. I shouldn’t say I don’t enjoy client work as I need to do that at this point, and it’s fun working with different people and working on cool projects and stuff. RC: Thanks Dan and thanks so much for taking time. I hope you enjoy your time in London and we look forward to hearing more from you later. DC: Thanks a lot Ryan. Cheers. Transcribed by Scott Morris tag:odeo.com,2006-08-13,22017690 Sun, 13 Aug 2006 01:22:53 -0700 no Carsonified » Blog http://www.odeo.com/episodes/1565906-Interview-Chris-Wilson tag:odeo.com,2006-07-24,1565906 Mon, 24 Jul 2006 10:15:04 -0700 no Carsonified » Blog http://www.odeo.com/episodes/23616829-Chris-Wilson Download the MP3 (2.6 MB) In the interview, we discuss everything from Web Standards support in IE7, to whether or not IE6 will auto-update to IE7. Enjoy! Full transcription of the interview RC: Hi, my name is Ryan and we are here with Chris Wilson from Microsoft and we’re just gonna ask him a couple of quick questions, and so over to you, Chris. CW: Thanks, Ryan. So, I’m Chris Wilson and I’m the Group Program Manager for the Internet Explorer team, on the platform and Security side of the Internet Explorer Team. RC: Okay, so the first question I have for you is, “What new feature are you most excited about in IE7?” CW: That’s a really hard question for me to answer, obviously, because I’m really close to it and there are a lot of features that I absolutely love. I think that as a user, probably the feature I’m most excited about is our support for RSS and our integrated feed subscriptions, feed reading, the integrated platform that do... Download the MP3 (2.6 MB) In the interview, we discuss everything from Web Standards support in IE7, to whether or not IE6 will auto-update to IE7. Enjoy! Full transcription of the interview RC: Hi, my name is Ryan and we are here with Chris Wilson from Microsoft and we’re just gonna ask him a couple of quick questions, and so over to you, Chris. CW: Thanks, Ryan. So, I’m Chris Wilson and I’m the Group Program Manager for the Internet Explorer team, on the platform and Security side of the Internet Explorer Team. RC: Okay, so the first question I have for you is, “What new feature are you most excited about in IE7?” CW: That’s a really hard question for me to answer, obviously, because I’m really close to it and there are a lot of features that I absolutely love. I think that as a user, probably the feature I’m most excited about is our support for RSS and our integrated feed subscriptions, feed reading, the integrated platform that does the sync engine and everything, that gets me really excited. I think as a developer, the best thing really is all the work we’ve done on standards support, all the fixes were done but as a user certainly the RSS platform is pretty exciting. RC: A quick question about that RSS support, is that going to be similar to what people are used to in Firefox, when you subscribe to a feed in Firefox? Could you tell us just a little bit about what that’s actually going to be like. CW: Sure. The user experience is actually somewhat similar for feed discovery, y’know, you’re browsing a web page and it has an RSS feed then a little RSS icon lights up, in fact it’s currently the same icon even that Firefox uses. The feed reading experience is kind of similar, the really exciting thing that we’ve done though is that we’ve built a platform not just for Internet Explorer, with RSS feeds, we’ve actually exposed APIs in both Win32 and the .NET frameworks platforms so you can actually write applications that use all of these feeds and they all share this common feed list, common store, common synchronisation engine. Like, I have a screensaver installed on my machine that automatically picks up all of the photos that are in my RSS feeds and uses them as a screensaver, so my contacts post new photos to Flickr, and I automatically get them on my screensaver. It’s pretty cool. RC: That is so exciting! I mean it’s going to just break it wide open. Wow, cool. The next question I have for you is, tell me a little about your involvement with the Web Standards Project, I know that we at Vitamin are really supportive of what you’re doing and excited about it so I’ll just give you a chance to defend yourself. CW: The Web Standards project, y’know, I’ve actually worked with them, peripherally at least, for a really long time, I mean, almost since their inception. I’ve talked to Zeldman a lot back in the day and I think lately, for the last year / year and a half, it’s been really exciting because we’ve really managed to build a relationship where the Web Standards Project helps advise us on what web developers and web designers really want and need, and help to prioritise that, and it’s not really necessarily that we don’t care about standards or anything like that, it’s really that we need help in prioritising what’s most important. We had a lot of requests and a lot of them are really very grand requests in both senses of the word. They’re good requests, but they’re huge, and we really need some help to figure out what’s the most important to make people’s lives easier in the web development community, so I think that our relationship with the Web Standards Project has been great to help figure that out, help us to prioritise and help get the message out too that we really do care and we’re trying to do better. RC: The last question that I have for you is, “Is IE going to auto-update to IE7 and how do you feel about that?” CW: Is IE going to auto-update to IE7? I think that the first thing really is that we can’t really force it on users. That’s not our goal. We really do like to offer users choice. It is a different user interface, some people will be really jarred by that. I think that we certainly want to encourage everyone out there to, um, I do believe that we will offer it through Windows Update, but it won’t be an automatic silent update, certainly it won’t be like you come in one day and suddenly your computer’s running IE7 rather than IE6. Certainly we have to ask the user if they really want it. As nice as it would be to blast it onto everyone’s system I don’t think that can happen, so. RC: Alright, well that’s it, so thank you for joining us, I appreciate it. CW: Great, thank you, Ryan. Transcribed by Scott Morris Download the MP3 (2.6 MB) In the interview, we discuss everything from Web Standards support in IE7, to whether or not IE6 will auto-update to IE7. Enjoy! Full transcription of the interview RC: Hi, my name is Ryan and we are here with Chris Wilson from Microsoft and we’re just gonna ask him a couple of quick questions, and so over to you, Chris. CW: Thanks, Ryan. So, I’m Chris Wilson and I’m the Group Program Manager for the Internet Explorer team, on the platform and Security side of the Internet Explorer Team. RC: Okay, so the first question I have for you is, “What new feature are you most excited about in IE7?” CW: That’s a really hard question for me to answer, obviously, because I’m really close to it and there are a lot of features that I absolutely love. I think that as a user, probably the feature I’m most excited about is our support for RSS and our integrated feed subscriptions, feed reading, the integrated platform that does the sync engine and everything, that gets me really excited. I think as a developer, the best thing really is all the work we’ve done on standards support, all the fixes were done but as a user certainly the RSS platform is pretty exciting. RC: A quick question about that RSS support, is that going to be similar to what people are used to in Firefox, when you subscribe to a feed in Firefox? Could you tell us just a little bit about what that’s actually going to be like. CW: Sure. The user experience is actually somewhat similar for feed discovery, y’know, you’re browsing a web page and it has an RSS feed then a little RSS icon lights up, in fact it’s currently the same icon even that Firefox uses. The feed reading experience is kind of similar, the really exciting thing that we’ve done though is that we’ve built a platform not just for Internet Explorer, with RSS feeds, we’ve actually exposed APIs in both Win32 and the .NET frameworks platforms so you can actually write applications that use all of these feeds and they all share this common feed list, common store, common synchronisation engine. Like, I have a screensaver installed on my machine that automatically picks up all of the photos that are in my RSS feeds and uses them as a screensaver, so my contacts post new photos to Flickr, and I automatically get them on my screensaver. It’s pretty cool. RC: That is so exciting! I mean it’s going to just break it wide open. Wow, cool. The next question I have for you is, tell me a little about your involvement with the Web Standards Project, I know that we at Vitamin are really supportive of what you’re doing and excited about it so I’ll just give you a chance to defend yourself. CW: The Web Standards project, y’know, I’ve actually worked with them, peripherally at least, for a really long time, I mean, almost since their inception. I’ve talked to Zeldman a lot back in the day and I think lately, for the last year / year and a half, it’s been really exciting because we’ve really managed to build a relationship where the Web Standards Project helps advise us on what web developers and web designers really want and need, and help to prioritise that, and it’s not really necessarily that we don’t care about standards or anything like that, it’s really that we need help in prioritising what’s most important. We had a lot of requests and a lot of them are really very grand requests in both senses of the word. They’re good requests, but they’re huge, and we really need some help to figure out what’s the most important to make people’s lives easier in the web development community, so I think that our relationship with the Web Standards Project has been great to help figure that out, help us to prioritise and help get the message out too that we really do care and we’re trying to do better. RC: The last question that I have for you is, “Is IE going to auto-update to IE7 and how do you feel about that?” CW: Is IE going to auto-update to IE7? I think that the first thing really is that we can’t really force it on users. That’s not our goal. We really do like to offer users choice. It is a different user interface, some people will be really jarred by that. I think that we certainly want to encourage everyone out there to, um, I do believe that we will offer it through Windows Update, but it won’t be an automatic silent update, certainly it won’t be like you come in one day and suddenly your computer’s running IE7 rather than IE6. Certainly we have to ask the user if they really want it. As nice as it would be to blast it onto everyone’s system I don’t think that can happen, so. RC: Alright, well that’s it, so thank you for joining us, I appreciate it. CW: Great, thank you, Ryan. Transcribed by Scott Morris tag:odeo.com,2006-07-24,23616829 Mon, 24 Jul 2006 05:15:04 -0700 no Carsonified » Blog Web Apps http://www.odeo.com/episodes/22017696-Chris-Wilson Download the MP3 (2.6 MB) In the interview, we discuss everything from Web Standards support in IE7, to whether or not IE6 will auto-update to IE7. Enjoy! Full transcription of the interview RC: Hi, my name is Ryan and we are here with Chris Wilson from Microsoft and we’re just gonna ask him a couple of quick questions, and so over to you, Chris. CW: Thanks, Ryan. So, I’m Chris Wilson and I’m the Group Program Manager for the Internet Explorer team, on the platform and Security side of the Internet Explorer Team. RC: Okay, so the first question I have for you is, “What new feature are you most excited about in IE7?” CW: That’s a really hard question for me to answer, obviously, because I’m really close to it and there are a lot of features that I absolutely love. I think that as a user, probably the feature I’m most excited about is our support for RSS and our integrated feed subscriptions, feed reading, the integrated platform that do... Download the MP3 (2.6 MB) In the interview, we discuss everything from Web Standards support in IE7, to whether or not IE6 will auto-update to IE7. Enjoy! Full transcription of the interview RC: Hi, my name is Ryan and we are here with Chris Wilson from Microsoft and we’re just gonna ask him a couple of quick questions, and so over to you, Chris. CW: Thanks, Ryan. So, I’m Chris Wilson and I’m the Group Program Manager for the Internet Explorer team, on the platform and Security side of the Internet Explorer Team. RC: Okay, so the first question I have for you is, “What new feature are you most excited about in IE7?” CW: That’s a really hard question for me to answer, obviously, because I’m really close to it and there are a lot of features that I absolutely love. I think that as a user, probably the feature I’m most excited about is our support for RSS and our integrated feed subscriptions, feed reading, the integrated platform that does the sync engine and everything, that gets me really excited. I think as a developer, the best thing really is all the work we’ve done on standards support, all the fixes were done but as a user certainly the RSS platform is pretty exciting. RC: A quick question about that RSS support, is that going to be similar to what people are used to in Firefox, when you subscribe to a feed in Firefox? Could you tell us just a little bit about what that’s actually going to be like. CW: Sure. The user experience is actually somewhat similar for feed discovery, y’know, you’re browsing a web page and it has an RSS feed then a little RSS icon lights up, in fact it’s currently the same icon even that Firefox uses. The feed reading experience is kind of similar, the really exciting thing that we’ve done though is that we’ve built a platform not just for Internet Explorer, with RSS feeds, we’ve actually exposed APIs in both Win32 and the .NET frameworks platforms so you can actually write applications that use all of these feeds and they all share this common feed list, common store, common synchronisation engine. Like, I have a screensaver installed on my machine that automatically picks up all of the photos that are in my RSS feeds and uses them as a screensaver, so my contacts post new photos to Flickr, and I automatically get them on my screensaver. It’s pretty cool. RC: That is so exciting! I mean it’s going to just break it wide open. Wow, cool. The next question I have for you is, tell me a little about your involvement with the Web Standards Project, I know that we at Vitamin are really supportive of what you’re doing and excited about it so I’ll just give you a chance to defend yourself. CW: The Web Standards project, y’know, I’ve actually worked with them, peripherally at least, for a really long time, I mean, almost since their inception. I’ve talked to Zeldman a lot back in the day and I think lately, for the last year / year and a half, it’s been really exciting because we’ve really managed to build a relationship where the Web Standards Project helps advise us on what web developers and web designers really want and need, and help to prioritise that, and it’s not really necessarily that we don’t care about standards or anything like that, it’s really that we need help in prioritising what’s most important. We had a lot of requests and a lot of them are really very grand requests in both senses of the word. They’re good requests, but they’re huge, and we really need some help to figure out what’s the most important to make people’s lives easier in the web development community, so I think that our relationship with the Web Standards Project has been great to help figure that out, help us to prioritise and help get the message out too that we really do care and we’re trying to do better. RC: The last question that I have for you is, “Is IE going to auto-update to IE7 and how do you feel about that?” CW: Is IE going to auto-update to IE7? I think that the first thing really is that we can’t really force it on users. That’s not our goal. We really do like to offer users choice. It is a different user interface, some people will be really jarred by that. I think that we certainly want to encourage everyone out there to, um, I do believe that we will offer it through Windows Update, but it won’t be an automatic silent update, certainly it won’t be like you come in one day and suddenly your computer’s running IE7 rather than IE6. Certainly we have to ask the user if they really want it. As nice as it would be to blast it onto everyone’s system I don’t think that can happen, so. RC: Alright, well that’s it, so thank you for joining us, I appreciate it. CW: Great, thank you, Ryan. Transcribed by Scott Morris Download the MP3 (2.6 MB) In the interview, we discuss everything from Web Standards support in IE7, to whether or not IE6 will auto-update to IE7. Enjoy! Full transcription of the interview RC: Hi, my name is Ryan and we are here with Chris Wilson from Microsoft and we’re just gonna ask him a couple of quick questions, and so over to you, Chris. CW: Thanks, Ryan. So, I’m Chris Wilson and I’m the Group Program Manager for the Internet Explorer team, on the platform and Security side of the Internet Explorer Team. RC: Okay, so the first question I have for you is, “What new feature are you most excited about in IE7?” CW: That’s a really hard question for me to answer, obviously, because I’m really close to it and there are a lot of features that I absolutely love. I think that as a user, probably the feature I’m most excited about is our support for RSS and our integrated feed subscriptions, feed reading, the integrated platform that does the sync engine and everything, that gets me really excited. I think as a developer, the best thing really is all the work we’ve done on standards support, all the fixes were done but as a user certainly the RSS platform is pretty exciting. RC: A quick question about that RSS support, is that going to be similar to what people are used to in Firefox, when you subscribe to a feed in Firefox? Could you tell us just a little bit about what that’s actually going to be like. CW: Sure. The user experience is actually somewhat similar for feed discovery, y’know, you’re browsing a web page and it has an RSS feed then a little RSS icon lights up, in fact it’s currently the same icon even that Firefox uses. The feed reading experience is kind of similar, the really exciting thing that we’ve done though is that we’ve built a platform not just for Internet Explorer, with RSS feeds, we’ve actually exposed APIs in both Win32 and the .NET frameworks platforms so you can actually write applications that use all of these feeds and they all share this common feed list, common store, common synchronisation engine. Like, I have a screensaver installed on my machine that automatically picks up all of the photos that are in my RSS feeds and uses them as a screensaver, so my contacts post new photos to Flickr, and I automatically get them on my screensaver. It’s pretty cool. RC: That is so exciting! I mean it’s going to just break it wide open. Wow, cool. The next question I have for you is, tell me a little about your involvement with the Web Standards Project, I know that we at Vitamin are really supportive of what you’re doing and excited about it so I’ll just give you a chance to defend yourself. CW: The Web Standards project, y’know, I’ve actually worked with them, peripherally at least, for a really long time, I mean, almost since their inception. I’ve talked to Zeldman a lot back in the day and I think lately, for the last year / year and a half, it’s been really exciting because we’ve really managed to build a relationship where the Web Standards Project helps advise us on what web developers and web designers really want and need, and help to prioritise that, and it’s not really necessarily that we don’t care about standards or anything like that, it’s really that we need help in prioritising what’s most important. We had a lot of requests and a lot of them are really very grand requests in both senses of the word. They’re good requests, but they’re huge, and we really need some help to figure out what’s the most important to make people’s lives easier in the web development community, so I think that our relationship with the Web Standards Project has been great to help figure that out, help us to prioritise and help get the message out too that we really do care and we’re trying to do better. RC: The last question that I have for you is, “Is IE going to auto-update to IE7 and how do you feel about that?” CW: Is IE going to auto-update to IE7? I think that the first thing really is that we can’t really force it on users. That’s not our goal. We really do like to offer users choice. It is a different user interface, some people will be really jarred by that. I think that we certainly want to encourage everyone out there to, um, I do believe that we will offer it through Windows Update, but it won’t be an automatic silent update, certainly it won’t be like you come in one day and suddenly your computer’s running IE7 rather than IE6. Certainly we have to ask the user if they really want it. As nice as it would be to blast it onto everyone’s system I don’t think that can happen, so. RC: Alright, well that’s it, so thank you for joining us, I appreciate it. CW: Great, thank you, Ryan. Transcribed by Scott Morris tag:odeo.com,2006-07-24,22017696 Mon, 24 Jul 2006 05:15:04 -0700 no Carsonified » Blog Web Apps http://www.odeo.com/episodes/1520234-Interview-Tim-O-Reilly-part-two tag:odeo.com,2006-07-17,1520234 Mon, 17 Jul 2006 05:30:13 -0700 no Carsonified » Blog http://www.odeo.com/episodes/1481937-Interview-Tim-O-Reilly tag:odeo.com,2006-07-11,1481937 Tue, 11 Jul 2006 06:27:01 -0700 no Carsonified » Blog http://www.odeo.com/episodes/23616831-Cut-Your-Coding-Time Download the MP3 (6.6 MB) In this 12 minute audio training clip, David Heinemeier Hansson (37Signals & Ruby on Rails) discusses how Ruby on Rails makes coding easier, quicker and happier, by creating common conventions. This session is from the 1-day event The Future of Web Apps, hosted by Carson Workshops. Download the MP3 (6.6 MB) In this 12 minute audio training clip, David Heinemeier Hansson (37Signals & Ruby on Rails) discusses how Ruby on Rails makes coding easier, quicker and happier, by creating common conventions. This session is from the 1-day event The Future of Web Apps, hosted by Carson Workshops. Download the MP3 (6.6 MB) In this 12 minute audio training clip, David Heinemeier Hansson (37Signals & Ruby on Rails) discusses how Ruby on Rails makes coding easier, quicker and happier, by creating common conventions. This session is from the 1-day event The Future of Web Apps, hosted by Carson Workshops. tag:odeo.com,2006-04-29,23616831 Sat, 29 Apr 2006 23:00:28 -0700 no Carsonified » Blog http://www.odeo.com/episodes/22017700-Cut-Your-Coding-Time Download the MP3 (6.6 MB) In this 12 minute audio training clip, David Heinemeier Hansson (37Signals & Ruby on Rails) discusses how Ruby on Rails makes coding easier, quicker and happier, by creating common conventions. This session is from the 1-day event The Future of Web Apps, hosted by Carson Workshops. Download the MP3 (6.6 MB) In this 12 minute audio training clip, David Heinemeier Hansson (37Signals & Ruby on Rails) discusses how Ruby on Rails makes coding easier, quicker and happier, by creating common conventions. This session is from the 1-day event The Future of Web Apps, hosted by Carson Workshops. Download the MP3 (6.6 MB) In this 12 minute audio training clip, David Heinemeier Hansson (37Signals & Ruby on Rails) discusses how Ruby on Rails makes coding easier, quicker and happier, by creating common conventions. This session is from the 1-day event The Future of Web Apps, hosted by Carson Workshops. tag:odeo.com,2006-04-29,22017700 Sat, 29 Apr 2006 23:00:28 -0700 no Carsonified » Blog http://www.odeo.com/episodes/23616832-The-Secret-to-Perfect-Version-Control Download the MP3 In this 10 minute audio training session, Cal Henderson (Flickr.com) discusses the following topics: What you should put in version control How to deploy code rapidly How you can use development, staging and production environments for easy and safe deployment How to test This session is from the 1-day workshop Building Enterprise Web Apps on a Budget - How We Built Flickr, hosted by Carson Workshops. Download the MP3 In this 10 minute audio training session, Cal Henderson (Flickr.com) discusses the following topics: What you should put in version control How to deploy code rapidly How you can use development, staging and production environments for easy and safe deployment How to test This session is from the 1-day workshop Building Enterprise Web Apps on a Budget - How We Built Flickr, hosted by Carson Workshops. Download the MP3 In this 10 minute audio training session, Cal Henderson (Flickr.com) discusses the following topics: What you should put in version control How to deploy code rapidly How you can use development, staging and production environments for easy and safe deployment How to test This session is from the 1-day workshop Building Enterprise Web Apps on a Budget - How We Built Flickr, hosted by Carson Workshops. tag:odeo.com,2006-04-11,23616832 Tue, 11 Apr 2006 06:52:34 -0700 no Carsonified » Blog Web Apps http://www.odeo.com/episodes/22017703-The-Secret-to-Perfect-Version-Control Download the MP3 In this 10 minute audio training session, Cal Henderson (Flickr.com) discusses the following topics: What you should put in version control How to deploy code rapidly How you can use development, staging and production environments for easy and safe deployment How to test This session is from the 1-day workshop Building Enterprise Web Apps on a Budget - How We Built Flickr, hosted by Carson Workshops. Download the MP3 In this 10 minute audio training session, Cal Henderson (Flickr.com) discusses the following topics: What you should put in version control How to deploy code rapidly How you can use development, staging and production environments for easy and safe deployment How to test This session is from the 1-day workshop Building Enterprise Web Apps on a Budget - How We Built Flickr, hosted by Carson Workshops. Download the MP3 In this 10 minute audio training session, Cal Henderson (Flickr.com) discusses the following topics: What you should put in version control How to deploy code rapidly How you can use development, staging and production environments for easy and safe deployment How to test This session is from the 1-day workshop Building Enterprise Web Apps on a Budget - How We Built Flickr, hosted by Carson Workshops. tag:odeo.com,2006-04-11,22017703 Tue, 11 Apr 2006 06:52:34 -0700 no Carsonified » Blog Web Apps http://www.odeo.com/episodes/23616836-Ruby-Basics Download the MP3 In this valuable primer to Ruby, Geoff covers everything you need to know to get rockin’ with Ruby. Geoff discusses the following topics: Objects in Ruby Instance variables Model View Controllers in Ruby Constants Symbols Types of Strings Class variables Data structures: Hash tables Multi-level hashes Class inheritance Meta programming Getter and Setter methods This session is from the 1-day workshop Getting Started with Rails, hosted by Carson Workshops. Download the MP3 In this valuable primer to Ruby, Geoff covers everything you need to know to get rockin’ with Ruby. Geoff discusses the following topics: Objects in Ruby Instance variables Model View Controllers in Ruby Constants Symbols Types of Strings Class variables Data structures: Hash tables Multi-level hashes Class inheritance Meta programming Getter and Setter methods This session is from the 1-day workshop Getting Started with Rails, hosted by Carson Workshops. Download the MP3 In this valuable primer to Ruby, Geoff covers everything you need to know to get rockin’ with Ruby. Geoff discusses the following topics: Objects in Ruby Instance variables Model View Controllers in Ruby Constants Symbols Types of Strings Class variables Data structures: Hash tables Multi-level hashes Class inheritance Meta programming Getter and Setter methods This session is from the 1-day workshop Getting Started with Rails, hosted by Carson Workshops. tag:odeo.com,2006-04-09,23616836 Sun, 09 Apr 2006 04:15:58 -0700 no Carsonified » Blog http://www.odeo.com/episodes/22017708-Ruby-Basics Download the MP3 In this valuable primer to Ruby, Geoff covers everything you need to know to get rockin’ with Ruby. Geoff discusses the following topics: Objects in Ruby Instance variables Model View Controllers in Ruby Constants Symbols Types of Strings Class variables Data structures: Hash tables Multi-level hashes Class inheritance Meta programming Getter and Setter methods This session is from the 1-day workshop Getting Started with Rails, hosted by Carson Workshops. Download the MP3 In this valuable primer to Ruby, Geoff covers everything you need to know to get rockin’ with Ruby. Geoff discusses the following topics: Objects in Ruby Instance variables Model View Controllers in Ruby Constants Symbols Types of Strings Class variables Data structures: Hash tables Multi-level hashes Class inheritance Meta programming Getter and Setter methods This session is from the 1-day workshop Getting Started with Rails, hosted by Carson Workshops. Download the MP3 In this valuable primer to Ruby, Geoff covers everything you need to know to get rockin’ with Ruby. Geoff discusses the following topics: Objects in Ruby Instance variables Model View Controllers in Ruby Constants Symbols Types of Strings Class variables Data structures: Hash tables Multi-level hashes Class inheritance Meta programming Getter and Setter methods This session is from the 1-day workshop Getting Started with Rails, hosted by Carson Workshops. tag:odeo.com,2006-04-09,22017708 Sun, 09 Apr 2006 04:15:58 -0700 no Carsonified » Blog http://www.odeo.com/episodes/22017713-Scaling-Web-Apps-on-a-Budget Download the MP3 If you’re a small company on a budget, building large-scale web apps can be tricky. In this short audio training session, Ryan Carson, director of Carson Systems, shares some tips on how to make your web app scalable, when you’re on a tight budget. This session is from the 1-day event The Future of Web Apps, hosted by Carson Workshops. Download the MP3 If you’re a small company on a budget, building large-scale web apps can be tricky. In this short audio training session, Ryan Carson, director of Carson Systems, shares some tips on how to make your web app scalable, when you’re on a tight budget. This session is from the 1-day event The Future of Web Apps, hosted by Carson Workshops. Download the MP3 If you’re a small company on a budget, building large-scale web apps can be tricky. In this short audio training session, Ryan Carson, director of Carson Systems, shares some tips on how to make your web app scalable, when you’re on a tight budget. This session is from the 1-day event The Future of Web Apps, hosted by Carson Workshops. tag:odeo.com,2006-04-05,22017713 Wed, 05 Apr 2006 08:23:02 -0700 no Carsonified » Blog