Dana Blankenhorn

And now for something completely different. Michael Bradley to Aston Villa could be the steal of this EPL transfer window. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/football/article-1352004/Michael-Bradley-joins-Aston-Villa-loan.html A pro's pro, and only 23.

Who's Bob Metcalfe Now? The 1971 Game

Bob Metcalfe (right) may be one of my generation's most important innovators.

His concept of an "Ethernet" is at the heart of your local area network. Ethernet concepts are rolled all over the Internet, and most scaled Web hosts move their data around with it. There are now Ethernet standards running to 10 GBps.

Metcalfe created 3Com in 1980 to commercialize his concept, and while his performance was fine his board kicked him out 10 years later for Eric Benhamou. As with some of my firings, this was probably a blessing in disguise.

Metcalfe's mind is too big, and too wide-ranging, to be locked inside an office. He's a walk around, fly around kind of guy who can do anything. He spent the 1990s as a pundit and journalist, and has spent most of the last decade as a venture capitalist and eminence grise at UT-Austin. I keep hoping he'll "retire" to my alma mater, Rice University in Houston, where he can drive the world's energy giants deeper into the renewables space, but that's just my personal dream for him. At 64 he's still young enough to have dreams of his own.

Metcalfe is the first subject of our new feature, The 1971 Game. In past years I've spent time comparing figures of the present with those of the past, based on my belief that the crisis of our time is a reverse of what happened in the late 1960s. This made Barack Obama into a Bizarro Nixon. It also made figures of what became the Tea Party movement into Bizarro Hippies and Yippies. All this was fun, but in the end it doesn't really explain what was behind the change.

What my research began to reveal last year is that even the changes of the 1960s, which seemed entirely social and political, were in fact economic. And that this pattern of political change driven by economics has in fact repeated itself, time-after-time in our political history.

What makes America great is that it's a business culture. We are not ideological people. We do what works. But what aging, fading industries learned long ago is that they could hang on to economic power by capturing the political process. This is what southern planters did in the 1850s, what railroad barons did in the 1890s, what utility producers did in the 1920s, what manufacturers were actually doing in the 1960s. (What's good for Gemeral Motors is good for the USA.)

Since you can't win an election by running against economic progress, fading industries have spent immense sums creating a host of ancillary issues, associating themselves with causes that appear far afield from what they're about, but whose political alliances magically end up supporting their economic aims. 

Which brings us to the present day.

The Future is Never What They Say

Think of this as Volume 15, Number 6 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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I don't have an air car. Or a home in the sky. I have never been to space. My home and my car aren't terribly different from what my parents had while I was growing up -- in fact the home I live in is a generation older than the one I grew up in.

Point is, the future envisioned when I was a child in the 1960s did not come to pass. A very different future ensued. The futurists who came closest to being right were probably The Firesign Theater, who in We're All Bozos on This Bus envisaged the world as a Future Fair, a computer-directed make-believe, one which an able hacker could disassemble.

The last generation has been the era of Moore's Law, with most attention paid to creating the wonders of our time, chip-and-software based, networked life. We can, from the comfort of our desktops, be heard all around the world. We can, with a handheld device, get the answer to any question. As in the 18th century coffee shops have become our town centers, but they're as quiet as libraries, and most really are.

History has moved in this way because the computer chip changed the world. Chips created a radical transformation, and it was easier to grow in that direction than to focus on making things or going places. So transportation progress has slowed, and millions still make things as our forefathers did 80 years ago, on assembly lines, in sweatshops. The fact that those assembly lines and sweatshops are in China and India disturbs some people. But the route to the 21st century takes you through the 19th and 20th -- without that progress how will anyone else get here?

Internet killed the Video Star

All the brouhaha over Keith Olbermann obscured a key point.

More people now get their news and opinion from this medium, the Internet, than from TV.

More people now watch top YouTube videos than watch most TV shows, yes even network shows.

DailyKos now has over 278,000 registered subscribers on its RSS feed. This compares very favorably with the 876,000 who subscribe to CNN's world news feed. (Kos is almost entirely an American operation.) There is a DailyKos TV blog in beta. TalkingPointsMemo (TPM) has about 50,000 on its feed. MSNBC has 600,000.

I mention all this because Markos Moulitsas, unlike most in the liberal blogosphere (and like Josh Marshall, who runs TPM) is an entrepreneur. Compare Kos' numbers to those of Nick Denton, who gets all sorts of publicity for Gawker Media's entrepreneurial smarts, and you're in for a surprise - Gawker has only 55,000 on its list. (This blog, for those counting at home, has 61 subscribers.)

What's it take to do TV these days? TMZ has only 73,000 subscribers.

It's always been Larry Page's Google. http://ostatic.com/blog/as-ceo-of-google-larry-page-wont-frown-on-open-source And Sergey's. Schmidt was always a front man. So nothing has changed, except Larry now has executive-style (gray) hair like mine.

Memo to Tim Armstrong

This is a follow-up to this week's Clue newsletter, addressed to AOL CEO Tim Armstrong.

You've got some good ideas, son. But you're doomed unless you move faster, and move in the right direction.

I notice that you have actually bought some good titles, like Engadget and TechCrunch.  You have a good idea, in theory, with local news. And you were right to give others work you don't want to do yourself.

But notice something about your successes? First, they're entrepreneurial efforts. Second, they don't go by the name AOL.

So ditch it. Toss it out. It has negative brand equity. Anyone who's been on the Internet longer than three minutes knows what AOL means, and what it means is the tones a modem used to make. Sorry. I don't care what you call it. Call if Armstrong Online if you want. Just ditch that old name and old logo -- if you use your own name you can keep the AOL URL but that's it.

Second, only bring in entrepreneurs. Don't hire journalists. What you're trying to build is an enormous chain of local newspapers. You know what that means? It means you need thousands of people who can understand, organize and advocate for neighborhoods and small communities. Not editors, Tim. Publishers.

And let them sell their own advertising. Please.

Journalists are people who work for people who buy ink by the barrel, or bandwidth by the T-3. They're like cooks in a restaurant, a pirate crew you have to keep your eye on at all times, and keep focused on clearly designated assignments.

I've seen what a good editor can do with the Decatur Patch. It sucks. It's a jumble. Because it's looking through the wrong end of the telescope. (No offense. It's the same end I was trained to look through.)

Journalism in the Internet Age

Think of this as Volume 15, Number 5 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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While signing up recently at Seeking Alpha, which wants to re-publish some of my Renewableenergyworld stuff, I was stuck on the question of my status. (Image from Webdesignerdepot.)

Among the choices were either "professional blogger" or "journalist." (Not both.) I checked the latter, although for the last decade I've mainly been the former. I see no difference between the two, and I find it offensive that the profession I was trained to serve still does.

Not all blogs are journalism. But the idea that they they are separate ideas, that there is a difference between what I do at Renewableenergyworld and for InformationWeek, is foolish. And it reflects a basic misunderstanding that still exists within the business, nearly 20 years after the Web was spun.

Every medium is different. Each has different folkways, different ways of acquiring and measuring an audience, different ways of presenting things. The way you write for print looks atrocious when applied to the Web, and vice versa.

Yet too many companies, still, insist on treating those who work for the Web as though they're second-class, "not real journalists."

Join My Village, join my brand?

I recently began covering stories about "enterprise 2.0" or "social business" software for CMP, and here's an example of the power which comes from that.

Join My Village was crafted by the folks at CARE, which is based in my hometown of Atlanta, as yet-another way to separate corporations from their money in a good cause. Up to $900,000 will move from General Mills and Merck into the fight against poverty.

The way it does this is elegant. You sign up (they have your name) and you take some simple action, like watching a video on CARE's work in Malawi. Then the sponsors pony up some money. Your time becomes their cash.

Most attempts to extract corporate money for good causes are a lot more straightforward than this. Won't you help our cause? Wouldn't your customers and prospects like you better if you helped our cause?

All well and good. But not good enough in a highly-competitive world of charity giving. (Yes, this is a market just like any other.)

By using social networking in this way -- collecting active names -- CARE also becomes more self-sustaining. That's another big point for companies interested in giving. They all want the recipients of the gifts (in this case CARE) to find a way to sustain the project after the gift is spent. That's something groups like The Gates Foundation look at -- they try to see charitable giving as an investment rather than an expenditure.

Adding a form of social networking to the mix makes it just that. Expect more things like this.

 

 

Giffords to rehab at Houston Memorial Hospital. http://www.memorialhermann.org/locations/tirr/directions.aspx

Map says she'd be a great pick-up for Rice's Baker Policy Institute. http://bakerinstitute.org/ Hint, hint, from Dana '77.

The Open Source trend for 2011 is cloud integration

Each year brings a new trend to open source development. It's gone mobile, we've had the rise of Apache, and we've all gone to the mattresses with our lawyers.

Developers generally ignore these legal fights. They have better things to do. The law is mainly concerned with portioning off the value society creates. Open source is mainly concerned with creating new value, with rapidly turning innovation into common currency.

This year, it's already clear, the new value will lie in integration with the cloud.

NOTE: I covered open source for ZDNet for over 5 years and would like to get back in the game. Meanwhile I'm producing some essays for this site covering important topics.

Before I get into the story, a quick primer on what clouds are and why you should care.