Ironman China 2008 Here I Come; Thank you TriathleteMag.com

Dual announcements here. First I have signed up for Ironman China in April 2008. I now have 6 months to prepare for the 140 mile swim/bike/running race.

The other thing is that Triathlete Magazine has invited me to blog for them. I will be posting twice a week on all things relating to my Ironman preparation. Here is a link to my section.

I want to thank my friend Doug Binns who moved to Asia a few years ago for helping me do research for my Triathlete articles. Doug blogs here.

How to win a reader for life; the right way to respond to a “contact us” email

Wired Science just won my readership for life (or at least a very long time).

They did it not by being right, but how they handed a situation where I felt they could have done better. I read somewhere that businesses win over customers by how they handle things that go wrong and I very much agree. Had I just read a very good post at Wired Science it probably wouldn’t have registered all that much. However I disagreed with one of their posts enough to write to them. I receive an almost instataneous response from a human (that is not automated) telling me that they had forwarded by email to the writer of the piece and suggested that I leave a comment. The way that the email was written seemed sincere and I didn’t feel like I was being given the brush off.

The next day, I was checking Technorati links into LifeTwo and saw that the writer at Wired Science had written an entire post responding to my criticisms, agreeing with my point of view, and then linking to my site. He did this on the 3rd of July when most people were already heading out for the holiday. From his post:

Responding to our coverage of a biological tweak that prevented highly stressed, junk food-eating mice from getting fat, Wired Science reader Wesley Hein gave me a well-deserved scolding for ignoring the context of the research:

If stress + junk food = obesity, then to reduce obesity we need to reduce one or both of the contributing factors. Yet none of the major media outlets covering this story (including Wired) made any mention of this. Instead it is all about the possibility of a pill that will apparently absolve us of any need to exercise, eat properly or reduce stress. [...]

People today are dying today as the result of obesity-related diseases and they shouldn’t be told to wait for the promise of a wonder drug that will effortless melt fat away. It’s hard to imagine a worse message.

Wesley is absolutely right. The research isn’t any less valid for the points he raised, but they deserved to be mentioned — and we, along with other mainstream science journalists, generally failed to do this.

I was pleased, humbled, and impressed all at the same time and hope that I can be half as responsive the next time someone emails me with some constructive criticism regarding something that I write.

Voice communication: Going, going, gone

Fred Wilson on what beats email…

I’ve said it before on this blog. Spam has ruined email for the youth generation. They may adopt email at some point when they reach the workforce, but it will never be the messaging system of choice for them.

Site messaging (particularly in social networks) is incredibly popular among the younger crowd. The permissioning system is their social network and so they value the messages they get. They’ve been filtered. There’s no porn spam on facebook.

Instant messaging remains a popular option and at times its useful. But real time communication has its limits. It demands your attention and I think anything that demands permanent attention is suboptimal in this technology driven partial attention world we live in.

Blogging is a lot like social networking but without the permissioning filter of the social network. It’s useful and as many readers have found, one of the best ways to reach me is via a well articulated comment on this blog. Those rarely go unanswered. Funny enough the messaging system I prefer for those replies is email.

Notice the complete absence of even mentioning “voice” communications? It’s not that I disagree but instead how amazing how quickly voice communications has completely dropped off the radar so much so that it doesn’t even warrant inclusion in an article on communication. Meanwhile Twitter is referenced twice (in the full post that is).

Since you are reading this as a blog post (possibly in your RSS reader), I’ll count that as a vote for blogging as a communication tool. Also I view email combined with a Blackberry to be fundamentally different than email without. Email spam is indeed a continued issue but one that is largely under control–at least for me and at least now.

Off Topic: A Response to Whether I “Shelved” a Band 20 Years Ago and What Makes Bands Happy

Blogs can be pretty amazing communication tools. Take in point a blog posting from someone I worked with over twenty years ago (and pictured above) surfacing an issue that was important enough to him that two decades later he is writing about it. Despite all of the other forms of communication, email, phones, faxes, IM, and Twitter to name a few, it is only blogging that has the delicate balance of introspective thought and public sharing.

The post in question is on a personal blog by a former rock and roll artist, David Bach. I signed David to my record label in the middle 80’s and we have remained friends ever since. Before I get into his post, I want to give a little aside about the music industry. Most people who consider themselves musical artists will never have the chance to record professionally. Of those that do, only a tiny percentage will get signed and of those it is only a minority that will have enough success on their first album to put out additional albums. Anyone that is able to have a career making music is an incredible success and the very use of the term “career artist” means that they beat the odds–probably by a combination of talent, luck and a lot of hard work. To use a basketball analogy, being a “journeyman” in the NBA might not seem like a compliment but it means that one is among the top .00001% of basketball players in the world.

Why would someone conduct a DDoS attack on my website?

This morning I was trying to upload a post to LifeTwo but couldn’t access the site and knew it was not just our servers but something that was affecting many other sites at the hosting facility. This message was then posted in support section of our host:

This afternoon [our] engineers successfully mitigated a fairly sophisticated network attack aimed at several of our services. This distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack appears to have originated from China and other sources along the western Pacific rim.

We have upgraded our load balancing system and made various other network configuration changes to prevent disruptions like this in the future. We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused and thank you for your patience.

So now I know the reason but not the motivation for why people do this. You read about DDoS attacks all of the time but it is a different feeling when one hits your own servers.

Ageism in Silicon Valley

I just wrote a lengthy piece on ageism in Silicon Valley over at LifeTwo.

This is the “analysis” done by ValleyWag. Unabashedly unscientific but noteworthy nonetheless.

I’m going to use this blog to clarify points as they come up. First, is that while I believe that Silicon Valley is inherently (at least currently) ageist, I’m not passing judgment on them any more than I would pass judgment on the music business for not signing new acts that are in their 40s. Both are simply playing the odds as they figure out where to place their bets. If experiences have been better for VCs with younger founders then why shouldn’t that be a legitimate factor? If they turn out to be wrong then whoever has the foresight to look past age will then end up generating superior returns over the ageists. Then other VCs seeking those superior returns will stop using age as a factor. Unless and until that happens, expect Silicon Valley ageism to continue.

Here’s an interesting take from Rob Hyndman:

I’ve also noticed that older clients tend to be much more negative and cynical about the world. There are many exceptions to this, thankfully. But as a general rule, what I hear from younger clients is “yes, let’s try it”, and what I hear from the older ones is “no, it won’t work” or “here are a bunch of reasons why not”. Smart, well-thought out reasons, to be sure. But obstacles to success, nonetheless.

For background on the ageism meme go to this post.

Protecting Users From Spam is an Obligation not an Option

If you are planning on launching any form of web company, one of the first things you need to consider is how you are going to protect your users from all those who will want to use your site to barrage them with unwanted advertising messages. Failure to do this and you will lose your audience just as fast as you get them. If you offer comments then you better have a system to protect from comment spam. Ditto with trackbacks and so forth.

AOL never effectively did this with email and in the words of one observer they ruined email. Here’s how:

My kids grew up on AOL. It’s where they first went online. It’s where they learned how to dial up. It’s where they learned how to surf the web. It’s where they learned how to do email, instant messaging, download,  build a homepage, etc.

And it’s where they learned to stop usiemail.When

hen you are ten years old, you don’t get much email. Maybe a message or two per week. When you log in to check your email and you see this it’s basically a non starter.

(that is my current AOL inbox but I assure you my kid’s mailboxes look pretty much the same)

So they found other ways to communicate where the messages weren’t surrounded by spam. Primarily that was/is instant messaging. Then came text messaging. And site messaging. Basically any messaging paradigm where the signal to noise ratio was at least one one.

My kids check their email at best once a week. And it’s a chore. Because its mostly an exercise in deleting spam. Email is for old farts. And they wonder why we uit.

And I blame AOL for that. Not that I think it’s a big deal. They get by just fine with other messaging systems, maybe better than I do with email.

But I am sure that AOL is the reason they don’t use email and never will.

I’ve seen VC’s on panels asking companies “But how are you going to fight spam?” This is as important of a question as “What’s your business model”?

Be smart, have a solid answer before you go out for funding and certainly before your public launch.

Google Talk: No one’s listening

One gets the feeling that if AskJeeves launched an IM client they’d do better than Google. But why is Google doing so poorly and how poorly are they doing? From TechCrunch:

The user numbers coming out on Google Talk are staggeringly terrible. Comscore usage numbers show that nearly a year after launch Google is a distant, distant 4th after MSN, Yahoo and AIM. They hold a pitiful 1% of total instant messaging market share, with 3.4 million unique users in May 2006. See the Comscore chart below for more details (I wonder where Skype IM falls in those stats). Note that Comscore does not include Google Talk usage within Gmail itself (where it is embedded), but even factoring that in, the numbers are just awful.

Even factoring in the chatting that goes on within Gmail and which were not included in these numbers, GoogleTalk is a failure by most measures. However Google has been mum on the strategy of their IM client so one doesn’t know what priority, if any, Google placed on the success of their downloadable client.

Marketing and prioritization aside, why haven’t more people switched to Google? The most likely reason is the combination of inertia, switching costs and interoperability. Those that are comfortable with AIM see no reason to deal with the hassle of moving IM systems (despite AIM being bloated and ad heavy); Yahoo and MSN are now interoperable which has opened up new contacts for people on those systems. Since no one even talks about ICQ anymore we’ll just skip them. This leaves GoogleTalk.

The Web 2.0 Bookshelf

Alex Iskold’s (Web 2.0 Journal) recommended books for those interested in building Web 2.0 applications. It’s a very interesting mix of books about Java, CSS and about the power of networks. A good resource for someone looking for a couple of relevant books to take on their summer vacation.

Web 3.0 Explained

I've gotten in just enough "what is Web 3.0?" conversations to appreciate this definition (via Web 2.0 Journal):

 

Defining Web 3.0
The defining aspects of the Web 3.0 social experience may therefore be as follows:

· One, that you won’t need to “go” anywhere, except maybe to set up some initial parameters. Where your computer is, is where you are. Information comes to you based on tags and search criteria; you don’t have to go out there.

· Two, that there are no pages. Information comes in packets of discrete units. You merge or cross them, as you need to.

· Three, that there are no Web sites. Existing Web sites are no longer meant for human eyes. They act as indexes to the information, which is accessible via XML request. Exceptions to this will not be Web sites, but independent little islands of commerce or games.

· Four, that creating information is like writing an email or writing a document. Accessible to anyone with a computer.

· Finally, that being on the Web means not being on the Web at all. It is like being “on the telephone”, i.e. you have a telephone in your house.

I believe that some of these can be and should be part of current Web 2.0 design but the line between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 was blurry (e.g., eBay) so why should it surprise us that the transition to 3.0 won't be as grey?