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Site Redesign and Restructure

I have nearly completed a site redesign and restructure. I may write more at a later time, but the key elements have been:

• Add an informal blog
• Eliminate PHP for most pages
• Provide HTML and XHTML versions of most content and index pages
• Provide compressed versions of any content (specifically RSS/Atom) feeds which get requested often
• Use Google Adsense consistently throughout site
• Complete upgrade to MovableType 3.2

Why did I eliminate PHP? I found that I was using PHP almost entirely as a smart template and file imbedding tool. This is not a knock against PHP, but I found it to be overkill for what I was doing. I restructured the templates used for the Articles and blog so that they emit clean HTML and XHTML, performing whatever includes I'd been using PHP for from within MovableType.

I had been using PHP's built-in gzip compression to serve up compressed files but as a performance-weenie felt that that was a poor optimization: the server had to compress data on the fly for each request.

So one of the major goals was to rely on Apache's own features more and less on hacks in PHP scripts. Ideally I'd use mod_gzip as well but that is not presently supported on Pair networks' servers.

There's now an informal blog on the site, 202 Accepted. The title comes from one of the lesser known HTTP status codes. I plan to make this section (Articles) more about reference content and move opinion and conference notes to the blog.

Back to Apache...all major index pages are provided in HTML and XHTML formats. They are also compressed. Apache's content-negotiation is used to serve an appropriate file back. Once I determine how to patch MovableType to compress data after writing a file then the MovableType generated content will also be served compressed.

Now, no, I don't get so much traffic that this is a concern, but I wanted to get a real-life demonstration going of what's possible with a generic web hosting setup. It's my contention that with the typical hosting package, anyone can run a relatively high volume content site (if the volume is against content and not applications).

The upgrade to MovableType 3.2 was almost flawless. One hiccup has been, and continues to be, using the SixApart provided JavaScript files with XHTML pages. In brief, they rely on document.write, which is not supported in the DOM model used on XHTML pages. I had previously rewritten the JavaScript to work on XHTML and just need to patch in the latest updates. For now, typekey authentication only works on HTML pages.

On The Importance of Reverse DNS

I was creating a cache file for webalizer and analog and came to the obvious optimization to select only hosts which received a "200" status code in response to a request (I suppose I could add 304s as well but I'm not sure that would add any value), and then strip out any hosts which made less than 10 requests in a 30 day period. This reduced the IP address list from about 3500 entries across the sites I maintain, to 470.

See updates below...

There appear to be about 140 unique organizations that hit the sites (mainly epcostello.net, frisket.org, and artific.com).

18% of the addresses do not reverse resolve.

Of the 387 addresses which did reverse resolve, 41 (11%) reverse resolve to an address which itself does not forward resolve to anything (that is: address 1.2.3.4 reverse resolves to something.example.com, but something.example.com itself does not resolve back to 1.2.3.4.

MSN has a number of hosts which reverse to a phx.gbl top level domain (64.4.8.113 through .118). That is to say, 64.4.8.113 reverse maps to by1sch4041904.phx.gbl, not .msn.com or .msn.net. I sent a note to the poc for the 64.4.8 network but it appeared to disappear into a black hole. Or they're intentionally reverse mapping to a nonsense domain.

Oddly, there's another 17 hosts which all reverse resolve to msnbot.msn.com, none of which are on the 64.4.8 network. That is to say: 17 hosts, across a number of networks and subnets, all reverse resolve to the same hostname, msnbot.msn.com, this hostname itself does not resolve to anything.

crawler.bloglines.com does not forward resolve to [65.214.39.151], though 65.214.39.151 resolves back to crawler.bloglines.com.

MSN seems to have the largest number of IPs and hostname mismatches or resolution failures.

One of the IBM gateways (I'm guessing in the Southbury, CT data center) reverse resolves [129.33.1.37] to bi01pt1.ct.us.ibm.com, which does not in turn resolve back to 129.33.1.37.

Nothing earth shattering here...most web sites turn off name resolution these days, doing it only in post-processing, or on a specific basis within an application. And no one who is remotely sane turns on HostnameLookups double in their server configurations.

Where it does come into play is if you are using hostnames in access control lists. Unlikely on a totally public site, but if you have a protected area, a semi-private extranet, and you add a Allow from .ibm.com, then anyone who's using that 129.33.1.37 gateway will get bounced, at least from Apache based servers since mod_access will perform a double lookup (at least according to the documentation).

I suppose there are other situations where you might use the hostname to allow access for search engine spiders, where otherwise you might require some other form of authentication (eg: set up a satisfy any block, add allow *.google.com, *.msn.com, *.yahoo.com and then a check for a cookie with a mix of Allow and SetEnvIf rules.

This article continues here: http://artific.com/articles/2005/12/27/a_practically_u/l#more

Thoughts on Cyber Monday

I thought I knew all of the buzzwords, but this year's cybermonday seems new to me. Cybermonday is (allegedly) the web version of Black Friday, the traditional kick-off to the holiday shopping season, except online.

Some advice, for users and the technology types who will be under siege:

If you're buying...

Keep a copy of notepad or textedit (or whatever editor you happen to like) open while surfing and buying items. If you’ve found something that you have been looking for a long time, copy the URL or product number or even the contents of the page to the open editor window. This is insurance. Insurance against your browser crashing before you complete the transaction. Insurance against the web site crashing before you complete the transaction. Insurance against spending even more time re-searching for the item.

When you are checking out, pay very close attention to the check out pages. Look out for additional marketing offers (which you may or may not truly be interested in) which default to being checked “yes” or “interested” or “please send me even more junk mail”. Look out for additional “features” which have been courteously added to your shopping cart and may be small enough to be misread as tax or shipping charge.

If you’re buying downloadable software, or music, or other content, make and save a copy of the receipt for the content. If there are product keys, print them out, add them to your Yahoo! notepad (or that open editor window, but then save!) or Gmail or elsewhere.

My personal preference for all receipts, or things which are like receipts (automatically generated passwords, product keys, etc.) is to print them to PDF using Adobe Acrobat (or save as PDF for Macintosh users). I set the “Author” field to the URL of the page with the receipt (which frequently encodes information about the shopping cart).

If a web site is slowing down or acting “funky”, stop shopping there. Save the information you’ve captured in your editor and either return later or find an alternate site. There are a million reasons why a site may slow down, none of which are under your control. You can sit and get frustrated, or you can move on to other sites and other tasks.

Don’t shop from work. I write this not out of an ethical, misusing the company’s resources concern, but out of a security and privacy concern. Your work or business network is likely filtered and monitored. This data is captured and logged somewhere. Many commerce sites do not encrypt their transactions until you actually start the checkout process. This means that at a minimum, the URLs of the sites you’re visiting will be logged by the great corporate logger, and possibly the content (if you are using a proxy server, and many times you may not even know that you’re using a proxy server). Once that data is logged, your privacy is dependent on the security of that data. It’s out of your control.

Make sure encrypted connections really are encrypted and make sure you’re using the website you expect to be using. An encrypted URL will start with https://. The resulting page should cause a lock icon to appear somewhere in your browser. If you’re shopping at a site for the first time, inspect the encryption (depending on your browser, you can double-click the lock icon and bring up a dialog box). You can check out the certificate for the site to verify it’s for the business you expect it to be (as far as I know, no known phishing/pharming sites have forged SSL certificates to look exactly as the expected site).

If you're under siege (aka, the webmaster, CTO, etc.)...

It's too late for my first bit of advice: don’t make any technical changes to the site for the month leading up to Cybermonday. Too often the marketing & sales guys want to do a big launch this week. I know you know that is stupid and risky, however just to go on the record, my reasons are:

• A month is the minimum amount of time to shake out any technology changes, especially if you’re modifying technology which is in the pathway of the consumer executing a transaction. It doesn’t matter what the technology is, you could be updating software, optimizing your database, rearranging the filesystem, or putting up a redesign. You can run performance tests and verify that the site runs to your satisfaction, but you don’t control all the variables. An update to a popular web browser (even worse, an automatic update could quickly change the interaction with your site, and your testing cannot account for that. If your technology is static for several weeks you should have a good sense of how it will perform when you’re under siege.
• Redesign? You’re thinking did he write “no redesign” for Cybermonday? Yes…I personally believe that you should make sure your design is clean and launched well before you expect to get hit with holiday traffic (or whatever the event may be). It takes time for images to get cached around the web in caching servers, so initially your raw bandwidth will increase. If you launch a significant redesign, users will click around your site trying to find once-familiar pathways into your catalogues. Application use changes when you launch a redesign, more traffic may end up at an application than you expected or tested for. Finding this out when you’re “under load” is too late.
• If you have a really well run site, your technology team should be bored, but ready to respond. If you’re in the midst of launching new applications or design systems and it’s an extraordinary day, your team won’t have the slack time needed to evaluate and respond to situations and problems with the site.

Have a backup operations plan, a “plan B”. Not a disaster-recovery plan, but an operations strategy you can move to which retains the critical elements of your site (for instance: a commerce engine) but lightens the site (perhaps junking large interactive content, large images for small).

Running a large commercial web site is, unfortunately some times, a 24 hour a day job. Make sure you and your staff are set to provide coverage “off hours”, even if that means being off during a “normal” work day.

Be prepared with all sorts of statistics. Traffic in, out, number of shopping baskets created, items filled, number actually used. Whatever “transactional” activities occur, you should be able to slice & dice the data and present it. This is data you likely already collect and present on some periodic basis. When under “siege”, though, you’re likely to receive frequent demands for updates on traffic from the sales and marketing side of the house. Automate the collection and presentation of the information (ideally, let them interact with it directly, removing you from the path altogether). Furthermore it may have value to you. With the growth of broadband at home it takes people much less time to surf around a site, there’s less of a penalty to loading multiple pages. The result is that you may see more traffic as people browse around, vs. years ago when dialup pretty much limited browsing to variations on specific items.

Web 2.0 effect on Ad Measurements

When I was at ad:tech earlier this month I was wondering about this: Will AJAX Scrub IAB Impression Guidelines?. The IAB is just now getting agreement around the web on measurement and auditing, a project I remember working on at IBM almost six years ago. With AJAX and other dynamic techniques, it's possible for a user to "sit" on a single page for quite awhile. Do you count that as one impression? Do you report the time spent on the page (not counted in the current IAB standard IIRC)? Do you rotate ads?

OPA '06: Forum for the Future

Received an invite to attend OPA '06: Forum for the Future, which is a conference put on by the Online Publishers Association. It looks interesting, possibly even amazing, but I can't justify going (mostly because I'm already set to go to the e-tech conference in San Diego the following week). I'm not the target audience and don't (presently) have any clients who are in the target audience.

Besides, the registration server only supports SSL 2.0, which I've disabled (and MSIE 7.0 will not support). SSL 2.0 is ancient, even SSL 3.0 is ancient but is the latest version (and TLS seems to be favored now).

Here's an open invite to the readers of this site, all three of them: if you are going to OPA, I'll trade in-depth notes from etech the following week for notes from OPA, or at least point me to a blog with decent notes.

Web 2.0 2005 Recap

So, Web 2.0 2005 is over, I'm sitting in the AA lounge at SFO waiting for my flight back to Brooklyn and I'm trying to figure out if it was worth it.

No doubt, this was expensive for me as a freelancer. Was it interesting? Certainly. Was it valuable, did I learn anything? Not so much.

I learned that there's a lot of innovation going on, but much of what was demoed here I either knew about already from my insane Bloglines blogroll, or because I'd seen it at the 2005 eTech conference.

I learned that there appears to be a lot of money chasing projects around, which I'm not sure is a good thing. It's ironic for me personally, because three years ago I started out plotting various projects and learning the VC game to find out what I'd have to do to get seed money. At present I'm pretty much convinced that taking VC money would be the worst thing I could do. One of the speakers today talked about companies wrapped around products, that the logical exit strategy is acquisition, not the IPO that many VCs would expect or require.

On balance, while I don't regret coming, I don't expect to be back next year unless I've launched something and need to pick up buzz. I think part of the problem is that at heart I'm a server side tech guy, and Web 2.0 is geared to a different audience. I plan to attend eTech next year, and will likely look for a fall conference to attend.

I was disappointed in the production of the conference, especially with the first day. The organizers seemed overwhelmed with the attendance at the workshops as did the hotel (one speaker noted that we all now knew the "smell" of Web 2.0 as we steamed in the various rooms). I know what it takes to produce these events, and know that there's always glitches. But for US$3k I expected better.

I was surprised and dismayed at the absence of women, both on stage and in the audience. This last day we had both Kim Polese and Mena Trott, and the CIO of the city of Philadelphia, Dianah Neff. Earlier we had Mitchell Baker, but that's it as I can recall (and apologies if I'm forgetting someone). I don't know what I can do personally about the situation (well, I could fail to succeed in my upcoming projects but that's not in my best interests).

The conference was very US focussed, even West-Coast focussed. This is a general gripe I've had with the O'Reilly conferences, and I imagine that they make a satisfying profit staying on the West Coast and don't see a need to expand to the East or Midwest. As for the U.S. focus, while understandable, it seems contrary to the very idea of Web 2.0 of putting good, empowering technology out for anyone to use regardless of location.

My "net-net"? A lot of innovation is going on, using a variety of technologies under the Web 2.0 rubric. Combine data, broadband, web services (ignoring REST vs SOAP vs XML-RPC), AJAX and you've got Web 2.0. Web 2.0 is about simple projects that solve straight-forward problems. Web 2.0 is not large, complex applications (though really some of this code is complex and is large especially when you wire various services together). Web 2.0 isn't about the enterprise...yet.

Personally, my lesson learned (an aside and apologies to anyone new here: after leaving IBM in 2001 I spent the last few years sort of wandering in the wilderness trying to figure out what to do next), anyway, my lesson learned is to just get moving on some of the projects that have been stewing for the past couple of years. They all won't succeed, though hopefully a couple will at least recoup their costs, but enough sitting around trying to figure out the right thing to do: set out, stumble, get off the mat and try again. So I'll get back to work on Yet Another Social Bookmarking Tool and the other stuff that's piled up.

If you found value (or have criticism) in these notes over the past few days, could you either leave a comment or drop a note to inquiry@artific.com?

Web 2.0 2005 Day 3, Afternoon Session

A Conversation with Sergey Brin

• JB: How's your head?
• SB: The number one factor that contributed to our success was luck. We were very fortunate to have
  started out at Stanford. It's been a wild ride, but getting used to it.

• JB: google has come up several times during the conference ...reference Terry Semel, let's judge google as it is, it is a portal, and it's number four...how do you respond?
• SB: Based on my reading of that, that would make us the underdog. I think our food is pretty good and we try to improve it. But you know if you rank our cafeteria it's probably not in the top 100 or 1000. [much laughter from audience]
• JB: referneces the MSFT dinner and Yusuf Mehdi who claimed they were the underdog, do you see MSFT as an underdog?
• SB: I'd be excited to be viewed as the leader in terms of technology. We're not number one in terms of business deals or some huge platform or some of the other things that MSFT enjoys to its advantage. But if we're number one in technology, I like it.
• JB: Are you comfortable with your share, your market share, your 91 P/E
• SB: I don't consider myself a valuation expert...there are many professionals who do that. In terms of
  search market share I'm satisifed with that...primarily the way people come to google, and stay, is because of the search experience.
• JB: back to the portal ...you had a clean page, is that going to continue?
• SB: obviously there are other products we are exploring, Gmail arose out of frustration that I (SB) and others
  had that we didn't have a good solution to manage our own email. I think it's helped people who use other email systems.
  There are areas that have been overlooked by the industry, much as search quality and relevance was overlooked in the late
  90s by the portals at the time. I think that we have a lot of technologies and distribution and infrastructure that
  allows us to help in some of these areas. We'd be foolish not to attempt things in these areas.
• JB: Google as the weather How do you think about the idea of innovation, you have a platform for innovation, do you think of that ecosystem of people innovating outside google when you make a decision to add something to the Google suite
• SB: I don't know what will happen with the feed reader I'm guessing that a lot of the companies with feedreaders are about to get calls from Yahoo and MSN.
  The other thing we care about is enabling other businesses.
  That 1000s and 1000s of non-search sites use ads now.
  Worried about all this great content disappearing off the web. Sites were shutting down and that makes our search less useful if contnet disappears.
  So one of our goals was to help sustain these online businesses.
• JB: You brought up content, I wanted to ask,Terry Semel, Barry Diller, Jonahtan Miller all highlighted content both prosumer and "professional" content. All of them saw that as an important part of what they will do on the web. What is your vie wof that?
• SB: "We fundamentally believe in sending people to other sites giving people access to content but we do not believe we need to be producing the content ourselves" We want to send people to the best sites. We're really not about trying to create all of our own content, we're about sending them off.

• audience: Buzz about google office, do you see a place for a web based office suite and is that something google would be interested in
• SB: confounding issues is that there is a GOffice online office suite which is not google.
  I don't think that trying to take previous technology and port them directly to ...the minicomputer in AJAX does not make sense. I think that the web and all the technologies today give you the opportunity to do new things and better things. We don't have any particular plans. We are going to try to do our things, other companies will do theres, I'm sure there's some combination that people can use

• Audience: Heard earlier in Web 2.0 that click fraud is not a problem, form your perspective is it a problem
• SB: I'm sorry you got that [impression], it's a problem and we continue to investigate it with detection systems
  and detection teams. A lot of our advertisers, in fact most, they care about getting the conversions and making
  the sales and they know the exact ROI they are getting.
  The ad system is fairly complex, aside from the fraud prevention measures, it's not so simple to commit fraud
  It doesn't mean there's absolute protection for people.
  I think it is a low level.

• Dave McClure: What areas do you see as focussing on, what will you leave to others [what's safe to invest in?]
• SB: I disagree that areas we enter are poor investments.
  A lot of the things you see are bottom up projects, a lot of times they surprise us.
  Most of our successes have had nothing to do with anything an executive thought was a good idea.
  [So, there is no grand plan]
  JB: an observation that these things that trickle up tend to look like things that are in portals and give the illusion that there is indeed a plan
  SB: I imagine that our teams are dissatisified with what they see on portals [that that serves as the root for new ideas]

• Dare Obasanjo:
• SB: we have focussed on where we can impact something, where people spend a lot of time, and where we thought we could
  make it more efficient. I'm not the best person to predict the next generation. There are lots of ways communication
  could be improved. It's really hard to predict, that's why we place things up on labs.

• Audience: form a personal level can you address where you think video search is going or where you want it to go?
• SB: I think people underestimate the quality of information present in video. I think you'll find that if you take a discovery channel special about some scientific question or a nova show, they actually have extraordinarily high quality content. It just so happens that some of the best quality content we have is in video form. I think making it searchable will really unlock it where you want to know about subject X.

This article continues here: http://artific.com/articles/2005/10/07/web_20_2005_day_4/l#more

Web 2.0 2005 Day 3, Morning Session

Missed Stewart Butterfield

Dick Hardt from SXIP on presentation on identity 2.0

• .net passport rejected expensive, proprietary, sing signon
• that web services need identity protocols separte from username/password
• that identity 2.0 is inevitable
• that users need to own their identity, currently sites own various visages of identity
• http://identity20.com

CIO of City of Philadelphia, Dianah Neff

ad for Philly played...ergh

• access to affordable high-speed internet access
• in industrial areas can be $400-$1400/month to get internet access
• expect to create 3,000 jobs as a result of the city-wide wifi
• enable partnership to build on skills of private sector

UI Minute w/Seth Sternberg on Meebo

• With AJAX you can make I/M available in the browser
• completely dynamic
• as fast as regular IM
• making IM available anywhere to anyone

Conversation with John Highland and Vinod Khosla

• investing his own money in his own account, but not starting a fund
• that kids move amongst media more fluidly, more flexibly than we realize (media "mag?dl?")
• skype not web 2.0, more liner along web 1.0
• Q: feels very boomy in the room like 1996, where are we in the cycle
• A: That a lot of companies got funded in pre-2000 but then got stuck and lost their exit possibilities. Illiquid bulge of capital. Some companies have since found there way out, others have gone out of busines. The amount of money in the VC business is still more than is needed. Just because you get funded doesn't mean you're successfull. Just because you have money doesn't mean you can spend it like before.
• A: only when you're pretty certain you have traction and you're worrying about scaling, then you consider funding. That the more moeny you give to a startup the less likely they are to succeed.
• The older a company gets the more traditional it gets.
• That excite turned down buying Google's technology for $1M due to belief in their (excite's) own technology
• That authoring top-down content is no longer relevant. Far more creativity out there, small groups can be much more resonant with what the create
• psychology of this generation has completely changed...that kids think everything is clickable, always on IM, always on friendships
• that the total picture from blogs is more comprehensive, though any single blog may be less trustable
• trust rating sellers / vendors, building repuation systems and review systems
• that we should look past ringtons and simple games and ask "what's next?"
• Q: What's coming out of India/China that you think is really interesting?
• A: No one thing but multiple indicators of how more creative the world is getting.
  Example: learning English pronunciation via cell phone.
  Another example tutoring from India for US, European students.
• Q: What does the education system need to do to change to this new context?
• A: no longer a need to teach kids certain facts, but there is a desperate
  need to teach critical thinking, how to assess information and filter it.
  Not as urgent in the past because we had less information to deal with.
  Why can't we use the same model of Wikipedia to make textbooks open and
  free worldwide?
• Q: You are fond not just of open source text books but open source everything, can you give some examples?
• A: that researchers in australia developed alternate GM seed methods and turned the resulting patents over to the public domain
• Jeff Jarvis: look at wikibooks. delighted to hear you say that the top down content model is over. But in five-ten years where is the value going to be in media?
• A: I suspect the value is going to be in the company that can create and maintain audiences and not in the content. Aggregating audiences in interesting ways. The most adaptable company.
• Q: do you see the appearance of simpler devices beyond the PC or cell phone to take advantage of broadband or wifi?
• A: we will always want to do more computing than we have processing power or battery power. notion of a network proxy that does the work and interfaces with a personal thin client
• Q: what will happen with search?
• A: more innovation in search, more use of collaboration and filtering, many flavors of algorithms to be applied to different vertical areas.

From the Labs

HP, Yahoo...

Gene Becker of HP Labs

• ubiquitous and utility computing
• "break out of the kazoo interface"
• web getting diverse, social , creative, mobile, contextual, physical, experiential
• printable hyperlinks, eg QR Codes, http://activeprint.com/
• resulting in physical world clickthroughs, already big in japan
• mediascapes: digital landscapes overlaid in the physical world. Combine media authored on or tied to physical locations, access via wireless, results in rich, engagin experiences in the real world. Premiering mediascape in san francisco see http://www.dstory.com/dsf_05/
• misto: social, tangilble furniture
• that most computer applications today assume only one person driving at a time, how do you create applications where multiple people interact with the same application interface at the same time?
• virgil: context-aware extensible media browser
• utility computing: commoditization and democratization. created rendering service for use by places like dreamworks. saves companies who don't need all the equipment after the movie is done. Allow more general users to use the HP service to use 200-300 CPUs to do rendering.

Usama Fayyad and Prabhakar Raghavan from Yahoo

• drive innovation out of Yahoo at a much faster pace
• introduce 100s of products a year
• creating the science of the web
• Reference Yahoo Buzz game from etech (http://buzz.research.yahoo.com). Developing leading indicator to leading indicators.
• forecast error decreases over time. Humasn beat randomized bots.

Now Prabhakar on Yahoo! Mindset

• http://mindset.research.yahoo.com/ -- real time tuning of search results in browser
• Data deluge 10Tb of data in to Yahoo daily...transactions, crawls, tags
• TagLine ...combining social data mining, microeconomics ; demo of tags from flickr over time

Alan Eustace, VP Engineering of Google

• focused on innovation, small teams, 20% time
• gender identification of photos. create a system that's easy to implement and maintain
• information overload
• Introducing Google Reader ...rss reader, with search engine, tag feeds, ajaxy, in page rich media support can share, gmail, blog items
• http://labs.google.com/reader

This article continues here: http://artific.com/articles/2005/10/07/web_20_2005_day_3/l#more

Web 2.0 2005 Day 2, Afternoon Session

Afternoon session Web 2.0 2005

Discussion: Will Gaming Transform the Web?

Mark Stevens , Greg Ballard, Mike Cassidy, Raph Koster

• Entered late, missed intros
• small game development shops have advantage over large shops, more releases, updates in a given period, fewer parties to satisfy to release game.
• MMO®Gs ~ USD$21MM, many play for up to six months, others will play for years
• what's coming? user generated content (surprise). more aggregation, bypassing of retailers, more microtransactions
• dominant model in Korea. So predominant is that there is a professional gaming TV channel
• retail channel will not necessarily go away but will change, morph.
• MMOGs ...in china there are games where 1MM people are online playing at a time. Online community, inside game

network capabilities of newer consoles

• connectivity is required. consoles becoming home media center, easy interface
• network connectivity a core assumption

Discussion: The Future of Entertainment

Mark Cuban (hdnet, dallas mavericks) , Reed Hastings (netflix) , Michael Powell (ex-FCC, provident investors),
Evan Williams (ex-blogger, now odeo)

• JB: when are we getting itunes for video
• ?: sooner rather than later, but there is an epic battle between the forces of control (traditional media) over forces of freedom (internet). existing companies will defend existing models with exclusive deals. Note that the traditional systems work, they are always on, always there. Points to Movielink which is owened and run by the studios only has 600 titles because they can't get the content.
• ?: difference between iTunes for video and iPod for video. Could do iTunes for video today. That shipping video by media (hardrive, dvd) is still more efficient that delivering over the Internet.
• JB: that good content would route around forces of control
• EW: there is an itunes for video called fireant(sp?). That the content is there and the mechanisms are getting better.
• MC: That IP transport won't replace current delivery. Assumption that quality levels won't change. That expectations will change, problem is the delivery mechanisms aren't going to change. Infrastructure (cable, satellite) is expensive. We don't have the delivery mechanisms to keep up.
• JB: Why is Korea ahead of us, Michael [Powell]?
• MP: because 80% of the population lives in high rises. That broadband policy not informed by people as innovation. That its viewed as utility regulation. Need for enlightened innovation policy. That expectations change but so do what consumers are willing to accept. Case in point: people are willing to accept degraded quality on a cell phone after 99.999% quality on landline. That his son won't by $0.99 itunes online but will pay $2.99 for ringtones because that's what seems rational to him.

• JB: What you think of and is there a rational that makes sense for why we have the organizations which represent the content industries suing their customers?
• MC: Number one job of the media moguls is to keep their job. That you've got to have a bogeyman to go after to justify your (the moguls) jobs.
• MP: hiring lawyers and suing is a hell of a lot easier for the corporations than solving the problem. That the industries are missing the power of the new tools and toys is that consumers expect to be attended to or a Shawn Fanning will come up with another solution.
• RH: The content just sits there. The physical good (DVD) gives you an easy licensing basis. For netflix their current goal is 24hours. HD video if people could accept batch, overnight downloads, would work, but are people willing to wait for the video to download. Average consumers are spending thousands of dollars for high performance systems at home and expect the content to match. Willing to accept degraded quality in voice, and audio.

• MP: the entire regulatory state of the US telecommunications is premised and predicated on the natural monopoly of the public switched phone company. When the government is talking about competition it's talking about competition with this framework. That depending on what you use (twisted pair vs cable vs OTA) you get into different regulatory buckets. Could dramatically accelerate transition if we accept that it's all just bits.
• JB: so why didn't that happen while you were in office?
• MP: That they started to tear at this but that it falls to Congress.

• JB: That you could unleash a lot of talent by letting people play with this stuff.
• RH: I think we'll find out... most of those things are only illegal in the U.S.

• JB: where is the content going to come from for Odeo?
• EW: i take a broader view of what media is. most compelling experience is hearing a story from a friend, a family member, the production quality doesn't matter as much. That people will take lower quality stuff if there's a personal connection.
• MC: depends on the expectation of the content generator as well.

• JB: what do you make of Barry Diller and Terry Semel making content for the web?
• RH: it's new and exciting, what we're seeing now is the coupling of blogs and video, we're seeing tremendous creativity. it'll extend existing media, not replace it.

• JB: something about BD and TS, two icons of Hollywood, declaring their intent of this space
• MC: First I'm going to start a soap opera called "The Spot" (much laughing). It's not about the content, it's about the advertisers willing to pay higher CPMs and the need to create content to place these advertisements in
• MP: Still bullish on the power of technology, a proliferation of new types of distribution systems, lower cost of entry. There are more people now in the competitive content development business. Increasing competition is good policy. Look at VOIP, you can't replicate the VZ network but if you can create an alternate means of delivering the content you can create a disruptive technology.

• Audience: what's going on with the Tivo Netflix deal? don't see a technical problem.
• RH: fundamental issue is not technical, it's licensing. It's the traditional media companies with exclusive licenses over content. Problem is consumer expectations are extremely high based on experiences with itunes. Entirely due to people protecting existing business models.

• Audience: What do you think 802.16 starts appearing on cellphone towers along the freeways and you have 400Mbs available?
• RH: the U.S. is incredibly lucky about multiple paths to the house (powerline, cable, phone, etc) That we are seeing a lot of competition between these providers.

• Audience: lowering barriers to entry to produce content without spending millions of dollars and instead take advantage of technological advances. How do people produce professional content without access to the hollywood technology.
• MC: the problem isn't the technology, it's distribution. That they had to have two tv networks and buy a theatre chain to improve distribution.

• To what extent does the success of Netflix and the Long Tail enable people to create the next Blair Witch Project
• RH: the cost to make a film is coming down, but the cost to promote it and create awareness. Cost of distribution on DVD is tiny, it's not where the studios spend their revenue, it's on actors, promotion. How do you do demand creation? Cost of production has dropped. Netflix is about demand creation. We're good at it but not great at it.
• MC: don't talk about Enron, talk about the War Withing which is premering tomorrow

• JB: isn't it about gettin gthe content into search engines?
• RH: Why is it that entertainment is so hard? It's because it's one-off content. You get this sort of thing with serial content but that's not being created.

• Jeff Jarvis: that we're still thinking of the block buster economy. the definiton of good enough has changed. Word of mouth marketing increasing. It's not content, it's converation, it's sharing. That the volume is going to go from the blockbuster economy to just good enough, just big enough.

• JD Lasica: to MP: love everything you've said today, are you willing to participate in organizations that are about open source media, open source software, are you willing to not embrace Hollywood?
• MP: I don't think I'm doing penance, I disagree that we ebraced one industry to the disadvantage of other industries. The media rules are only about broadcasting, and not media. That what we (FCC) failed to do is to engage a more complex converstation that took into account all of the various forms of media, not the way a broadcaster does with its 1950 view.

(mark cuban and michael powell embrace)

A Conversation with Jonathan Miller (JM) , CEO AOL

• JB: Is there anyone who hasn't called you yet? [i think a reference to MSFT/MSN dinner]
• JM: the discussion has turned from whatever you want to term it before to there is significant value here that can be recognized
• JB: let me push this a bit more, Are you talking to Microsoft?
• JM: I'll try to say something but avoid the question. AOL is a company in transition from a proprietary view of the world to what you're tlaking about here at web 2.0. it's a mindset, it's a business model transition. Anything that accelerates that discussion, and there are a couple of ways to do that and that's what we're discussing
• JB: AOL has been extremely important in building other platform players. It seems that Microsoft has a new ad network they need to power, might they come to a partner like AOL and offer a better deal than Google?
• JM: we're the largest swing voter...doesn't guarantee anything, could go different ways, yes we're aware of that

• JB: what do you make of the discussions swirling around about content and media? Head end content vs user content?
• JM: most important thing is a succession plan for me is Jason Calcanis. Important thing is that the playing field gets leveled. Copyrighted content plays on the same playing field as user generated content. That spectrum exists, let 100, 1000, a million flowers bloom. As a consumer can come to and enjoy whatever they want and there's a role for that in the world. Our issue is to make these content forms coexist.

• JB: are you putting more investment in content? Where are we going to see AOL in a year or two?
• JM: we are doing more with web logs, music, content partnerships with hollywood, a home for user genreated content. A cusp for video consumption on the web. That AOL is in a good position for this on the web.

• JB: Tell me about AOL and video
• JM: There are two networks on the web today that are on a path to be out in front of other folks, us and Yahoo!
• JM: I think today we do more than anybody else, we're principal in video search, more video assets and programs
• JM: we're just farther down that line today and dedicated to at multiple levels

• JB: AOL was the ultimate walled garden, safe harbor, how easy is it to shed that DNA, how is the open thing going?
• JM: I find one of the hardest parts of the job is changing the mentality of the company but I feel that that change has occurred. Number one goal was to get in sync with the market. A walled garden is not in sync with the market. It's hard when your economics and history tell you something else.
• JB: so you're not abandoning the ISP business
• JM: no we're not , we're not doing the web thing because we're losing subscribers
• JM: Do you want your entire business to be defined by a specific set of subscribers or do you want to take and embrace the world wide web on a world wide basis. You have to have a world wide view, not just a [traditional] subscriber base point of view.
• JM: Think about the brands on the web, define great brands as 100MM+ users, only one has been created in the last ten yeasr, Google. Yahoo, Microsoft, Amazon are all older. The worst thing you can do is limit that brand down to something like a dialup subscriber brand. You can't just create a brand out of thing air.

• JB: I'm curious about, you talked about Europe, China. What about AOL and China? What about America Online and China?
• JM: We are changing the name of the company, today from America Online Inc, to AOL Inc. AOL is a brand and name that can travel on a worldwide basis.
• JM: we had plans to enter china as an access business, which when I joined made no sense whatsoever. Consistent with our plans we're now actively looking at moves into China as a web business

• JB: I want you to respond to this idea of platform companies
• JB: google
• JM: money
• JB: yahoo
• JM: I think they're smart
• JB: ebay
• JM: platform. i think of ebay as a platform
• JB: barry diller
• JM: barry is the hardest to sound bite. Barry pays attention. I've never seen anyone go into detail as he does. An incredible ability to understand something.
• JB: Newscorp
• JM: Directed. When Rupert decides to do something he just does it.

• JB: Changing topics to Time Warner. I understand you had something to do with the name change from AOL Time Warner to Time Warner
• JM: I felt we had to move on. There was a lot of heat in the room. JM suggested that the name of the company be changed. It's fair to say that they (Time warner folks) were angry.
• JM: I have a story... I went to different divisons, my colleague CEO said I had a really bad experience with other people from your group (AOL) before, I just want you to know. Have you ever had your car towed? It's a miserable experience. At the car pound they have a sign that says "The person here did not tow your car. If you cooperate you'll get your car faster"
• JB: Has time warner gotten over this?
• JM: I think so...the market values AOLs at 4-5 times its earnings trajectory. Essentially a terminal value, if you believe it has value it should hit 9-10, that's the biggest delta is getting back to that value
• JB: so why not spin out AOL?
• JM: we have to make a transition, there are many ways to get the value. The exact mechanism you determine as you go but we'll get the value.

• Esther Dyson: Reference to ad campaign as AOL as safe. Did you find that to be an effective approach?
• JM: short answer is yes. We had a tremendous amount of trust with consumers which was squandered. In side by side comparison of search results people picked google over AOl even if they were the same results, indicating a branding problem. We are making progress on improving trust in the brand.
• JB: didn't the spamming of CDs contribute to the branding problem?
• JM: guess how many CDs we sent out? 660 million. But now everyone is online.

• Audience: why did you guys let Diller get ahold of ASK? You could have approached microsoft's market share
• JM: we thought about it, i think it's a good company and they'll do great. I couldn't make the math work from where we are. I didn't see from where we sat. The second piece is that I don't know that we want to fight out with folks on web search. I think video search is a place we can go and we're a principal. But the math didn't make sense.

• audience: on buying weblogsinc. Perhaps AOL doesn't get the conversation that's going on with blogs and maybe just was buying the content. How is the acquistion of WebLogsInc going to look in a few months when the blogosphere has doubled.
• It's a big tent, yes we can repurpose the content on our other assets and places, but it's a piece of the puzzle.

A Conversation With Jeff Mallett and Mickey Hart

interviewer: ?

• Snocap: in the business of trying to turn pirates into shipping merchants
• enable transactions on the P2P platforms for people to buy/sell/trade assets
• we have an open platform, we make sure people get paid

• to mickey: you (grateful dead) have had a different attitude to music and the question of sharing of its property
• MH: they wanted it real bad, the tapers and we sat down one day and had the option of letting them in and taping or arresting them. We decided that wouldn't be a good option. So let them come and tape. And they had the grateful dead free tape exchange. We gave it away willingly. They had equity in the improvisation of the music at the concert. It's a complex issue but the idea is that you're taking someone's property and doing what you will with it it's just not right. So we thought giving some of it away and doing business with it would make some sense, and as a result our audience grew. Each performance is different, it's like jazz.

• To Jeff: what's the online music marketplace snocap wants to build?
• JM: what shawn is where music is is discovery and content. the world does ont need another top 200 download site. The big idea is how you harness the power of the web. Remember the "my" moniker? Consumers took that seriously. How do you put some balance between the consumer and the business? Trying to shift from ignorance to innovation. How do you bring a market together that allows discovery and innovation and yet allows the old guard to be comfortable.

• ?: What's the reaction been by the labels?
• JM: they like Snocap, they've licensed a lot of content into the catalog. Their goal is to get it out there, get it viral, get money back to the artists. Goal is 25MM tracks shared on the networks?

• ?: Mickey you were a member of the greatest cult band, most successful touring band, is that a model that all acts can follow [of giving the content away]
• MH: We used to think music should be free and that we should be subsidized by the government. We always played better for free. It's a good thing to share and give people something, maybe whet their appetite, you charge people to come into the shows you want them to leave with something more than a memory. I think that people should loosen up and give it away a little bit. Music isn't a luxury or thrill it's a necessity of life, people who make it are coming up with something from nothing. It borders on the sacred, and yes it is business, but these songs these musical adventures are like your children. It's important, it's a valuable asset.
• ?: but giving it away was a big payday for you in whetting the appetites
• MH: allowing recordings increased our audiences by millions

• ?: Jeff you passed over iTunes...does iTunes have a future? Some labels seem upset with the .99 model, labels are talking of pulling out, will there be a marketplace or will itunes be the 900 pound gorilla
• JM: we owe a debt of gratitude to Steve Jobs and Apple for making the ipod and simplifying the digital music market. There just isn't a viable alternative out there. It's going to evolve, they're doing a great job, but as you look at the multiplicity of devices you're going to see the next generation, compoetitors will come out on the device side and on the content side What we're trying to do is to make it cost efficient. Attaching media to the sponsored links.
• ?: you made the point that itunes is like a label

• ?: what do you think of itunes
• MH: my daughter uses it all the time. she learns the value of the music. i tihnk it's a viable service right now but it's absolutely going to morph to transform into something more fluid. Would be nice if there was a body of work where you could get that and make and mix your own disks. There's a lot of ways to make this more interesting more powerful and more profitable.

• ?: you're creating this amazing alternative distribution scene, do you think that if your vision of the marketplace comes to pass is that the end of the labels? or at least the end of A&R?
• JM: I don't think the labels are going away, there's still a traditional market. But the list of labels gets smaller It'll be great for the Madonna's and big acts, but millions of artists around the world will have access to this market, and maybe they'll need a last kick to make it as a megaband, but you can make a reasonable earnings without the labels
• MH: it's very important to allow people to have access to your music. Labels don't really nurture your music. The Grateful Dead could not be now, our records were duds for years. it took many years for us to make a profit. Only leased their music, not sold it.

• ?: if you were starting a band today, would you look to this model and say we don't really need labels?
• MH: You need to get the throw, people need to hear your music. This [Snocap] sounds like a wonderful model for anyone starting out.

• ?: It must be profound irony that your business profited from the Grokster verdict?
• JM: well, we were working on it prior to Grokster The vision that shawn had was that this was where the market was going.

• ?: Is this a system that transfers easily to video? Do you make that move in the 3-5 year timeframe?
• JM: Our vision is that we're cross-content, millions of pieces of information that can be fingerprinted, whether video, audio or other, that the fingerprint triggers the payment mechanisms.

• ?: How are you making money?
• JM: Making money on transaction volumes. we get a bit from retailers and from labels. Get out there, make sure it scales and take a few pennies on the side

• ?: If you from the point of view of an artist can you imagin a siisytem of distrubtion and technology that would be the ideal, the nirvana for an artist. What does that system look like?
• MH: the bottom line is to be published. You want it to get out and you want to make money but you have to get published. Record it and get it out. You don't want to wait six months for it to be packaged and distributed. You want to release when it's recorded. You make music in your dreams, you make music every day.
• MH: has to be flexible, have to work with artists and ask what they need. To have a constant flow of art and feedback. If people don't get paid for their art they won't do art.

• Audience: when you made the decision to allow people to record, it was more challenging due to equipment costs, it's cheaper today do you think you'd make the same decision today?
• MH: It wasn't economically feasible to do what we did then but we did it anyway.

• Audience: what seems to be difficult is for peple doing the technology to get the companies to think differently about price?
• JM: It's still the bucket mentality, here's our wares and here's a set price. What I think will unfold is getting data back and shared. Create a airline like model where you look at activity and can change the price as necessary. That you can change the pricepoint as you see data from the marketplace.
• Audience followup: if the pricepoint is too high people will just steal the music anyway
• JM: you have to get the data an dhope the market balances itself. We're empowering a world on the label side where they used to put lawyers in front

• ?: that Snocap will be monitoring the flow of data through the P2P networks and help determine the pricepoint
• JM: we enabled control, which is why the labels are dealing with us. we are hoping the data is intelligently analyzed and absorbed.

• audience: art is generally hard to value and keep the same value between people. have you ever considered a pricing model where the consumer sets the price? derive maximum utility from consumers and producers
• JM: we don't set the prices. data is consumption patterns from consumers. the data is as individual as you can get
• followup: but you're aggregating across people. Is there a priceline model for music.
• MH: it's not as simple as the musician giving away the music, they're lyrical licenses, you can't just decide to give everything away. It might have worked. It would be an interesting experiemnt, i don't think anyone has done that.

• audience: jeff you talked about the control artists would have, what are some of the buttons and knobs that distributors will get?
• JM: control at the retail side, control at the artist side. Retailer sets the final price. At the end of the day we're talking proprietary rights.

[implies to me that via Snocap you can't d/l directly from artists but only throuhg approved retailer sites]