2008 Golden Gate Triathlon - Results and Pictures

Warning: as the title suggests, this is not a tech-related blog post... and at the risk of upsetting readers, I do that from time to time! Today, longtime friend Steuart Martens and I competed in the 2008 Golden Gate Triathlon. It is a relatively overlooked Bay Area triathlon considering that it is sandwiched between Wildflower and the San Jose International (both very big events). The course was brutally difficult - but it must be the most beautiful event in the continental United States:

- Swim: Occurs in the San Francisco Bay. You swim towards parallel to the shore, with Alcatraz behind you and the Golden Gate / Bay Bridges in the distance (depending on the direction)

- Bike: Almost entirely uphill. You go from sea-level to high in the Presidio - well above the Golden Gate's entrance. 90% of the bike is done is gear 1-1.

- Run: Along Chrissy Field and up to the Golden Gate Bridge... which includes scaling very steep steps.

Notice the beRecruited swim caps (and the shameless promotion)! We will both be wearing these during our upcoming Alcatraz swim at the end of July (will be #6 for me). Congratulations to Steuart, who placed 6th overall and won the swim leg:

More pictures after the jump

Analyzing Techmeme's Top 100 Blogs: Techmeme Presence vs. Monthly Traffic

One of the appeals of Techmeme is it's transparent, always updated leaderboard. Techmeme ranks it's top 100 contributors by the number of headlines each blog sends to the homepage. The ratio of overall headlines to a specific blogs headlines is called "presence". Techcrunch, for instance, represents 7.56% of Techmeme's headlines during the last 30 days - a very significant portion considering that no other blog contributes over 3% and only 7 other blogs have over 1%. I've looked at Techmeme's Top 100 contributors before, but this time I wanted to place each of the top 100's Presence against monthly traffic (monthly unique visitors). To pull traffic numbers, I used Quantcast (of note: a very large portion of the sites were 'Quantified') and removed all major publications from the data (Fortune, WSJ, AP, etc)... I wanted to focus on blogs and felt that those publications would cloud that data considering their larger audiences and extensive websites (much of which was irrelevant to Techmeme).

Techmeme publishes its Top 100 sites by Presence. After removing the major publications and collecting traffic data, I then recharted the results by what I refer to as "Network Presence" (the portion of traffic that a particular site represents as compared to the collective traffic of the Techmeme Top 100).

The interesting part is that those leaderboards are *very* different. I pulled the 10 best and 10 worst differentials to highlight those differences.

It seems very intuitive but:

- Technology / gadget blogs have very high Network Presences that outweigh their Techmeme Presence - Conversely, industry and web 2.0 blogs see a lot of Techmeme coverage but don't generate a representative amount of traffic

A couple conclusions are:

- While Techmeme gets heat for favoring bigger blogs, the Network Presence data suggests this isn't true - Having strong Techmeme Presence doesn't equate into big traffic numbers... but Techmeme probably represents a good portion of that traffic - Techmeme links to a fair amount of gagdet news - but considering their high volume of traffic, Techmeme probably isn't a top referrer

Techmeme's Top 25 by Presence 1 TechCrunch 7.56% 2 ReadWriteWeb 2.99% 3 Ars Technica 2.18% 4 Silicon Alley Insider 2.01% 5 GigaOM 1.66% 6 BoomTown 1.49% 7 Gizmodo 1.33% 8 VentureBeat 1.33% 9 Bits 0.99% 10 paidContent.org 0.98% 11 TorrentFreak 0.95% 12 Scobleizer 0.95% 13 Search Engine Land 0.93% 14 Engadget 0.89% 15 Boy Genius Report 0.88% 16 AppleInsider 0.83% 17 Webware.com 0.80% 18 Techdirt 0.73% 19 InfoWorld 0.72% 20 A VC 0.72% 21 MacRumors 0.63% 22 O'Reilly Radar 0.62% 23 Between the Lines 0.58% 24 Google Blogoscoped 0.56% 25 eWeek 0.56%

Top 25 of Techmeme's Network Presence 1 Gizmodo 20.22% 2 Lifehacker 14.82% 3 MacRumors 13.76% 4 TechCrunch 5.65% 5 Computerworld 5.25% 6 Bits 4.50% 7 AppleInsider 3.32% 8 Ars Technica 3.32% 9 Engadget 3.07% 10 PR Newswire 3.07% 11 Valleywag 2.66% 12 InfoWorld 2.19% 13 DSLreports 1.88% 14 CrunchGear 1.80% 15 Mashable! 1.76% 16 Silicon Alley Insider 1.51% 17 ReadWriteWeb 1.28% 18 GigaOM 1.24% 19 Techdirt 0.97% 20 Between the Lines 0.93% 21 Business Wire 0.83% 22 Search Engine Land 0.65% 23 Jason Calacanis Weblog 0.55% 24 O'Reilly Radar 0.44% 25 DailyTech 0.44%

10 Worst Differentials (Traffic Outweighs Presence) 1. Gizmodo -18.89% 2. Lifehacker -14.31% 3. MacRumors -13.13% 4. Computerworld -5.04% 5. Bits -3.51% 6. PR Newswire -2.62% 7. AppleInsider -2.49% 8. Valleywag -2.35% 9. Engadget -2.18% 10. DSLreports -1.57%

Ten Best Differentials (Presence Outweighs Traffic) 1. TechCrunch 1.91% 2. ReadWriteWeb 1.71% 3. BoomTown 1.45% 4. VentureBeat 1.26% 5. paidContent.org 0.95% 6. Boy Genius Report 0.83% 7. TorrentFreak 0.80% 8. A VC 0.70% 9. Webware.com 0.61% 10. Scobleizer 0.54%

Techmeme Presence vs. Monthly Traffic

Techmeme Presence vs. Network Presence

Mahalo Opens Up; Recognizes the Power of Transparency

In what Jason Calacanis bills as "Wikipedia 3.0", Mahalo has just taken a very major step forward by opening their platform to all registered users. Until now, Mahalo has crafted each of their 50,000 pages by hand (hence the tagline "human powered search"). But by enabling users to directly contribute, create and edit pages - Mahalo is becoming a "human powered portal" or "directory".

What's particularly important about Mahalo's move is their focus on transparency. I am a firm believer that websites and communities work only as well as the users' incentives are aligned. Digg is a terrific example: publishers are incented to submit content; diggers are incented to vote, befriend and share; and everyone is incented to digg as much (and as fairly) as possible.

Jason recognizes that fully opening Mahalo can be noisy or even turbulent ("it's not going to be as freewheeling as Wikipedia day one"). So they have two solutions.

The first isn't scalable over the long term, but important for helping define community interactions and demonstrate proper behaviors: "[Mahalo's] staff is going to check every edit made and confirm it is correct. We have three full-time folks on this right now and our expectation is we will only get 10-50 editors per day."

The second solution is to make activity fully transparent and consequently establish self-imposed community guidelines and incentives. Mahalo has made their User Activity Dashboard public. It's the same dashboard that their staff follows internally. By publishing this content and making the community's behavior fully transparent - there is an incentive to behave properly and frequently (attention and reputation!) and there is a consequence for misbehaving (your actions are public and tied to an account).

Most importantly, it establishes accountability. Users are accountable for their actions. Vertical specialists are accountable for the changes in their verticals. Readers become accountable for validating the quality (or lack thereof) of an article. And Mahalo staffers become accountable for either enabling or disabling content, users and topics.

Available data in the Dashboard: - Recommended Links - Declined Recommended Links - Note Edits - Message Board Posts

Driving Engagement By Delivering Relevant Emails (Attention Apple, iTunes!)

As a consumer - and an inbox owner - email marketing can range from highly effective wildly annoying and irrelevant. The respective consequences can lead to activity / purchases or permanently blocking emails by classifying them as SPAM.

As a marketer, email marketing is a highly effective medium to drive user retention, promote new features / products and relay important news.

Andrew Chen, author of the Futuristic Play blog, recently wrote that 'depending on notification-driven retention sucks'. The key word there is 'depending'. In reality, you never want to depend on anything - whether its SEO, SEM, direct traffic, referrals, etc. It's too risky and often places control in other player's hands. Unlike most of his work, I disagree with Andrew here: when done right, notification-driven retention is:

1. a critical lever to engage and reengage users 2. an opportunity to standout among the clutter of web and reach user's in their preferred setting (whether it be .com, email, mobile, etc) 3. an opportunity to convert traffic into direct, more active users

Furthermore, I found Andrew's article ironic as allows users to subscribe to his blog via email, citing "I don't write often, so sometimes the easiest thing to do is to subscribe to my blog (which you can do below)"... sounds like notification-driven retention right?

Focusing on email, here are a few forms of notification-driven retention - ranging significantly in effectiveness. While I've chosen to focus on email for this post, notifications can exist in numerous forms. Twitter and Facebook are terrific examples. My entire Twitter experience is predicated on notifications (both as a pusher and a puller). If I had to visit Twitter directly each time, I would certainly be a less-engaged user and perhaps wouldn't even be a user. 90% of my Facebook visits begin with an SMS or email alerting me of new activity (friend, email, connection, etc).

Below are a variety of different emails. Some are terrific. Some trigger my SPAM filters (and rightly so).

Amazon = Best in Class. I read nearly every Amazon email I receive. They deliver content based on my purchases and site activity - and they tell me that in the email: "As someone who has shopped for high-def players or high-definition movies and games..." They know that I'll be interested in the offers and the major discounts. I actually enjoy these emails and regularly start my shopping from them.

iTunes = I Tune These Out. I have written about how untargetted and irrelevant iTunes emails are. Here is the most recent: a spotlight for iTunes latest videos... but this is worthless to me as I have NEVER bought an iTunes video. If you are going to send me spotlight emails - make sure that the spotlight fits my filter... by not doing so, this email appears exclusively commercial, demonstrates no relationship we me, and fails to get me back to iTunes.

JCrew = SPAM. This is the worst big-brand email I've received. First, it comes from "crewcuts" - when I saw that on my blackberry, I immediately assumed it was SPAM and deleted it (attention marketers: every component of an email is important - including the sender's name!). More disturbing parts about the email: I don't have a son, I don't need to shop in 'boys swimwear' and there isn't a single other message in the email (even if I wanted to find something that might interest *me* on JCrew.com).

Live Nation = I Look Forward to These. Live Nation has email marketing down: send scheduled emails that are relevant based on geography, highlight upcoming and new shows and give readers an incentive to open them (ie exclusive news, pricing, etc). I always open these emails as, sadly, it's a way for me to stay current with music.

Social Median = News in My Network. I registered with Social Median precisely to receive these notifications. Social Median works on my behalf to find new content that is relevant to the interests and topics that I previously designated. They then send scheduled emails that deliver this news. As reader, I always scan the headlines (usually on my blackberry). As a publisher, I know that other readers do the same (I get a fair amount of traffic from Social Median).

Google Alerts = Customized Notifications. I love Google News and have dozens of alerts created. Some arrive instantly and some are scheduled to deliver daily summaries. Google knows that by enabling users to create customizable notifications, they drive News activity and retention. Again, I look forward to these emails and receive dozens of them a day (which is my choice remember!).

Speaking of email - you can now subscribe to this blog via email. Just enter your email address into the box on the left side-bar. It's powered by Feedburner.

Why Twitter's Problem is Social Findability (Twitter in Pictures)

Twitter's inability to stay online is well documented. The reason for their instability, however, is much debated. Both Twitter and Om Malik argue that it stems from power-users (who tax the system with each post). Others argue its Ruby - which is still a new, relatively unproven language and some argue it's due to organizational / developmental woes. It's likely a combination of factors - but here's one way to alleviate the pain and solve a major usability issue: Improve findability and effectively enable users to find relevant friends and content.

Sounds simple right? Search is a core feature of any social site (and Twitter is surely that) - but Twitter is void of any meaningful finding experience. Consequently, users are incented (or forced) to follow users that they really have no proven affinity for. And while search can be technically 'expensive' - it's less costly than deliver millions of relatively meaningless messages:

Having an empty Twitter account is lonely... and frankly useless:

So how do you gain friends? In addition to posting, you follow as many Twitter-ers as possible:

Following someone delivers an email and is a primary way to amass your own following:

As a publisher, having a large following means a large network to distribute posts:

But most of those users aren't actively following and the feed becomes unmanageable:

What I'm suggesting won't entirely solve the scalability issues - but it will solve Twitter's current inability to scale socially. Without being able to efficiently find related users, people, content and so forth, users are incented to follow everyone and everything: it's the best way to amass your own readership and it's the only way to begin finding what's interesting.

Twitter is predicated on distribution. But completely untargeted distribution delivers cloudy, turbulent results. Allow users to define their distribution (in both directions) and you've taken the first step towards a cleaner, more relevant and (likely) more efficient platform.

Why iGoogle is About to Be Game Changing - For Google and for Us

A couple months ago, I had the following email exchange with one of the sharpest, big internet-thinkers I know. I thought very little of the discussion until the past few days. Speaking about iGoogle:

...My wife didn't have an account, but could play with it and then had to set up account to personalize and save. She also set up a series of custom "vertical" searches now much more easily.

I frankly -- mostly due to my schedule -- had not played with their gadgets in some weeks. I reset up my entire information world in about 12 minutes...

Me: Is 12 minutes short or long? I created one but don't go back to it... Still just navigate in and out to each destination.

For us, very short -- because it is amazingly comprehensive. iGoogle may become our homepage now.

That's a powerful notion: recomposing your entire 'information world' in a matter of minutes. At the time though, I passed over the comment because iGoogle wasn't (yet) overly differentiated (Netvibes, Pageflakes, etc); nor was it more than a one-dimensional delivery of content (or as he puts it, "information"). I've seriously rethought that premise as Google is quickly turning iGoogle into a multi-dimensional hub that might very well become the base of your distributed web... and personalization / distribution are the key tenants of web 2.0.

So how does iGoogle get there?

- First, leverage Google. It's already happening. Google is already a one of the top two start pages and has begun making iGoogle a default page. Add that (which is the most valuable asset anyone can ask for) with an unlimited marketing budget, and iGoogle will have no issues with traffic (previously an issue with Froogle, Gmail, Base, etc). iGoogle ads are appearing in *heavy* rotation throughout AdWords campaigns and AdSense units. They are everywhere.

- Integrate Google Reader I think the web is still in need of the killer RSS app. Think about BlogRovr, SocialMedian, FriendFeed and Digg - to different extents, they are about finding relevant and interesting content based on relationships, browsing history, popularity and so on. iGoogle, which got it's start with RSS-feed based containers, is an ideal platform to push out a killer social RSS app (alongside other Google properties like Reader, Feedburner, Google Accounts, etc).

- Integrate Friend Connect and Open Social... Tightly. Two of Google's other current focuses are about enabling social interaction and graphing across other platforms. But Google can also power Friend Connect and Open Social through their own platform: iGoogle; and just as FriendFeed is able to leverage (and lure users from) Twitter, iGoogle will be able to do the same with platforms like FriendFeed. Once iGoogle becomes social, it shifts from pushing content one-dimensionally into an intelligent, fully social and multi-dimensional platform.

- Open it Up. Make it Consumer Facing. One of the values of a robust iGoogle is the sorts of data and interactions that will be collected... and should be reflected. One of the current failing of Google Trends and Google Hot Trends (and for that matter, Google News and Google Analytics) is that they aren't transparent - either on a network or social graph level. iGoogle can become Digg for networks, verticals and any form of content. Hacker News is a terrific example: it gets a small fraction of Digg's traffic, but the tight community makes the sharing of content immensely valuable. That can and should exist for any size network or type of content.

Based on their advertising alone, it's evident that iGoogle is a focus for Google (and I have to imagine internally the strategy is deeply connected to their other social focuses). It's an important strategy for Google because, if they can amass a powerful enough user base, iGoogle represents a platform to launch new products (a struggle in the past for non-search related products) and opens up a new revenue platform (ads will be live soon enough and Gadget Ads will follow soon after).

Why Twitter Needs It's Power Users: They Play Host to Newbies

In response to Om Malik's proposal that Twitter tax it's top users with usage fees, I argued that Twitter needs power users like Michael Arrington, Robert Scoble, and Loic Lemeur. Loic then shared the article via Twitter, sparking an influx of Twitter friend requests and direct messages... which lead me to a point that, in hindsight, is very obvious: Power users are essential to Twitter for more than just their content... Power users drive connections.

We all agree that there is nothing more awkward than arriving somewhere where we don't know or recognize anybody. If you come to Twitter without a close set of friends - it's an empty, useless place.

But users like Scoble and Arrington are your MCs. They play host to your experience on Twitter. Even if you don't particularly love their content, they update frequently and demonstrate that there is activity and interaction. The other critical role of a host is to make introductions - and that is precisely what these users do. Some times it's direct - like the example where Loic referred his followers to my blog post (and with a @berecruited comment). But most often the introductions are indirect. @techcruch has nearly 20,000 followers - which equates to 20,000 users who have somewhat relevant interests. That's 20,000 pivot points and 20,000 more users to act as hosts to new conversations and communities.

Update (and a future post to come) - 9:31 pst, 5/30/2008

VentureBeat has a post saying that Twitter doesn't blame Ruby's infrastructure, they blame power users like Scoble. The following quote is from Twitter developer Alex Payne. His point is accurate - but I would be *very* cautious of placing blame. If Twitter (which we should all remember is still in it's infancy) can't handle a handful of power-users, they are going to be in real trouble:

The events that hit our system the hardest are generally when “popular” users - that is, users with large numbers of followers and people they’re following - perform a number of actions in rapid succession. This usually results in a number of big queries that pile up in our database(s). Not running scripts to follow thousands of users at a time would be a help, but that’s behavior we have to limit on our side.

Major League Baseball's Economy 2.0 (Follow Up)

This is the first of two brief follow up posts (I was going to label them "Part II's" but they really aren't thorough enough to qualify...).

I wrote about the shifting economy in Major League Baseball and how deals are shifting towards younger players with longer, more reasonable deals. ESPN's Buster Olney (one of the reason's I'm a paid Insider subscriber) had a terrific article today. Olney opened by reinforcing my premise:

... Everything that happens seems to reinforce two essential hypotheses. No. 1: You almost never realize anything close to equal return in signing veteran players to long-term contracts. No. 2: The perceived value of young players keeps rising and rising and rising.

And then he added insights that I never could:

The industry trend, as we have seen, has been toward player development, toward drafting and shaping young players and eschewing big-money deals, and nothing that has happened this year has changed that. Some executives already have come to strongly believe the following:

• By the end of Miguel Cabrera's contract with Detroit, his $152.3 million deal will be viewed as a major mistake. • Over the duration of [Johan] Santana's contract, he will not be the kind of pitcher that the Mets paid for.

A couple things that strike me about this:

1) I love the use of the word "industry". That's what it is. And the dollars are large enough to support it.

2) Neither Cabrera's nor Santana's contracts were widely second-guessed in the off-seasons... in fact, many analysts lauded the deals.

3) The "collision course" between big veteran deals and youth extensions has happened seemingly instantly. The result is likely a very different trade deadline (now a few weeks away) and off-season free agency. Players like CC Sabathia and Mark Texiera turned down monster contracts in the hopes of getting $200m plus this off-season... those deals likely won't happen and may be well off.

All of this, in my opinion, is good for the baseball. Keeping an open-'marketplace' in tact, baseball is going to see small market teams effectively compete and to build for long-term success. Meanwhile, if the economic standards indeed shifts, there will be major consequences for striking major deals that don't work... which is a good thing.

Widgetbox Releases New In-Widget Promotional Unit

Over the last few days, you might have noticed changes to the widget in my blog's sidebar... those changes are Widgetbox's new in-widget promotional unit (now live in beta)! When the widget first appears on the viewable screen, the promotional unit drops down and, after a couple seconds, it retracts. The unit can then be hovered over (or clicked) to re-open it. You'll find other popular and/or related widgets within the unit (and depending on the widget's size - an icon, title and/or description). We are excited because this is a powerful mechanism to promote content, target widgets or demographics, and understand in-widget behavior and engagement; we are also excited as this is a beta product... and that means that many changes and enhancements are on the way.

If you are interested in learning more about the unit or working with Widgetbox during the beta, you can either contact me directly (contact information in the left sidebar) or via Widgetbox's partnership form.