Category Archives: dave winer

Winer vs. Calacanis – Let’s Get Ready to RUMBLE!

Posted by Todd Sawicki on August 11, 2007 View Comments

Yesterday at Gnomedex – Jason Calacanis gave a presentation that ended up unfortunately being a commercial for Mahalo. Jason’s cause behind Mahalo is just in his fight against search spam and if he had stuck to that mission, that mantra with just a slight mention of how he’s tactically fighting the good fight via Mahalo. And in the spirit of Gnomedex where heckling is tolerated and understood (ie. it’s will within in the social norm here) Dave Winer took exception and heckled Jason. Fine, it happens, move on. (And in fairness if one really wanted to see some heckling chat out the IRC chat below the live video feed – plenty of the other speakers were CRUCIFIED).

But what gets interesting is that Jason decided to vent back and take exception to Winer’s commentary with this blog post. And boy did it piss off Dave Winer. Like steaming, that $#$!##@’er mad. And so Dave took it out on Jason here.

Two things – what’s amazing about this very public fight, is that Dave and Jason are sitting three seats apart in the last row right behind me. How our lives as bloggers have changed such that the battle is done online instead of in person. And given the private rancor what’s interesting is that if you didn’t know what was going on on their blogs you would never guess looking at them anything is amiss. Putting aside the merit of their arguments (and I align with Dave’s thinking but completely think Jason has stumbled into a really big idea worth supporting – stopping spam), it kind of reminds me of Austen’ian England where battles were fought through scathing letters while the rules of civility forced the landed gentry to always play nice in public.

As an observer – the drama and it’s a very human drama is fun to watch. Jason, Scoble, Denton and now Thomas, DaveW are now characters in a real drama. And what’s making it even more interesting is now having met all of them. So keep at it guys – the debates, arguments and spats are worth every second they attract our attention (even if it means Jason at the podium not only calls Nick Denton an F***ing liar once, but twice – though the second time was instigating by me).

McClure + Google + Metrics = Advertising OS and Lock-in

Posted by Todd Sawicki on August 3, 2007 View Comments

Dave McClure puts down the Facebook crackpipe to grok about Google Analytics and how it represents another layer of Google’s online marketing dominance.  And Dave’s right – Dave and I talked extensively about this notion back at the Web Analytics Summit in SF back in May (just took Dave 2 months to write the post amazing).  Analytics now drives everything marketing related online – the more and better analytics the easier it is to justify business and marketing decisions.  So much so that when hiring for various marketing roles over the past few years, I have transitioned away from hiring folks with traditional marketing backgrounds or marketing degrees in favor of folks with economics degrees and backgrounds.  It’s all about the math these days.  Online marketing is a science.

And Google is killing it with the tools they are providing for FREE.  Web analytics and multi-variate testing for free are very powerful tools for marketers of all stripes to figure out what works and doesn’t – small or large.  I am an avid user of Google Analytics and having used Omniture, Unica and Webtrends over the years – Google Analytics compares very well with those other commercial offerings.  Now is Google doing this out of the goodness of its heart?  Heck-no!  The better you understand the 50% of your marketing that works – the more you are going to spend on Google advertising and at higher CPC’s.  What’s interesting is Google not only becoming the Search OS but potentialy also the Advertising OS?

At the same time, to what Dave Winer and I have blogged about with regards to Google’s acqusition of Feedburner does show up with Google Analytics.  Google Analytics shares a lot of deep ties with Google Adwords.  They make it very, very easy to track your Adwords campaigns performance but not very easy to track your Yahoo or Ask.com search spend (it’s possible but a major PITA).  So if you are locked into Google Analytics (and to an extent you are because you can’t export the historical data – another example of lock-in theme that Dave Winer has been talking about recently) – you are likely going to biased to use Google Adwords over other search marketing programs.   So though free, there is a cost as a user to using Google’s free advertiser tools.

winer’s on to something here – open source feedburner that is

Posted by Todd Sawicki on August 1, 2007 View Comments

Dave Winer has been bloggingabout feedburner in response to Google’s acquisition of the company.  Dave is concerned about how Google might co-opt feedburner to their benefit – ie. special tie-in’s to google reader for instance that might put other readers at a disadvantage (hmmm sounds a lot like what Microsoft has been accused of with regards to Office and Windows integration).  

Fred Wilson – VC extraordinaire (this is a compliment) and investor in feedburner (seriously has there been a better web 2.0 hit rate then Fred’s?) believes Dave is just whining unnecessarily - that if Google were to muck with Feedburner folks will just switch their feed aggregator to a Feedburner competitor.

My two cents (though probably only worth 1/10th of that):  I am in Dave’s camp.  I don’t think Google will do anything maliciously, but I do worry about the unintended consequences of google trying to improve the google reader-feedburner-analytics integration.  Integration points will go undocumented (because that happens with all software which is what I think happened with Windows per my earlier comment) and the marketplace will be forced to choose between Google’s “closed” platform and everything else.

Re: Fred’s point – I actually don’t think switching is a realistic alternative.  The switching costs are too high (as a VC I think Fred understands the value of high switching costs since it comes up in every competitive review I’ve ever been involved in).  My guess is that 80% of anyone’s RSS subscribers are passive and 20% active.  My assumption is the 20% who are active would take the time to switch the RSS feed, but you would likely lose 80% of your subscribers by switching feeds.  Is it worth the risk of losing perhaps 80% of one’s blog subs?  For most likely not.  For an analogy look at how many people switching cell carriers before number portability – essentially none.  One’s RSS URL is likely the equivalent of a cell phone number – change it and you lose touch with your network.  So as much as Fred says that we can all just leave Feedburner – I think he’s wrong – for the moment we’re stuck at the mercy of Google.  And being any more at the mercy of any company – Google included – is not a good thing.