having 2 young boys currently, i'm saddened to read that the little boy has not yet been found.   Posted in 1 ]]> http://jeremiahsjamison.wordpress.com/2009/10/15/thoughts-and-prayers-with-the-family-in-colorado-whose-son-went-up-in-balloon/feed/ 0 jeremiahsjamison http://jeremiahsjamison.wordpress.com/2009/08/27/how-im-learning-seo-in-2-weeks/ http://jeremiahsjamison.wordpress.com/2009/08/27/how-im-learning-seo-in-2-weeks/#comments Thu, 27 Aug 2009 22:30:25 +0000 Jeremiah Jamison http://jeremiahsjamison.wordpress.com/2009/08/27/how-im-learning-seo-in-2-weeks/ ]]>

Ahh, back to blogging.  This summer I’ve had the good fortune to witness a lot of progress on Moonshoot, and to help other startups in the Bay Area, as a mentor at the Founder Institute.  It’s been a lot of fun.

One project I’ve been helping out with is nearing launch, and because this team is planning very little spend on marketing, it occurred to us that SEO was probably something to focus on a bit.  I drew the straw to help out with that. 

So, what do I know about SEO?  Zero, zip, nada.  I’ve heard it a bunch of times, and I think I watch seemingly intelligent folks nod their heads knowingly when they hear these letters.  The consistent style of nodding that I see generally conveys to me that they have no idea what SEO means either.  Or if they have read an article or two about it, then they have no idea what how to really do it. 

I figured I had learning to do, a good thing as SEO seemed like such a hot area.  Good to get new skills, sharpen the saw.  So off I went to the my trusty browser and search engine of choice.

As I’ve begun digging in on SEO, I’ve gotten myself up the learning curve I think pretty quickly.  The stuff seems pretty logical, not really so hard.  Certainly not worth what I read SEO consultants are charging people for it.  . 

Although there are a lot of how-to’s, 10-steps to better SEO, 15 minutes to foo and bar, blah blah blah, I didn’t see many first person accounts of going through the process of learning how to do this, trying things out and reporting on results. 

In an effort to fill that gap, I’m putting together a series of blog postings aiming at doing just that.  This series of SEO is meant to be an update, real-time, on what I’m doing to optimize search engine results for this project. 

For anyone who follows or finds this who knows more about this SEO thing than me, feel free to contact me or add comments.  If you find this useful or not useless, kindly let me know.  Thanks! 

Interesting article in the WSJ today on wifi pricing, usage and trends for airlines that have wifi enabled. What I find interesting is going to be watching how this market develops.  I’ve only used wifi on a plane once, on a long overseas flight–it was terrific, even at $14.95. These days, I”d probably not pay more than $10 for a cross-country flight though, and this would definitely require a power adapter in the seat.

Points  in the article that grabbed my eye:

• Virgin America is getting 12-15% conversion, on a high proportion of cross-country flights and its hubs of tech-centric places like SF, Seattle, and NY.
• Airlines need about 8-10% paid usage (presumably at their mini-bar like prices) for 5 year profitability.
• Users appear quite elastic, as one exec is quoted as saying ‘even when we charge $1, and we did try $1, we see a drop off in people willing to pay.’  (This surprises me, as I’d expect you’d have a lot of business users who can expense this signing up.)

I think it will be interesting to watch how pricing — subscriptions, ad-based, per per minute, etc.–evolves in this market. Also, will it be free?  My guess is that over time this just gets bundled into the ticket prices, but we’ll see.

Very cool scenario, of course, but it will be fascinating to see where this market ends up.

Today announcements of sharp people cuts at MySpace hit and hit hard.  This is a painful step, and my sympathies go out to any employee impacted.  I take no pleasure or glee in poking fun at this.  I’m sure that in the coming days, plenty of press will focus on more salacious elements of the moves, the pain inside MySpace, whether offices are remaining open, etc.  The story of growing so quickly, getting bought by News Corporation, followed by the rapid flattening of growth–all within the span of a few years–is just too much of a story to pass up for many.

That’s not my focus.  Instead, I’d like to write and applaud Owen Van Natta and his exec team for moving quickly to cut down while they try to figure out what to do.  In a post I wrote upon the announcement of Mr. Van Natta’s appointment to the role, I suggested that I’d be watching for 3 things–(1) a focus on scenarios, (2) execution, and (3) any cultural phenomenon starting in MySpace versus the other tools (Twit, FBK, etc.).  Given that it’s been less than one month, I’d say that taking the step of cutting back this fast and this hard is an example of execution.  It’s a painful sign, but a good one. I’d not expected such decisiveness here to be honest.

I think this is a good move, not just because it helps signal an execution focus.  I think it also helps the team that remains get hunkered down to figure out what the heck they’re actually going to go do.  The features and scenarios that might help them get ahead are not ones that should take tons of people.  Instead, they need a tight focus with highly motivated superstars–hard to do that when you’ve got wave after wave of layoffs.  Better to just get the cut done big and fast.  So kudos to the leaders of MySpace for having the courage to get after this fast.

MySpace still has miles to go before it sleeps.  But I’d say that this is on the whole a good sign, and I’ll be interested to see what’s next with them.

TechCrunch summarizes Wired Editor-in-Chief Chris Anderson’s rules for pricing on online media by calling them “counterintuitive.”  Author Erick Schoenfeld, writes that Mr. Anderson “articulated something that is now increasingly becoming obvious: As products go digital, their marginal cost goes to zero.”

“This is the law of gravity online,” says Anderson. “Everything that becomes digital will become free. There will be a free version, either you will be competing with free or giving it away for free and selling something else. If it is not zero today, it will be zero tomorrow.”

He then goes on to summarize Anderson’s new “rules”, which appear to be:

1. The best model is a mix of free and paid
2. You can’t charge for an exclusive that will be repeated elsewhere,
3. Don’t charge for the most popular content on your site,
4. Content behind a pay wall should appeal to niches, the narrower the niche the better

I’m scratching my head a bit here, and I’d love to have read more evidence of this actually working at mass scale. There are a bunch of counter-examples that a hard-headed business guy like me might push back on here with a hearty WTF.   First off, some counterexamples.

The best model is a mix of 100% pay / 0% free, like World of Warcraft.  It’s media IMHO, you want onto their servers, you pay to be there.

Any packaged software (or pharmaceutical for that matter) has a marginal cost of zero, it is still for pay.  I reject the idea that media–becuase its marginal cost is zero–cannot be for pay.  Plenty of other high-value products have zero marginal costs and extract high prices.  Linux and Windows have been two versions of digital OSs for more than 10 years.  Windows still has the vast, vast majority of revenue and unit share.

Plenty of authors are finding opportunities to charge for their content–especially in the financial sector. Jeremy Siegel for example.

Finally, nowhere do I hear that the core model of big media brand (e.g., WSJ) and all its writers are needed to do what they do.  I love the WSJ, and this stinks to write.  But the net net is that most news will be covered by more citizen-oriented news outlets by  citizen journalists and niches that are running around snapping Twitpics and posting to blogs.  This will mean that vastly smaller newsrooms are going to be needed to do what they do today.  Some will be needed and some are crucial.  But many will be continuing to compete with free.  Very hard to deal with.  This needs to get teed up and discussed.  Openly.

With that out of the way, now I want to explain why I think this talk is off base with respect to big media.  Brands such as the WSJ, Wired, Time, Newsweek do have a well-known problem–they’ve got a bunch of folks in a priesthood of journalism competing with their congregation of citizen bloggers, twitterers and so forth who are happily, ignobly disrupting the stuffing out of them.

Anderson’s prescription may work for them, but I’m extremely dubious.  I think that the congregation of citizens is going to disrupt all the slices of profit from the priesthood of jounralists.  While I might pay a few bucks for virtual currency on Zynga or a special hat on WeeWorld, I’m not going to pay $0.99 for an article that I can just read somewhere else.

I really think that we’re watching in journalism what we saw in the auto makers a few years ago.  We are looking at an industry that doesn’t realize its dead yet.   The business model needs far more dramatic reinvention in terms of what we’ll consume.  That debate ain’t happening though.  Instead, what we’re hearing is that the pricing model needs to go this long tail route, which is a baby step.  They’re using a pea shooter against an elephant on this.

As an example of how radical things need to get, here’s Jon Stewart talking to Katie Couric about what the TV news should do.  His ideas are closer to what I think needs to happen than working on a long-tail price model.

Jon Stewart Interviews Katie Couric

Here Stewart gives Couric all kinds of crazy suggestions–”free colonoscopy for viewers,” etc.  These get laughs, but he’s basically right.  Old media is going to need things like cage-matched talking heads debating health care pay-per-view, manage Wolf Blitzer’s as a multi-medai franchise similar to Tom Petty, and a bunch of other completely crazy ideas.

The idea that a pricing model as suggested is going to do the trick is in my mind, extremely short-sighted and likely to fail.  Media franchises will need to think radically about trying vastly new and different things, else they’ll be in the same spot GM / Chrysler are in now.

Jon Stewart’s become one of the most trusted ‘newsmen’ in the US, crazily.  His ideas on how to fix big media may make him the smartest business person too!