Scoble doesn’t get Vox

In his BlogHer writeup, Robert Scoble dings Vox for being targeted at novices.

“As to Vox, the idea is great (expand blogging to more “regular people”) but I’ve gotta wonder how successful it’ll be. Microsoft’s Bob taught the world that no one wants to be a beginner, or seen as one. I think it’s condescending, don’t you? If you’re going to get dragged to learn to ski, don’t you want to get off the beginning slopes and hang out with your friends on the intermediate and advanced slopes?”

Vox strikes me less as blogging for novices and more like LiveJournal or MySpace for grownups. Vox takes the build-in social networking and privacy design patterns and applies them in an application that’s more tastefully designed and easy to customize. The Vox target audience is grownups wanting to communicate privately to friends and family. The challenge for SixApart is the need for viral spread of a more introverted application.
The younger culture is more extroverted, not to say exhibitionist. The tools spread across social networks defined by groups of friends and subcultures that want to reach out and leave their mark. These networks can spread like wildfire. The growth of grownup networks of public blogging, using tools like WordPress and MovableType, connected by implicit links and overlay tools like Technorati rather than explicit networking features, are driven by a different exhibitionistic impulse. For reasons personal and professional, many bloggers strive for recognition and fame. This can be microfame (say, bay area food bloggers) or macrofame (DailyKos), but there’s a built-in drive for attention.
The grownup friends and family networks that Vox seems to want to support are more stable and more private. People might want to share pictures of kids in the pool that they wouldn’t share on a public blog. The question is whether this quieter desire to share and connect will cross the threshold needed for viral growth and baseline success.

Bay area identity

At the Backfence event, the Backfence people were setting up a Palo Alto focused site, but folks in attendence felt like their geographic identity spanned Palo Alto and Menlo Park. Which set me musing on Bay Area identity. I haven’t been here that long, so this observation could be either trivially obvious or wrong. But it seems to me that Bay Area folk have an interesting composite regional identity. There’s a part of one’s identity that’s affiliated with a town: Palo Alto, Half Moon Bay, Fremont, Berkeley. There’s part of the identity that is regional; identifying with regional transportation, regional landmarks, other issues that might be going on across the bay. And there’s part of the local identity that is social and/or professional — going to Barcamp in San Francisco or Blogher in San Jose. Is this right, dead obvious, or wrong?
It would be interesting to have a tagged and geocoded service that let you pick or zoom to the appropriate level of geographic and topical interest, and didn’t constrain you to one of them. Out of the various services I’ve seen, Yelp does a pretty good job of allowing you to find things by genre, and within an x mile radius of a particular place.

Blogher: business, party, or movement?

I went to Blogher on Friday and Saturday, and had a blast. The Hyatt San Jose on First Street has a weird blowzy appearance, but the snacks’n’drinks area sorrounding the large pool, with shady side gazebos, was just perfect for extended hanging out. I saw friends from out of town and across town, met some new folk, got a good lead on a contractor for a work project, went to a good panel billed on political blogging, where the best discussion was about hyperlocal blogging.
Blogher has clearly grown up, gone mainstream, and reaped the benefits of good old-fashioned commercialism. I heard there were over 750 people. Last year, I was somewhat surprised by the outpouring of interest in making money from one’s blog. The blogging I’ve done has been affiliated and complementary with various professional and avocational activities. I’ve thought about blogging as a way of connecting with people and getting the word out, but never about making money directly. The Blogher crew have tapped a vein of demand to make blogging an economically sustaining activity for bloggers by creating an ad network. And they’ve clearly tapped an interest among mainstream marketers for the niche that used to be filled by women’s magazines. This resulted in jarring yet archetypal combinations of conference schwag — the weight watchers propaganda next to the mineral water next to the condoms . Meanwhile, one of the keynote speakers talked about her daughter’s struggle with an eating disorder.
I’m glad to see that people who were seeking economic support for blogging are getting it. The reinvention of the magazine industry around ad networks for independent writers with two-way comments and linking is not a bad thing and a step forward. The commercializing and mainstreaming of Blogher was disapointing to some of my friends who looked back nostalgically to the previous year when Blogher felt less like a commercial venture and more like a movement. There were definitely some real deficits – the crowd looked more prosperous and paler than average, and didn’t have lots of younger folk — there are probably pricing, scholarship, and outreach choices that would make the event accessible to a greater diversity of people. I’m not going to go down the liberal guilt path and say that an event with middle class people is not worth doing, just that more accessibility is better.
There were birds of a feather sessions and networking opportunities, so folk who want to gather around minority interests could. I didn’t find the commercialism to be censoring of things that I might say, including criticism of the product pitches at the closing session (I counted four) and the Cadilac Escalade promotion in the age of global warming and peak oil.
So, Blogher this year was an expression of our culture, with connection, culture and consumerism intertwingled. The universe of peer media is combining with commerce; the various permutations will have differing combinations of integrity. Overall, I came to Blogher expecting to have fun and connect, and did. Overall, I felt that the conference had some of the ambiguities of our culture, but the sum was a good thing and a good time.

How community is community news?

I went to a strange community meeting a few weeks ago BackFence is a site that publishes citizen-generated community news. This is the company that acquired Dan Gillmor’s Bayophere venture. They are new in Palo Alto and want to get the word out. The CEO, community manager, and development manager stood up at the front of the room wearing jackets. They gave a polished series of frontal presentations about the value and importance of bottom-up, community-generated news.
As it turns out, the folks included leaders from Palo Alto’s active community groups and moms’ groups. Interestingly, their main problem wasn’t that they didn’t get enough news — there are apparently very active listservs for the various neighborhood associations. THeir needs were getting word out to a wider audience. Also, getting locally powerful groups, like city council and real estate developers to pay attention to citizen concerns.
The questions for the audience tended toward condescention, “do any of you have any hobbies”? (I was waiting for someone to say, “I’m on a nobel slection committee”, or I’m on the boards of two schools and a church,” “I’m precinct captain of a political party”, that sort of thing. At times, speech used the language of advertising demographics, “a lot of our users in Virginia are “soccer moms.” Right, and the soccer moms also run the pta and the local fundraising, or take their kids to soccer in a break from software coding.
The audience sat silently. Slowly, people in the audience started to speak up. Many of the comments were feature requests — one person wanted different sorts of ratings, another person wanted to be able to control how the boxes on the portal appeared, another person wanted to tone down the blinking advertisements.
The feature requests struck me as thoroughly beside the point. The value of Backfence, if it takes off, is the telling of stories that are undercovered in existing media. The role of the instigators, then, would logically be to kick off a conversation about what people wanted to write and read about. By putting a screenshot up and describing features, the Backfence team positioned themselves as software providers rather than community enablers.
Attendees also commented that the focus on Palo Alto created an unnatural separation of Palo Alto and Menlo Park. At least three of the people in the room lived in Menlo; one of the mom’s groups was Palo Alto/Menlo Park, the sports leagues cross the town boundaries, social groups and cultural activities flow smoothly across the towns. The areas are politically separate but culturally linked. The CEO asked us to post that to Backfence, so they could consider making the change. It wouldn’t be hard to have a system that used tagging or geocoding to allow users to define the boundaries of their own community; it was irksome that the vendor was trying to define the boundaries of our community for us.
The Backfence presentation was totally different from my previous experience with a community portal. Austinbloggers.org grew out of get-togethers of local bloggers. We wanted to have a shared space to post about austin. So we gathered around tables at Mozarts, Brick Oven pizza, Spider House and chatted about the functionality and the rules. With Chip Rosenthal as tech lead and site host, and others including Adam Rice, David Nunez and me, we got started simply. We added features when it seemed like they were needed.
Austinbloggers is noncommercial, community governed, and the tools are released open source. Having a commercial community portal doesn’t bother me that much. It takes some money to keep a server running and keep spammers away. As long as I own my copyright and am free from spam — and those are their non-evil policies — I’m ok with a money-making site. There’s more of a problem making money off of someone else’s words. The BlogHer ad network, by contrast, shares the wealth, giving a majority share to the bloggers.
The governance issues are more troubling. To play a role in Austinbloggers, I showed up and tried to be useful. Probably the best way to a role in Backfence governance is to apply for a job — there was no obvious way to have a say other than market research. Backfence (and BlogHer) would benefit from going more of the DailyKos route, with additional front page editors chosen from among the community, with the power to make or promote posts to the front age.
In general, peer content is getting mixed with commerce in a variety of ways. In order to be accepted, the vendor needs to have the right level of respect for the community and contribution to the community. The niche that Backfence is attempting to occupy is an important and powerful one. If they don’t succeed at it, someone will. I’ll check in at Backfence to see if something interesting is going on, but will be seeking models of community media that provide more room for the community.

Why isn’t Saudi oil production decline headline news

More confirming reports are out that Saudi oil production has been down for a couple of months, while their orders of new drilling rigs have been going through the roof. A completely unscientific poll of my reasonably well-informed friends and acquaintances reveals that nobody has heard of this. This isn’t proof of peak production, but it seems rather ominous. This series seems at least as worthy of headline attention and anticipation as the federal reserve interest rates and George Bush’s poll numbers.

Great CEO blogging from John Mackey

Journalist Michael Pollan and Whole Foods CEO John Mackey are having a wonderful public dialog about the organic supermarket chain living up to its values. The first Whole Foods response to the Omnivore’s Dilemma was good — it acknowledged Pollan’s critique, and provided substantive information about Whole Foods’ role in the growth of organic food, and some decent information about Whole Foods support for local agriculture. But it also read like it was written by 10 people in 30 drafts, with old-school marketing folk giving it a few good swipes with the marketing-speak polishing rag. It didn’t acknowldge room for improvement — it focused on defending Whole Foods history and policies. The bit about animal treatment standards sounded particularly phoney and substance-free.
Pollan wrote back with a respectful letter, re-asserting some of his criticisms about local suppliers and the treatment of animials in the name of shared values, and encouraging Whole Foods to use its power to lead. Mackey’s latest response to Pollan’s letter is much better in substance and in tone. Whole Foods is making substantive changes in response to Pollan’s critique. Mackey acknowledges that it has been hard for them to find suppliers who treat animals well. So Whole Foods hired someone to be in charge of sourcing meat from farms with better standards. They have also created a financing arm to supply low-cost credit to farmers who want to supply Whole Foods. Mackey also acknowledges that the move to regional distribution has lost some suppliers, and Whole Foods is increasing the charter for individual stores to buy locally.
Mackey’s letter also sounds more human, and more like a manager taking responsibility for his business. This is what Mackey says in response to the report that some Bay area farmers stopped selling to Whole Foods. “Whole Foods Market would like to try working again with any of the Bay Area farmers you know who are unhappy with Whole Foods Market and no longer sell to us. Please encourage them to contact our Northern California and Pacific Northwest Produce Director, Karen Christensen, at 415-307-5337 about selling directly into our stores again. You’ve also got my e-mail address. Please encourage those farmers to contact me directly via e-mail (but don’t give my e-mail address out to anyone else, please) if they don’t want to talk to Karen. I want to talk to them. Thanks.”
In the second letter, Mackey answers the question about sourcing food internationally in terms of values. The first letter described the long distance sourcing policy as simple response to customer demand. Customers want asparagus in December, so we need to supply them. The second letter explains that organic food production offers farmers in poor countries better income, healthier working conditions without toxic pesticides, and improves soil degraded by non-organic market agriculture. One might disagree with the result on balance — the costs of subsidized transport, vs. the benefits of organic agriculture around the world — but the answer has integrity.
Mackey still doesn’t answer Pollan’s question — what is the share of local food in dollars, not just in number of farms. You’d expect to see a larger number of local farms, but that doesn’t say anything about the proportion of food they offer.
Overall, though, this is a great example of blogs supporting meaningful public dialog, and, if Whole Foods does what they say, using the conversation to make the world a bit better.

TechDirt is right in theory on Net Neutrality

I read TechDirt religiously. I love how they have no patience for spin and bs, and argue with reason, snark, and relentlessness against shortsighted business practices. On Net Neutrality, though, I think they’re being naive.
They’re right in theory. Of course the main issue isn’t net neutrality, it’s excessive market concentration and lack of competition. In recent years, the US government has gone back on the policy to break up Ma Bell, has removed obligations to wholesale their networks, and approved merger after merger. The unsurprising result — the neomonopolist AT&T is bragging that it’s about to exert its power by using its monopoly on the wire to control the market for content and services.
Sure, the right policy is to break up the monopoly again, one way or another. Legally split network from services. Encourage government-supported fiber, wholesaled to allow free-market competition for connectivity and content. But those things aren’t going to happen with today’s Republicans (no Teddy Roosevelts these days), and it would take a pretty serious populist revolution to pry the Democrats back from incumbent industry tool.
Sure, Net Neutrality is second best, but if that’s what we can get while building back policies that favor competition and oppose monopoly, we should take it. Hopefully the TechDirt guys aren’t dissuating techies from calling and writing their Senators to support Net Neutrality, If we don’t get this partial victory now, there will be a smaller and less powerful community to fight for the real win later.

Designing Interfaces

Jennifer Tidwell’s new O’Reilly book, Designing Interfaces, is a superb complement to Steve Krug’s web usabilty classic Don’t Make Me Think Focused on the design of websites for large constituencies, Krug emphasizes the relentless pursuite of simplicity for users who probably aren’t giving your website their full attention. Tidwell’s book addresses the continuum from mobile phones and streetside kiosks, requiring no little familiarity and partial attention, to scientific and technical analytics tools that assume expert knowledge and full attention.
Tidwell’s day job is the design of user interfaces for MatLab, a mathematics software tool for researchers, engineers and statisticians . Some of the most intriguing chapters deal with techniques for analyzing and exploring data sets. A benefit of the recent publishing date is that the book covers desktop, mobile, and web examples, with some interesting insights on how web design practices have affected conventions of desktop application design.
The book uses “pattern language” format effectively, starting with high-level patterns such as safe exploration and incremental construction, continuing to medium-levels of navigation abstraction such as the hub and spoke and pyramid matterns, and finishing with granular detail such as the choice of widgets and visual design effects. The pattern format makes the book helpful for teams searching for shared words for design effects. Another strength of the pattern language format is its focus on describing the context in which each design solution can be used to good effect. Instead of posing glib magazine cover-style cure-alls — the 50 mistakes to avoid, the 21 secrets to design success, the pattern format presumes that readers are creative pros who can work with their user base to make good decisions in context.
Tidwell’s background as a practicing ui designer gives the book a pleasing practicality and humility. She cites academic work in relevant places, such as so and so’s work on x, and such and such on why. But the citations are used to explain design practices, instead of arguing for or against a theoretical position. As an in-house designer, Tidwell is missing the arrogance of consulting gurus such as Alan Cooper and Don Norman, whose writing is designed to convey the necessity of hiring high-priced consultants in order to access the secret wisdom and power of ui design.
For Peter Merholz: the book has enough periodic insights to be appealing to experts, while helping to build shared language among teams with different vocabularies. I enjoyed it and recommend it.

Fry’s Austin has been holding my computer hostage

Fry’s in Austin still has my laptop computer. I bought the Fujitsu touchpad in Austin before I moved to California. When I was in Austin two weeks ago, the computer stopped charging. I’d had problems with the internal part of the power connector on Fujitsu laptops before, so I figured that’s what it was, and took it into Fry’s. The friendly service person said they would look into it. If they were done by Monday afternoon while I was leaving town, they’d let me know and I’d pick it up. Otherwise they’d send it to me in Austin.
A week goes by. No computer. I called them last weekend. They had diagnosed the problem on Thursday. It was the power adapter failing, not the inside part. They were waiting for me to pay an $89 diagnostic fee. They hadn’t called to tell me that’s why they waiting.
The service person said that they might have the part in stock, and that she’d be willing to go check. At that point, I made the mistake of asking her to look for the power adapter, but to ship without the power adapter if it was not in stock.
A week later I call Fry’s again. Turns out the power adapter was not in stock. So, Fry’s kept the computer, did not ship it, and didn’t notify me. The service person I talked to this weekend promised she is going to ship the computer, although Fry’s has a policy not to ship computers (now they tell me??). The service person told me they are not charging me for the shipping, not because they want to waive the fee to apologize for bad service, but because they forgot to put the shipping charges on e.arlier. The service rep was not apologetic at all. She sounded quite annoyed that I had the nerve to want my computer back, and pleased with the level of incompetence they had managed to achieve so far.

Whole Foods responds to Michael Pollan

Whole Foods CEO John Mackey blogs an extended blog defenseto Michael Pollan’s critique of Whole Foods “industrial organic” model. The response is partly satisfying; it’s a good example of a business using blogging to participate in a public conversation about it’s business; and Whole Foods could go much further to use blog openness to be better corporate citizen.
The strongest part of John Mackey’s post is his explanation of Whole Foods support for local agriculture. With statistics about support for local farms, information about the decentralized purchashing practices of local and regional stores, and a history of Whole Foods’ role in reviving local farming with organic agriculture, Mackey makes a strong case against the accusation that Whole Foods is too big these days to support small local farms. The statistics about the declining use of pesticides and artificial fertilizers in some regions were particularly inspiring.
The defense of animal raising practices is less strong. Mackey cites one big organic dairy that Whole Foods doesn’t buy from because of it’s factory farming, and another big organic dairy that has improved it’s practices; but he doesn’t name names, and therefore doesn’t do a good job of rebutting Pollan’s specific critiques of the practices of brands found the Whole Foods shelves.
Mackey justifies shipping organic produce half way around the world because customers demand the products. This is a fine explanation for Whole Foods shareholders, but a non-answer for constituences who want agriculture to be sustainable. On the other hand, Whole Foods marks the origin of its produce, so US customers who don’t want to buy products from Chile and New Zealand con’t have to. This puts Whole Foods on a continuum of ethical choices; do you want to buy more local when you can, or do you want to avoid businesses that have anything to do with global transport of food.
It’s a fine thing that Mackey and his executives used the blog podium to publicly explain Whole Foods practices. The post was open to comments, and the conversation around the post was discoverable with Technorati or other blog search tools. Michael Pollan responded to Mackey’s post in a NY Times column republished on his blog, and moderated his tone in response to Mackey’s letter, encouraging Whole Foods to do what’s in it’s power to live up to its stated philosophy instead of using the philosophy as an empty marketing slogan.
Whole Foods could do even better to communicate its day-to-day efforts on behalf of local and sustainable food by blogging more; by having divisional and regional managers blog about what they’re doing. More information about Whole Foods day-to-day execution of their practices would help build their reputation where they deserve it, and make it harder to obfuscate in areas like energy use and animal farming.
One good thing about following the blog debate was finding some interesting blogs about local food, including Small Farms and Saute Wednesday, the blog by the editor of a newspaper about sustainable food in the San Francisco bay area.