Slashdot Mirror
The New Brat Pack of Silicon Valley
bart_scriv writes "BusinessWeek looks at the current entrepreneurs of Web 2.0 via the lens of Kevin Rose and Digg. Although the article focuses on the rise and success of Digg, it also looks at the ethos of Web 2.0 and its successful companies, including YouTube, Del.icio.us, Facebook and Xfire. From the article: 'Clearly much has changed since 1999, and Rose and his fellow wealth punks have little in common with the sharp-talking MBAs in crisp khakis and blue button-downs who rushed the Valley as the NASDAQ climbed. In the late 1990s, entrepreneurs were the supplicants, and Sand Hill Road, dotted with venture-capital firms, was the mecca. Dot-commers relied on VCs for the millions needed to buy hardware, rent servers, hire designers, and advertise like crazy to bring in the eyeballs. For their big stakes of, say, $15 million for 20% of a company, venture capitalists received board seats, control of the management levers, and most of the equity. Now, it's more like: Maybe we'll let you throw a few bucks our way -- if you get it. Otherwise, get lost.'"
Meet the new web, same as the old web.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
...a bitter and angry Rob Malda told reports looking for a quote to "Get the hell off my lawn".
"Web 2.0 and its successful companies, including YouTube, Del.icio.us, Facebook and Xfire."
I'm sorry, Xfire?
Am I the only one who hasn't heard of Xfire or/and it's success?
I remember Kevin Rose's other ventures. He was lame on screen savers. He had that lame psuedo hacker web show (of which I cracked his site and figured out how to get free t-shirts). It seems odd that he was a founder of digg. His other projects were pretty crappy.
If an officer ever threatens to taze you, say you have a pacemaker.
The economy in a downfall, interest rates lower than the inflation, people with money trying hard to find a place for investment. That's what we have today.
On the other hand, not too many people want to go down the dangerous road of self employment in the IT sector after the dot.com bubble burst. More so since if you have experience, are a good coder, know your stuff and don't quote "web design" as the core feature of your CV, you have no troubles finding a moderately to well paying job. Those would be the people to go for self employment, though, because without any experience (and connections) in the market, self employment is suicide.
In other words, there's a lot of investment money and not many people daring to pick it up. It kinda feels like dot.com all over again.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
So, the perpetrators of the current web2.0 bubble has little in common with the dot-com bubble?
Let's see...
Fly-by-night operations... check.
Crazed Investors... check.
Funny naming conventions... check.
Non-standard work-places... check.
Failure-to-profit... check.
Oh yeah, SO VERY LITTLE in common.
Well, let's see what they don't have in common...
Different clothes.
Different year.
Umm... Yeah, that's it.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
1992 called. They want their inflated ego back
Open Source Drum Kit, LPLC deve board - mjhdesigns.com
It appears to be a lesson every of the Web 2.0 CEO must learn: pop up your human side, dress casual and don't show your wealth. And the best of all: make people say poor guy; manipulate people's sympathy (Rose's girlfriend sad story, sleepless etc), it will open all doors
cut this signatures madness. stop reading them now!
Silicon Valley to Business Week: Get a grip!
Ok, so there are a number of "Web 2.0" entrepreneurs who aren't in it soley for the money. (Or equally likely, IMO, some entrepreneurs are now standing pat in the hopes of a bigger payday later... but that's another issue).
So what? Back in the "Web 1.0" days there were also a good number of folks who didn't immediately go off the deep end when VC money became available. I was personally involved with two startups just before the dotbomb burst, and both had offers that they turned down because they wanted to keep control. This is nothing new, despite the ridiculous article. (Another hint to BW: don't try for "hip"--you just come off as lame)
And the folks in the story are still definitely a minority, as far as I can tell. There are still lots of folks out there who are trying the old scam of trying to get VCs to give them money based on a business plan and a Flash demo. It's just that now instead of "we'll give it away at a loss, but make it up on volume" there's the "we'll create a 'community' and sell advertising" theme.
Nothing to see here. Move along.
Interested in a Flash-based MAME front end? Visit mame.danzbb.com
I really wish people would stop using version numbers where they don't belong...
There really should be some sort of service that lets you order someone to smack those people upside the head, preferably with a nice AJAX interface.
I'm going to start using a totally fictitious term that sounds like it might be related to the Internet, like iWebby or something like that, and then see how long before the businessweeks start naming 'players', 'moguls', and 'leaders'.
Talk about form over substance.
I can see it now - "businessweek interview iWebby founder and lead VC. There no money - yet, but like web 2.0 and web 3.0 and web 4.0, the profound impact of iWebby and the soon to be termed iWebby 2.0 will change everything, and give birth to new horizons. Free of the traditional burdens of function, specifics, and meaning, iWebby should grow unfettered and furious to take over the Internet."
Soon followed by the famous iWebby bust.
"We are all geniuses when we dream"
- E.M. Cioran
In web 2.0 did they fix that problem with the slashdot "editors" that made them into nincompoops who don't know the difference between "then" and "than"?
I reported that problem ages ago.
Yeah. It must be pretty bad if not even the trolls read Slashdot anymore.
Man is a slave because freedom is difficult, whereas slavery is easy.
...the more they get the lame. And nothing is lamer than Digg and Kevin.
OK, in all fairness here's where I stand on Digg vs. Slashdot:
-Sort through the massive amount of crap on Digg for the latest news bits that might be worthwhile. On Digg it'a all about quantity, not quality. Or to put it another way, "How do we do it? VOLUME"!!!
-Hit Slashdot and find that some of the stories you found interesting on Digg are featured here and there is a better quality of discussion (amazingly) than there is on Digg. So this is where you get social. Digg is just an unsorted pile of crap.
-Yeah, I'm aware that the stories are "voted" to the front page by the readers. That's fine as long as your readers aren't idiots. The more popular Digg gets, the more idiots they collect. Therefore the quality of the front page represents what the idiots want to see. Not what actual, thinking readers are interested in.
Now, what I can also thank Digg for is the effect it's had on Slashdot. Not so much internally, but externally. I don't give a rat's ass if Taco and crew are scrambling to try and compete with Digg. That's not the effect I'm talking about. I'm talking about the somewhat homeopathic effect they've had on Slashdot. By becoming more popular, they've lured away most of the idiots. I've noticed that the level of discussion on Slashdot has improved since Digg 3.0 was unleashed. I think that a lot of the morons who annoyed the piss out of me after Slashdot became popular (I've been here since 1997 when I used to be CaptEno) couldn't resist that suction of stupid that Digg presented. The only negative effect I've seen is much slower story submission. Whereas the stories used to tick by quickly, now we're lucky if we see five new stories in a day.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
Bandwidth nearly free, hardware cheap, software free. All you need is time, skills, devotion and a good idea. Who needs VC? Back in 1999 people where shedding millions just to get a proper DB up and running. Nowadays all it takes is two clicks of a mouse and a 3 minute download. Hell, you can get yourself a new server after working a few extra shifts at Mc Donalds if the need arises. My cheap-ass PDA has more horsepower than my workstation back then. It's the age of Cyberpunk, pure and simple.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Techdirt puts this article into nice perspective.
Providing no real value, but pumping the stock market.
90-95% of Web surfers do nothing. They don't create content. They don't participate. The "Social Web" is millions of people waiting for something to happen and a small number of neurotics who think what they say is important or get a weird kick out the whole circus.
In the meantime, you throw advertizing at the aimless creatures and place your bets.
It's the hypnosis revenue model of television and radio. People have not changed. If this guy's ~really~ smart, he'll convert his "market value" into cold hard cash (and not Google stock) right now.
Rich And Stupid is not so bad as Working For Rich And Stupid.
On July 18, AOL tried to lure Digg's top 50 contributors with $1,000 a month to switch to its site, which led Rose to rant on his weekly podcast that Calcanis and AOL were trying to "squash Digg." The corporate giant's failure to gain inroads so far shows that simply copying Digg won't work. It also spells out why Old Media types are so afraid of being eaten alive by the creative destruction these young new players are delivering. The barriers to entry are now so low that all it takes is a laptop and a $50-a-month Internet hookup to make a kid the next mogul. Emphasis mine.
To quote the late great Hubert Farnsworth: "Huh-wha?"
Are the BW writers totally logic-impaired? AOL==Old Media? Creative destruction? Barriers to entry are low because all it takes is X and Y? Are they deliberately ignoring all the things that X and Y depend upon?
Here = refers to a place (ie: It's over here)
Hear = to listen with your ears (ie: You would probably only hear of Xfire if you are a gamer)
Ok.. the term "brat pack" wasn't at all funny when they were using it to describe the teen stars of "The Breakfast Club" in the 1980s. Could we please not resurrect this particular dead lingo?
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
Is this the same Kevin Rose that's hosting AOTS on G4?
We're through being cool! Eliminate the ninnies and the twits! -Devo
totally left out last winter's flap about Rose and Digg banning dissenting or questioning voices from their midst. Digg faces censorship accusations.
I should rebrand my site! People think that is what I do now anyway when they see the logo.
Huh? I never really got the idea that most people in I.T. went down the self-employment road out of choice, so much as out of desperation!
At least here in the midwest, that's what I've seen, time and time again. Someone with specific talents in an area of I.T. gets laid off from a good-paying job with a large-ish firm, can't find another job in a reasonable time-frame, so they finally decide to venture out on their own.
For example, before my current job, I worked for a couple years for a guy's start-up business doing computer "house-calls". (He had a number of business contracts, largely forged from a lucky break. One of his residential customers turned out to have lots of influence over people in her church, which was in a well-to-do part of town. All the business owners who went to that church started using him for their computer needs.) Anyway - before he started that business up, he spent years as a software developer for IBM. But as we all know, IBM has done a few rounds of "cutbacks" since the dot-com days, and he was a casualty. Luckily for him, he apparently received enough severance pay to invest in his new company.
As for the trend of creating new web content/services, I've seen more crestivity lately than I remember seeing at the height of the "boom". In the 90's, the "great new ideas" were usually just poor attempts to market something via the net instead of "brick and mortar" retail, and it often made no sense to the buyer. (Buy your dog food online? Why?! So you can pay all that shipping and your dog's still stuck with no food for a couple days until the bag arrives? Buy your clothing online, where you can't even try it on to see if it fits first?)
I can't speak for the state of "investors" right now, but I'd think the current offerings bear a much closer look than the silly things they funded in the past!
My own personal "short list" would probably include:
www.meebo.com (These guys have a great litle idea here. Build IM into a web page.)
www.mozy.com (Lots of people want Internet-based backup solutions, but this one looks more promising than most I've seen - and they let you use the basics for FREE.)
www.zoho.com (Haven't looked at this one too closely yet, but it might really fill a niche for small offices. There's often a need for a business owner, his/her receptionist, and several employees to have access to shared calendars and resources for appointment scheduling and so on. Right now, options like MS Exchange and Outlook are overpriced/overkill for it, and it's better to be able to access the data from anywhere, regardless of the apps installed on a given machine.)
....and all I got was this T-shirt.
...the fricking site didn't take so long to reload! Once an article gets over 50 comments, forget it. Molasses.
damaged by dogma
I take it you don't play Counter-Strike? ;-)
Yeah everyone has already explained what it is... but if you (actively) play Counter-Strike, or Quake III and what-not, it's a good tool.
Only if:
Moreover, if YouTube ever tried to do something like that and made money from it, I imagine an awful lot of people would suddenly be interested in how their illegally copied material was being redistributed by YouTube, since any hope it had of a viable defence along the lines of automated processes would evaporate almost instantly. (Example: I know for a fact that teaching videos related to some of my hobbies have been ripped and put on sites like this, and that this was done without the consent of the teachers and production teams involved in making the videos. These things have a relatively small market in the first place, and are usually produced by tiny outfits who don't make a lot of profit off them, so blatant infringement of the copyright does hurt.)
IANAL, but I've been around long enough to see that this isn't black and white.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
besides 12 year olds posting?
Slashdot = -1 Redundant, Asperger, kdawson FUD, Libertarian, and Linux
I only ask because quite often digg will link to a video on youtube and on you tube there is a count of how many people have played the video. Quite often this will be a number of around 2,500. certainly low 1000's seems common with a world wide audience shouldnt more people be looking at the video links from digg.
Blarney Quality Restaurant, Plants
Because it points out the bleeding obvious to its parent, who seems to be knee-jerking at the mere idea of a 'content license' without apparently bothering to read said license.
Argh.
It's also open source.
I know for a fact they are not based above the SF Weekly office. The SF Weekly office is next door to mine, and I have a friend at Digg. We do not hang out for lunch, because he's a bit too far away.
With such a simple fact wrong, I would not be suprised if more of it was incorrect.
"Meet the new web, same as the old web."
What's insightful about saying you run mosaic?
Jay McInerney and Bret Easton Ellis called, and they're totally going to write something bad about you if you don't mention the other Brat Pack.
0/5 sites must be some kind of record.
All these ad-supported services are chasing the same pool of advertising spending. In that sense, they're competitors of Google. Now AOL has gone advertising-supported, so they're going after the same revenue.
The result is probably going to be that online advertising rates go through the floor, like banner ads did. We'll also see some sites get desperate and try annoying ads, popups, popunders, interstitials, and adware. Total spending on advertising is not going to increase; it has to stay a fraction of total retail sales. Somebody has to lose.
Print newspapers are already getting killed by this. Craigslist is draining off their classified ad revenue, and now Google has a deal witih the Associated Press. As a result, most newspapers really have very little content today. Take a typical newspaper today and mark all the articles that were generated by the newspaper's own reporters, and did not start as a press release. You might find ten per day. Only a few papers still have big reporting staffs.
There are two things that need to move to the web to finally kill off newspapers - real estate ads and car ads. So far, that hasn't happened. People have tried; Cars.com was supposed to replace auto dealerships, but today it's just a lead generation service. Realtor.com tried to take over real estate, but hasn't made a big dent. Now that's where to work on "Web 2.0" ideas - those are huge markets with real money being done badly.
So a Brat Packer would be one who either packs the meat into the brat casing, or packs the brat into someplace that I don't want to think about.
BRIAN: At digg, um, we ah, we talk about digg... about people who post on digg.
BENDER: So it's sorta social...demented and sad, but social. Right?
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
- The cool thing I've noticed about Reddit is it has some of the democratic, fast-paced nature of Digg with a *much* more intelligent community.
- Reddit also has a much cleaner layout than Digg and is more useable.
- And of course, Reddit has none of that admin censorship that Digg has been bitched at about recently.
So try Reddit out if you think Digg is lame andI removed two bookmarks and feeds this week which I finally had enough of. The first was BoingBoing. A site I've loved for years, with its quirky, slightly camp slant on the world. But you know what it finally was?
Amy Bloody Crehore I just don't like her paintings. But shoved down my throat day after day after day.... it made me realise how parochial Boingboing.net really is.
The there's Digg. Such promise, but they must think we're stupid and can't see the whole site is rigged. Yesterday there were a couple of items on the Middle East. Every single comment that was bloodthirsty, arab bashing, offensive warmongering hate was modded right up, and every single comment that was even mildy anti-Israeli was modded right down. It wasn't even done subtley, just really really obviously. There is no way, on the basis of statistics alone, that represents a balance of views, even if it were limited soley to American teenagers.
So I deleted Digg. Not so much because I was angry at the comments, I've heard it all before, but because Digg is a pretense and a fraud, and the puppet masters behind it stupidly exposed themselves over a bit of politics.
FTFA: "Rose's social stock has climbed,too. He has more than 11,000 friends on MySpace. He was a runner-up in blog ValleyWag's "Hottest Guy in the Valley" contest.....and he co-hosts a hot weekly video podcast called Diggnation.....At a party for the 50th show, Rose was mobbed by fans and even photographed signing a pretty brunette's cleavage."
You know you've arrived when you have 11K+ friends on MySpace and signed a brunette's ta-ta's. OMG, a real girl even!!!
Yes, these are the classic indicators of true success in this life. All your cleavage are belong to Kevin Rose...
I loved the Brat Pack from the eighties. The Brat Pack their talking about here obviously doesn't have as much money as the young actors in the eighties did or know how to hide it better!
Peace is not the absence of trouble but the presence of God.
Almost as surprising as seeing Kevin Rose on the cover of Business Week was seeing him on the cover of People Magazine. Good going, Kev!
That's the source... Loop the loop... http://blog.cognitivelabs.com/2006/08/slash-diggre ddit-asymmetrical-media.html