All Things Digital

If we were an actual baby, AllThingsD.com would be just about to walk by now.

Hopefully, we have done better than that over the past year and we hope to do even more in the year ahead, attempting to give readers the very best tech news and analysis married with the high standards The Wall Street Journal is known for.

At the same time, we have also tried to capture the excitement and energy of the blogosphere, in what has been an entrepreneurial effort within a major media company.

The site officially launched on April 26, 2007, one year and two days ago.

No presents, but your presence over the next year, as we make even more improvements to our work-in-progress site.

Thanks, of course, go first to my amazing partner, Walt Mossberg, as well as our crack staff (click here to see them in all their glory), partners, designers and all the many Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones folks involved.

To mark the past year, BoomTown could spend a lot of time deeply ruminating on how blogging is so very different than mainstream journalism (much more fun, much less sleep).

Or I could ponder the agonizing quest to improve standards and accuracy in the blogosphere (”I am I, Don Quixote, the lord of La Mancha/Destroyer of evil am I/I will march to the sound of the trumpets of glory/Forever to conquer or die.”)

Or I could discuss widgets and how they have changed my life (I don’t know what I would have done had Scramble not inspired my empty soul!).

But, no!

Instead, I will just re-post here one of the very first posts I had up on that first day, about…drum roll, please…my worries about the situation at Yahoo (YHOO).

I don’t want to say I am a psychic or anything, but in this piece, called “Terry in Turnaround,” I begin my obsessive coverage of the Internet portal, which I thought a year ago could be headed for trouble.

(Interestingly, my other post that day was about Facebook trying to become more mature.)

Read more »

This week, I had lunch with one of the nicest young Web entrepreneurs around the scene, WordPress Founder Matt Mullenweg.

We use a custom WordPress.com installation for this site, which has worked out well for us, and the start-up also hosts AllThingsD.com. We also got a very nice hoodie.

In all seriousness, the company started as an open-source blogging software project at WordPress.org with Mullenweg as founding developer, while WordPress.com is for-profit and is run by Mullenweg and others at a start-up called Automattic.

Mullenweg came to San Francisco from his hometown of Houston to work on WordPress and other projects for CNET in 2004. He left a year later to work full-time on the development of WordPress.

It and others like it quickly rode the wave of an ever-growing trend of self-publishing, which has been increasingly embraced by both the single person writing about their cat to the large-scale media companies looking to develop more dynamic properties online.

WordPress and Automattic (which also runs Akismet, an anti-comment and trackback spam software service) has been the frequent target of takeover speculation.

But, while Automattic has reportedly considered those options, as well as hooking up with other companies like Sphere (which was just bought for $35 million in cash by AOL [TWX]), Mullenweg seems just as determined to build out his simple publishing platform, by adding ad networks and all sorts of bells and whistles to the offerings.

In fact, WordPress competitor Six Apart did just that last week with its acquisition of the New York-based ad, design and consulting services firm Apperceptive.

So I will bet Mullenweg probably has some news of his own, when he gives a short speech at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco this morning.

We’ll see, but in this video, Mullenweg talks with BoomTown–after we admit to an obvious man crush on him–about the progress in the blog-publishing arena and where it is all going.

Here’s the video:

While the tech blogosphere fiddles away on navel-gazing stories–Who are the top tech bloggers? Do they Twitter to get to the top? Or do they FriendFeed? Do they feed friends while tweeting? More importantly, will there be chicken wings?–I’d advise anyone interested in the much more serious issue of making some money from Web 2.0 to take a gander at ReadWriteWeb’s piece yesterday on enterprise spending in the arena.

According to a new report from Forrester Research (FORR) the site references in the post, enterprises will spend much more in the coming years on social networking, RSS, blogs, widgets and such, making it a $4.6 billion market by 2013.

Here is an interesting data table from the ReadWriteWeb post (click on the image to make it larger):

Of course, that doesn’t mean that Twitter’s creators should be jumping up and down now that an actual business plan might be surfacing.

In fact, a lot of popular consumer products might not port over to the business market, even if the concept does.

And, naturally, the old grumps in the IT departments loom large over what gets into corporations and what does not, the ReadWriteWeb piece notes, although other enterprise departments like marketing are already enamored with Web 2.0 tools.

Still security and scaling issues remain paramount, and start-ups that have pioneered these apps in the consumer space might lose business to big copycats like IBM (IBM) and Microsoft (MSFT).

I saw real evidence of the shift at an event in Silicon Valley last week, related to Rohit Bhargava’s new book “Personality Not Included: Why Companies Lose Their Authenticity and How Great Brands Get It Back.”

And, although I expected much more of a corporate love fest, since the affable Bhargava is an SVP of digital strategy and marketing at Ogilvy Public Relations, it turned out to be a very interesting discussion of ways companies could embrace Web 2.0.

I was particularly struck with the very sharp questions from the Silicon Valley-heavy corporate audience too, who were savvy but still curious about the potential pitfalls and benefits of such tools.

Such discussions will be even more interesting, as they percolate across the country to places where most people are just hearing the word widget.

You know, pretty much everywhere except here.

Here is a clip from my favorite new television show, “Tracey Ullman’s State of the Union,” which recently debuted on Showtime.

The British comedian does spot-on impressions of average people and the errant celebrity too, including a pitch-perfect one (right down to yelling for her sister Agape) of blogger Arianna Huffington with the signature line: Blogs and Kisses!

And in this video, accepting an award at the Bloggies, the hysterical moment when Ullman/Huffington tells a competing right-wing blogger to have her “YouTubes tied.”

Here’s the video and also the promotional one for the show that is pretty funny too:

“Demo needs to die,” said TechCrunch Editor Michael Arrington yesterday.

Oh, my. Oh, dear. Not more bloody tangoing!?!

The pugnacious tech blogger–who was last seen slapping around other tech bloggers who deigned to also raise money for their ventures, much as he has been doing–made this classy statement in an interview with Daniel Terdiman of CNET’s Geek Gestalt yesterday, about scheduling his TechCrunch 50 conference at the same time as the fall conference of the longtime leader in the start-up conference space, Demo, run by Chris Shipley.

(Shipley’s response is here.)

DemoFall is September 7th to the 9th, while TC 50 is September 8th through 10th.

“It’s just an old-school model,” continued Arrington to Terdiman. “It clearly involves pay to play, and what we’re offering is better.”

Not satisfied to just schedule his event at the same time as Demo–which is fine, I guess, given this is America and we all have the right to be aggressively, and even pointlessly, competitive–the second shot is at the $18,500 fee that Demo demonstrators pay, once they get invited to that conference.

TC 50 does not charge, which, to be fair, would be my choice too.

Still, given his inaugural TC 40 conference sold out and was, said Arrington to Geek Gestalt, profitable, the channeling of the Corleone Family in the online tech space seems a bit much to me.

After all, despite the fact that Arrington recently characterized tech blog sites as competing gangs (”You can do just about anything you want, but the politically savvy folks tend to arm themselves to the teeth and gang together to protect their property. Everyone else is in the middle of chaos, either fighting blindly for attention or politely asking–by linking early and linking often–if they can join the big Gang.”), let’s be honest.

The whole group of us together would lose badly in a fair fight with my son’s kindergarten class.

Of course, they bite. We should know better.

(Full disclosure: Walt Mossberg and I have been running a conference, called D: All Things Digital, for many years. D6 is in late May and is sold out. Nonetheless, full coverage of the event and also full video of the interviews with tech and media players on stage–including Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Bewkes, Howard Stringer, Mark Zuckerberg and many others–will be on this site. We also do a few demos, so until then, we fervently hope to find no horse heads in our beds.)

As BoomTown argued yesterday in a piece on the landscape of Yahoo if Microsoft completes its purchase of the Internet portal, Yahoo (YHOO) certainly knows how to make online content.

As we wrote: “For all its history, right down to today, even with all these dumb widgets competing for users’ attention, Yahoo continues to natively understand how to to entertain, inform and serve up their own and others content to consumers.”

Case in point, an attractive new site it launched today called Shine, which is aimed at women from their mid-20s to their mid-50s.

As you can see from the image below, it is a very well-done site, incorporating a lot of the good stuff in the same genre from around the Web.

Does it look a bit like the sassy properties of Sugar Inc.? Is it light and frothy like Glam Media? Does it feel a bit like DailyCandy, in its focus on the shopping as a sport? And, is it as helpful as iVillage (and does it even “borrow” a wiggly “i”)?

Yes indeedy to all!

Imitation is a form of flattery, I suppose, although Yahoo’s site feels fresher than any out there and it has an aspirational and hip feel that women will like, I think.

I’d call it an Eat-Pray-Love mood, with a lot of Oprah mixed in.

More importantly, it is clearly a good market for Yahoo’s advertisers, who all aim to reach this high-spending but underserved demographic online.

Yahoo is trying to reinvigorate its lackluster efforts here, as well as making plans to further drill down into related topics like parenting, sex, food and wellness that are present on the Shine site now.

While it looks a lot like a blog plus, Shine obviously has social written all over it and a wide range of communications tools will be easy to layer over the service.

It also is smart in its partnering with lots of media companies like Hearst and in pointing across the Web to give users a more comprehensive offering.

But can Yahoo compete in a very crowded field with such a late entrant? Probably. It recently put up a celebrity site called OMG, which has grabbed significant traffic quickly.

And while we honestly could care less if men look bad in skinny jeans (um, yes!), there is probably something on the very-full page of interest to everyone.

The Shine site has Brandon Holley as its editor-in-chief, but the effort in the arena is being helmed by Amy Iorio, who is the VP/GM of Yahoo’s Lifestyles unit. It all rolls up under Yahoo Media SVP Scott Moore.

While Yahoo PR will probably blah-blah too much about “starting points,” which is the latest buzz word from top brass, related to Shine, it should just hush up and realize Yahoo’s many owned-and-operated media conglomerations just need decent support and promotion to stay as strong as they are and to keep them as one of the bright spots at the company.

Here’s a screen shot of the site (click on the image once to make it appear on another page and then again to make it larger):

For those heading into the weekend, don’t miss this post from tech blogger Om Malik (pictured here, but the cigar is now a thing of the past), assessing his life and work three months after he suffered a serious heart attack.

Titled “Off Topic: What the Past Three Months Have Taught Me,” it is actually quite on topic for anyone who works a bit too hard and is a bit too connected (that would be everyone reading this right now).

While Malik has changed the obvious things–no more smoking, less meat-eating and adding exercise into his daily life–he notes that it is more the “little things that have proved to be a challenge.”

Because he is a true geek, Malik reaches for tech metaphors when trying to describe the state of his new being, comparing himself to a MacBook Air.

Not the sleek and thin part, but because “the Macbook Air comes with [a] minuscule amount of storage space, so one needs to be careful about how to use it. The machine’s battery power limitations remind me of how much time I have to devote to work on a daily basis.”

Thus, gone from Malik’s hard drive: excessive public appearances, too much travel and too many RSS feeds.

In addition, he realized something my grandmother always used to tell me: There are no indispensable people. Even if your blog is called GigaOm.

Through his experience, Malik said he learned to rely on his team more and stopped micromanaging. “You empower people, and in turn they power you to do good things,” he wrote.

And perhaps most important of all for those who live in the pressure cooker of Silicon Valley: Get a cardiac heart check-up now.

Could it be a digital indicator that the Blue states are taking back ground from the Red ones–at least in cyberspace?

In February, for the first time ever, Arianna Huffington’s liberal political mega-blog and news site, the Huffington Post, has apparently surpassed the longtime mighty blog leader, Matt Drudge of the conservative/populist-leaning Drudge Report, according to recent traffic data reports from both comScore (SCOR) and Nielsen Online. (Both are pictured here.)

According to data from Nielsen Online, for example, the Huffington Post’s traffic–as measured by monthly unique visitors in the U.S., at home and work–has more than tripled since February of 2007, when it had about 1.1 million unique visitors; by February of 2008, unique visitors had risen to 3.7 million.

In that same month, the Drudge Report had 3.4 million (it had 2.75 million in February of 2007).

Data from comScore is different, as measurement data often is, but shows the same trend (see chart below). The Huffington Post jumped from 457,000 unique visitors in the U.S. at all locations, but had risen to 2.3 million in February of 2008.

For Drudge, comScore reported that it had 1.2 million unique visitors in February of 2007 and 1.6 million in February of 2008.

Of course, internal logs at both sites are likely to show much higher numbers than either comScore or Nielsen Online, by a factor of even four or five times.

Sources at the Huffington Post, for example, said that logs show 12 million uniques for the last month, which they attribute to the addition of new vertical sites within the main site, as well as an increased interest in political news and analysis.

In comparison, Drudge’s site notes it had 21.8 million visits in the past 24 hours. But the site does not define this figure, and it is not and cannot be compared to unique visitors.

“We couldn’t be more pleased with our traffic growth and look forward to continuing to build out our brand,” wrote Arianna Huffington in an email, asking about the traffic spike on her site.

(BoomTown sent an email to the Drudge Report’s contact email on its site late last night, asking for a comment about the data, and will post a reply if I receive one.)

So what prompted TechCrunch Editor Michael Arrington to pen a pugnacious piece on how blogs should not be raising so much venture capital and instead roll themselves into a “Dream Team,” with the unusual title of “More Bloggers Raising Money. Here Comes Politics. And Here Comes My Rant” yesterday?

Well, besides garnering Arrington a big dollop of traffic and attention, which is perhaps one of the blog entrepreneur’s most impressive talents, could it have something to do with the fact that he’s been busy recently talking to several well-known tech blogs about joining a roll-up organized by TechCrunch itself?

Or that he has told several people I spoke to that TechCrunch was considering doing this by raising as much as $15 million, giving it a $35 million valuation?

Reached by email last night, the voluble Arrington declined to comment.

Thus, a BoomTown translation of his TechCrunch piece is Job No. 1!

Arrington wrote: More blogs are raising venture capital, we’re hearing from people they’ve pitched. Newcomer Silicon Alley Insider is looking for a $3 million to $5 million round, if reports are correct. And paidContent is pitching for a second round in that same range (paidContent raised a round of “less than $1 million” in 2006). We’re also hearing that paidContent is trying to sell the company for $15 million or more, and just bail out with some spending money.

Translation: If that scalawag Henry Blodget thinks he can steal even an iota of my thunder, he better get ready to rumble. And while it is entirely incorrect that paidContent is selling itself or raising that much money, I love the smell of napalm in the morning and FUD in the blogosphere!

[BoomTown actually contacted paidContent’s founder, Rafat Ali, who strongly reiterated that the site might raise a very small amount of money, nowhere close to $3 million to $5 million, and was not trying to sell the company at all.]

Arrington wrote: These rumored deals come as funding for bloggers is heating up in general. Just a month ago VentureBeat reported a $320,000 raise. In 2007 we saw Sugar Inc. ($10 million), GigaOm ($1 million), Xconomy, Blogher ($3.5 million) and The Huffington Post ($10 million) raise venture capital. That’s at least $25 million in 2007 invested in blogs and blog networks.

As far as we know, no significant investments were made in blogs in 2005. Weblogs, Inc. raised around $300,000 in 2004, but before they got around to spending it they had sold themselves to AOL (TWX) for an estimated $25 million. The investors, including Mark Cuban, received 15x on their initial investment.

Translation: And if that elfin Jason Calacanis can score, where’s MY payoff!?! I mean, I am the Jason Calacanis of Web 2.0, aren’t I!? The Mac Daddy of the widget economy! The Sultan of Zing! And did Calacanis ever have the chutzpah to pose for a picture lighting cigars with a handful of crisp, flaming Benjamins! I think not!

Arrington wrote: But apart from that first 2004 investment in Weblogs, Inc., there haven’t been any sales or liquidity events to suggest these investments will be a success. And back then blogging was a cakewalk. Most bloggers linked to each other constantly in a state of brotherly or sisterly love. No one was making any money or getting much attention, so for the most part people got along (with notable exceptions like engadget/gizmodo, who play to win).

Translation: The rain may never fall till after sundown./By eight, the morning fog must disappear./In short, there’s simply not/A more congenial spot/For happily-ever-aftering than here/In Camelot.

Arrington wrote: Those salad days are long gone. Writers suddenly want to be paid market wages, far above the $5 per post that they received two years ago. No, we’re talking a big salary, with benefits, and stock options. There went half your margins at least.

Translation: Wages?! Big salary!? Benefits!? Stock options!!!??? Half your margins!!? Who do these people think they are? The Web 2.0 shooting stars I write about incessantly in TechCrunch?

Arrington wrote: And writing good content is only half the battle. You have to figure out the complex, dynamic web of politics between bloggers and mainstream media before you post to know where to get support. And you’ll need support in the form of links from other prominent bloggers. An early push can take a post and make it a headline on TechMeme, which leads to page views and notice by sponsors. But since blogging is almost by definition a conversation between bloggers, fights tend to break out over emotional issues. Cliques develop. Can you count on them to support you down the road?

Translation: TechCrunch is from Mars, Valleywag is from Venus.

Arrington wrote: Personally, I’ve found that if a fight is necessary, fight clean and fight hard. Make it as bloody as possible and end it fast, with no loose ends dangling about. Leave no lingering emotional stone unturned. When everyone gets up and dusts themselves off, the issue should have been resolved one way or the other, and both sides should be happy to shake hands and tango another day, even if the handshaking is done privately. Those that aren’t capable of doing that tend to push themselves to the outskirts of the blogosphere, where their main job is to lob in attacks at random intervals, pursuing long-forgotten insults.

Translation: Bloody tango? Ouch. Ew. Yuk. And handshakes after that seems unhygienic. But let’s solider on. Aha! Another Broadway musical clue! The Jets are gonna have their day/Tonight/The Jets are gonna have their way/Tonight/The Puerto Ricans grumble/”Fair fight”/But if they start a rumble/We’ll rumble ‘em right.

Arrington wrote: So today, at best, I’d describe the blogosphere as a frontier town with no lawman (I mean, O’Reilly has a badge on, but no gun and no jail). You can do just about anything you want, but the politically savvy folks tend to arm themselves to the teeth and gang together to protect their property. Everyone else is in the middle of chaos, either fighting blindly for attention or politely asking (by linking early and linking often) if they can join the big Gang.

Translation: Wait, now the metaphor has shifted to the Old West? OK, we can keep up: Anything you can do, I can do better./I can do anything better than you./No, you can’t./Yes, I can./No, you can’t./Yes, I can./No, you can’t./Yes, I can, Yes, I can!

Arrington wrote: And now that the big guys in the Gang are being injected with capital, hiring tens of employees and expanding their businesses, they suddenly have a lot more to lose. Linking is never done just because. Rather, links are your political capital that must be expended appropriately. Don’t link at the right time and in two weeks when you’re pushing your own headline, you’ll wish you had. When you stop seeing other blogs as people you admire and want to discuss things with, and start to see them as your competitor, your brain shifts and you stop linking the way you had previously.

Translation: Hey, how did we get to Washington, D.C. and the inside of Sen. Hillary Clinton’s cerebral cortex in the midst of yet another compromised political calculation? It’s like we’re on “Fantastic Voyage”!

Arrington: Luckily, the newbie bloggers are there to fill in the links when they’re needed. That’s why, if you are a mid-level blogger, you are likely courted by the bigger blogs looking to get your support. If you know what’s going on and are willing to play the game, you can see your blog rise very, very quickly. Choose the wrong blog, though, and you may find yourself alone and lonely in your forgotten blog.

As an aside, when I see a young but promising blogger, I’ll start linking to him or her constantly to build them up (others, like Winer, Scoble, Jarvis and Rubel did that for me). The goal is to help move them up to a position of influence as quickly as possible. The more non-crazy influencers in the game, the easier it is to ignore the noise generators and the better the overall conversation becomes. Over the last year, for example, Silicon Alley Insider, CenterNetworks, LouisGray and Mathew Ingram I’ve been pushing hard. These guys rarely agree with me, but when they talk I listen because they’ve put some thought into what they are saying and how they are saying it. Those guys haven’t hit the big politics yet, and tend to link out a lot to everyone. They are a very important part of the ecosystem–pushing their link votes toward stories they find interesting and helping those other bloggers get headlines and maintain their place in the Gang.

Translation: Next stop, the stylings of Mr. Michael Corleone! There are many things my father taught me here in this room. He taught me: keep your friends close, but your enemies closer.

Arrington wrote: So what’s the point of this rant? Well, all this money flowing into the blogosphere is disrupting the complicated and emotional, but also stable way things are done. Bloggers with money and employees and health care programs and boards of directors and shareholders have to play politics with a whole new group of people, splitting them away from what they do best–Fighting the Blog War. Their behavior can become erratic as they have to decide to tone down their writing to get a certain type of sponsor on board, which in turn lets them make payroll. Investors want to see growth, so more and more blogs are launched, but perhaps without the right talent to grow it into a long-term business.

If a VC hands you a check, their intention is not to hang around for 20 years while you build a nice lifestyle business for yourself. What they want to see is an exit, preferably a 10x or higher exit, within 3 to 4 years. But something tells me that few of these networks are going to be able to grow quite as easily as they think and reach those liquidity events. The talent is, increasingly, locked up. Even when new talent is discovered or trained, every niche has serious heavyweights already there with page views and advertising dollars to back them up for a long fight.

Translation: Finally, the point! Which is: Assimilate or Die!

Arrington wrote: At some point it’s going to become painfully obvious that the only way to get to a massive valuation is for the top talent to band together in a company where they each have an equity stake and therefore a reason to work all night on that next great story. They’ll each have their own space to stretch their legs and let their personality run around a little. Someone needs to pony up a big round of financing around an existing blog, or perhaps a new entity, and then start rolling them up into a big fat CNET-crushing $200 million/year in revenue business.

Translation: This is my sneaky but clever way of floating a trial balloon of an effort I am already trying to organize. The existing blog? Mine! The new entity? Run by me! The $200 million a year? Mine, again! Now, enough about me–what do you think of me?

Arrington wrote: It can happen. In fact it’s almost certainly going to happen. But if you bloggers go out there and raise $3 million to $5 million on say a $10 million valuation, you’ve just priced yourself out of the roll-up. That option will be closed to you, and you’ll be stuck out in the cold, taking life-support payments from Federated Media or another ad network, and having a generally awful time running your business.

Translation: Luca Brasi sleeps with the fishes.

Arrington wrote: What I’d like to see, and even be a part of, is the blogger equivalent to the 1992 U.S. Men’s Basketball Dream Team. That team could take CNET apart in a year, hire the best of the survivors there, and then move on to bigger prey.

Translation: After we are done bloody-tangoing with Neil Ashe at CNET (CNET), Owen Thomas and his evil overlord Nick Denton better sleep with one eye open.

Arrington wrote: Just the thought of being a part of something like that has held us back from raising any outside capital at all. I believe we have the beginning of a team that can play a role in this new Dream Team.

So think twice before taking that venture money, guys. You may be shutting more doors of opportunity than you realize.

Translation: By saying we have held back from raising any outside capital at all, what I really mean to say is that I am going to do it.

Resistance is futile.

You have to hand it to Slide Founder and CEO Max Levchin, who has just launched a new blog.

The title of the blog? “You’ve Gotta Be Kidding Me: The Official Press Organ of the Maxist Revolution.”

Very funny, Max! (Here the Ukrainian-born Levchin is pictured in Moscow’s Red Square!)

By spooky coincidence, “you’ve gotta be kidding me” is the working title and guiding principle of a post I am preparing on the recent $500 million valuation for the San Francisco-based widget maker!

More on kooky widget economics soon, but Levchin is a welcome addition to the blogosphere, given his obvious intellect and engaging personality.

He joins other entrepreneurs, like Mark Cuban and Marc Andreessen, who have proved themselves to be most excellent bloggers.

Levchin’s first post is about how to successfully launch a social-networking development platform, which he knows a thing or two about.

I am particularly intrigued by No. 9 and No. 10:

9. Make the No. 1 measurable goal of your PR team the amount of coverage that successful (or just interesting) developers get. People will jump through all kinds of hoops to be in the papers. Double so if the article lists them next to a [your] big brand.

10. Hold frequent developer events and invite leading developers to speak at those. Elevating developers (especially the smaller ones) to a pseudo-celebrity status can create a great deal of good will.

Hoop-jumping to get in papers and pseudo-celebrity status sounds a little Britney Spears for my tastes, but I like the spirit of it!

Of course, he did forget getting a crazy valuation as the best attention-seeking missile of all, and he already had a close-shaved haircut!

Here’s Max doing some Olympic hoop-jumping in one of my video interviews with him last fall, discussing the IPO market for widget companies like Slide:

This is my third and last post about what my move from old to new media has taught me. In the first, I discussed its dynamism, in the second its amazing level of clarity.

And the third? Well, because it never stops. Ever.

Case in point, a somewhat frivolous story, which actually does have important broader implications for the Web, about the mini-tussle between blogger Robert Scoble and Facebook.

Right away, I backed up Scoble over the popular social network, after Facebook disabled his account over his violation of its policies. The voluble blogger used a software program to scrape data off his profile.

I did so mostly because I am a big proponent of data portability and find it offensive that sites like Facebook endlessly scrape everyone’s data. But then they are shocked when people want to control their own information and move into a hypocritical protective mode of data they typically abuse.

Others disagreed, like commenters on my post and the always sharp Nick Carr, who raised the notion that Scoble was a “data thief” for trying to move some data–name, contact info and birthdays–to another service.

Wrote Carr on his Rough Type blog: “Now, if you happen to be one of those ‘friends,’ would you think of your name, email address and birthday as being ‘Scoble’s data’ or as being ‘my data.’ If you’re smart, you’ll think of it as being ‘my data,’ and you’ll be very nervous about the ability of someone to easily suck it out of Facebook’s database and move it into another database without your knowledge or permission. After all, if someone has your name, email address and birthday, they pretty much have your identity–not just your online identity, but your real-world identity.”

Carr added that “members should have the right to decide whether or not their personal information can be scraped out of the Facebook database. Scoble did not give them that choice. … Until controls are in place, unauthorized scraping of other members’ personal information shouldn’t be allowed.”

To my mind, that’s a rather nanny-state stance for him to take, given that people put that data up there for their friends to presumably use. Scoble or anyone could have simply copied down that info and transferred it (everyone does this ALL the time) manually.

Scoble’s motives in doing this were obviously benign (aside from his eternal need for attention, which is also harmless). And, big surprise, there are a lot of bad actors out there who want the data for other more nefarious reasons.

But all that’s needed, I think, is to treat people like intelligent adults and make it perfectly clear to them that some may actually use the data you post publicly for friends you accept into your online circle. That way people can decide exactly how much information they want out there.

Of course, the teapot-tempest got all resolved after Scoble promised he would no longer be naughty–even though he compared himself in a deeply goofy manner to Gandhi and then the Boston Tea Party gang–and Facebook reinstated him.

But what I loved about the story and countless ones like it was the enormous range of opinions, Twitters, posts, comments and videos (from Scoble too, of course) that were generated. While some might call it piling on or even mindless, I think it represents an amazing sign of vibrancy and energy that is promising for journalism.

While print publications might be suffering, the information business is not. Although there are many more players–some better than others–in the landscape, the changes give professionals the chance to notch up their game by delivering more energetic, more informed content that is characterized by the high standards they carry with them from old media at its best.

Of course, new business models for online content are nascent and still questionable, but smart people with great offerings can always figure out a way to benefit from the obvious interest in consumers in being able to access all kinds of information, both trusted and also even silly.

Which is why I laughed out loud when I got a link to a new Facebook group being formed to “Keep Robert Scoble Off Facebook,” all with the blessing of Fake Steve Jobs.

He wrote: “Meanwhile we’re trying to figure out if we can banish Scoble from using Apple products or visiting Apple retail stores. From what I’m told others have picked up on the same idea. Google wants him off their apps. Twitter says he’s eating up too much bandwidth. Here’s a thought. Why not banish Robert Scoble from the Internet altogether? Is that even possible? Moshe says he’s looking into it.”

Namaste.

So yesterday I posted my first of three ruminations of what the leap from old media to new media has taught me.

In it, I noted that “I think it is safe to say that I will probably never write another thing professionally for a print publication and will spend the rest of my career–such that it will be–publishing online only.”

And that, my friends, was a prime example of truthiness in action!

Nonetheless, the statement of that glaringly obvious fact caused a little bit of a stir around the Web, almost as if I was saying something amazingly freakish, such as: I have decided that forthwith I will bake my scribblings into delicious frosted donuts and readers can literally eat all my tasty bons mots up.

In fact, the shift I am making is perhaps one of the more normal and logical things I have done (which are acts you can count on one hand, in my case), essentially responding to a dramatic change in consumer habits by trying to provide the best offering I can in that new venue.

Which brings me to my next point about the nature of the blogosphere, which demands from its contributors a level of clarity and, dare I say, intimacy.

That is much easier to avoid in the print medium, where it is simple to distance yourself from readers and rely on on-one-hand-on-the-other-hand back and forth that leaves them with little idea of what is actually going on.

Of course, the best of journalists don’t do this–their prose is as clear as a pane of newly washed glass, through which one can see everything, even as they maintain a level of fairness and accuracy that is always required.

But I have found writing a blog that being non-opaque is necessary. You pretty much have to say what you know in much more firm terms or risk that the legions who always know more than you do will tell the story better.

Of course, that can often result in blabby and flabby online writing that comments and reacts and has no underpinnings of actual reporting and is too often simply untrue.

That was a common complaint in the early days of blogging from mainstream journalists. Of course, many of them had made their fair share of mistakes too, but they correctly felt that the Web was lacking in the kind of checks and balances that would temper this problem.

At the time, I thought that was mostly the case. But I also believed blogs would inevitably get better and better, adding on the kinds of standards and practices that are important for credibility and then combining them with the valuable immediacy of the Web, its sassy energy and, perhaps most importantly, its proclivity to tell it like it is.

Thus, while being a columnist offline or online definitely gives me more latitude, I can now offer scoops and news along with analysis and observation in what I think is a much more useful combination.

That’s what I have been trying to do, for example, in my coverage of Web companies like Facebook and Yahoo, where I break news often, as well as begin conversations about everything from their valuation to strategy or lack thereof.

And, in the Web’s ability to offer instant video, I have found it even more helpful and relevant to take the audience where I go too.

While some might not like the rawness of this approach, I feel it offers a much clearer perspective and gives people more of an ability to make their own judgments on what I am showing them.

This more transparent approach that blogging at its best can offer is not a mind-blowingly new concept, but it is a key one going forward.

When it all works right, it results in a virtuous circle of information that is created between professionals and nonprofessionals and, hopefully, where a new level of respect and credibility is achieved.

And, if that doesn’t work, there is always the donut option.

As the new year begins, it’s probably past time to assess what the jump from old media to new media has taught me.

I know what it sounds like–old lady print reporter starts a gen-you-wine blog and goes all gaga about new media or else makes a tsk-tsk list of what needs to change to make blogs as good as mainstream media.

Well, I will try my very hardest not be too navel-gazing in a series of three posts I will make this week about the key things I have learned so far.

Thus, as they say in one of mainstream journalism’s favorite cliches–let’s not bury the lede:

First, after almost eight months of daily blogging for this site, I think it is safe to say that I will probably never write another thing professionally for a print publication and will spend the rest of my career–such that it will be–publishing online only.

Read more »

Speaking in London last week, New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller delivered a speech that sounded suspiciously like the grumpy rants of Hollywood moguls of late, who don’t like this digital thing one little bit.

To his credit, Keller (pictured here) spent the start of the speech in honor of the late legendary Guardian columnist Hugo Young expertly dissecting the appalling attitude of the Bush administration toward the free press.

Kudos to that. But then he could not resist that tiresome tendency of many mainstream journalists to blame the explosion in the popularity of the Internet for the woes of the newspaper industry.

Dubbing the Internet a “media tsunami” and calling much of what is out there “unreliable,” Keller pilloried sites like Wikipedia and Google News for not having things like foreign bureaus in war zones and because they don’t create content and do aggregate it from other media.

It’s a little odd, though, to insult such Web products for doing exactly what they do–neither Google News nor Wikipedia has ever claimed to perform the function of a news organization like the Times.

Actually, I think Keller’s real problem is the audience, especially young people, who are increasingly using those sites and others.

Read more »

Today, we post below our most pathetic video ever in our attempt to garner donations for DonorsChoose.org, using (and abusing) our favorite icon, Miss Barbra Streisand.

Last week, I wrote about October Tech Blogger Challenge on the the charity site called DonorsChoose.org, which funds classroom projects in high-need public schools, using the Web to match teacher project requests with donors.

I picked tech projects in both San Francisco (where I live) and Washington, D.C. (where Walt Mossberg lives) and have set a goal of $25,000. So far, our AllThingsD page on the DonorsChoose site (and you can also access it using the nifty fund-raising thermometer on the left rail of the main BoomTown page here) has raised $1,928 from seven donors.

That puts us fourth, just behind Endgadget ($2,830 from 22), TechCrunch ($2,875 from eight) and the putting-us-to-shame Fred Wilson ($9,283 from 32).

We want to thank all who have given, but we’re asking for more from more now both to help the kids and also for our more nefarious purposes, which require sheer numbers.

That’s due to BoomTown’s dastardly master plan of winning the award Yahoo is giving. The company is sponsoring an award for the bloggers who inspire the most readers to give and the winner will get a free lunch with CEO Jerry Yang.

Here on the Tech Leaderboard in terms of donor numbers, we are fifth (Anil Dash drops in with 14). But Fred Wilson is still leading by a mile!

Like Yang needs to have lunch with another VC!

So here is our video plea to stop this unfortunate event (and where all that will be discussed is widget valuations and real estate):