All Things Digital

Earlier this week, BoomTown posted our speaker list for the sixth edition of D: All Things Digital, which will take place in a few weeks–May 27 to 29, to be exact–in Carlsbad, Calif.

The annual gathering of tech and media luminaries was created and is run by my partner Walt Mossberg and me.

D6 tech and media speakers include: Microsoft Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer of Microsoft (MSFT); News Corp.’s (NWS) Rupert Murdoch; Jeff Bewkes of Time Warner (TWX); Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg of Facebook; Michael Dell of Dell Computer (DELL); IAC’s (IACI) Barry Diller; Amazon’s (AMZN) Jeff Bezos; Howard Stringer of Sony (SNE); and TiVo’s (TIVO) Tom Rogers.

Also: Tom Glocer of Thomson Reuters (TRI); Melinda Gates of the Gates Foundation; FCC Chairman Kevin Martin; Lowell McAdam of Verizon Wireless (VZ); Activision’s (ATVI) Robert Kotick; and former Microsoft tech guru Nathan Myhrvold of Intellectual Ventures.

Just recently, we added Jerry Yang, CEO and co-founder of Yahoo (YHOO), and now he is being joined onstage at the conference by Yahoo President Sue Decker (pictured here in a lovely Wall Street Journal dot-drawing).

The pairing should make for a lively session, given all the heat around Yahoo of late, largely related to the scuttled attempt by Microsoft to buy the company.

What would you like to know about that and anything else about Yahoo?

As it so happens, you can ask!

While the conference is sold out, you can submit questions that you would like answered to Yang and Decker or any of the speakers via text or video. Walt and I will pick the best ones and let loose.

Ask early and often here!

In addition, the whole conference will be online at AllThingsD during the conference, via live blogs and reports of breaking news (and there will be breaking news, as there always is), along with video highlights.

And videos of all the interviews will be posted soon after it is over.

When it reports its first-quarter earnings this afternoon, CNET Networks (CNET) will also announce a much expanded editorial and advertising relationship with Yahoo (YHOO) that will give the tech news site broad distribution on the highly trafficked Internet portal.

CNET and Yahoo have had content licensing deals in the past, in which some CNET content has been featured in the tech areas of Yahoo.

But in 2006, Yahoo launched a more robust tech section, which includes original blogs and reviews, and which many saw as a direct competitor to sites like CNET.

Yahoo more recently launched a Tech Ticker site, a blog-like site aimed at tech investors with original material and a lot of videos, along with content from partners (including AllThingsD.com).

Under the new deal, sources at both companies said a large swath of CNET tech news and also reviews will be carried on Yahoo, making it the major supplier of tech news content to the site. Rather than just focusing on its owned-and-operated properties, Yahoo’s more recent strategy has been to partner with media companies.

In addition, under the terms of the deal, Yahoo will sell some of CNET’s remnant inventory and also allow CNET ad sales staff to sell into some areas of Yahoo.

This deal is likely to be touted as a big win for CNET’s current management, including CEO Neil Ashe, who has been under siege from a group of dissident shareholders who are unhappy with the company’s lackluster performance and have called for a variety of significant changes.

“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.)

After dissident shareholders, led by Jana Partners, landed one right in the kisser to the board and management of CNET Networks yesterday–releasing a 38-page report that essentially called the company’s leadership incompetent, the tech news and review site gave the literary effort a kiss-off of its own.

First, rather politely, CNET said that Jana’s proposed strategies, which called for a major overhaul of all aspects of CNET’s operation, “will be carefully reviewed. To the extent there are any new strategies that would create stockholder value, they will be implemented.”

But wait for it!

The statement continued: “CNET Networks added that while it welcomes the views of its stockholders, after a preliminary review, the white paper contains numerous misstatements and is misleading in many respects. The Company will respond in due course.”

BoomTown looks forward to that response, especially since the Jana group pulled no punches in its initial parry, writing in the report:

“The current leadership of CNET Networks Inc. (”CNET” or the “Company”) has presided over massive value destruction…CNET’s current leadership now claims it can reverse course and begin creating shareholder value, but we believe they have offered no evidence that they can do so. Despite years of shareholder value destruction, CNET’s leadership during this time failed to act on the urgent need to make fundamental strategic and operational change, instead pursuing a failed expansion strategy even as CNET fell further behind…In addition, we believe CNET’s Board and senior management lack the industry-specific experience and expertise to stop this shareholder value destruction.”

And did they mention “value destruction”?

Unfortunately, for CNET (CNET) Networks, it’s not an April Fool’s joke, but more lump of coal to the tech news and review site’s management and board.

Today, a group of very obviously stubborn activist investors, who have been seeking to gain CNET board seats and make other major changes at the company to boost its moribund stock price, will release their own assessment of the situation at the company called, “CNET: Value-Unlocking Change For All Shareholders.”

And their conclusion is no surprise: CNET has failed to deliver for shareholders and its whole operation, along with the board and executive suite, need a complete overhaul.

Since CNET’s major shareholders have been relatively passive and complacent, despite recent declines in the company’s stock price, it is not clear exactly how effective such tactics will be.

And last week, CNET kind of beat the disgruntled group to the punch by throttling itself and announcing that it was conducting layoffs and also making a variety of key changes, as part of a task force to improve the company’s performance.

As BoomTown wrote in a post about the situation:

Thus, to assuage Wall Street, the courts and, well, to look like it was getting busy, CNET laid off 10 percent of its U.S. workforce, or 120 employees, as well as saying it would be fixing a range of other things gone wrong at the company.

That included cutting costs, upgrading technology, rejiggering content offerings, fixing the sales process and “implementing business unit changes to realign resources to support the company’s strategic priorities and promote efficiencies.”

Well, at least the bathrooms are in good working order! But otherwise, that would be everything, right?

Interestingly, the 38-page report–prepared by an activist group led by Jana Partners, and includes Alex Interactive Media, Sandell Asset Management, Spark Capital Management and Velocity Interactive Management–agrees, except that it wants to shove aside the current crew at CNET and be the ones to make the needed changes.

As the group notes in the report’s executive summary not-so-subtly titled “CNET’s Destruction of Shareholder Value”:

The current leadership of CNET Networks Inc. (”CNET” or the “Company”) has presided over massive value destruction, with CNET’s shares declining (25)%, (52)% and (21)% in the one, two and three year periods ended March 28, 2008, respectively, compared to 39%, 6% and (1)% changes, respectively, for its stated benchmark peer index, as set forth herein. Also as set forth herein, CNET has also consistently underperformed peers in profitability and growth, ranking last among these peers in key metrics. This underperformance comes despite CNET’s premiere assets, including the tenth largest collection of Internet sites in the world and strong brands and content.

CNET’s current leadership now claims it can reverse course and begin creating shareholder value, but we believe they have offered no evidence that they can do so. Despite years of shareholder value destruction, CNET’s leadership during this time failed to act on the urgent need to make fundamental strategic and operational change, instead pursuing a failed expansion strategy even as CNET fell further behind. CNET’s leadership did not even start examining the basics of improving performance until we called for change, both publicly and directly with CNET’s Board of Directors.

In addition, we believe CNET’s Board and senior management lack the industry-specific experience and expertise to stop this shareholder value destruction. CNET’s Board of Directors’ backgrounds in our opinion are primarily in traditional media or early-stage technology rather than today’s digital media landscape, while its senior management team consists primarily of first time senior public company executives without significant operational experience at large Internet companies other than CNET.

Also, they take candy from babies!

Okay, maybe not that, but the group, which admits in the report that it is only an external review, posits that CNET needs a new board, made up–natch!–of its selected members.

That includes former AOL head Jon Miller, CAA exec Brian Weinstein and other Web execs from IAC and Overture, as well as reps from Spark and Jana.

The report also insults CNET’s expansion into verticals, such as shopping service MySimon, and calls its transition to Web 2.0 technology cloddish.

As for recommendations, the report says CNET must improve things like its monetization infrastructure, build a vertical ad network, make third-party ad deals, turbocharge its SEO techniques, add in more social media doodads, fix its publishing and content management system and, of course, cut costs.

The report also denies that the activist group is seeking to control the company, in order to essentially buy it without paying a premium, as CNET has contended.

And, finally, it outlines the grim road to the current tensions between CNET and the Jana group, including failed settlement talks, corporate moves and countermoves and, inevitably, the legal action.

For now, CNET’s board and management do not seem inclined to change their stance on its mano-a-mano with Jana, which recently won in court over being allowed to nominate directors to the board of the company. CNET has said it would appeal that ruling.

Clearly, CNET is taking a hard line, despite the fact that it has a somewhat weak position in regards to its glaringly obvious performance issues.

Thus the report from Jana, which is, basically, a we’ll-see-about-that! response.

In fact, as the report notes at the end:

CEO Neil Ashe has referred to this contest as a ‘chess game,’ which we believe perfectly encapsulates CNET’s misunderstanding of the situation. This should not be a game of legal tactics but a debate about the future of CNET and who is best qualified to guide the strategic direction of the Company and create maximum shareholder value.

No checkmate yet, of course, but now it is clearly CNET’s move.

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.

How far ahead of the political curve is our D: All Things Digital conference?

So far that we put all those bendy-straws-in-the-wind television pundits to shame!

Case in point: At D4, we invited former Vice President Al Gore to come just before everyone decided he was the best thing since organic whole-wheat sliced bread.

And at D5, held last May, we invited Sen. John McCain of Arizona to talk about things like tech policy and Iraq, during a time when most had written him off in his bid for the Republican presidential nomination.

Not so, it seems, after Comeback Jack’s big win in New Hampshire last night.

Given our powerful psychic political skills, we are keeping our next political selection sealed in a mayo jar in the back of ATD HQ.

But to see what McCain is all about, here’s an hour-plus interview with McCain by Walt Mossberg and me:

It’s not all luxury hotels, rolling green hills and Guinness here on our trip to Dublin, Ireland, to look for a place to possibly hold an international version of D: All Things Digital, which we are calling EuroD.

You can see videos of Walt Mossberg and me undertaking that arduous effort (visits to Dublin Castle, fancy hotels in the city of Dublin, a stroll in the streets and a trip to the Wicklow Mountains to see a bit of the lovely Irish countryside.

But we also went to visit the Dublin offices of Google, which has its biggest facility–outside of its Mountain View Googleplex headquarters in California–here in the Docklands section of the city, with 1,300 employees. We got a tour of the facility from John Herlihy, who is director of online sales and operations for Google’s European operations.

The search giant has grown its presence here in Ireland, like a lot of other U.S. Web and tech companies, including Dell, Apple, eBay, Amazon, IBM and many others, because of its educated and multinational population and the country’s digitally friendly government.

Here’s a video of our tour by Herlihy, where we talked about innovation in Europe, explored new Web trends and, of course, encountered those same annoying exercise balls as at Google’s California HQ. While futile, I know, it is my personal goal to eliminate them entirely from the corporate ethos for their sheer irksome “Googley-ness.”

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.

So Walt Mossberg and I are here in Dublin, Ireland, and in my last post about our trip, I neglected to explain why:

Our D: All Things Digital conference might be going international.

We have had a lot of success with our annual flagship D, which just took place for the fifth time in late May in Carlsbad, Calif. (D6 is scheduled to be held in late May of 2008.)

This past year was particularly memorable, especially because of the joint interview Walt and I did with longtime rivals and tech legends, Apple’s Steve Jobs and Bill Gates of Microsoft (pictured here, but you can see the highlights video of the interview here).

Thus, we are on what you might call a fact-finding mission, to see if we should make the leap and expand our successful conference brand by adding a new conference with a focus outside the United States.

So, here’s a longish video, with others to follow, of our quest (along with D staffers Lia Lorenzano and Jill Pendergast) to decide on where we would hold EuroD.

First up, a visit to the historic Dublin Castle (circa 1204), where we might hold part of the event and where we are woefully outclassed by the tony surroundings:

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