The "Ask Jason" feature I used to do here on the blog would get a great response every time I did it. I'm going to start it up again--but for the CalacanisCast!

So, please call the CalacanisCast Beta Voicemail: 310-694-9491 and leave a message.

You can ask me:

1. For advice on business
2. For advice on how to raise capital or sell your company
3. To look at your website or business and give you honest feedback
4. Ask me what I think of a company, person, or trend.

I'll be 100% honest and tell you everything I know!

Oh yeah, you can plug your stuff and make an intelligent comment about the last show, however keep that kind of stuff short and to the point (someone sent a 12 minute mp3 file recently... come on!).

I don't know Randy Falco or Ron Grant, but I wish them luck. The NYT says they have a long view of AOL, everything I read says AOL's is going to be cleaned up and sold.

My advice to both men: start blogging today. AOL was a very closed culture when we got there a year ago, and blogging is what really pulled the company into the Web world. There are dozens of important folks in the company having honest discussions on blogs and the best way for you two to build AOL is to embrace the culture of honesty, transparency, and debate. Blogging is the best medium for this. Take a page from Microsoft and let all your team members blog, and even pay some folks to be company bloggers. Let it all hang out, let the marketplace tell you where to go, and be open about everything--the good and the bad.

Even though I was at AOL for only a year it felt like home. ~50 members of "my team" are still rocking it out at Netscape, WeblogsInc, and Blogsmith, and I really hope the new guys recognize the amazing potential those groups have and continue to invest in them.

Weblogs, Inc. has grown into an eight figure business at AOL over the past year and I think it could be a nine figure business if they keep investing in it. Easily.

Netscape has continued to advance and grow since the bottom out in October. It takes 2-3 years to build an online community like Netscape, not three to six months. Social news is the future and Netscape is in first or second position on every important factor in that race (along with digg). To give up now would be such a wasted opportunity (especially since there are 500 folks trying to get into the top five slots right now!). I mean, Conde Nast just bought reddit--a distant 3rd or 4th to Netscape and digg.

Blogsmith is a fantastic platform that could rival TypePad and WordPress in the market place if AOL put some muscle behind it. Brian is a genius and AOL should really pull him in to the senior management team--guys like him don't wind up in big companies often.

Anyway, I've got to get back to my day job... I don't work for AOL anymore but I still spend 2-3 hours a day thinking about and talking to the folks who run those businesses. Giving them advice (solicited and unsolicited), and participating in and using those fine services and products.

Randy & Ron: If you every need any free advice on them or want to grab lunch you know how to reach me. Good luck and please take care of my babies. :-)

Ted pointed me to a report that profiles the "out there person" that has been showing up in organizations recently. The report says that the "out there" folks are more likely to:

1. Value fame as an "asset"
2. Willing to share certain types of sensitive information on the web
3. Believe it is appropriate to criticize their organizations on the web
4. Believe that "organizations need to be more transparent to succeed"
5. Believe "there's no harm in openly discussing the work I do inside my organization with others"

Obviously I agree with all those points. However, the fame part I think is a temporary thing. Folks who are open and transparent today are getting famous for their candor but in another couple of years this candor will be the norm. Folks like Scoble when he was Microsoft (he's now at Podtech), and Jeremy at Yahoo, were viewed as shocking two years ago, important this year, and in two years they will simply be the norm. That's how trends go.

Mark Cuban deserves a lot of credit for this trend as well. He's always been blunt and to the point. Some folks don't like it, sure, but most folks love it. And, at the end of the day you have to be who you are. Cuban is Cuban--that's it. He will tell you to your face that something is stupid, say it on his blog, or say it on ESPN. He will also listen to what you say and if he was wrong say "@#$%#$%, I was wrong about that one!"

So, I would add to the list another two points. Out there folks are:

• #6: Willing to listen to all sides of a debate openly
• #7: Willing to change their position quickly and without remorse

As Ted points out, I brought this brutal honesty to AOL and that was always the plan (Ted, Jon MIller, and Jim Bankoff very clear with me to "go for it" and not pull punches). A year after I was there folks were routinely "mixing it up" on the group listsrvs and the heroes started to emerge. The folks who cared, the folks who were engaged, and the folks who could keep up chimed in--those who couldn't stood on the sidelines.

These were flat out sparring matches and we debated major topics. One exchange that went for what seemed like 50 comments was a debate surrounding Netscape's video hosting. (As in should Netscape have it's own video hosting or should it just dump folks to AOL's video service). I argued that Netscape should have it's own video services even if there was some overlapping pieces. Others thought I was crazy and doing duplicate work (shades of peanut butter--yes). Of course, in business most answer are not right or wrong--they are 50, 60, 70, or 80% right or wrong.

That debate however let everyone know who was smart enough to be in the debate. Some jumped into the debate with weak arguments and got smacked down real quick--as they should be! If you're not able to jump in the ring and defend your position don't jump in the ring. It was great--AOL was alive with debate and deep thinking in an open platform where *anyone* could chime in--your title didn't mean a thing. Everyone involved got a serious education--including myself. After that debate the video group and I became fast friends, and the collaboration level only *increased*. Debate is great.

Anyway, the report goes on to say: "In summary, your 'Out There' people are the ones who are:

1. Fast followers
2. More flexible
3. Open communicators
4. Aspire to greatness
5. Looking for new, innovative ideas
6. In short – your future leaders

I agree with these as well. If your putting yourself out there you have to be flexible and open, and just by the fact that you are open you're gonna find innovative ideas. I will add the follow to the list. "Out there" people are:

• #7 Passionate
• #8 Lovers of intelligent debate
• #9 Don't take themselves to seriously

Frankly, I couldn't run a business any other way. The only way to really get things done is to be out there. There is so much noise in the space, so little attention, that you're best bet for building great products is being totally honest about what you're doing and letting folks help you.

Read/Write web has some additional thoughts.

CalacanisCast Beta Five... if you have feedback please send me an MP3 or WAV file.

No show notes--ever!

Here is the MP3 file

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Sitting in the airport in Washington on the way back to Dallas.

Eating a horrible salad.

Tired... two flights down, two more flights to go.

Two speaking gigs down, one more to go.

No time for the gym so I'm trying to walk for 20-30 minutes inside the airport before getting ready for the loooooooong flight (four hours) to Dallas.

Wish I was at the Clinton Global Conference in New York with the Netscape team (or home).

Note: Cingular's built in EVDO in Sony laptops sucks. It's slow and hangs. Verizon EVDO is much, much better.

We're up, we're down... we gotta keep getting better. Fankly, this is very simple: we must worship our users. We have to love them more than Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft.

How do you show love in our world? Let me count the ways:

1. More disk space
2. Better screen real estate
3. Faster servers
4. Better editorial
5. More features
   
6. More support
7. Better design
8. Less ads
9. Less annoying ads
10. Less obnoxious ads
11. More targeted ads
12. Take that which is paid and make it free
    
13. Anticipate members needs and fill them
    
14. Surprise members with fun, new experiences
15. Communicate with members open and freely
16. Listen to members--then listen to them some more
17. Treat members how you would like to be treated
18. Be honest with members--always
    
19. Don't do anything sneaky because a) members are smart and will bust you, b) life is so short--why would you want to be a sneak?, and c) this is a long-term business, the short term is meaningless.
    
20. Respect your members wishes above all else. If they don't love you any more that is their choice, and it's an opportunity for you to reflect on why they don't love you (consider it a free focus group)
21. Let people consume your product on their terms with their software, browser, device, hardware or operating system (this is also known as the "don't be Microsoft rule").

Bunch of Netscape updates happening this weekend:

The Role of Anchors: WE ARE HERE TO SERVE.
There seems to be some misinformation spreading about the role of the Netscape Anchors. The Anchors do NOT filter the results or control the site. The Netscape Anchors are HERE TO SERVE the members. If the members vote a story to the top 10 our Netscape Anchors will add an image for them and do some meta-journalism on the site. WE ARE HERE TO SERVE, NOT TO CONTROL. We are your editorial concierges. If you want followup on a story we do it for you immediately. The Anchors can vote on stories of course, but their votes count for as much as the publics do.

The home page ranking
We tweaked the velocity (how fast things go up the page) and gravity (how quick they go down the page) formulas and the results are looking good. This is a real art/science procedure... you're basically turning a bunch of dials to see which one gets the best result in terms of speed vs. quality. It's really amazing.

% of advertising, and designing for the mass vs. the (Delicious/DIGG) elite.
We've got the site down to almost no advertising right now. People attacked us for having five ad units at launch and they were right--it was over the top. We're going to keep it light for the beta and I think we will wind up with three advertisements (like the New York Times) at the end of the day. I'm thinking a leaderboard and medium rectangle above the fold and a skyscaper below the fold. The DIGGsters have been beating me up for the number of ads and the cluttered nature of the site, which I can appreciate. DIGGsters like myself love clean design (or no design). However, the mass audience likes a lot of design and images--they even like ads. So, we're gonna do something for our DIGGsters/clean design folks as an alternative to the current home page.

On killing DIGG ad the Jason vs. Kevin silliness.
I've been in this business since two years before it started (1993/94). I've watched pronouncement after pronouncement about Microsoft-, Netscape-, Yahoo-, and Google-killers. Heck, people have talked about AOL-killers since we launched and it has never seemed to happen (and as long as I'm here it's not gonna happen I can tell you that!).

The fact is, we've evolved the work done by DIGG by bringing an editorial layer to Kevin's community model. Kevin's community model was, of course, based on Josh's bookmarking model at Delicious. Delicious was inspired by Flickr tagging and Furl's group bookmarking, and Furl was inspired by the *dozens* of bookmarking sites that were around in the Web 1.0 days.

DIGG didn't create voting or social bookmarking--they just did it best. They evolved the entire concept, and that is what *GREAT* entrepreneurs do: they build a better mousetrap. There are no original ideas in this world, only ideas to be evolved.

After everyone calms down about the size of Netscape (12M uniques a month) vs. the scrappy upstart DIGG, they will realize that us launching Netscape has tripled the value of DIGG. Yahoo, Microsoft, and Fox are now thinking "if this works for AOL/Netscape we gotta get into the space." When they do they will look and see that the best way to win the race will be not to build but to buy DIGG--heck, if this model works I could see AOL offering to buy DIGG to consolidate the market. So, it's not like AOL has been taken out of the race to buy DIGG or other social bookmarking sites. I think this space is the future, and I could see us owning seven different social bookmarking sites some day--just like we own dozens of content /services like TMZ, Engadget, TVSquad, MoviePhone, Mapquest, etc.

We are going to bring the social news concept to more people than DIGG ever could, and those users will become DIGG users as well (like I am). This is not a winner take all space--very few spaces ever are in fact. Hotmail/Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, and AOL all share the IM and email markets. The news market online is shared by dozens of folks. To think that Netscape would crush DIGG, or that DIGG would crush Delicious is silly. It's what the silly inexperienced bloggers think.

A rising tide does lift all boats.

You can check what happened when Weblogs, Inc. joined Gawker Media in the professional blogging space--we both go much bigger. Nick Denton became a better entrepreneur when we came into the space. He got more focused, he staffed up, and the competition made us both stronger. It also made for a better product for the users.

Advertisers that Nick sold on blogging bought ads on Weblogs, Inc--and visa versa. I would say that Gizmodo and Engadget shared 50% of their advertisers at one point. Nick and I discussed group selling once in fact (we didn't need to because we both had f/t staff).

-- Kevin and the crew are dedicated to the community model of social news.
-- My team at Netscape are dedicated to the community model of social news with a term of Anchors to serve the users.
-- Google News is dedicated to solving the new aggregation problem with better algorithms.
-- Rojo is dedicated to solving the social news problem with an aggregation + tags model.
-- Newsvine is dedicated to solving the social news problem with news feeds + bloggng + voting.

If this is a real industry we will all get there *together*, and when we do we will all slap each others backs while drinking aged scotch and fine cigars at some outdoor cafe five years from now. We'll talk about the good old days and laugh. I do that right now with Tom from @NY (my Silicon Alley "rival") and Nick Denton (my blogging rival).

Michael Jordan and Patrick Ewing are best friends even though they fought like gladiators for over a decade. Competitors share a deep bond--they are the only people who experience the war from the inside, and as a result they are forever one with the experience.

I love Kevin, I love Josh at Delicious, I love both of their sites and admire what they've accomplished. Their not competitors, they're compadres.

Bottom line: we're all in this together and we'll either make it as a group or none of us will make it--let the games begin!

Google is doing an Excel killer, and we all know Google bought a WORD killer not long ago.

I called it back at CES: http://www.calacanis.com/2006/01/07/ces-analysis-google-will-do-an-office-suite-and-a-desktop-os-in/

Google will launch Powerpoint and a light OS shortly.

My role at AOL is to shake things up. Sometimes people think I go to far, sometimes people think I'm holding back--the truth is I'm doing neither.

I'm doing what I've always done: being honest and upfront with my opinions. The one thing I've learned from blogging--and running Weblogs, Inc. from nothing the sale to AOL in 18 months--is that blogging/life/business is all about AUTHENTICITY.

All of my posts are 100% authentic. Am I biased... yes, authentically so! Am I wrong sometimes--of course! Do I own up to my mistakes in an authentic fashion--you bet! I don't blog to give people a hard time and I don't blog to kiss up to people. I blog what I feel, and if you've ever spent time with me you know I'm blunt. I don't know where I picked this trait up, but it's all I know how to do and it's served me well in this life.

My new blog buddy at AOL, Shawn Christopher, laid into me last week for my style.

Today, after hearing Jeff Bewkes call bull---- in the WSJ, he's reconsidering. Shawn and I now have a relationship and we're engaged in a very honest dialog about how to make our company better. He's putting out ideas for me (and other AOLers) to respond to--the conversation is getting bigger and deeper. Only good things can come from that.

So, mission accomplished.

We all know the best way to solve problems is to shine a light on them.

I'm going to go underground for the next two weeks, so the posting will be light. No, AOL didn't get to me. I'm on a little analyst/press tour over the next two weeks that will take me to from Los Angeles to Mountain View, San Francisco, Dulles/DC, and my home sweet home New York. I'll keep you posted to my location, and if you're not on the press tour yet feel free to ping me.

I'm at the amazing D conference in SoCal this week. It's an amazing conference... you never know who you're going to bump into. Last night I was talking to a friend and bumped into someone and we both turned around it was Bill Gates. Sorry Bill! I didn't try to get any face time with Bill this year (last year we talked twice).

Gates was the opening interview last night and he demoed a very cool version of Office that had a very clean--but still packed--GUI. One thing I noticed while the demo was going on was that Gates was smiling like a kid on Christmas. As the audience oooed and ahhhhed you could see him get more excited and smile more. I thought to myself, "wow, this guys been building the same pieces of software for over 20 years and he is still excited about it--that's pretty cool."

Someone speculated to me that since Gates got married and started a family he's become less aggressive and happier. He does seem very happy and at peace. I think the world looking at him as the personification of Evil for so long has turned around. Microsoft is playing nice in the ecosystem, and when Walt and Kara dogged him about not gaining marketshare vs. iTunes and Google search he sort shruged and said "we'll get there." He's clearly not happy that search has not grown for them, but he said it was a five year race--which is true.

One attendee told me Gates seemed upset by every question Walt and Kara asked him, which was true. It wasn't that they asked bad questions, but Gates has this habit of shaking his head and rolling his eyes ever time they ask him a question. After he does that he rephrases their question, and admittedly, makes the question better. I guess that's what life is like when you're that brilliant.

My big takeaways:

1. He's defiantly building an iPod killer (sorry, viable co-exister) into the XBOX platform. Gates is very easy to read, unlike Jobs who last year told me to my face "Jason, no one wants to watch video on their iPod" only to annouce the product shortly after. When Gates is asked about a product he smiles and moves on, when Steve Jobs is asked a question he gets a kick out bluffing you. I'd love to play poker with one of them. BTW: are we playing poker tonight or what?!?

2. He sees the closed hardware system model (Apple's model) as attractive in some places--like XBOX. When Walt told him the XBOX group was more like Apple he responded by saying something to the effect of a "very, very big Apple." That got a laugh. I could see Microsoft doing more hardware based on what he said. Not a PC, but I could see him doing the iPod thing and maybe some other stuff (they do keyboards and they used to do routers I believe).

3. He dismissed the web-based office concept, which I thought was in-authentic. Clearly for some folks--perhaps most--a web-based solution is better. However, their earnings are based on Office so I can understand his position.
4. This was the big one for me: Microsoft is gonna built free and paid storage in the sky and synch them with their applications/OS.

Let me start by saying I love(d) the Economist and read it front-to-back on every flight I take. It's well written and I *assumed* well researched. However, after reading a bizarrely inaccurate story on AOL I posted a response to the facts.

It seems my comments on the Economist's highly inaccurate, AOL-bashing story have paid off. In the process of correcting the story I've uncovered exactly what I suspected: the author spun the facts to slam AOL. Check out this comment, in which the highly-respected Kevin Werbach says the reporter misused his quotes.

Note: One of the reporters on the story, Tamzin Booth, contacted me by email. I'd love to hear her defend the story in the comments below.

Kevin's comment:

It was interesting to read how that piece came out. I told the reporter I was a contrarian on the topic, and actually thought AOL was well-positioned. He used the one (backward-looking) negative sentence of my 3-paragraph email, and vaguely paraphrased the rest.

Anyway, my point was that "social network" does not equal "Friendster/MySpace". And that AOL actually has all the hard-to-acquire assets and experience it will take to monetize social software in the broad sense.

As you point out, no one expects much of AOL these days, which is a good place to be. Keep in mind that Yahoo! was seen as a dog 3 years ago, until Semel & Co. turned things around. Good luck....

-k-

That's the question I constantly find myself coming back to. Who are these people who spend hours a day contributing to things like DIGG and Wikipedia for no financial gain.

I've been seeing the user below on the home page of DIGG (the icon is memorable huh?), so I clicked through to their page. They've submitted 776 stories to digg over the past 278 days. That's basically three stories every single day without a day off for almost a year.

It has to take 15 minutes--on average--to find and publish a decent story to DIGG. So, this person has spent 194 hours on the site in less than a year. If you worked seven hours a day doing this as a day job this would be six weeks of full-time work. So, this person is spending around eight full-time weeks a year.

Wow. That is just.... wow, so impressive.

...but why? Do they work for DIGG?



Here is a look at the top ten digg users by stories submitted and the number of hours they've spent working on the site over the past year or so. This is based on 15 minutes to find and submit a story. I think on average that is what it takes. You could argue ten minutes or 20 I guess, but even at five minutes per story you're looking at a ton of time.

On thing I'm sure of is that some of these folks run their own websites, and as a result get value from publishing to DIGG.

I'm speaking at the excellent Personal Democracy Forum in NYC tomorrow. I highlt recommend attending if you're in town.

details:

http://www.personaldemocracy.com/conference/2006/program

Fred says that the Flash player and slick syndication stuff on YouTube is why they won. That certainly helped, however Fred's 100% wrong when he dismisses the impact of stolen content and I can prove it to you in one link:

http://www.google.com/search?q=lazy+sunday

The real reason why YouTube won is because they matched great SEO with stolen content that was not available anywhere else.

Mainstream media has been creating a huge vacuum on the Internet for over a decade. When stolen content becomes available--years ago on Napster, today on YouTube--it races off the charts. In YouTube's case it also races to #1 on Google.

SNL didn't put their videos online and the price they paid is that they lost the #1 Google ranking for their content to YouTube.

Do a search for SNL Video and YouTube is #1 and SNL is #2--how on earth is that fair? How on earth can VCs back--or in Fred's case praise--a company that is involved in massive piracy for personal gain? Now don't go giving me that "if NBC doesn't put their stuff on the Internet users will/information wants to be free" line of BS. YouTube did this so they could get rich quick--it's a business not the wikipedia or OurMedia. This is a site with advertising on it back by VCs.

If YouTube makes $250M from a sale their founders and VCs should give $225M of it back to the content owners like NBC and Loren Michaels who they stole it from!

Here is what the YouTube story is going to look like:

1. Create extremely simple technology in a couple of weeks.
2. Blow $1m in hosting costs a month.
3. Enable the stealing of people's content for a year, while turning a blind eye to piracy.
4. Claim they never, ever looked at their logs or their own sites top 20 list to see that it was filled with stolen content.
5. Sell the company and let someone else deal wth the IP headache.

If they sellout this will be the Internet industry's hit and run, and I'm gonna write the book.

If someone buys YouTube they will not be rewarding entrepreneurship, they will be rewarding piracy and they should be ashamed of themselves. Everyone else in the video space played by the rules, YouTube gave content holders the finger while shrugging their shoulders pretending they didn't know. Please.... really.

YouTube stole their way to the top while other folks behaved themselves.

Sinister but brilliant... but we as an industry shouldn't reward such behavior.

TechCrunch doesn't see how Squidoo will ever work:

The best lenses are generating $30 or so a month for the lensmaster. A true expert on a topic could generate many, many times that number by creating a blog, along with some static content, and putting up simple Google adsense ads. So top content producers are not going to be heading to Squidoo for the money, ever (Squidoo's model is set up in such a way that they could never make as much money from a lens as they could on their own). And besides, the blog format just works better for experts - fresh content generates lots of links, which equals traffic and search engine juice.

I came to the same conclusion back in March:

I think it's not gonna work as it is structured today because there will be too many "experts" in each vertical, and the truth is that most folks are not really experts. Less is more. No one on Squidoo will do a better job covering gadgets than Engadget, stocks than TheStreet.com, or Hollywood gossip than Defamer. Real experts command real money, contingent money draws the weak experts.