Strike Indicator by Ellen McGirt

07:23 pm | 0 recommendations | Be the first to comment

CNN/YouTube Debate: First "Third Person" Violation of the Night

Joe Biden, in a question about bi-partisan along-getting and theoretical Republican running mates, chooses Chuck Hagel as his symbolic Republican VP. He then reminds us in the ill-advised third person that Joe Biden was responsible for many great bi-partisan things. Other candidates wisely dodge the question, thereby throwing Joe Biden under the Joe Biden express.

Oooo -- Obama takes on the race card by complaining about not being able to get a cab in New York. The house party, all white New Yorkers, (not that I see race) chuckles appreciatively. Obama looks appropriately annoyed for being asked, once again, if he was black enough yet.

Hillary Clinton openly acknowledges being a woman, and manages to avoid looking annoyed at being asked if she were woman enough to do a man's job.

John Edwards doesn't want the vote of anyone who wouldn't vote for someone based on race or gender. The house party wrinkled their collective noses -- nice, but cheesy -- is the call.

07:15 pm | 0 recommendations | Be the first to comment

CNN/YouTube Debate: Thank God For Mike Gravel

Always entertaining; the only thing that would make this house party more fun is if he were actually in the room. Watching him take wild swings at his fellow candidates is never dull.

He actually sputtered: You'll never get CHANGE if you vote for THESE PEOPLE. Utter contempt. Then he went right for Obama, and attacked his claim that his campaign doesn't take PAC money. (Question to the crowd: What's a bundler?)

07:08 pm | 0 recommendations | Be the first to comment

CNN/YouTube Debate. First Question

First question: Will you be different than do-nothing politicians who can't do their jobs?

Answer from Chris Dodd: Basically, no.

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My New Facebook Friends: CNN/YouTube Debate

I'm happily ensconced at my liveblog HQ, aka Stacey and Sascha's house, and trying not to dissolve into major apartment envy. (The happy couple have a killer river view and a gourmet kitchen.) But more important, they are hosting a Club 44 houseparty, 450 of which are happening around the country to engage female voters in all things Hillary. (Sascha is one of two men in attendance so far.)

The mood is warm and congenial, and the couple are excellent hosts. But Stacey is deadly serious about why she's here: She's shocked that women aren't more engaged voters. "How about the women who only vote after they get married?" she asks rhetorically. "I have a friend, 35 years old, she's never voted. That's not unusual."

The party begins with a conference call from the Clinton campaign, starring, among others, Mary Steenburgen, a long time Hillary friend. It was a moving tributed, and the assembled throng - all six of them - were thrilled.

Here comes the debate....

04:29 pm | 0 recommendations | Be the first to comment

You Watch, You Vote, YouTube the Democrats on CNN

Tonight marks the much hyped debut of the CNN YouTube Debates, in which ordinary citizens run the show by asking the candidates questions via videos which they've posted on YouTube. It sounds like the making of revolutionary, true voter generated debate... except for the fact that CNN honchos have vetted all the questions in advance.

So, it seems unlikely that any full-on YouTube freakery will make the cut. (We could find out once and for all who had a sense of humor.) But whether forcing the candidates to answer questions that have been "personalized" through the experiences of real people will trigger any true authentic responses is anybody's guess.

The debate is being hosted by The Citadel in Charleston, South Carolina. Candidates will be squaring off against a giant video screen, which will play a couple of dozen questions that were culled from the more than 2,000 videos that were submitted.

I'll be watching and liveblogging the debate from the home of one of my new BFF's - the administrators of a Facebook group called "I'm a Girl and I Vote!" so stay tuned.

I'm optimistic. Anything that changes the current nature of political debate, certainly televised debate, would be progress. But I gotta wonder if the medium itself isn't part the problem. Anyone who has been one of a handful of citizens who have shown up at a middle school basement in the dead of winter to hear a Presidential hopeful sling chili and press the flesh has seen the low tech version: Candidates facing real questions from real people, often with a remarkable degree of authenticity. It feels like a real conversation - the good, the bad and the profound - because it often is. Showing up matters. Getting rid of the journalists may be a good first step - I admire the impulse. But perhaps losing the blinking lights, the logos, the urgent music, and the silly American Idol vibe might not hurt either.

But one issue is still nagging me. Does it matter more who asks the question or who chooses the questions that are asked? It might have been nice, as a hat tip to the participatory promise implied by a wired world, if the "people" got to choose the questions by voting for them online, rather than simply letting the usual suspects frame the debate.

How CNN chose the questions.

Check out the submissions on YouTube.

05:38 pm | 0 recommendations | 1 comment

Web: Facebook Makes Its Move

Facebook is about to send IPO speculation into overdrive again with its latest business move. This time they are not turning away suitors. Instead, they've made their first acquisition - the company announced ten minutes ago that they've acquired Parakey, a startup run by Blake Ross and Joe Hewitt, co-founders of Mozilla Firefox, an open-source and non-profit web browser.

From the company's press release:

“Blake and Joe built the Firefox web browser and then turned to the developer community to build on top of the foundation they’d established, not unlike what we’ve done with Facebook Platform,” said Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook. “The work they’ve done with Firefox and Parakey and their approach to building products fit right in at Facebook.”

Ross and Hewitt are best known as the co-founders of Firefox, which has been downloaded more than 300 million times by people worldwide. Hewitt went on to build popular web development tools such as Firebug. In early 2006, Ross and Hewitt founded Parakey to build a platform bridging the gap between information on the web and the desktop.

No, we don't know how much they shelled out for Parakey. But Facebook has been on a remarkable roll with the expansion of Facebook Platform - they've grown to a stunning 31 million registered users. The only question I want answered: How many employees does Facebook have now?

02:07 pm | 0 recommendations | 16 comments

Al Gore's $100 Million Makeover

When you pick up the next issue of Fast Company magazine, Al Gore will be serenely looking back at you. We were fortunate to have Good Morning America do a quick mention of the story -- check it out here. (The video screen for the segment is to the right.) The story will be available in its entirety early next week on FastCompany.com.

As all the cash register sound-effects clearly indicate, Mr. Gore has generated a significant amount of personal wealth since he left office; this in itself is not entirely unusual for someone who enters the private sector after a lifetime of public service. Money has long been a tonic for former politicians who leave, or are invited to leave, their jobs -- think symbolic board posts, memoirs, corporate keynote speeches, a lifetime of hefty honoraria. And, after his dramatic 2000 nonelection, Gore might have limped along to just that sort of life. Significant wealth alone does not a Fast Company cover subject make, however.

In what may be one of the greatest brand makeovers in history, Gore has become an international darling, hailed as a visionary on everything from climate change to Iraq. He's an Academy Award winner, a best-selling author, a front-runner for the Nobel Prize, and a concert promoter who turned out to be a bigger rock star at this year's Grammys than the rock stars themselves.

But what no one is talking about is that Gore has also become a stunningly successful businessman and entrepreneur, using the Petri dish of business to explore his deeply felt ideas about how the world works, doesn't work, and could work better. (In addition to being associated with two of the most successful technology companies in history, Google and Apple, he has also co-founded a cable network and an asset management company, both boasting radically new, and profitable, business models. They are becoming quiet forces in their respective fields.) And this, in many ways, has fueled his extraordinary comeback.

If I believed in the concept of a “natural”, I'd say Al Gore is about the most natural entrepreneur I'd ever met. Instead, we make the case -- with his help -- that a lifetime in government actually prepared him to take full advantage of the possibilities that exist, at least in theory, in the private sector. But he brings a tremendous ability to the table -- some of the very same stuff that tripped him up as a candidate. (If you've seen An Inconvenient Truth, you know he can handle, and prefers, complex data. Tough to get a soundbite out of him. Especially if he doesn't want to give one.) He's also a person of immeasureable charm and persuasiveness; he can work a room and a Rolodex like few others. He's deeply introspective. He's got the guts to invest his own money; he's hands on, yet trusts his partners and team members. (He credits them with much of his success. In every meaningful way, this is their story, too.)

For nearly two months, I've watched crowds filled with people of every size, shape, color and perspective clamor to get a chance to greet the Veep. Just to touch him. He was the star attraction at the Tribeca Film Festival's opening gala; he conversed effortlessly with programmers at an Adobe conference -- he'd circled the globe presenting his slideshow and attending meetings at least twice in the time it took me to write the piece. The "robo-candidate" of Y2K is gone -- he appears relaxed, happy in his own skin, passionately engaged in issues he gets to choose, with an agenda he gets to set. As a result, he's reenergized both his fans and his detractors -- nobody is neutral on the subject of Gore -- to powerfully emotional debates on everything from the issues of the day to his weight. And, he is the subject of endless political speculation. Will he? Won't he? (We give our own best guess in the story.)

It comes a surprise to everyone except the people who know him and work with him, that Gore has turned out to be such an extraordinarily nimble entrepreneur. And yes, he's made a tremendous amount of money. But this profile -- a business tale hiding in plain sight -- is how he did it.

Stay tuned.

06:02 pm | 0 recommendations | 3 comments

GoogleBooks and Adobe Fever – A Luddite’s Lament.

I used to think I was a reasonably creative professional, until I attended the Cre8 conference, an annual gathering that is devoted to all things Adobe. The Acrobat version, as opposed to the southwest version. It was held in one of the resort hotels at Disneyworld Orlando, and sponsored by the Aquent Graphics Institute – A Woburn, Mass based company which offers training, consulting and support for anyone who wants to better create better web or marketing documents. Dreamweaver? Bring it on. Pagemaker? No problem. Unless you’re me. I cannot be helped. Of this I am now clear.

The conference material was exhaustive, and in many cases, pretty specific stuff. Topics ranged from the very technical, like manipulating user interfaces to the more over-arching, like how to efficiently PDF your business into the modern era. Better living through software, that sort of thing.

The conference made a compelling case that the possibilities offered by a digital age are more than worth any hassles associated with selling your supervisor on a new workflow process, or worrying about document security. Hey, they must be on to something – the keynote lunchtime speaker was none other than former vice president Al Gore. That’s one pricey lunch. But worth it - – he delivered his signature global warming slideshow with the sort of passion that almost made you believe that it his first time giving it.

The first session I attended was called Paper to PDF: How Alice In Wonderland Gets Found on GoogleBooks. I figured it was a good way to start, since I’d heard of books. But if you haven’t heard of Google Book Search, check it out – since it will let you search the contents of books, any book, with a varying degree of access, depending upon the permission of the publisher or copyright holder. (If the book is out of copyright, you can digitally thumb through the entire book as often as you like, saving a PDF version if you wish. Whoa.) It’s heady stuff for a reporter, researcher, bibliophile and of course, publisher, regardless of your concerns about copyright issues.. “We’ll solve the digital rights management issues in the future,” said Michael Jahn, the presenter and bona fide PDF guru. “But we’re not going to solve them without using the digital services we have.” Or in other words, not without the next, best versions of the very technologies that created the problems in the first place.

Part of the presentation involved scanning old texts – books made before PDF -and turning them into readable, searchable PDF files. The example Jahn used was a worn text from a previous century, with speckled pages, poor registration, and other marks from a now ancient way of publishing. Through the miracle of software, speckles disappeared, skewed text stood straight, contrast issues were solved, and any unwanted marks were magically erased. It was really amazing.

And then the Luddite thing hit me. I couldn’t help but feel a bit sad about the information that may be lost when you pluck an object out of the era that created it, and then systematically remove the subtle elements that give it its identity in time. I like being reminded that someone labored to make an object with challenging technology that now seems hopelessly clunky. Perhaps they made it by hand. What does that tell me? Would I feel differently if I could tell that a book has passed through the hands of an unknown number of souls - some of whom have left a record of their musings in the margins? A less than perfect copy of a book would probably make for a less efficient research tool, granted - but aren’t our imperfections often among the most interesting, and most authentic, things about us?

Right. Or maybe I’m just feeling my age.

07:15 pm | 0 recommendations | 2 comments

AOL: More Beta Blues?

Some Fast food for thought: One of my favorite Internet experts (and fellow FC'er) pointed out a striking similarity between AOL.com's new beta homepage and Yahoo's. It does seem to be a remarkable...homage. (Check out our friends at Techcrunch
for some pointed commentary on the matter.) So how has innovation in web design become an afterthought for a company of AOL's size? Does being big necessarily mean that you are doomed to simply chase the competition? Will the entire web look the same one day?

04:39 pm | 0 recommendations | 4 comments

Inside "Inside Facebook"

One of the nice thing about being a magazine writer who also has access to a clean, well-lighted space on the internet, is that I get to resurrect some of tasty tidbits of reporting which get cut in the often brutal process of making words fit into the time/space continuum of magazine-making. There were many people who contributed to my understanding of the Facebook phenomenon and who didn’t make it into print; one of my clear favorites is former Facebook senior engineer Karel Baloun.

Baloun was an interesting and generous source, and spent a lot of time helping me grasp the many personalities behind the company. (It was Baloun that tipped me off to the anecdote that became the lede to the magazine piece.)

He’d been one of ten engineers hired in May 2005, right after the $12.7 million Accel Partners cash infusion, when the 790 day old company had grown to accommodate a heady 800 college networks, and was still called thefacebook.com. One of the engineers hired along with him was Steve Chen, who would leave the company a few months later to found YouTube. (Follow the networking ball: Baloun was recruited by Matt Cohler through a trusted connection via LinkedIn. Those playing along at home will remember that Cohler had been working at LinkedIn with investor Peter Thiel when Mark Zuckerberg came in for his first pitch meeting in the summer of 2004. Cohler joined the company shortly thereafter, as VP of pretty much everything.)

The Accel cash meant new blood, but it also meant that the small, ragged band of coding brothers who’d been building the site on rickety furniture from rented flats around the area would have to give up their alt.business creds and move into real offices. Sort of. In a self-published eBook called “Inside Facebook,” Baloun has fun describing the casual nature of the early Facebook as they adjusted to their new space on University Avenue inPalo Alto. “Zuck would come into the office, and seeing every chair full, just lie down on the thin carpet on his belly, sandals flapping, and start typing into his little white Mac iBook.” There’s lots of “history of the product” stuff in there too; Facebook job-seekers will no doubt get a kick out of that.

There’s quite a bit of friendly dish in the book as well. For example, Baloun believes that Chen was looking to create, ramp up and sell a company from the get-go. “Steve was looking at two choices: be a critical early success at a succeeding start-up (since he’d done that before at Paypal) or start his own company with his buddy Chad.” In a funny passage, Baloun describes counseling Chen to stick with the steady paycheck of Facebook, since he’d just bought an expensive condo in San Francisco. “But when I talked to him about the risks of adjustable rate mortgages… his mind was obviously somewhere else. His vision had him worth millions.” Sixteen months later, YouTube had a $1.65 billion pricetag, and Chen was victorious. Baloun recalls good-naturedly, “I laugh to myself how insistent we were that he personally return his corporate laptop!”

Baloun is a soft-spoken, introspective man, who recalls feeling a bit like an elder statesman among such young talent. In the book, he takes the opportunity to share his philosophies about life, family, start-ups, materialism and how technology is changing the world. Baloun, a former LookSmart engineer, also shares his 1.0 battle scars. “One fond LookSmart memory is of an executive at an all-hands Q&A session in mid-1999, at an expensive San Francisco hotel ballroom, being asked about purchasing Google. He replied that such a move would dilute LookSmart’s stock.” Ouch. But in between philosophizing and reminiscing, Baloun makes a similar point as early Facebook investor Peter Thiel does in the magazine piece – that the Facebook founders’ youth is an asset, not a liability. “I loved my early Facebook days so much because Zuck and company were completely oblivious to [sic] cynicism and therefore immune to being paralyzed by it. I have some lingering business cynicism shared by many late-nineties dotcom investors and one canine sock puppet…”

Baloun left Facebook after nearly a year - both he and the Facebook crew are politely vague about why - but each recalls the other fondly and clearly wish each other well. In fact, Baloun is a frequent contributor to many online conversations on the future of Facebook.

Baloun has moved on to other projects. He’s launched ptrades.com, a niche social site for commodity traders to experiment with free paper trades. “It applies the strengths of web2.0 community to a financial application - members can see what other successful traders are doing and why.” He’s also built a social web application “on which I'm launching half a dozen niche sites this year.”

But one of the things he misses, I bet, is the Mexican hot chocolate over at the Coupa Café, where Facebookers occasionally spend too much time. It was one of a series of recommendations he made to me which were gratefully received.

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