Saturday, April 02, 2005

BBC: Pope John Paul II dead at 84. 

Scoble is a man of respect. "My co-author Shel Israel gave me heck for being too nice to my fellow bloggers." Right on. Too much footsie in the blogosphere. Enough. Just the facts please. Enough telling me about your friends. Make some new enemies for a change.  

Listening to the endless radio "coverage" of the Pope's death, it's remarkable how unbalanced it is. They have priests, saying we all know deep inside the Pope was right about everything. Hello. Earth to Catholics. The Pope was a good PR guy, but come on, he was against birth control. The Catholics actually burned condoms in AIDS-plagued Africa. Now would be a great opportunity for some of the real reporting the pros are so famous for. Instead they're running an endless infomercial for the Catholic Church. Hey the Catholics are the church of sin and hell, fire and brimstone. If ever there were an opportunity to be balanced this is it. No more footsie? Heh, yeah sure.  

Rex Hammock isn't playing footsie. "Do I really need all that crap portalized?" Tell it like it is bro. 

Rogers Cadenhead: "Every time commercial developers create an innovative new software category, as Netscape, UserLand Software and Pyra Labs did in weblogging and syndication, open source coders follow behind with software that makes it harder to earn a living in that niche." 

Why Darren Barefoot isn't smoking the podcasting dope.  

5PM Eastern: I've arrived safely back at the beach in Florida. Had a great time in NYC, look forward to going back soon.  

Kevin Fox on a Ben Hammersley article in the Guardian. "The trouble is that his datapoints are pretty selective, and in some cases are flat-out incorrect."  

Reviewing the Yahoo 360 launch, after the fact 

The launch of Yahoo 360 seems so long ago, but it was just six days. How did it go? This screed nails it. Invite-only, exclusive, two-tier marketing of beta services, a tradition started by Google (as far as anyone knows) don't work. It only worked for Gmail because there was great anticipation, the idea was new (the method of marketing, that is), and you could use Gmail to communicate with people who didn't use Gmail.

Everything about Yahoo 360 is for members only, and in the first few hours of its life in the blogosphere, most people couldn't get in. Now, after it's launched, there's no way to see anything other than a ghost town. Maybe that's all there is, maybe not. But for a service like this, the appearance of being a ghost town is just as bad as actually being one.

All this fuss for a service that most people thought was a poor cousin to Flickr that Yahoo bought just before rolling out 360. It's a disaster epic on the scale of The Towering Inferno or The Poseidon Adventure. They did everything wrong, and worked really hard at it.

Moral of the story, big companies don't have mojo, they can't, and it's not fair to make that the issue. They can, however, make the trains run on time, and at that Yahoo does quite well. But they should leave the innovation to small, nimble, motivated devteams with nothing to lose and no corporate hierarchy to please. Hire a business school prof to do a case study for you. It's never worked differently in Silicon Valley, yet this is a lesson Silicon Valley keeps relearning. The next revolution isn't on stage at Esther's or SXSW or even Etech -- those were the last revolutions.