Mike Arrington And Linelessness

David Carr has done a good job outlining the specifics of the TechCrunch/CrunchFund mess, and raising the spectre of self-serving publicity:

As business reporters, we are often pressed up against the glass, watching as others take risks, make investments and build companies. We are observers, not players. But the froth and money sloshing around has reached a whole other level, and looks enticing no matter what side of the glass you are on.

Michael Arrington kicked a hole in the glass. A former lawyer and investor who founded TechCrunch in 2005, he told his bosses at AOL in April that he was going to continue to edit the site, but resume investing in some of the companies TechCrunch covered.

When criticism followed, he said he would fully disclose any conflicts, and besides, he never saw himself as a journalist anyway, even though he often broke news. AOL swallowed hard and said Mr. Arrington was free to do what he wanted. Thus emboldened, he spent the following months both investing and directing coverage.

TechCrunch is capable of tearing the limbs off a baby company, but it’s been a generally nurturing place for start-ups when Mr. Arrington has skin in the game. On April 1, he invested in Supyo, a video-chat start-up created by Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker, the pair who changed the world with Napster.

Fourteen days later, M G Siegler, one of the TechCrunch’s highly regarded writers, wrote: “The new project is nothing if not interesting. Think Chatroulette done right.” Mr. Arrington’s involvement was duly noted.

On April 4 TechCrunch wrote a generally positive post about Milk, a mobile development lab created by Kevin Rose, one of the co-founders of Digg, the social news site. On April 26, a round of funding closed, which included Mr. Arrington’s investment, and his involvement was disclosed at that time in an article about the funding.

On June 30, Mr. Arrington invested in LikeALittle, a location-based flirtation site for young people. On Aug. 1, they got a favorable product announcement along with a video visit to their office in a home in Palo Alto where an employee talked about what an “awesome” workplace it was..

We know these things because Mr. Arrington was mostly transparent about the conflicts. But how many articles about equally interesting competitors did not get written?

All sorts of arguments can be made pro and con about the general and specific issues — Arrington is a good guy/bad guy, discloses all/conceals a great deal, everyone does it/no one should be able to do that — but something tectonic is being overlooked.

The subtext of this brouhaha is the incipient linelessness of new media. Arrington pushed the line, or jumped over the line, or erased the line. What line? Are there any lines left? Can there be lines?

I personally subscribe to the notion that potential conflicts of interest should be exposed, but I don’t believe that ends favoritism. My disclosure that company X is a client in a story about compnay X doesn’t mean that over the course of a given year I will not have written more about client X than non-client Y. It’s only natural that I would know more about a company that is a client, and less about companies that I am not in touch with.

And how would such an ‘imbalance’ of coverage be tracked? All press releases aren’t objectively the same, and obviously some judgment has to be made, but they can’t even all be read: there are too many.

Even at a old school bastion of journalism like the NY Times, editors and authors have to pick what stories to follow, out of the infinity of potential stories in the universe. There is no infallible, objective mechanism to pick stories, one that is fair and unbiased in some truly general and provable sense.

The reality is that all organizations (and individuals) have to settle for extreme approximations of what a hypothetically unbiased approach to news coverage would produce, if such a thing actually existed.

Arrington’s heresy in all this is the simple fact of owning stock in the companies that he and others at Techcrunch are covering. This was old news years ago, when Mike was a small entrepreneurial blogger, and even later as the head of a go-go tech blogging company. But now that AOL has purchased TechCrunch, and then invests in CrunchFund, old school media takes another look and cries foul.

So, it comes down to this: Are there still lines that constrain ‘journalists’ from taking sides in the marketplace? Obviously, the NY Times has a rulebook that they require their employees to follow, as do many other organizations, that spells out their position: thou shalt not invest in companies in the industry you cover. The Times created that rule book in a time before blogs, social media, and the mess we live in today.

Mike has no such rulebook. And he says he’s not a journalist, either. He’s something new, living outside the lines. In fact, his existence suggests there are no lines. When anyone can write and reach millions without being anointed by an old school, ‘there are lines’ sort of organization like the NY Times, then there are no longer any lines. Someone like Arrington is, in this lineless universe, just a chameleon who used the trappings and style of publishing to achieve economic influence on the tech start-up market, and then has cashed out on that, exploiting a power vacuum. It’s an identity conflict, with his detractors saying he must act like a journalist, and Mike saying, ‘no thanks’.

But it wasn’t journalists that created Arrington, but the tech scene: a tight-knit, self-absorbed community of investors, entrepreneurs, and wannabes, all desperate for ink, share-of-mind, and a chance for the brass ring. So many hanging on every word printed in TechCrunch, trying to get written up, hoping for a leg up in the steeplechase that is the central animating goal of the tech scene.

Maybe the deep libertarianism of the West Coast tech scene is a factor here, also. The ideology that the elite should be allowed to do whatever, and that there is no need for regulation or lines.

One last thought: It’s strange to recall that Arrington was the guy to break the news in 2010 about Angelgate, a meeting of various angel investors who were engaged in cartel-like behavior, if the stories are to be believed. This was a case where he thought lines had been crossed, possibly into outright criminal behavior.

But in the current TechCrunchgate, the lines aren’t about illegality: this is a story about identities, and the communities that create them. An identity conflict, a culture conflict, and one that might end with a truly Shakespearean close, like Titus Andronicus, with nearly all the dramatis personae lying in a heap on the stage.

related

TechCrunch50: What Ever Happened To Awesome?

[I am returning to my old 3 threes review format for conferences, starting with this week’s TechCrunch50. This format involves a description of the three most interesting, challenging, or compelling companies, people, and ideas from the event.]

What ever happened to awesome?

Maybe it’s just me getting old and curdudgeonly, but I had hoped that I would see 10 or so really interesting products debuted at TechCrunch50. Instead, the most fun I had was talking to returnees (like David Sachs of Yammer) and hearing what their plans were for third generation products. The awesome start-ups just weren’t there.


Three Companies

Microsoft (Bing) — It’s unusual for me to praise Microsoft, but the newly announced Bing Visual Search was very impressive: the first Microsoft technology I’ve really imagined using since OneNote.

The service arrays results of certain searches in tables of images — like womens shoes, or other products — and provides controls to allow the searcher to change characteristics unique to the search domain to further refine the search results. Very impressive.

Threadsy — I think that the first company to come up with the right way to allow infovores (or ‘onfovores’) to manage their ever-expanding streams of links, recommendations and commentary will become the next big thing. No one so far has cracked that code. I thought that Threadsy was the best candidate at the show, however. And the company was runner-up in the final judging, so I guess others agreed.

AnyClip — I love the idea of being able to access any scene in any movie, since I am constantly pulling out movie references. AnyClip seems geared to supporting my addiction in exactly that way. As the judges said at the presentation, if they can work out all the agreements with the studios this is going to be a great service. And the demo showed that it really worked.

Three People

Mike Arrington/Jason Calacanis — Mike Arrington’s meltdown in the final 20 minutes of the conference was extremely odd (although consonant with Arrington’s Murdoch-like media baron persona), and highlighted Jason Calacanis’ showmanship, by contrast. I found myself wondering if the meltdown was staged, at first, but I guess it wasn’t just a ploy for press attention, but appears to be a real business breakdown between the two, and it means the end of Techcrunch50 as a conference, apprently.

George Zachary — A difficult choice for the best judge, considering that the group including Yossi Vardi, Ron Conway, Don Dodge, Bradley Horowitz, Sean Parker, and a dozen other luminaries. Chamillionaire proved himself capable of holding his own, in this crowd, by the way.

Penn Gillette — Penn Gillette appeared to show off his new iPhone app, which seemed pretty lame. However, he wins the award for his one liner. When asked what he was going to do next, which was intended as a question regarding the business behind the app, he responded “I guess I will go to Vegas and shoot some guns at my partner.”

Three Ideas

Dolls Are Scary — I found the obsession with toys and dolls creepy (see TechCrunch 50: Digital Bedtime Stories Are Icky). More importantly, showcasing this niche, as opposed to general purpose Web 2.0 apps, suggested to me that we aren’t seeing as many products intended to be worldbeaters.

Maybe 50 Is Too Many? — Cramming 50 companies into two days meant that the conference started early, ran late, and the companies only had 6 minutes for their pitches. Despite 50 sounding like a small number, I came away feeling like ten or fifteen less — like the original TechCrunch40 — might have been better. Moot now, since the event seems to be headed for the dustbin of history.

The Flow Is Still A Torrent — No one has solved the stream problem: how to effectively throttle the stream so that people can stay on top without drowning. It might be interesting if there was a conference dedicated just to this issue, and showcasing various approaches. (Jason… are you listening? You don’t need Arrington for this.)

Techcrunch50 in Retrospect

So, a few days have passed. I have given away all the tchotchkes and washed all the tshirts (Zark get’s kudos for best shirt, by the way). Looking back, it really didn’t amount to much. No staggeringly beautiful SlideRocket, no enterprise-suitable Yammer, no crowd-pleasing Twitter client breakthrough.

Perhaps its a sign of the times. San Francisco and the attendant tech scene is under the cloud of the econolypse. Despite the bonhomie and attempts at pressing on, the layoffs, stillborn companies, and career wreckage is taking a toll. The investors and entrepreneurs that were preaching thrift and ‘longer runway’ last fall seem to be in a perpetual state of enforced optimism, but the tech start-up scene seems low energy now.

The high points for me were discussions with more established companies, like Yammer, and hearing what David Sachs, their CEO, is contemplating for next year and beyond. Or seeing serial entrepreneur Brian Alvey, former CTO of Weblogsinc, take another run at blogging with his Crowd Fusion. While these are young companies, they are not blazing a trail in the wilderness, defining a new product category.

So maybe it’s a time of consolidation and small advances. If so, Techcrunch 50 was the perfect show.

Arrington on Scoble, FriendFeed, And The Web Of Flow

Arrington has staged a mock intervention for Scoble, whose ‘addiction’ to Friendfeed (and to a lesser extent, Twitter) has led to a serious diminution of his blogging, and for what?

[from I’m Sorry Robert, But It’s Time For A Friendfeed Intervention]

[…]

I asked Robert how much time he actually spends on those services. He monitors them all day, he said, hitting refresh over and over on both (he doesn’t use desktop clients to manage the services, and he says he doesn’t like real-time streaming feature on Friendfeed). In addition to watching all day, he says he spends at least seven hours a day, seven days a week, actually reading and responding directly on those services.

That’s 2,555 hours over the last year.

Which is more than a full time job (2,000 hours/year).

It is more than 106 full 24 hour days interacting with those services in aggregate.

It is an addiction.

What is the cost of this addiction? Well, I’ll put his family life aside, that’s his business. But his blog has clearly suffered. He now posts only a few times a week, sometimes sporadically writing multiple posts in a day but often skipping 3-4 days in between. A year ago, Robert wrote multiple posts, every day. I used to read his blog daily, now I visit once a week.

“Some people tell me my thought leadership has declined as I’ve blogged less.”

What has he gained? On Twitter Robert has nearly 45,000 followers and has written over 16,000 messages. On Friendfeed Robert has nearly 23,000 subscribers.

So lots of people follow Robert on those services, but they aren’t visiting his site and the content he writes is on someone else’s server. Plus all that content is just really forgettable, compared to a good thought piece that people refer back to over time. There is no direct way to monetize any of that content, which is something that a full time blogger with a family really needs to think about.

Meanwhile, all this attention from Robert has certainly helped the valuations of Friendfeed and Twitter. How much of that value does Robert receive? Zilch.

Much of what Arrington is saying rings so true, and primarily because Scoble is such an outlier, such an anomaly. However, the general trends of how Scoble, and others, have shifted their web interaction is more interested than the naked numbers without a trend line.

Robert is the guy that put the sizzle in RSS, you may recall, back when he was a fire-eating blogger. He was following hundreds of blogs — back in 2004 he was reading 2000? He has always overdone in the line of consumption; he’s like watching an eating contest: it’s either amusing or nauseating, but it’s certainly not for the average person.

So what has really happened is not some normal web user who has all of a sudden started spending seven hours a day in his underwear, not showering, smashing the return key. He’s transitioned from roughly N hours of blog reading via RSS to N hours of conversation (with many, many links) via streaming applications.

We can divide this discussion into two parts:

  1. The intervention into Robert’s psychology and behavior that leads him to spend so much time hitting the return key: I will leave that to others to dwell on, after mentioning that if Scoble is doing something dangerous to his health or well-being we have been supporting him for five years or more.
  2. The transition from a web-of-pages, where the principal source of critical information is found on static, unitary web pages, generally written by a single owner/author, and where comments are left on those pages by ‘visitors’, to the web-of-flow, where conversation has left the web-of-pages and moved into flow applications, like Twitter and Friendfeed. Robert has moved into this new context, more or less organically, and he now spends his time chatting instead of writing blog posts. Arrington is principally ranting against this transition to flow, making the case that Scoble to helping Friendfeed enormously without recompense, and losing all the traffic that he might have passing by a blog where he could make money selling ads, like Arrington does.

I have said for years that traditional media — and Arrington has become mainstream media at this point, a Murdoch in the making — would war against the movement from pages to flow: they will say it is illegitimate, immoral, fattening, addictive, whatever.

Arrington’s points make sense relative to a certain perspective. In essence he is saying that time we spend engaging with others on the web has got to have a point, otherwise it’s just hanging out. And in the simplest terms, you should either be making money from becoming heavily invested (and well-known) on the web, or doing something else of great value.

Scoble maintains that his involvement with those in his various networks has great value, and that his more tangible work — his video series — has improved because of this involvement. But Arrington’s argument is stronger, at least to Arrington and other realists, since, implicitly, if Scoble went to work for a media outlet like TechCrunch and devoted his energies to media work that was more monetizable than the amorphous ‘following’ he has amassed in Flowland, he’d be worth millions. And he isn’t using his great hypothetical influence on the web to cure poverty, or end the genocide in Darfur, or overturn prop 8, either. He’s just fooling with tools.

But Scoble is some sort of idealist, maybe even a utopian, who sees the distant glimmerings of a new tomorrow, one that hasn’t been figured out yet. Arrington is right that Scoble can’t sell ads on his Friendfeed stream. Yet. So in very concrete terms, Scoble is losing serious bank while he is putzing around with all this social community chit-chat stuff.

And to a lesser extent, so are all of us that Twitter all day. Some a certain viewpoint, it’s like sitting on the porch and whittling.

But Robert is a early adopter, and not necessarily even the ablest promoter of the movement he is in.

The rise of flow and the new form of social connection that these flow applications engenders will slowly erode the edges of the more established, page-based Web 1.0 publishing models, like TechCrunch, Huffington Post, and whatever it is that the newspaper behemoths metamorphose into before finally shutting off their printing presses. Something new will emerge, out here, at the far fringes of Flowland. I believe it will recast the older forms of media, reshape them, like TV did to radio, and web 1.0 has done to print. But it’s going to take a long time, a decade or more, and a million baby steps to get there.

Scoble’s in love with the edge, and he doesn’t apparently want to monetize every waking second of his life. But is not an addiction: he’s blinded by the light, which is a whole different problem.