Troy Angrignon - Adventure Capitalist

Web 2.0 Summit 2006 - Table of Contents

Troy Angrignon — Mon, 20 Nov 2006 13:33:00 -0800

(For the most recent articles on Web 2.0, check out my full Web 2.0 articles category.)

This posting has links to all of the Web 2.0 Summit 2006 blog posts that I wrote:

Day 1

Enterprise 2.0
SMB Session
Launch Pad
Keynote with Eric Schmidt
Joi Ito on Worlds of Warcraft
Ben Trott of Six Apart, talking about Vox
Discussion with Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. (Washington Post) and Barry Diller (IAC)

Day 2:

Day 3:

My Summary of the Summit

Web 2.0 Summit 2006 - Day 3 / Disruption: Harnessing the Collective Intelligence

Troy Angrignon — Mon, 20 Nov 2006 11:50:00 -0800

Here are the day 3 notes for the Web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco:

[My notes are in this square brackets.]

Harnessing Collective Intelligence with Jim Buckmaster (Craigslist), Owen Van Natta (Facebook), Toni Schneider (Automattic), and Richard Rosenblatt (Demand Media)

On the panel:

Jim Buckmaster / CEO, Craigslist
Owen Van Natta, COO of Facebook
Toni Schneider, CEO of Automatic
Richard Rosenblatt, cofounder, chairman, CEO of Demand Media

Buckmaster:

We have made major business decisions (do we have sales people, do we get funding, do we expand the site) based on our customers discussions.
We keep having people tell us we should be running text-ads. In theory we would make tens of millions of dollars. But so far...(in a deadpan voice)...none of our users are requesting those ads be there so we haven't done it.

[This got a great response from the audience. It's funny. As audience members, we all want to monetize the web, but as users of Craigslist, we appreciate his user-centricity!]

We have taken no VC money at all.

Rosenblatt:

Demand Media is going to build tools that will let people embed their knowledge and share it with like-minded people and then get paid for it. We're moving into all sorts of niches: hiking, outdoor sports, gradening,
Question: You raised $220M. You bought 9 companies and rolled them into one big platform to start off with a solid base. So they bought "Trails" - that documents the 50,000 "professional trails" that are out there.

Answer: Yes, we saw an opportunity and we moved to dominate it quickly and massively.

Schneider:

We only took a little bit of money (from Polaris)
"User generated content" is too narrow of a term. It doesn't capture the ranking/sorting/sifting functions.
Spam is a huge problem for blogs. We have seen a doubling on the blogs in THE PAST THREE WEEKS alone. We built a completely adaptive spam system. When you mark something spam, that goes back to the server and the server learns going forward. That isn't user generated content but it certainly is collective intelligence or community based ranking/marking/flagging.

Van Natta:

We built some new stuff and our customers got very mad. We had to adjust very quickly. That's good. It's good to have your customers hammer you once in a while to make you realize how adaptable you need to be.

Question: It sounds like you can be very adaptive. Talk about that.

Rosenblatt: We consider product features as marketing. "Feature roll-out IS marketing."

[I **LOVE** that!!! What's our marketing budget? What marketing budget? You mean the money we're spending on talking with customers and making this product "kick ass?"]

Question: what about giving up control. How do you do it?

Schneider: We let our users do the language translation. We set up Wordpress so that our users could hit the button and translate the page and post it directly and it went live that second. We reviewed thousands of lines of translation later and tweaked only a very few things and found only one intentional swap and it was a guy announcing his wedding date in German! It was BRILLIANT and allowed us to do a full language translation in 24 hours!!

[That is a very powerful story!!]

What advice do you have for new entrepreneurs?

Schneider: Don't build a business that people think is a good idea. People will always tell you that it is a bad idea. Focus on what you think is important and ignore the advice.
Rosenblatt: Follow the users. Early.

Question: There is a difference between knowledge and opinion; How do you deal with the fact that a large audience can say a lot of stuff that isn't true?

O'Reilly: Have you ever heard of Sturgeon's Law? A science fiction writer named Theodore Sturgeon had an audience member once say to him, "95% of all science fiction is crap", to which Sturgeon replied, "yes, but 95% of EVERYTHING is crap. So what?"

[This parallells the comment in The Long Tail by Chris Anderson where he says: "The Long Tail is indeed full of crap. Yet it's also full of works of refined brilliance and depth and an awful lot in between." (p.116, The Long Tail)]

Question: All of you have big communities. What is your role? Leader? Cop? Good guy? Bad guy?

Rosenblatt: you are a guide most of the time but you also have the ability to police it to remove/sanction the damaging elements of the community. Your moderators need to have that ability to do that.
Schneider: Your most involved people will begin to feel that they are helping you build your COMPANY, not just your product. You need to realize that ownership feeling is there and treat those people accordingly. You might not actually give them shares but you definitely need to let them be involved in your business.

Patriot Act abuse: couple being overtly sexual on a plane have been charged under the Patriot Act. WTF?

Troy Angrignon — Fri, 17 Nov 2006 11:59:00 -0800

THIS is the reason you don't allow overly broad stupid legislation like the Patriot Acts I and II and the most recent Military Commission Act to pass. They are always unintended uses that far exceed the original intent of the law. In this case, a couple in their mid-forties were being overtly sexual on a Southwest Airlines flight and have been charged under the Patriot Act (which was designed as a tool to charge terrorists.)

What a joke. Why are Americans putting up with this? WAKE UP. Unbelievable.

I mean, don't get me wrong. They should have been hauled off the plane if he was threatening the staff, but charge them with mischief, not under the fracking terrorism act.

Craig Ferguson had a funny episode on this story: "When the other passengers saw these goings-on, they were surprised and thought....'What, entertainment on a Southwest Airlines flight?'" Funny. But not.

Web 2.0 Summit 2006 - Day 2 / Net Neutrality debate between Vinton Cerf (ICANN/Google) and Robert Pepper (ex-FCC, now Cisco)

Troy Angrignon — Thu, 16 Nov 2006 08:19:00 -0800

Day 2 notes from Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, CA:

[my analysis and notes are in these square brackets.]

Net Neutrality debate: Vinton Cerf, father of the internet vs. Robert Pepper, ex-FCC and now Cisco

Bob:

this is a falsely premised debate setting up tyranny on the one hand (heavy-handed regulation) vs.chaos (no regulation)
As an FCC policy guy, I have fought heavy regulation for ten years. If you invite the govt in to fix the problem, it will get in there and be much more far-reaching than you intended.

Cerf:

The architecture of the internet (separation of layers) has been responsible for success of the internet
Power is at the edge (you can grab an application and install it without central control.)
But with the current broadband monopoly/duopoly and their inherent desire to be anti competitive, we want to pre-empt them from being anti-competitive.

Bob:

There was some legislation that would have given the FCC teeth to do much of this but that legislation died

Cerf:

We didn't back that legislation because we hadn't seen FCC enforcement work properly in the past.
we wanted common-carriage rights but you didn't want that.

Bob:

This is more complex than you think.

Cerf:

"That's theorem 207. EVERYTHING is more complex than we think." [Funny theorem...but I'm not sure that I have the theorem number correct.]
The internet is a layered structure. We need to factor that into the law.

Bob:

Cerf and I agree in end-to-end principles, punishing anti-competitive behaviours, and universal access.
We just disagree on how to get there. You want regulation. We want case law developed over time.

Cerf:

Case law takes too long to develop. We want to lay it out up front so that we know what is right, what is wrong, and what are the bad behaviours that will get published.

the big lie is that the application service providers (google etc.) were getting a free ride.

Cerf: Bob and I both want to crush the anti-competitive behaviours so that we protect the innovation on the web. We just differ in our thoughts on how best to get there.
[At the end of the day, this debate appears to be more based on: what is the best regulatory mechanism to fulfill one's desired ends? There is something to be said about understanding these things and taking the more complicated route (case law?) vs. the easy route that might have more complicated spill-over effects? There have been many cases where the "simple" legislated answer ended up having all sorts of complex effects that could not have been predicted in advance. Case law does tend to be more iterative.]