NEW YORK--A year ago, a handful of local entrepreneurs got together and threw a party called The Founders Club. It took over a private residence, albeit a very upscale one, in Manhattan's Tribeca neighborhood, and was essentially a low-buzz gathering of Gotham tech enthusiasts who wanted to schmooze.
Bar. Elevator. Awesomeness.
(Credit: Caroline McCarthy/CNET News.com)My, how times have changed. Wednesday night marked the fifth occurrence of the semi-sporadic Founders Club parties, and the organizers (most prominently Blip.tv co-founder Dina Kaplan, Paltalk creator Joel Smernoff, and event planner Celia Chen of Notes on a Party) had stepped it up a few notches. This time around, it was held in ABC's Good Morning America studios in Times Square--and there was a bar in the elevator.
No, I'm not kidding. Upon entering the space, everyone was treated to a desperately needed glass of wine between the ground and second floors. I guess they couldn't wait.
The attendees were a combination of big media's digital gurus, venture capitalists, and local start-up entrepreneurs, overall amassing quite the who's-who of New York tech culture. The roll call, in part, included DoubleClick founder and Alley Corp. chief Kevin Ryan, Greycroft Partners' Alan Patricof, TheLadders' Marc Cenedella (I told him I'd seen one of his company's ads on TV while on the treadmill at the gym), George Kliavkoff and Jessica Schell of NBC Universal, Disney-ABC's Bernard Gershon, InterActiveCorp exec Jason Rapp, CollegeHumor co-founders Josh Abramson and Ricky Van Veen, former AOL exec and Pilot Group overlord Bob Pittman, Google's president of advertising and commerce Tim Armstrong, Digg CEO Jay Adelson, and a whole bunch of representatives from sponsor Bain Capital Ventures as well as a smattering of other venture firms (some of which I'd heard of, some of which I hadn't).
Representing the city's prolific new-media and blogger culture were Rocketboom host Joanne Colan, Mainstreet's Caroline Waxler, Gawker Media's Nick Denton and Gaby Darbyshire, TreeHugger (now Discovery Communications-owned) founder Graham Hill, and Curbed publisher Lockhart Steele, who told me that his blog network's current plans involve taking over the world. Watch out for that one.
A few folks were willing to dish out details on their companies--perhaps it was the martinis being served copiously at the bar. Tumblr founder David Karp told me about his red-hot micro-blogging start-up's plan to handle a revenue model--he plans to create a central "destination" homepage showcasing cool and popular Tumblr content and then serve ads on it.
I also talked to Carlos Garcia, co-founder and CEO of Scrapblog, who will be welcoming a whole lot of Web-ish folks to his home city for the Future of Web Apps conference next week. Scrapblog is hosting one of the event's official parties--I hope they know what they're getting into!
LX.TV founder Joseph Varet, whose company was recently acquired by NBC Universal, told me that his video site's content will start appearing on Los Angeles-area stations soon, and that a new show is in the works, too--but he wouldn't say anything more about that one.
As for the press corps, I was in the company of quite a few other tech reporters, like Fortune's Jessi Hempel, the Wall Street Journal's Jessica Vascellaro, the New York Times' Brian Stelter and Saul Hansell, TechCrunch's Erick Schonfeld, Silicon Alley Insider editor Henry Blodget, and Valleywag assistant editor Nicholas Carlson, who wanted to know why so many people didn't want to talk to him.
Don't worry, buddy, I don't think it's anything personal.
Official photos, courtesy of an event photographer, are on Flickr.
In a quintessentially Web 2.0 case of "If it got funding, it must be worth a look," user-generated news site NowPublic hauled in $10.6 million in series A venture capital funding earlier this week, and now the blog community has pounced on it with accolades and criticism alike. NowPublic, in case you haven't checked it out yet, is a "citizen journalism" site devoted to bringing you news of the user-generated variety--all stories and accompanying photos, videos, and other multimedia are contributed by fellow NowPublic readers. Then, much like Digg, which remains the top name in "social news," the user base is invited to rank and comment on stories.
It's pretty easy to use, especially if you're familiar with Digg. The top handful of stories are displayed on the front page, and a click will get you to a longer list. An Ajax-powered widget shows you the latest in comments and submissions. You can also divide the news up into verticals (politics, culture, entertainment, what-have-you). The interface is a little clunky, but pretty well-designed. The really important factor for a site like this, however, is the content.
News aggregation, either through "crowdsourcing" the reader base or automating the story selection (a la Google News), has grown more all the more appealing in recent months as headlines of Paris Hilton's jail sentence have made the jump between Us Weekly and USA Today. It makes the "shark attack story," once the poster child for media sensationalism, look downright newsworthy--and it also means that there are plenty of disgruntled news junkies out there who are fully convinced that they'd do a better job of picking which stories are the important ones.
Crowdsourcing is trendy. The problem is that you don't know what the crowd is going to be. There are a handful of "real" stories at the top of NowPublic's ranking (a bridge collapse in California, for example), but the top photo-video hit remains "Sexy Girls Playing Beach Volleyball." Additionally, there are already stories popping up on NowPublic--and getting some high ratings--that are clearly satirical. Cute, yes, but what happens when somebody plants a fake story on a user-generated news site? We've already seen this happen with Digg; remember that story about Apple Stores charging admission? 1500 Diggs later, readers caught onto the fact that it came from an Onion clone.
Right now, if you look at the top stories on NowPublic and compare them to those on the automated Google News, there is some overlap--but some disconnect, too. A bridge collapse in northern California, which doesn't make an appearance on Google News' front page, is the top story on NowPublic. No mention is made on the Vancouver-based NowPublic of Google News' current top story--that the chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court was hospitalized--but photographs from a nude anti-oil protest in the start-up's home city are plentiful. On the flip side, Google News' aggregator has glossed over reports of a threatening typhoon off Japan, but it's right there on NowPublic. Human filtering, it seems, has both its drawbacks and benefits. Just look at Digg: it's great for tech enthusiasts, but hasn't caught on much outside the geek community.
I'm a believer in the theory that a lot of the Internet's biggest successes owe a whole lot to luck, and that the early days of a new Web endeavor are the most crucial. It's tough to kill a site's early reputation when nothing "goes away" online, and when word gets around among the early-adopter crowd that TechCrunch's Michael Arrington has trashed a hotly anticipated new start-up, that company will have a hard time cooking up a second chance. It's the same reasoning that has made a handful of New York restauranteurs rather annoyed with the city's very vocal community of food bloggers, claiming that the epicurean WordPressers rush in and test out their establishments before all the kinks have been ironed out (newspaper restaurant reviewers typically give a few weeks' grace period) and giving the eateries prematurely bad reputations that tend to last.
Consequently, these first few weeks in the wake of the funding announcement are going to be important for the evolution of NowPublic. If curious Web users, having read about the site's new funding, click their browsers over to NowPublic and see a refreshing new take on relevant news, the site could be a real phenomenon. But if NowPublic is clogged early on with fake or satirical news, political fringe or conspiracy-theory stories, celebrity gossip, or local news that's only relevant to a narrow demographic, then it could easily become crammed into a niche from which it will be hard to escape. Yes, reputations can change--just look at how the Huffington Post went from being a "liberal Drudge Report" to a reputable news destination--but when there's a lot of hard-to-control user-generated content involved, it's not going to be easy for a company to shape and reshape is own image.
Because no matter what your business model is, putting so much control into the hands of users is always a gamble. If it works, it works great. But if it doesn't work, well, you're in quite the bind.
The MyCapture offering for the Contra Costa Times' Web site
(Credit: Contra Costa Times)The actual merit of this month's CNN-YouTube Democratic debate has proven arguable, but it at least appears to have been influential, as more and more "traditional" news outlets are turning to the power of YouTube and its ilk as a way to breathe some new life into participatory citizenship.
One CNET News.com editor directed me to a relatively new feature offered by the online operations of the California regional paper Contra Costa Times--"Your Views," which allows users to submit their own photos, videos, and cartoons. The whole system is provided by a multimedia service company called MyCapture. It's not all that well-integrated into the main newspaper site, but it does offer some cool ways for readers to interact with the publication and ultimately network with other members of the community.
The most notable offering is probably the fact that readers can submit letters to the editor in video form, much as the CNN-YouTube debate encouraged ordinary citizens to go beyond the restrictions of the usual question-and-answer format. It is, as you can imagine, quite versatile. Presumably, you can now use video to show the newsroom powers-that-be that your street is full of potholes, that the naughty kids next door just TP'ed your magnolia tree again, or--as so many YouTube videos do--that your cat knows some really cute tricks. That being said, it doesn't look like the Contra Costa Times' video letters to the editor have really caught on yet.
Anyone else have local newspapers that are taking video letters-to-the-editor or are doing something else particularly unusual on the new-media front?
This one's kind of a bitter irony. We've all been reading over and over about how traditional news outlets are turning to the Web in order to boost readership and advertising revenue in the face of a well-documented decline in print media (Wired magazine has a feature in this month's issue about newspaper chain Gannett's attempt to modernize). But in this case, it's the other way around: The Associated Press, according to a report on Friday evening, has announced that it's axing its youth-oriented, blog- and video-heavy ASAP news portal because it proved to be a failed experiment.
The two-year-old ASAP, which was created as an alternative news hub for the generation of young professionals who typically don't turn on a TV news show unless Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert is involved, will go under on October 31. Director Kathleen Carroll said in a memo that it simply wasn't profitable enough.
A look at what's on ASAP's front page. Not nearly enough on 'the news.'
(Credit: The Associated Press)This is really too bad, in my opinion, because the AP had a great chance to show that it's possible for an established and reputable name in reporting to create a separate property geared toward the YouTube crowd. Unfortunately, it fell short in a few ways--ASAP offers up traditional AP news stories mixed with podcasts, video footage, map mashups, and blog commentary, but most of it isn't integrated as seamlessly as it could be. There's no central video player, for example.
Also, you have to do some clicking to find what you want to. Top billing is currently given to a feature on The Simpsons, a story and accompanying video about "office casual" fashion, and a link to ASAP's main news blog. Headlines, meanwhile, are kept in small print under verticals like News, Entertainment, and Sports; there's a ticker of AP stories at the top. It just isn't an adequate presentation of what's important--stratifying headlines by freshness and relevance is something that I think the Huffington Post does very well, for example.
The unappealing structure might've been behind ASAP's demise, or perhaps it was a matter of publicity: I'd never even heard of the project until I was at a party thrown by some New York-area media entrepreneurs and there happened to be an ASAP videoblogger walking around.
There's some cool content on ASAP, so enjoy it while it lasts--and stay tuned for more developments in the ongoing evolution of "next-generation news."
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