Being Mark Cohen

I spent the day at the Tech23 event in Surry Hills today, seeing some of what the Australian startup scene has to offer.  There were a wide array of startups – some pitching to get started and some already off the ground, pitching to get equity to try fire up the business and take it to the next level.  One or two who didn’t need investors at all, who were looking for relationships.

The key take-aways for me were that (possibly a massive and cruel generalisation) the success indicators can really be summed up as two points:

1. The crew working on a project should have significant experience in the target market between them.
2. The team are led by someone who is at least a little charismatic, and is visibly passionate about their space.

If you can’t do an elevator pitch you’ll lose what little attention you attract.  As an extension of that, if you can’t explain your idea in an elevator pitch you’re not going to be able to sell it to the person you’re pitching.  That doesn’t make it wrong, but it does tell you you’re selling it wrong – or maybe just to the wrong target audience.

For more info on who presented and what they showed off, search Twitter for #tech23 and check out the site at http://www.tech23.com.au

I have some hobby sites I play with to keep me entertained. The biggest one suffered what I would describe as a perfect storm. One part of the application broke because a third party API I use started throwing warning messages that their wrapper did not handle. At the same time as I was trying to fix this, the hosting provider I use for the website decided to apply some changes to their shared hosting, which basically locked down security and absolutely toasted my site. Dead dead dead.

Granted it’s still early days but you can see from the traffic chart above that things seem to have recovered. If I gave up in the face of either of these setbacks it would indeed have been a perfect storm and my little site would have been out of business. But instead, after two weeks of relocating hosting, battling with databases, tweaking code, killing another site to avoid duplicate content, and a host of other points of attack I’m getting a bit of confidence back that this might be over.

Little Lessons for Mark: Wherever possible acquire a copy of source code, no site is too small to be worth monitoring, never give up until you are convinced you’ve exhausted the possibilities. And spend the money on better hosting providers.

I had a discussion today about how many blogs that have been established have fallen into ruin.  We were also talking specifically about late-comer blogs launched by companies who wanted a dialogue with their customers, who discovered it was a tougher job than they had anticipated.  Some blogs go dry within a few weeks of launch.

Stagnation, and the proliferation of social media and social sites like Facebook and Twitter have apparently dealt the blogosphere a fatal blow.  This is evident in my Google Reader, where i used to have close to a thousand items every couple of nights I now have more like two to three hundred – and they are more concentrated in a few busy blogs.

I personally hope that blogging makes a comeback.  I miss the eloquently penned words of the many bloggers who are so much smarter than me, and I think the world’s a poorer place for their silence.  Some thoughts just don’t fit into 140 characters or less.  The depth of understanding and the colour that can be given through the craft of copywriting is not to be underestimated.

I for one will be waiting patiently and with a welcoming smile and an eager eye when you, the small-audience bloggers who took the citizen-journalism battle to the streets, decide to return.

I’ve had a whole bunch of accounts with a few different shared hosting providers.  On a mate’s recommendation I headed over to Dreamhost and happened to do so on a day when they had a 92% discount promotion.  $15 AUD for a year of hosting seemed a reasonable gamble for a year’s hosting so I signed up.  Dreamhost really do rock.  Their signup is easy, their setup is easy, and so far the sites I have there are reliably up-and-running non-stop.  They offer multi-domain hosting on the one account, and I can see the speed difference on this blog when doing a full-refresh compared to the old host in terms of image load speed – and best of all the wierd characters I used to get in posts look like they’ve vanished.  So after a few months using Dreamhost I highly recommend them for wordpress (that’s really all my php) or rails hosting (I’m using Passenger).

I also upgraded my Wordpress installation because I was running a really old version.  While I was at it I added in a few new plugins.  Specifically, I want to mention WP Hashcash, the spam trapping plugin.  I had a half-dozen spam comments coming in every hour before, which were getting trapped by Akismet.  With WP Hashcash I’ve had three spam comments in a whole month, and they were trapped and queued in “Spam”.   I can’t stress the benefit enough, to site owners, hosts, and probably even for Akismet.  Pure Gold

@renailemay interviewed @stephenconroy and most poignantly pointed out the calamity of Fake Stephen Conroy being out of beer.  Oh, and out of a job too.  Funny how the fake Stephen Conroy, even when full of beer, makes so much more sense than the allegedly real one

Here’s the video:

 

Seems to me that the general lifecycle of a social media site goes “niche site -> organic growth -> critical mass -> boom growth -> marketers arrive -> metamorphosis -> maturity or fragmentation”

Twitter seems to be  arriving at the “metamorphosis” point.  Our favourite child of a social media site is growing up.  Every day I get a few followers who are marketers or some other form of people with something to sell.  I will admit to having been sucked into the “it’s not polite to NOT follow back” idea, and so my twitterstream is now quite polluted with a lot of crap.  But I’m unsubscribing a heap of them now.

My basic rules of thumb which I use to determine whether I’ll follow someone back are:

• The person is a person or a spectacularly interesting feed
• The person converses with their followers
• The person has at least half as many followers as they follow
• The person on average posts less than five things in an hour

These are the screens. The pics are refreshing hourly and so far the
biggest contributor has been iammrwong.

I think I enjoyed putting this together a little too much

We have three big LCD displays in our offices, in an area that used to be the reception when our company didn’t occupy the whole building. They sit off in one corner, sort-of-visible to people arriving and leaving the office. I’ve always thought that showing screenshots of our websites which are always updated was good for when it was a reception and clients would sit and wait there, but now that its in informal area it’s been a little ineffective. So I approached senior management and got permission to try a little experiment.

I’ve downloaded and modified the FlickrNetScreenSaver which is powered using a cool Flickr .net API wrapper called FlickrNet by Sam Judson. I have it set up to serve images approved by moderators (that was the concession to get it up and running) which are posted to a member-only flickr group.  I had to change the way it loads to stop it timing out with three displays as it pings back to wackylabs on load.  I also changed the cache time to one hour, as the default is one day.

What I’m wondering now though, is has it now lost it’s social edge. If it’s moderated then it’s forced to be moderate. And while I totally understand that we don’t want any HR nightmares on screen in the entry to our floor, does moderation remove the “social” from social media? Is a moderated forum really social media…

Either way, having the screens ticking over with photos we can send from team lunches or presentations or conferences feels like a way cool idea to me.  And for those who care to, we can use the same screensaver on our desktops to show the same stream in the office.  The experiment is really to see whether we have enough people to make it worth the effort.  I’m hoping so.

All this fresh county air has has my boys running wild all day.
They’ve been bushwalking, playing at the dam, out exploring the huge
gardens, seed collecting, to the tea house for lunch and now on the
trampolines again. (look at the background in the photo)

When you spend some time far enough to not be able to tell whether the
neighbours are on holiday you realize how packed-in we are in Sydney.
It’s a very different quality of life.

LinkedIn are tinkering under the hood and about to release something new, that requires taking the while site down.  I’m looking forward to seeing what’s coming.  They have a nice friendly Fail Wizard who is even kind enough to offer trilingual explanations for what’s happening, in English, Spanish and French.