Robot Loves Kitten

Since we’ve been talking about the future of journalism, and by extension media, here in Portland, I thought I’d put together a short list of tips that should guide any actual projects that get off the drawing board stage. I’m going to express them as intractable laws, with corollaries, just because it’s more fun that way.

1. Need a CMS? You need WordPress
1b. Drupal or WordPress Mu (multi-user) will also do the job.
1c. The cheapest program you know how to use is the one you should use.
This goes for everything — audio, video, etc. Spend an hour or two figuring out what you know how to do best. Write it all down, then work on creative combinations of your skills to make something interesting. This is not a shopping list, it’s a DIY list. What you can get done with spare time over a weekend is more likely to be sustainable.

2. Need a programming language? You need PHP
2b. The programming language you know best is the one you should use.
2c. Who do you know who can program? Use the language they know best.
2d. Whoever mentioned the word “scalability” needs to leave the room. Right now.
It’s almost impossible not to think about your impending success, but you need to fight these urges. They create “must haves” and “wouldn’t it be cool ifs”, that can derail your project. You have nothing right now, and you need to get that first user, the first 10, before you can take over the world. Assume that

3. Don’t have a plan, have a goal
3b. Have plan? Throw it out
3d. Re-express your goal so that your website analytics package can measure it
3c. Whoever suggested writing a business plan needs to leave the room. Right now.
Business plans are a useful exercise for learning about a market and getting random thoughts on paper. Once written, no one reads them, and they are outdated within weeks, if not days. Ditto for financial models. When you have money coming in, you can distribute some of it. Until then, focus on discovering how viable your goal actually is.

4. Pick a single revenue stream
4b. Advertising & subscriptions counts as two streams
4c. Whoever suggests using Google Adsense needs to leave the room. Right now.
Picking one revenue stream allows you to focus on creating value and doing your best work. Traditional media have evolved a duplicitous two-headed model that tries to take money from subscribers while simultaneously selling them out to advertisers. The conundrum created leaves you doing a half-assed job serving both. It’s no wonder readers are flocking to free and advertisers have focused on demand-driven ad models.

5.

We talk the talk, but very often find it difficult to “think small” in practice. It’s very difficult to deny “important” or “key” features unless we’ve a very clear idea of the experience we’re trying to create.

If all we have to go on is some vague notion of a demographic and market segment, or a rough sketch of a prototypical customer, there’s really no end to the list of “useful” features we could add to help this person out.

But if we create a very specific, detailed picture of an experience — a single frame, composed to show a single person in a specific situation — some of those additional features begin to stand out.

If you were starting a baseball team, you might list stadium seating, lighting, vendors, uniforms, good equipments — even talented players — as keys to creating a successful experience. That’s what the pros play with, right? Yet reduce the picture to you and your son or daughter playing catch in the backyard. Maybe add a few neighbor kids and a bat. That’s baseball, too.

Now what to do with all that stuff? Add the seating and there’s no room in the backyard to play. Everyone has to go home to eat at dusk, so the lighting is useless. Mom’s bringing the snacks. Everyone knows who’s on what team. And lastly, everyone’s kind of bad, so who cares what shoes, if any, we wear?

And yet, I guarantee that you will have a better time in the backyard than in the stadium with the pros. Baseball is a game, and a game is supposed to be fun. We play because it’s fun. We watch because we associate our experiences playing.

All that other stuff, that’s there for other reasons: for TV, for revenues, for the league, for the players’ salaries, for the crowds. And it all grew out of the fact that baseball — at its core — is a fun game.

So don’t start with the business idea or a marketing plan. Start with a simple, small picture that expresses the core idea and relentlessly defend its purity from every new idea that approaches.

Sketch it out. Put a person in there doing something better or easier because of you. It could be a fun picture. It could be a dis

So, I’m reading a recent post by Scott Karp on how content businesses don’t scale anymore, and I’m honestly wondering, when did they? The Big Media we all love to rail on are defined largely by their scale, of course, but that scale has been built up over decades or is the result of controlling distribution (the pipes). That’s entirely unsurprising, as is the fact that the vast majority of media businesses are quite small. And while many of these small media companies aren’t cash cows (think indie), quite a few make a lot of money (think B2B).

The long tail, when applied to businesses (the few large and multitude of small), isn’t especially surprising. There aren’t many bounds limiting the creation of new businesses.

I do agree with the inclusion of the “fat belly” in the middle of the long tail. There certainly is a middle in the long tail — almost anyone could identify it when asked. Figuring out where it begins and ends to measure it is a different story. But I see natural parallels between the “fat belly” and the 10% of participant/connector/remixers in the 1:10:89 rule of community creators/participants/consumers.

So why should content suddenly “scale”?

Just because the Internet brings the world to your doorstep in almost infinite detail, doesn’t mean that the Internet suddenly invented the world. It was all there yesterday and the day before, there were conversations and publications and businesses serving every niche. You just didn’t know about it.

And as these niche businesses proliferate, there are almost as many revenue-generating opportunities springing up, looking to profit on being able to reach into these tiny niches. So it seems to me that the content business is probably OK. More audience, more content, more revenue. Sure, the landscape is different, but it doesn’t seem fundamentally broken at all.

But what of the aggregators?

Since we’re all about the niches these days, and we recognize that the niche landscape changes so rapidly we need communities dedicated to keeping track of it all, the rise of the aggregator is again not surprising.

If aggregators worry some people, I’d ask whether those people have adjusted their business models to account for them. The aggregators perform an important role, and you can make them work for you, I think.

(And BTW, isn’t “aggregator” just another word for “portal”?)

But how effective (how big) can the big aggregators be?

If we’re all moving toward niches, does a “portal/aggregator” lose its ability to provide focus for the individual user, leading to the rise of smaller niche aggregators? Or does the aggregator’s scale allow it to plumb the depths of the long tail more effectively, meaning it simply works better at targeting your individual interests than a smaller company could?

Or does the commodotization of large-scale computing resources (“the grid”) democratize the concept of scale, allowing anyone with an algorithm to play?

And will the backlash (currently fueled by piracy/copyright concerns) against the aggregators perceived “free ride” continue to grow, until the aggregators prove out the benefits they contribute to the marketplace and the individual businesses they profit from? Google is at once the aggregator with the biggest target on its back, and the aggregator that (through its text ad business) arguably contributes back — albeit indirectly — the most.

Many changes are afoot. I just accepted an offer for a full-time job here in Portland with Portland Monthly, Inc., a very successful up-and-coming magazine publisher. I will be heading up their Web division, building it out from scratch, actually. It’s a pretty great opportunity and I would have been completely stupid to pass it up. It’s going to mean big changes in my life, and will no doubt adversely affect several personal projects I’ve been working on. Both SMITH and Helloindie are going to have to take a back seat, at least until I get settled into things. Helloindie has definitely suffered of late, as I’ve been consumed with SMITH and the job search.

What is Portland Monthly? It’s a high-end glossy city magazine for the city of Portland, started in Oct. 2003. It’s an extremely high-quality magazine, much moreso than you’d normally expect from such a young company. PM has won several magazine awards over the past few years from the City/Regional Magazine Alliance (like the National Magazine Awards, but for city mags). In 2005, it won

Don’t you blink!