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Friday, January 27, 2006
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 Friday, January 27, 2006
started 1/27/2006; 7:06:15 PM - last post 1/27/2006; 7:06:15 PM
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Doc Searls - Friday, January 27, 2006 
1/27/2006; 11:06:15 PM (reads: 4919, responses: 0)
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Adventure Capitalism 
| | This is cool. Dave writes, If there's going to be game-changing in technology investment, I'd like to be part of the discussion. (That's after reading this and this.) Me too. (For Dave, for me, for anybody else who's interested.) |
| | I'm sure the old game will go on. I'm intrigued by Rick Segal because he's trying to start a new game that disrupts the old one. |
| | I'm looking here at what "disruption", in the Clayton Christensen sense, involves. Here are a few sentences that stand out for me: |
| | Does the innovation enable less-skilled or less-wealthy customers to do for themselves things that only the wealthy or skilled intermediaries could previously do? |
| | Does the innovation target customers at the low end of a market who don't need all the functionality of current products? And does the business model enable the disruptive innovator to earn attractive returns at discount prices unattractive to the incumbents? |
| | When the functionality of products has overshot what mainstream customers can use, however, companies must compete through improvements in speed to market, simplicity and convenience, and the ability to customize products to the needs of customers in ever smaller market niches. |
| | If an innovation helps customers do things they are already trying to do more simply and conveniently, it has a higher probability of success. |
| | Seems these are all along the lines of what Rick has been talking about. |
| | My question is, Can venture captital have fun? I don't just mean big-payoff fun. Or race-to-market fun. Or any of the other kinds of fun I'm sure conventional venture capitalism has. I'm talking about new kinds of fun, in line with what Dave calls "developers and users, diggin' together". |
| | Today Rick's fun line is, I guess if I want to disrupt the VC business, I need to get the "Venture Capitalist Killer" hits up there. |
Broken record
| | In endless debate, deadtree journalists love to bash bloggers, saying we're not really journalists, that we can say anything we want because we have no editors, we don't have a code of ethics, that our reporting is sloppy and inaccurate, blah, blah, blah. |
| | Don't they have editors at Forbes? |
| | Dear Forbes: You need to post Taulli's notes from the interview on their website. |
| | Or kiss your credibility, at least about the blogosphere, goodbye. |
| | So let me change the subject a bit here. |
| | First, not all deadtree journalists are joined in this "debate". Hey, I'm a deadtree journalist too. I'm on both "sides" of this thing, and frankly don't see them as "sides" at all. Every once in awhile some clueless mainstream journo goes off on a crank about blogs, bloggers fisk the crap out of the crank, and life goes on. Meanwhile, I think natural synergies between mainstream and widestream (that's blogging) will outperform any "debate" energy that persists. (All that said, fact-checking, like BL did here, remains essential.) |
| | Second, it doesn't matter if the journo's medium is deadtree or online, because the distinction gets lost when "the record" one reads is online rather than off. |
| | Third, "the record" is a big long-term issue here. We're used to thinking of "the record" as a breed of fact certified by print: Says right here, in black and white... But it isn't anymore. "The record" increasingly is what you can find, source, prove, disprove, improve and otherwise shape to the rolling and growing thing we call understanding. In any case, it ain't the same. |
| | Fourth, the Web is proving to be a much more useful record than print catacombed in libraries. Google, Yahoo and the Live Web engines aren't perfect; but they're a lot more convenient, and thorough, than driving down to your local library and going through card catalogs and Readers Guides to Periodical Literature. |
| | And its errors are easier to point out and correct. |
| | Case in point. "Attack of the Blogs" has scrolled behind a paywall, so now one can only find stuff said about it. (Such as what I wrote here.) Thus it suffers the fossil fate of all paywalled pieces: what survives on the Web is no longer the real thing, but an impression in hardened surroundings that have outlived it. |
| | Fifth, if Forbes and other publishers really want to participate in "the record", they need to get their archives out from beyind their paywalls, and put them where they can be found, where they can live on, where they can continue to participate in public debate and growing understandings. |
| | With advertising having advanced as far as it has, the archives will make more money exposed than they will closed, anyway. Doncha think? |
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