The NVA Blog

Business blogs (like this one) are becoming more and more common and relevant as communication and marketing tools. There are a thousand conversations going on in the blog-o-sphere right now on the topic of how important having a business blog is. Some believe that companies will be left behind if they don’t enter the fray since their competition surely will. A counter arguement is that doing it right is time consuming and non-trivial and should not be taken as a “me too” decision.

Business Week has a good article on this topic posted here. Their headline “Catch Up…or Catch You Later”
Jason Calcanis, CEO of Weblogs, Inc. says blog-or-die in his post here, and there is a good discussion on this topic over at BolderBlogs.com.

Business blogs can serve a number of purposes. If you are considering starting one for your company consider the following elements;

• What is the purpose of the blog? What do we want it to do for the company?
• Who dictates/manages what gets posted? Who’s in charge of content?
• Is this another PR machine, or is this a way to engage in conversations with our customers and the public?
• Will you allow public commentary? Will you engage contentious questions or comments with thoughtful responses?
• How frequently will you update the blog? Who gets to contribute content?

What seems to be working is when leaders from companies start personal blogs and talk about the company and themselves. It’s a business blog in a backhanded kind of way, and is effective because of the personalization. The leaders get a forum to share their thoughts in an “unofficial” communication format, but rest assured what gets posted is carefully thought out and crafted.

There is perhaps no web site launched in the last 6 months that better signifies our arrival at bubble 2.0 than that of Dogster.com, a site where dogs and their owners can have a webpage. Sound silly? Rediculous even? Not to the millions of passionate dog lovers out there who have felt their cannine friends are under represented online and have no real means of networking with their furry friends. As it turns out they are doing pretty well, and backed by a suprising number of recognizable names. Check out the list of angel investors listed on a related post on VC Confidential, not to mention comments that they are “kicking ass”. There are over 200,000 dogs registered so far, with 600+ added yesterday. That’s almost a million paws…

Social networking for dogs has taken off, and is making money on ad revenues. This is good news for folks starting up ad supported “niche” web sites I suppose. I have to wonder if it’s all part of a hype cycle and when the novelty fades and people go back to their routines, if the doggie blog traffic will collect dust like a forgotten bone under the porch.

Stay tuned, someday soon catster.com (also owned by the same company) and dogster.com will need to merge and become pawster.com.

Update: Andrew Fife pointed out that the site has been around since 2004, which shows not only staying power (or deep pockets) but good vision to take social networking elements to the pet market early on.

Big thanks to Amy Gahran for putting together this group. We held the inaugural meeting tonight at the Trident in Boulder. It was great to meet a variety of local bloggers out there. I’m sure there are many more of you in the area - come join us! Topics ranged from “why do you blog?” to “help - I can’t get xyz to work!”.

During the discussion I stated the obvious by commenting that blogs have enabled millions of people to self-publish online without having to learn html or become a webmaster. While everyone has their own reasons for blogging, it seems we can all benefit from each other’s experience to get the most out of it. I’m glad this group was established, and I’m thankful that Boulder’s got a diverse blogger community that was willing to come out and play.

You can join, or just check out the group’s meetup.com page here. The meetup.com page is also a blog, and our plan is to post tips, tools, and best practices on the page for everyone to benefit from. Members list is here.

Watching Steve Job’s keynote speech from the Apple 2006 WWDC really got my attention. Apple has surely kicked ass in 2006. In historical fashion even.

Even if you are a die-hard Windows user, or shrug off Apple because Windows rules the corporate desktops and server rooms, I urge you to watch this keynote as you will learn (at least) two important things:

1. Apple has accomplished things within one calendar year that take other companies 5 years to do poorly

2. Windows Vista appears in several ways to be a sad rip-off of functionality Apple began delivering in the first version of OS X close to 5 years ago. (Bonus for PC users: you should still be psyched about Vista when you get your hands on it, because you will then be pretending to be using OS X).

Apple has executed impressively on both hardware and software fronts this year (and we are not talking about iPods). The company has completed the transition of the entire hardware product line from PowerPC to Intel in less than 12 months. On the software side, they have not only delivered the port of OS X to the new Intel architecture, they introduced the Universal platform for cross-compatibility between PPC and Intel, and are on track to deliver the next version of OS X, Leopard, before the end of the year.

Here are some of the interesting stats mentioned during the keynote:

• Apple doubled its laptop market share in 2006 - from 6% to 12%. Most of the growth came after the Intel based MacBooks were launched.
• Q2 2006 was Apple’s best quarter ever - they sold 1.33M Macs
• Apple’s new MacPro is a 64-bit Quad - 2 duo-core processor Xeon 64-bit CPUs @ 2.66Ghz - $2500 - that’s $1000 less than a similar setup from Dell! (check out Apple’s fastest Mac EVER)
• Apple has released 5 OS updates in 5 years
• There are now 19M OS X users
• Apple includes BootCamp - the dual-boot utility in Leopard. You can run Windows on your Mac.
• Leopard brings 64-bit application layer support. This means you have 64-bit support from Kernel to Application. You can run 32bit and 64bit apps side by side without emulation.

Time Machine - If you have ever had backup problems, lost files, or overwrote a template by clicking “Save” instead of “Save As”, you have to check out Time Machine - the built-in backup and recovery application built into Leopard. What is innovative here is how Apple turned the not-used-as-much-as-it-should-be backup and restore world on its head by leveraging some new and existing features in the OS. Time Machine appears to use the new Core animation platform and some combination of rsync/shadow copy to create an eye-candy UI that literally flies thru time and allows you to jump to restore points when the file changed. If you have ever tried to restore a file or filesystem that does daily backups, you know it can take hours or days of restore/hunt/delete in order to find thru trial and error the version of the file you want. What is equally impressive is that this works at the meta-data level as well, so you can restore individual objects such as contacts, emails, photos, etc. Check out the demo - restoring files is easy for the first time in computing history! Time Machine requires a second HFS+ drive, it sounds like this can be a USB/Firewire external, network, or internal drive. I’m looking for more details as to whether this can be a partition on the same physical drive (you lose the hardware-failure protection if you are not running RAID volumes), or what the options are for network drive support and how it works if you are disconnected from the backup target.

iChat - Apple has taken the built-in chat client (which is based on AOL’s AIM) to a whole new level. This ain’t your grandma’s chat…You can now share pictures, video, and documents with your buddies in a presentation format (not just sending the file thru the messaging window). You can also do green-screen and video-over-video backgrounds in your video chats. With all new laptops and iMacs coming with built-in iSight cameras, suddenly every Mac user can get studio-fancy with their chatting. The big feature here is iChat Screen Sharing, according to the Apple website, Screen Sharing enables “shared observation and control of a single desktop”. This is going to be great for collaboration efforts (an audio chat automatically starts along with the desktop sharing), but even more so for remote-help/remote-control efforts. I’m now twice as convinced switching my parents over to a Mac from a Dell/XP box was the right choice. (Note: Some people are upset that Apple ripped off Script Software’s ChatFX features in Leopard. They have an interesting blog post on this topic)
There are more details about the new Leopard features complete with a few digs at MSFT Vista in the keynote. This post isn’t meant to be a full report on the WWDC or the keynote, hence the hilghlighting of only two new features. Some have said that the Leopard announcement lacked a big “wow” feature. I think Time Machine is pretty damn impressive. The new iChat features have lots of potential, and there are more features coming Apple is not yet announcing.

I have read criticism of Apple that they may miss the 2006 holiday season (which we know Vista will), and that Apple remains a “non-starter” in the business world because MSFT has such dominating market share. Personally, I think Apple has moved mountains this year and should be applauded and respected for their ability to execute on life-threatening platform change without stumbling or eroding their iPod/iTunes business. At the end of the day, I don’t care about market share. When I need to sit down in front of my computer to complete an important task or do something fun, what matters is ease of use, intuitiveness, and style. Not market share.
Regardless of how well Visa hits or misses the mark, or whether critics will pan Apple for this or that, I urge you to take a step back and look at what this company (who is NOT the market leader in the desktop or server markets) has accomplished in the last few years, and what they pulled off in 2006. Like me, you may find yourself impressed.

P.S. - this post was written on an Apple G4 PowerBook

I’ve been reading a good number of VC and Entrepreneur blogs this year and it struck me as somewhat ironic that of all the blogs I read, it seems the VC blogs serve a disproportionate number of ads. Given that VCs are entrepreneurial and coin-operated by nature this didn’t entirely surprise me. That said, successful VCs are the last group of folks that need the additional cash from serving a few ads.

I asked Fred Wilson of “A VC” about this as he’s got a ton of ads on his site and he is a very active blogger. Fred responded quickly and mentioned he donates all of the ad proceeds to charity. He also blogged about it today, naturally. Fred has some pretty impressive traffic numbers (2 million page views and 1 million views via feeds) and plans to donate around 40k to charity from the ad revenue. I think this is a great thing to do, and hope that others take his lead. Kudos Fred!

I don’t see anything wrong with monetizing your thoughts and ideas online in principal. One could draw parallels to traditional content/media sites… I think there are pros and cons:

Pros:

• it takes time and energy to be a good and relevant blogger, so seeing some compensation for your efforts is rewarding (hey - time is money!)
• serving ads also helps you learn more about the ad business and your visitors.
• you can use the revenue to fund other projects, or even better charities as Fred has done

Cons:

• the ads can be annoying to look at, and they break up the visual flow of many sites
• some people can perceive blog-advertising as being greedy or cheap
• managing ad placement and watching your ad revenue can be big distractions