Barney Pell's Weblog

February 4, 2007

Barney on Cooking With Geeks (Podcast)

I was invited a few weeks ago to attend an experimental dinner event called "Cooking with Geeks". The idea was to combine a salon with a cooking lesson and podcast it to the world. The Cooking With Geeks podcast is now available (the previous link is to part 1, after which you can watch part2).

Here's the writeup from the CWG website:

We got a group of geeks together, had a great chef come in and teach us how to cook, handed out some wine, and kicked off an interesting conversation. Come on along for a San Francisco geek dinner.

Geeks involved are: Barney Pell, CEO, Powerset; Mary Hodder, CEO, Dabble; Henri Poole, founder/director, Civic Actions; Kathleen Lyman, CEO, LaunchMedia; Steve Gillmor. Our co-hosts were Robert Scoble [of Scobleizer fame] and Fred Davis, co-founder of Wired Magazine. Videographers are Eddie Codel and Glenn Gullmes. Chef is Rozana Ogneva of www.AreYouBeingServedCatering.com. Our host is Jeannine Barnard.

I knew some of these folks before, in particular Mary Hodder is a friend of mine. I didn't know just how expert Mary was about food. The food itself was delicious and we all gave our compliments to the chef. In addition to food, we covered several interesting (to us) topics. Here are a few that I remember after a month (I haven't watched the videos yet).

• I brought up the question of whether the MySpace generation would grow up to regret sharing all their personal information, and shared my view that more likely they would come into power and reshape the mainstream perspective on private/public information so that is is no big deal.
• We had an unexpectedly long discussion about Powerset (in Part 2) with several good perspectives shared by the other guests.
• Mary talked about trends in personal video creation, mixing, and sharing.
• Fred talked about the early history of Wired magazine, and his later startup companies.
• And we learned about the long history of publishing in the computer industry.

I enjoyed the event and look forward to doing this again.

For folks who don't live in the Bay Area, I think this dinner gives a pretty typical glimpse into how folks here in the tech industry combine work and play in social contexts. It captures pretty well the way that everyone is passionate about ideas, technology, and startup companies.

Posted by barney at 10:01 PM | TrackBack

October 11, 2006

The Powerset Blogstorm: 1 week later

I wrote a week ago about how Powerset had become the subject of a blog storm, and shared my vision of natural language search. Little did I realize that the storm had barely started. One week later, there are now about 400 blog articles about Powerset, according to Technorati (over 100 with some authority). We got covered by many of the leading writers on search and internet technology. Below are a few comments on some of the articles by high-authority bloggers.

• Michael Arrington on TechCruch presented the story to a broad audience. He stated he has become so familiar with keywordese that he even uses it now sometimes in IM and email discussions, but that he is open to the possibility of improved communication of meaning and intent with natural language search. The 60 comments to his article address the issues of natural language and search from many useful perspectives.
• Danny Sullivan's Search Engine Watch gave a great critique of past attempts at natural language search and wonders why Powerset would be any different. He argues that natural language requires users to change behavior, and is thus unlikely to succeed. By contrast, he is a big fan of query refinement. For the record, in addition to natural language, I like query refinement too, and I'll throw in suggestions, guided navigation and faceted refinement to round out the picture.
• Erick Schonfeld at Business2.0 picked up on Danny's criticism that "the most 'natural' thing for people is to be lazy". He then talks about other approaches to improving search: personalization, social search, and query refinement.
• Matt Hurst's Data Mining picked up on my "grunting pidgin language" characterization of keywordese. While I used an analogy of getting by speaking first-year French but wanting more expressiveness, he gives a great analogy of talking to a reference librarian in keywordese vs. English. This really points out how much potential there is to go beyond what search offers users today.
• ValleyWag says "If the company can pull this off, it has a shot at rescuing the world from speaking Search Grunt."
• Om Malik has a poll on whether Powerset can really beat Google. As of this writing, 20% votes cast agreed that "Powerset will reset Google". I think that's a lot of confidence for a product most people have never seen...

Continue reading "The Powerset Blogstorm: 1 week later"

Posted by barney at 1:09 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

April 1, 2006

AAAI Spring Symposium on Computational Approaches to Analysing Weblogs

This week I attended the AAAI Spring Symposium on Computational Approaches to Analysing Weblogs.
This photo is from a group dinner during the symposium. Present were Natalie Glance and Matt Hurst (from Whizbang, Intelliseek, Blogpulse, and now Nielsen Buzzmetrics), Niall Kennedy (most recently at Technorati), Nicolas Nicolov and Franco Salvetti (Umbria), Rada Mihalcea (U. North Texas), Kevin Burton (TailRank) and Barney Pell.

Posted by barney at 3:22 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 20, 2005

Marc Cuban at AlwaysOn05

Fireside Chat with Marc Cuban, interviewed by Allen Delattre

At Always On 2005

July 20, 2005

I thought it was an interesting discussion. Here are the points I found most noteworthy:

• blog search: I agree with Marc's comments about the growing importance of Blog Search, and his view that the aggregators will capture the market value from the long tail of blog search. I personally like www.blogpulse.com the best. Cuban's new IceRocket seems to be direct knockoff. Blogpulse gets my vote for best blog search engine not just because my friends from Whizbang days were the founders of this service, but because it has the best analytics and, unlike Technorati, it hasn't yet hit a scaling barrier.
• Releasing movies simultaneously in all channels: I think that's a great idea, and it is exciting to see Marc Cuban in a position to lead the way here.
• Interactive TV and accountable TV advertising models: I agree with him that models for TV advertising are going to change, and that this will be enabled by interactive TV (and time shifting services like Tivo). The 30 second spot is dying (George Gilder made a comment about this in a preceding session at Always On), and new measurable forms of advertising are being developed to take its place. I don't expect it will be as simple as pay-for-placement, but I do think internet and tv advertising models will come together in some interesting blend over the next few years.
• Dennis Rodman and Paris Hilton's intuitive sense for media manipulation: indeed! (I hope that previous reference doesn't cause my blog to become misclassified...).

Below are my (mostly raw) notes from this session.

Continue reading "Marc Cuban at AlwaysOn05"

Posted by barney at 7:44 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

July 15, 2005

Badly BackBlogged, But Barney's Back Blogging

After a period of intense work and travel, I'm finally gearing up to do some more blogging. However, so much has happened and there are so many blog entries I want to write about that I now feel severely backlogged. So it only seems fitting to resume my blogging activity by coining some new terms (?) for the feeling I have:

backblog: a set of topics that must be blogged but are now behind in the queue.

backblogged: the feeling a blogger gets when life is happening so fast that you wonder if you can ever work through the backblog.

Now my question is: where to start -- with the current or the previous items?

Since currency is everything in the blogosphere, I think I'll start with today, and hope that new topics come in slow enough that I can hit the older, but hopefully a little timeless, topics.

Posted by barney at 12:40 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

June 26, 2005

Allen Morgan's Blog in Time Magazine's 50 Coolest Websites

Time Magazine published a list of 50 Coolest Websites for 2005. Recognizing the growing importance of blogs, they broke out blogs as a separate segment within that list (50 Coolest Websites 2005: Blogs).

My Mayfield colleague Allen Morgan's Blog was listed as the coolest blog/website for entrepreneurs:

Allen Morgan, managing director at Mayfield—a venture capital firm in Menlo Park, California—backer of Beatnik, PlanetOut, Tribe and Pluck —guides entrepreneurs on how to pitch ideas and get financing. The recent "10 Commandments" series on how to handle those critical meetings with VCs is a must-read.

I agree with Time's endorsement -- Allen's 10 commandments series is great. I also agree with Dave Panos, CEO of Pluck, who commented to Allen, "I am particularly impressed that you pulled off such a feat with a mean-time-between posts of five weeks." It shows that focus and quality can matter more than freshness even in the blogosphere; at least this true for media critics.

Allen was actually an inspiration for me to start blogging, right around the time he convinced me to join Mayfield. I imagined that I would have lots of content about insights from an Entrepreneur in Residence, kind of like an entrepreneurial undercover agent sharing how things really happen on the other side of the funding table. When I later brainstormed with Allen about how to achieve both substance and discretion in such a blog, Allen summarized along the following lines: "As long as you don't specifically identify any of the companies, entrepreneurs, or Mayfield partners, and you only say good things about Mayfield, you should feel free to blog about anything you like!"

Posted by barney at 8:49 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 5, 2005

Models for the potential impact of blogs: hubs vs. fabric

Katie Kaye at Personal Democracy Forum reports on a recent study that assesses the extent to which blogs instigate issues that then make their way into mainstream media.

Bloggers are often touted as influential instigators, feeding buzz-worthy topics to the mainstream media they so disdain, and even guiding discussion in other communication channels. Not so, says a new study analyzing the impact of political blogs on the national conversation leading up to the 2004 presidential election. Indeed, Buzz, Blogs, and Beyond: The Internet and the National Discourse in the Fall of 2004 concludes that, while a force to be reckoned with, blogs are merely cogs in the meme machine.

... while the report acknowledges “there must be something special about the relationship between bloggers and political buzz,“ blogs were no more responsible for setting the issue agenda or sustaining it than were the other channels. Yet, the findings show that blogs do act as an Internet hub, positioned between the media and online chats in such a way as to act as a Web guide to the media.

This conclusion resonates with the points made in the blogger and mainstream media session at the D3 conference (see my notes from this).

The "blogs as internet hub" model describes one of the truly innovative possibilities enabled by digital media and low-cost publishing. But I think the "hub" notion misses some of the real power and impact of blogs. I think a greater influence will increasingly derive from the role of "blogs as fabric". While each blog may be a hub for discussion, the blogs in aggregate serve to connect the fragmented information sources. Someone who reads a blog post can not only learn what the author and commentators thought, but also gets connection to the broader web of discussion from different blogs and other articles. New tools are enabling readers to integrate and comprehend the large-scale conversation on a given topic, including supporting facts and dissenting views. When mature and mainstream, I think this will change the nature of discourse. This will also realize the vision of the hypermedia pioneers like Doug Englebart, who views linking and integration as supporting capabilities required to increase our Collective IQ.

Posted by barney at 11:58 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 25, 2005

Blogging vs. Mainstream Media Part 2: The Mainstream Media Publishers

The final day of the 2005 All Things Digital Conference began with a two-part panel session on Blogging and the Mainstream Media. The first panel comprised a set of well known bloggers. The second panel comprised a set of well known mainstream media publishers.

All Things Digital Conference
Blogging and Mainstream Media Session
May 24, 2005

Part 2: The Mainstream Media Publishers

• Don Graham, CEO, Washington Post

• Tony Ridder, CEO, Knight Ridder

• Peter Kann, CEO, Dow Jones and Company
  

The rest of this blog entry contains my notes from the publishers panel.

Continue reading "Blogging vs. Mainstream Media Part 2: The Mainstream Media Publishers"

Posted by barney at 11:46 AM | Comments (0)

Blogging vs. Mainstream Media Part 1: The Bloggers

The final day of the 2005 All Things Digital Conference began with a two-part panel session on Blogging and the Mainstream Media. The first panel comprised a set of well known bloggers. The second panel comprised a set of well known mainstream media publishers.

One thought that struck me while taking notes during the panel was that the bloggers for the most part spoke very quickly, rarely finished a sentence or a thought, offered many provocative and personal statements, and contained some genuinely interesting nuggests admidst the volume of content. By contrast, the mainstream publishers spoke much more slowly, in complete sentences (and even paragraphs), were thorough in their facts, offered broad historical context for their statements, and articulated the principles of journalism that have been the basis for their industry. Hence the different style of the panels mirrored that of the media itself.

The rest of this blog entry contains my notes.

Continue reading "Blogging vs. Mainstream Media Part 1: The Bloggers"

Posted by barney at 11:09 AM | Comments (1)

February 15, 2005

More features on my new blog

After a couple hours, I've now exercised most of the tabs on typepad. I found it pretty easy to select various types of links to include and to control their placement, to upload a photo and bio for my about-me pages, and even to start publishing a list of my friends. 

Posted by barney at 10:01 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

My first post

Welcome to my first blog posting.  I just finished composing a blog all about first blogging experience, but then lost my content when I clicked the button to customize display of the editing page on typepad (What a shame). 

To create my first blog, I had to make several significant choices.

First, I thought I what kind of blog I wanted, and who would read it. I decided for now that my blog would be about whatever I was interested in, for whoever wanted to read it.  Yes that's vague and probably violates the first few laws of media publishing, but I figure I can always subcategorize or even split off into multiple blogs.

Having chosen to base the blog on anything of interest to me, I chose to name my blog "Barney Pell's Weblog", rather than something more random, thematic, or specific. 

• I was  lucky enough to have the URL http://barney.typepad.com still available.  Luke Nosek is sitting with me now, also creating his own first blog. He was jealous that "barney" was still available, as he had to settle for http://lukenosek.typepad.com, which is not bad at all.  Plus he will probably replace it with any of his thousands of domain names.
• I chose typepad as many people I know are using this or moveable type already (e.g. Ross Mayfield, Auren Hoffman, Joi Ito, Andrew Chaiken, Alex Jacobson).
• I chose the power user version, and mixed media with three columns, so I could use all the advanced features (just in case).

With that, I'm off to submit this and then see what other advanced features I can play with.  The main question running through my head is how quickly I can copy the cool elements from other typepad blogs I see out there, like lists of books and movies, links to other bloggers, lists of categories, etc.  I will categorize my blog-about-blogging posts with the "weblog" category, and use other categories for less self-reflective content going forward.

Continue reading "My first post"

Posted by barney at 8:46 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack