Why I Don't Care About News Aggregators

I’m old school, that’s why. Old school meaning old. I have nothing against news aggregators like TechMeme at all. I’m just in the tiny percentage of people who developed a habit of RSS and between that and the sites I visit the news aggregators seem like completely unnecessary overhead for me.

First of all in the case of TechMeme, I just don’t personally have any need to know about some topic that’s “hot” right at this moment. If it’s that hot, one of the feeds I read will cover it anyway. I do like seeing multiple viewpoints to a story – a few anyway, but I feel like I get them. I read TechCrunch, Fred Wilson’s AVC, Kara Swisher, and Jason Calacanis via RSS. Then, other than the stuff I’m following for the TV biz, I subscribe to maybe about 50 other RSS feeds. I do peek at Valleywag for the entertainment value. If I wasn’t doing any of that already, I’d find TechMeme very useful.

Perhaps I just like picking my own sources instead of someone picking them for me. I first met Fred Wilson in the mid 90s when I wrote a newsletter about online and Internet stuff (and too much about AOL for many people’s tastes). Fred was a VC back then but he didn’t have a blog. I wish he had, because usually when I’d hear from him it was to hear how wrong I was about something! : ) Then as now, I don’t always agree with what Fred thinks, but I like how he thinks very much.

Same for Swisher, and Calacanis (both of whom I’ve also known for years) and Arrington (who I’ve never met). These and others become my news aggregators. If they link to something I think I want to or should read – I click it. Even though I may not always agree with what they are saying, I trust them to speak their minds. How Calacanis behaves or how Arrington handles embargoes, I just don’t really care about any of that stuff. I read them and others for their thinking and to help me think about things.

I read a lot of other blogs besides those “A-List” folks, but mostly I am a New York Times, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune and LA Times guy. And because I live here, the San Francisco Chronicle (mostly for sports and restaurant reviews).

Angela Penny, knowing that I loved baseball told me about BallBug from the makers of TechMeme (essentially TechMeme for MLB). But I read the Chronicle, the NY Times, The Washington Post, ESPN, etc – how many versions of “Paul Byrd took HGH” do I need to see? Honestly, I didn’t even need to see the one, the bigger story on that front would be “Player X can prove he didn’t take performance enhancers!” But I promised no more steroid rants.

Jason Calacanis: One Step Closer to Owning the New York Knicks

I’d kind of like to see it. I remember the glory days of Earl Monroe, Clyde Frazier, Dave Debusschere, Willis Reed, etc. The Dolans have run the franchise for far too long now. New blood!

I was going to go with the headline of: “Facebook to buy Mahalo for TEN BILLION DOLLARS?”, but I didn’t want to get the Dolans too excited. People will be all over Robert Scoble for this (watch the videos, they’re worth watching), especially the Web 2.0 dweebs who don’t understand that most of the world doesn’t think the same way as they do.

Scoble predicts in four years time, Techmeme, Mahalo, and Facebook are going to cause problems for Google.

Though I’m sure it won’t have any impact on Google’s stock price tomorrow and I’m not as convinced Google can’t compete well with what he’s talking about, Scoble is on to something. And hats off to Scoble, as I’d have placed him as one of those Web 2.0 dweebs.

I don’t yet buy as Scoble does that it’s just not in Google’s DNA to do something like Mahalo (and Techmeme and Facebook) itself or just buy them, but I loved where in part 3 he riffed on Yahoo for a bit as being the potential wildcard in all of this. “Watch out for Yahoo!” (about the only thing that would’ve made that any better for me is if he had said, this means YOU Kara Swisher!).

I’m still agnostic on Mahalo, but I like the premise of it a lot and want to see what happens when they have 25K human edited pages. Jason’s play here is the 80-20 rule. He doesn’t plan for Mahalo to be as all encompassing as Google, instead going for the 20% of the searches that probably represent 80% of the search market. Though why Mahalo already has pages on bacon and kielbasa and not TV Ratings is…interesting.

But c’mon, don’t you want to see Calacanis high fiving with Spike Lee during the NBA finals?

Scoble’s plan that you would only find out about the videos via social networking and not Google went south in about 10 minutes (very good natured of Scoble to post the link via twitter himself). If anything Google has gotten better and faster over the last 6 months.

Note to Scoble: More white boarding videos, less blogging. You’re a natural!

Buy "Strength", Sell "Weakness"

Ok, for now Kara Swisher gets to laugh. But I'm hoping the old maxim about laughing last holds true. Sadly, when it comes to the stock market it has been said, and correctly that "hope" is just a four letter word.

My 1000 share buy of Yahoo from over a month ago is underwater. While I always looked at this as a 10 year hold, if I look at what's going on in the market right now these are still not great times for Yahoo. Lately it seems, whether the market is up or down, YHOO is down. Today the market is up, YHOO is down. This is not a sign of strength.

Someone much more savvy than I, Mark Pincus is long YHOO @ 23.32 (current price as of this writing = $22.68) and very, very long at $20...

For those coming from allthingsd.com: About Me

For those landing here because they read what I wrote about the new Nielsen/NetRatings measurements, here's a bit more on my background:

I have been a computer hobbyist/enthusiast since the early 1980s when I got my first modem. I launched Seidman’s Online Insider in September 1994 (though initially it was called ‘In, Around and Online’). My timing was good because the first launch of the Netscape beta was a couple of months later.

Then the following summer based largely it seemed on the success of Netscape's IPO there was suddenly huge interest in all things internet. For me personally it wound up being a very nice merging of avocation and vocation.

I am indebted both to Walt Mossberg and to Kara Swisher.

Because Walt wound up reading my newsletter and told other people to read it I wound up with both more readers and with more access to the companies and executives I wrote about. Microsoft, for example took a great interest in me. Initially I was naive enough to think it’s because Microsoft cared about what I thought, but I caught on pretty quickly that Microsoft is extremely smart about how it deals with “the press”. They probably did have some interest in what I thought, but really what interested Microsoft mostly was that Walt might wind up reading my thinking. Microsoft is very big on managing the influencers of the influencers. I did get more access as a result of Walt, and it certainly made some of what I wrote about better.

I already thought Mr. Mossberg was fabulous regardless because he is on a mission to truly make things easy to use and I believe he has made a difference and that things are easier to use. Walt is still at it though because things still aren’t as easy as they should be.

As for Kara, she provided me with one of the sweetest moments of my life. I wrote about AOL a lot because AOL was huge, and mostly I wrote about their ramp pre-web to acquiring Time Warner in 2000 (and then I didn’t really write at all until…now). Kara was one of a very small number of people who was as obsessed with AOL as I was. At one point I wrote something comparing AOL and CompuServe (which AOL ultimately acquired) and wrote something like that if the online services were the Mommas and the Poppas, AOL was Michelle Phillips and CompuServe was Momma Cass (based on the visual appeal of the software). Kara, who at the time was still writing for the Washington Post liked this comparison and wrote about it.

Although I was living in New York at the time, I am a Washington, DC native and spent most of my first 32 years in or in the suburbs of Our Nation’s Capitol, and it was pretty cool being written up in my hometown newspaper. But what was really cool was... A while after my grandmother died (just after turning 90), I saw my brother and he handed me an envelope and said, “This was in Nana’s wallet.” Inside the envelope, was the article Kara had written in the Post, my grandmother had clipped it out and stuck it in her wallet. It was very special to me.

My background for most of the 80s and early 90s was in telecommunications, but I switched to technology/product development in the early 90s (in addition to publishing an Internet newsletter). I worked for IBM for a while, and then I left to try to work for a publishing/media company (CMP Media) and then I had a little business with Mark Hurst of Creative Good fame, and then I wound up at Charles Schwab where I launched and ran Schwab’s outbound e-mail channel and ultimately was responsible for the “customer experience” for Schwab.com. I haven’t worked there (or anywhere else) since 2002 though, so I take no credit or blame for anything currently happening on that web site!

These days I am all about San Francisco and 72 degrees, sunny and beautiful in the middle of July. Oh sure by 8pm, I might be freezing, but I don’t miss the heat or the humidity and I don’t have to go very far at all if the goal is to be warmer.

I’m also all about the iPhone. I wouldn’t recommend it as-is to everyone, but it’s the dawn of truly portable computing and you can get a very good idea of the way things will progress regardless of the fact that it’s not currently perfect. I don’t buy into all the anti-hype hype. It’s the first generation, I didn’t expect it to be perfect. I believe Windows Vista is the 8th or 9th release of Windows, but it was the first one that I felt, “Wow, it finally more or less works exactly as it should!” The iPhone already mostly (60% of the way there) very efficiently combines phone, iPod and laptop into one device.

Finally, I’m all about (except for my little couple of week iPhone obsession) TVbytheNumbers.com, which won’t be available until September. I’m launching this with my good friend and former AOL exec., Bill Gorman who lives about 6 blocks from me in San Francisco.

We both have a love of numbers and analyzing them and we are both very much sometimes perplexed about what Bill calls “the drama of the inefficient auction” that takes place between television executives and advertising executives. About 2 months ago I was looking for some numbers and it occurred to me that the numbers (even those publicly available) about the television industry are spread out all over the place – there is not one central location. At one of our regular lunches I brought this “hole in the blogsphere” up with Bill and the offshoot of that is TVbytheNumbers.com. We won't just be aggregating numbers though, we’re going to help make some sense out of the numbers. This won’t make the auction any more efficient, but it will hopefully help people be more efficient in how they think about the drama. Stay tuned…

I can be reached at robert.seidman at gmail.com

Hello Yahoos!

i ran my Google analytics and saw a little traffic in Sunnyvale and because Feedburner provides ip addresses I got curious. And damn if you can't run NSLOOKUP from a DOS command line just like you could in the 1990s. Yahoo! I'm guessing a little tiny mention from Kara Swisher goes a long way. But as long as you're here...

Google won. Really. The whole thing. However...

I'm thinking about this like I am thinking about the TV business. Did you know that in about the last 11 years (1995-2006) the combined "share" during primetime for CBS, NBC, ABC has decreased by a full 2/3rds? That's right, there are about as as many eyeballs on ABC, CBS, NBC combined now as each used to have. But guess what: ABC, CBS and NBC are worth MORE today than they were 12 years ago (even adjusting for inflation and whatnot).

So even though Google won, it's not over for Yahoo. Not by a long shot. Good luck!