Mr. Bubble

John Battelle boasts and whines

2007-02-02T16:38:00.000-08:00

I was over Professor Battelle. I buried the hatchet. I was going to let him rot in his own pompous hell. It was either that or go insane. Then I saw a link to a February 17 Business Week story. Bigger Bucks For The Blogoshere. I drank it faster than a bottle of whisky at my AA meeting.

The lede: "Over the past decade, John Battelle has shown a flair for creating innovative media properties. In the 1990s, he helped found Wired magazine. During the dot-com boom, he launched The Industry Standard." No mention that those were busts. No mention of the many lives ruined by those innovative media properties.

The article's author, Spencer E. Ante, should remember those rotten times. In 2003 he reviewed a book about the The Industry Standard's epic meltdown and the liquidation of John's grand, arrogant promises. "Ever cocky, Battelle once boasted to staffers that the publication would have 900 employees and $1 billion in sales by 2005." That wrinkle is forgotten in the rush to write about the newest fad.

Anyway, what's a billion dollars between friends? Ante reports with a straight face that in 2006 Federated Media "sold more than $10 million in advertising for about 90 Web sites. This year, Battelle says it is on track to turn a profit and increase sales fivefold." Hubris is in full bubble again.

Factcheck! Get out your calculator. 40% of $10 million is $4 million dollars. John reportedly had fewer than 20 hirelings last year, so unless he's renting the TajMahal and paying himself $500,000 and everyone else $200,000, $4 million should have given John a healthy profit 2006. That $10 million smells rotten or maybe John is paying himself $1,000,000. OK, that's possible.

I Googled more and tripped over this screamer. "It was a strange Davos moment--a large "media lunch" with bloggers and MainStream Media in one room which included Jeff Jarvis and Arthur Sulzbergers Jr. The MSM folks were complaining about the decline of quality journalism due to a fall in advertising causing cutbacks of seasoned reporters in foreign and domestic bureaus. Nothing new there. But then there was John Battelle, king of the bloggers, complaining about the lack of advertising for blogs. He's aggregated a bunch and is trying to sell them to advertisers but they won't pay much for quality blogging. It's all about CPM, he said and they didn't understand quality blogging."

Is anyone editing over at Business Week? I pick random sites listed on John's site. Metafilter = no ads. Lifeclever = no ads. Digg, are they still with him? On Digg, ads from Google. Is the pompous professor taking credit for Google sales in his $10 million? If so, is he charging bloggers 40% for putting Google ads on their sites?

John thinks that saying something makes it true. He's a writer and words are more powerful than reality. Say you are professor and you are a professor. Say you sold $10 million in ads and you sold $10 million. Yeah, that's right, and next year I'll sell $50 million.

Ante should have asked these questions. But of course, John knows how to play journalists. Give 'em some candy, flatter their writing, hint that they might join you some day. The market for advertising may rise and fall, but the market for self-aggrandizing self-delusion never goes down. Having been suckered by the companies he wrote about and depended on for ads through the first dotcom boom, John has himself learned how to play uncritical journalists for amnesiac fools.

Federated Media loses Fark and Digg

2006-11-13T20:36:00.000-08:00

True, I've not updated this site in five weeks. Apologies for that; life has interfered with Battelle Watch. Unlike Mr. Battelle, I've been forced to work for a living since his earlier Internet bubble schemes collapsed.

Today, there is good news for the online industry. Federated Media has lost Fark.com and is about to lose Digg.com. FM is supposed to sell ads, but it can't seem to sell ads for its two biggest clients.

The "Valley Wag" site has details, and also apparently has a new editor who calls the good Professor "passive aggressive."

Federated Media outsourcing ad sales to Europe?

2006-09-29T21:43:00.000-07:00

Interesting developments:

Sources confirmed to me last night, ahead of an official announcement, that Batelle is contracting out sales of UK and European traffic across its network to a company based out of London called Net Communities. NetCom used to sell traffic for popular Brit news rag The Inquirer before that venerable publication was bought by VNU Publishing, and the company now also dabbles in Podcast creation.

NetCom, ironically, has also come under fire in the past for its lack of advertising sales at the Inq, so cynics might suggest that the company may be a good match for FM. Can traffic at the 'author-driven' business be successfully monetised? That's the question on the lips of everybody, it seems - except for Digg's staff, who have repeatedly stated their desire to build traffic, not revenue.

Thank you for this tip.

Hmm, where's Professor Battelle?

2006-09-26T22:49:00.001-07:00

Check for yourself: http://journalism.berkeley.edu/faculty/battelle/

The screen capture:

What does it mean?

2006-09-24T22:02:00.000-07:00

From a new article on the Click Z advertising site:

I talked to the group at Federated Media Publishing a while ago. They totally forgo (when possible) CPM (define) or impression-based buys. They have a network of very influential bloggers and are more interested in creating clever, new connections between brands and consumers via these people.

That sounds very new-age, but what does it mean? The cost per impression (or Costs Per Thousand, which "CPM" signifies) is a bookkeeping method, not a philosophy. If you don't know how many ad impressions you're selling, then how do you charge for the advertising?

Another Click Z article from last week describes Federated Media as "Battelle's high-touch, high CPM network." Does anybody understand what's going on here?

Not senile, just mature

2006-09-24T21:02:00.000-07:00

This bit from Paid Content caught my eye. It repeats what I've already mentioned here: that Federated Media is backing off from adding new sites to the network. Why? Market maturity, of course.

And then there's this from a site called "Hot Entrepreneur," which has a very 1999 name:

How to earn $20-30 CPM rates on a website? Well, it's not easy. But some companies out there are doing it. Federated Media, a blog ads specialist, is working on getting their clients these ad rates. Currently, CPM rates average about $8 for FM clients.

Anyone getting $8 CPMs from Federated, or any blog advertising network?

Smart move or private meltdown?

2006-09-21T06:10:00.000-07:00

I don't know what to make of this Monday night announcement on the Federated Media site.

With the addition of these quality sites, FM will slow the pace of new Author recruitment in the coming months. The company has been fortunate enough to attract the interest of hundreds of web publishers, but, given the personal attention FM's model delivers to each site, FM will focus on servicing existing Authors and evaluating prospective Authors with which it has already begun discussions.

On one hand, a company with a fairly small staff can't be expected to represent hundreds and hundreds of sites - especially when a lot of the current sites are clearly unhappy with FM's advertising sales.

On the other hand, this fits my theory that Battelle never planned to do anything with FM beyond a) bilk a bunch of VC types, and b) sell FM right before the bubble bursts. He's got a handful of high-profile sites and three score that nobody's ever heard of. Time to dump this turd.

I bet he co-founded MTV and Apple, too

2006-09-20T17:40:00.000-07:00

Battelle continues to claim he "co-founded" the important technology magazine "Wired."

Did he? How does his claim stand up? I was an early reader of Wired. My office received the first edition back in 1993. It was an interesting journal of technological ideals.

The New York Times (in a 2003 book review) describes the co-founder of Wired as none other than Wired founder's Louis Rossetto's partner Jane Metcalfe. Are you pretending to be Jane, John? Why not just admit you were an editor at the magazine after its founding?

"Relative obscurity drawing to a close"

2006-09-18T16:23:00.000-07:00

It would be difficult to describe Federated Media's kid-gloves treatment by the media and bloggers as an example of "obscurity," but that's just what Battelle does in this Federated Media screed about the mean people complaining about his company:

As we build FM, I've realized that our period of relative obscurity is drawing to a close. We are under increasing scrutiny, and should be, given the high profile sites we now represent.

I was also struck by this odd defense:

FM's model is based on the idea that content creators should get 60% of the dollars, not 10-15%. Sounds a lot better, doesn't it?

Yes, that sounds quite wonderful. The question is this: Has there ever been an online advertising agency that claims 85% or 90% commissions?

Exciting news: Battelle Watch has readers

2006-09-09T21:19:00.000-07:00

Traffic to this site has been going crazy, from "no readers" to "quite a lot of readers for such an inside-baseball subject."

In recent days and weeks, the following sites have linked to Battelle Watch. Thank you to these discriminating tech news sites:

* The Register - The snarky British tech site linked to this post about John Battelle's cozy relationship with the subjects of his book about Google.

* Valley Wag - This is a newer Silicon Valley gossip site with the sort of bite we all could've used five years ago. Battelle Watch gets a whole little article. This made my day.

* Newsome.org - The blog of techie/lawyer/investor/musician Kent Newsome says of this site, "a little harsh and a little funny at the same time."

* Brand Destruction Research - This site has an interesting post about what we're up to at Battelle Watch:

Reading Battelle Watch, I kind of think that Mr. Bubble is more or less who he says he is because who else would care about most of what he's discussing?

Admitted: This is not exactly the most popular subject in the world. Yet all of these sites sent quite a few readers to Battelle Watch in August and September. Mr. Bubble is grateful.

All is well!

2006-09-09T19:49:00.000-07:00

The young gentleman from Newsvine says everything is great with Battelle. The Federated Media button appears now on the site. Who's Falk? The company apparently placing the Tickle advertisements throughout Newsvine. Do you count those "sign up for Newsvine" things at the top of Newsvine as Federated ads?

This was originally posted before Labor Day. Somehow I changed it back to "draft" and it vanished.

Bitter bubbles

2006-09-09T19:47:00.000-07:00

A mole inside Mr. Battelle's folly notes that Federated Media is having trouble fulfilling its promises.

Someone at Newsvine - one of the big-name sites that's depending on Battelle for money – posted a bitter note about the situation:

Although the site has tripled its unique visitors since May, recording our best month ever in July, you may have noticed that ads have been very slow to roll in. This disappoints us, because even though we're now visited by several hundred thousand users a month, the site (and all other sites within the FM Publishing family, including Digg, Fark, Metafilter, etc.) still has a high level of unsold inventory. To the average web user, less ads is a good thing, but we're very concerned about helping you monetize your content and paying our own bills as well!

A smart VC reporter in Seattle noticed the FM troubles and wrote a good article.

Just one week later, the starving bloggers at Newsvine "suddenly saw all kinds of advertisements appear.

And today?

Federated Media is no longer brokering ads for Newsvine. Some company I've never heard of – Falk – is now serving the Newsvine banners.

Hello, John Cook. This one needs a follow-up.

This was originally posted before Labor Day. Somehow I changed it back to "draft" and it vanished.

News Flash: FM can't sell ads on Digg

2006-09-07T06:01:00.000-07:00

I had no idea Digg existed a few months ago, and I wasn't alone.

But the user-submitted news-links site has rapidly climbed into the Top 100 of all websites.

According to Alexa, it is shooting up the online charts in all categories. Traffic, page views and user reach are all skyrocketing.

Yet Federated Media can't seem to sell ads for the wildly popular site. Mike Rundle writes on 9rules.com:

I was talking with my friend Pat McCarthy from Right Media the other day about online advertising, and one of the things we chatted about was that one of the best-known "Web 2.0" companies out there, Digg, is having trouble selling ads. About 30 minutes after I got done talking to Pat, I went to Digg.com and for the first time in my entire life, I saw a banner ad at the top that wasn't a Google ad. Gasp! They sold one!

Today, the usual Google text ads are on the Digg home page. Same as yesterday, and the day before.

Rundle concludes with this:

So if the poster child for "Web 2.0" has trouble selling advertising, and "Web 2.0" is all about giving services away for free and selling ads (tongue in cheek), what hope is there for the rest of us?

That's a fair question. Another fair question would be, Could Battelle care less about what happens to his "authors" once FM is sold off to some greedy latecomer to the latest Internet banquet?

An update to this post: PhaseTwo.org has posted an illuminating look at the FM/Digg situation.

He has carefully studied the Google model ...

2006-09-06T20:18:00.000-07:00

And he has learned Google makes its money from ... classified-style text ads.

The "he" is our own Bubble Boy, Mr. John Battelle. His Bubble 2.0 company, Federated Media (not that one!) is now selling Google-style text ads.

This is either:

a) A sign of desperation, as the display ads aren't exactly selling like hotcakes.

b) A realistic re-evaluation of his company.

c) Just another example of trying to play all sides of everything, so it looks like he's got a diversified company when he tries to dump it in three months.

'Please buy us, Google'

2006-08-28T22:48:00.000-07:00

Has free-lance Google evangelist Battelle finally made his scam public?

In an Aug. 25 post, the man who plays every horse noted that Google has so much cash on hand - more than $10 billion - that it's now "subject to SEC regulations as a mutual fund."

Battelle's suggestion?

"Time to buy someone, Google..."

A commenter asks, "Is that a 'For Sale' sign I just saw pop up on this site?"

'Investor Optimisim Reaches Low for 2006'

2006-08-28T22:03:00.000-07:00

That's the headline of this AP article.

Investor optimism hit a new low for the year during August, according to a survey of 802 investors by UBS and Gallup. Rising prices for energy and falling prices for real estate were two of investors' biggest concerns. As measured by the survey, investor optimism reached a height of 178 in January 2000, during the Internet bubble. The optimism index was 93 in January 2006 but dipped to 53 in August, a decline of 40 points.

'There's simply not enough failure out there right now'

2006-08-22T15:21:00.000-07:00

On August 20, Battelle was wearing his "Web 2.0" huckster suit and encouraged new online companies to compete for the attentions of various VC vermin at the upcoming "Web 2.0" conference headed by (naturally) young Mr. Battelle.

Less than 12 hours later, he posts a thumbsucker about "Web 2.0" being threatened by too many new online companies surviving solely on VC money.

And today, Business 2.0 (the same Business 2.0 that employs John Battelle!) posts an article about advertising on weblogs - a "flourishing business" with "fat profits." Of course, Battelle is right in there, pimping his Federated Media weblog outfit while offering no evidence of either fat profits or flourishing businesses.

(There is no clearer sign of a bubble than "business" articles that fail to mention any numbers related to the businesses profiled. Have you ever read a business article about Ford or Toyota that didn't note the company's income, earnings, profit or loss? From reading this business story, all we know of Battelle's Folly is that he claims to take a 40% commission on ads brokered by Federated Media, that "about 75 sites" are in his stable, and that he compares his business model to that of a rec ord comp any.)

So what's up? The stench from Battelle's blog tells me his business is a flop. Not even a year ago, he was writing Rah Rah Web 2.0 puff pieces about his New York Times-backed weblog-advertising company (in the New York Times, natch). Now he's setting up his suckers for the fall.

Battelle is so impossibly sleazy that it doesn't bother him at all to write a book-length love song to Google (an online-advertising company) which he sells to Google by the thousands while launching a competing online-advertising company.

Likewise, his "time for a shakedown" bubble acknowledgement is posted 12 hours after his latest Web. 2.0 hucksterism. Oh, and he gets a "fee" for whoring your VC-hungry startup. Shameless!

What happens in Vegas ...

2006-08-14T20:52:00.000-07:00

Here's a funny situation:

A pal at a tech-trade magazine was scheduled to cover this conference called "Webmaster World Pub Con," but discovered that it overlaps his family's fall vacation by one day.

The pal (let's use the name "Pally") tried to get out of the assignment, but apparently could find no takers. No takers for Las Vegas at the most pleasant time of year?

Pally kindly offered it to me, as a free-lance gig. As I've probably mentioned before, this used to be my business. I've covered a lot of similar trade shows and conferences, even going back to the early 1980s. And since crawling out of my hole last year, this network of pals has handed me just enough of these free-lancer gigs to keep my head above water.

We worked out a dollar amount and a cap on expenses, because it's easy to blow a grand in Vegas these days without ever leaving your hotel room. I made my reservations and marked it in my calendar.

Imagine my surprise when I got an email this morning from another old Industry Standard fellow traveler. "You should come to this Web show in Vegas before Thanksgiving," it read in part. "Battelle's giving the keynote address. We can throw tomatoes at him!"

Battelle ... Vegas ... November ... free-lance ....

While these conference schedules and the industry news in general change so often that it's rarely worthwhile to research a trade show before it's about to happen, Webmaster World Pub Con is an exception.

Yes, there he is.

Austin, TX (PRWEB) August 2, 2006 -- WebmasterWorld's Search Engine & Internet Marketing Conference, PubCon, Las Vegas, November 14th to 17th, 2006, features a keynote speech by John Battelle, co-founding editor of Wired Magazine and Wired Ventures.

"I love the WebmasterWorld events, it's one conference where you can truly take the pulse of the online world from the folks in the trenches truly building out the future," said John Battelle.

How did I miss that?

No matter. It seems I'll be hobnobbing with the great Mr. Battelle (again) in the most vulgar of American cities. Fitting, that.

Will he recognize me? I doubt it, even if I looked exactly the same; underlings (er, editors) never really make an impression on the John Battelle types. Anyway, these last half-dozen years have been a bit rough. Beyond poverty and its all-too-visible effects, the years since 2001 have been those years we all dread - when the skin sags, the hairline rises, the hair itself grays, the waistline swells. The good thing is that I still look slightly better than the Bay Area's leading tech reporters.

Print journalism is a business for those with faces built for radio. And the Silicon Valley press corps is possibly the most physically unattractive collection of humans in the industrialized world.

In the boom days, however, we used to be almost dashing, compared to most print journalists. We had snazzy eyeglasses and Palm Pilots. Some of us even had wives or girlfriends, who would help dress us. Ah, the $40 San Francisco haircut ... we schlubs would walk out of the salon with an artfully constructed coif and hipster sideburns. I remember getting my hair "done" in this place near South Park (the San Francisco tech neighborhood, not the cartoon) and coming out to see people from Wired magazine sitting in the park, drinking lattes, with laptops that couldn't connect to anything because WiFi didn't yet exist.

Will I confront Battelle? Of course not. I'll just watch like Tom Wolfe's fly on the wall. When his house-of-cards business collapsed, he abandoned his co-workers and colleagues and blithely skipped away to find the "next big thing." He ran for the hills - literally.

But I do enjoy the idea that young Mr. Battelle might know I am watching and documenting his new sins. And that he has so very many enemies that a Web trade show with a thousand or so attendees is quite likely to include scores of his disgruntled former colleagues.

Silver Lining

2006-08-08T23:46:00.000-07:00

So AOL gets caught releasing the search records of 658,000 people that can easily be reconciled with actual AOL subscribers.

In short, an online advertising company - what else is America Online today? - dumps all this personal information about its users.

So who does the New York Times go to for comment? Could it be a certain online-advertising shaman named ... John Battelle?

You know, that guy who started a company that's bankrolled by the ... New York Times?

John Battelle, the author of the 2005 book The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture, said AOL's misstep, while unfortunate, could have a silver lining if people began to understand just what was at stake. In his book, he says search engines are mining the priceless "database of intentions" formed by the worldÂs search requests.

"It's only by these kinds of screw-ups and unintended behind-the-curtain views that we can push this dialogue along," Mr. Battelle said. "As unhappy as I am to see this data on people leaked, I'm heartened that we will have this conversation as a culture, which is long overdue."

The same young Mr. Battelle who saw such a silver lining to the craptacular collapse of a business that employed so many of his peers ("Maybe I'll go look for the next big thing") is now happy to see 20 million search queries go naked before the public.

So we can "push this dialogue along" only by exposing every typed thought of 62-year-old Georgia widow Thelma Arnold?

Ms. Arnold seems less impressed with this new dialogue. She is canceling her AOL account.

I would hope she is also investigating the "anonymizer" websites that hide the human from the awful machine Mr. Battelle spends his whole life promoting.

Watch the scumbag squirm

2006-07-31T08:47:00.000-07:00

From the PBS News Hour, Aug. 20, 2001:

The "Industry Standard," a San Francisco-based magazine that chronicled and mirrored the rise of the so-called new economy and its dotcom wizards announced last week that it was ceasing publication. As of tonight, about 175 employees will be out of work. In a three-and-a-half-year publishing history, the "Standard" rode the dot-com boom to the top. At its height in the spring last year, with advertising revenues pouring in, the publication ran to 360 pages. The last issue, dated August 27, had shrunk to 88 pages, as advertising revenues from struggling high-tech companies plunged.

After that grim introduction, young Mr. Battelle appears on the television and tells such sweet, stupid lies. Yes, "about 175" journalists lost their livelihoods that day. And he went on TV to say how it's not that bad.

John, some of us were watching. Oh, I mean, "All of us were watching."

You sure seem like a smug sack of shit here on this TV show while we were trying to figure out how to make our house payments, feed our children, pay our insurance, etc.

Read this and feel all the hate and trauma all over again. It is a good way to prepare for Battelle's latest car crash - oh yes, and he's headed right for that farmer's market filled with innocent people.

Murder, Inc.

2006-07-31T04:42:00.000-07:00

Did John Battelle's wretched tech magazine the Industry Standard only ruin lives?

A tipster (thanks Joe) sent me this terrible story today ... and I admit this is the first I've heard of it.

Murder Accusations Shroud Industry Standard's Latin America Talks

Unproved charges didn't kill deal with magazine, CEO says

Um, what?

Here's a story you won't read in the Industry Standard.

It's a tale of how the hot Internet magazine nearly nailed a deal to acquire or enter a partnership with a new Latin American monthly.

And it's also a tale of how talks with the new magazine faltered -- just as the Standard received a background check that tied one of the new publication's execs to an old murder accusation in Colombia.

65 is the new 54!

2006-07-30T23:06:00.000-07:00

Constant exaggeration is Job #1 for the Web Bubble Master.

It should be sketchy enough that all but a half-dozen of Federated Media's "author driven properties" are tiny unknown sites.

But that's not sketchy enough for Mr. Battelle. His company claims "nearly 65 sites" in the Federated Media stable ... yet only 54 are listed on his little company's roster.

Are underperforming sites being culled from the Federated Media pack? Lord knows there are scores of sites nobody has ever heard of, and too many that "boast" traffic of a few thousand page views per month.

(Has any site given up on Federated Media - or been dropped - just yet? If so, they're keeping shamefully quiet. Nothing like the smell of NDA's in the morning ... smells like ... failure.)

The vulture capitalists are still enjoying their holidays and vacation homes this summer, so it's hard to imagine any of the Federated Media "angel" investors carefully watching over Battelle's shady stable of mostly-lesser websites during these dog days of summer.

But the dog days will end. Will the "angels" realize Federated Media has based its entire bubbly business on a handful of sites out of that alleged "nearly 65"?

Facts evolve in this scummy world. Mr. Battelle even seems to have quit claiming he's a "professor," as his recent biographies claimed.

Even the "adjunct professor" bits have faded away. These days, according to Federated Media, Mr. Battelle is so humble that he's just on leave from the graduate school of journalism at UC Berkeley - maybe he's earning a degree.

Maybe he's even studying ethics.

Stench of Death

2006-07-21T18:19:00.000-07:00

Maybe it sounded like hyperbole or sour grapes when I said a bubble will burst whenever John Battelle enters the scene. Or maybe my dire predictions are "only" based on the devastating Internet Bubble collapse of just five years ago.

But what's this?

Yahoo's value drops by 22% - or some $11 billion - in a single day, all because of a seemingly minor delay in new advertising software?

And Google, which is constantly championed by Mr. Battelle, takes a $4 stock plunge even though the news is supposed to be good for Google?

Both companies make tons of money, and they absolutely dominate the search-engine industry.

Federated Media's corporate blog wisely ignores both developments. And Mr. Battelle himself skipped town a week ago, promising to avoid the Internet and leaving his dubious "Search Blog" in the hands of a guest editor.

What does he know, and how did he know it?

2006-07-12T14:45:00.000-07:00

A smart guy named Jason Calacanis, who made $25 million selling his company to AOL, thinks Battelle's idea is moronic.

'Web 2.0 is bollocks'

2006-07-05T08:11:00.000-07:00

A Web 2.0 Battelle skeptic? Could it be? Is there still hope for any of us?

Web 2.0 is, in short, bollocks. Or put another way, Web 2.0 is Bubble 2.0. There, now we’ve said it. It’s out in the open. We can all relax.

Why? Well. Fundamentaly Web 2.0 resits definition. Therefore you could classify it as falling into that category of thoughts that commonly resists definition: emotions. You see, Web 2.0 is a very emo thing. It’s about sharing (blogs, del.icio.us, flikr), it’s about the people (myspace), connections (friendster), holding hands and a whole load of other socially driven phenomena. It’s about people getting excited about the web again. "Shit," some characters are thinking, "this web really didn’t turn out to be the ‘CB radio of the 90s’. It, like, works."

But "why the hostility to this" you say ? Well. I’m glad you asked.

The problem comes when you have a reality gap between what the technology can do and what peole expect the technology can do. That’s when expectations depart from actuality and when people/companies begin to make foolish decisions with other peoples money. It’s what can happen when too much emotion surrounds a technology ...

A massive "reality gap" between the real world and the Silicon Valley hype machine is exactly what led to the bloody crash of 2001.

(The Internet Bubble crash, I mean. Somehow the events of Sept. 11, 2001, have completely vaporized the ugly events of the summer of 2001 ... at least in the memories of tech journalists.)

Bubble fireworks

2006-07-04T22:51:00.000-07:00

When John Battelle latches (leeches?) onto an industry, history says that industry is just about to have a painful collapse.

That's what happened when the Industry Standard magazine made its name. The rise of that glorified trade publication was directly tied to the fall of the first Internet bubble. Battelle slithered away, leaving countless wrecked lives and a stain on the technology world for years to come.

And then he crawled out of his bunker, sniffed the air, smelled that peculiar odor of a balloon about to pop, and launched a sketchy business based on the big fad of 2002 ... web logs.

Can you guess what the bubble is this week?

Monday's New York Times had a curious article about a pioneering (and successful) blog company suddenly downsizing, due to a decline in advertising and increased costs. Gawker Media is shutting down some of its failed sites and also fired several top editors. A consumer-magazine editor was brought in to make the content more mainstream.

Gawker Media is owned by the same English technology journalist who once ran another bubble business, the Silicon Valley networking party called "First Tuesday." Credited with turning blogs into a viable business, now he seems to be retreating. Why?

First, advertising is a fickle thing. Particularly the entertainment advertising upon which so many websites depend. A change in the advertising industry's conventional wisdom, cutbacks by the studios: it wouldn't take much to prick the current exuberance. Better to sober up now, before the end of the party.

Even though readership is up, it sounds like ad money is down. Everybody knows July is a dead time of year for ad sales, but this complicated decision was presumably made well before it showed up in the New York Times.

Hype popped the last bubble. Every prospectus was filled with big numbers, and venture capitalists quit verifying those numbers. That's what Battelle was counting on this time around.

For example, go to the Federated Media website and Battelle's star blog is right there, boasting "more than 2 million unique visitors" per month.

Yet Nielsen/Net Ratings (the only Internet-readership company trusted by big advertisers) reported only 605,000 unique visitors to Boing Boing in July 2005. Yes, that was a year ago, but Nielsen/Net Ratings pegs Boing Boing with 20 percent annual traffic growth.

And that would put Battelle's flagship site at 726,000 unique visitors a month ... far less than half of the 2 million claimed by Federated Media.

That kind of Enron accounting should serve as a giant red flag over not only the latest Battelle scheme, but the whole irrational exuberance of the blog bubble.

The new phone books are here!

2006-06-26T03:15:00.000-07:00

Federated Media's concept of an "author" has been bugging the hell out of me.

Like many people who work (or worked ...) in the publishing industry, I developed the quaint idea that an "author" was a person who wrote articles or books - or maybe plays and movie scripts. Since the weblog explosion, it's easy enough to stretch the definition of author to include people who post items on their blog.

Battelle's venture seems to share this non-controversial definition, at least on the Federated Media (not the real one) website:

An FM site has influence not because its author is well known, but because the author has earned the trust of an influential community.

Good! So what are some of the top FM sites, as far as traffic?

Beyond the Boing Boing enterprise, the handful of popular sites include Fark, Digg, Metafilter, Newsvine, Reddit and PopURLS ... all sites based on either news links submitted by readers or robot-submitted news links.

In other words, where's that author again?

Battelle's name made its weekly Mainstream Media appearance in a June 23 article in the San Francisco Chronicle about Digg.com -- one of those "author" sites championed by the brave speculators at Federated Media.

I couldn't care less if Battelle's latest Bubble Machine sells ads for a Pat Robertson BBS or some pedophile picture-trading site run by Pentagon staffers, but it is simply dishonest to trumpet "authors" when your main business comes from selling ads on pornography message boards like Fark.

I can quit whenever I want

2006-06-25T09:37:00.000-07:00

A former colleague in the Bay Area sent me a note last week with a grim accusation: I had become a "blog addict."

Really?

The evidence is limited to my previous post. Apparently I've been spending too much time examining this new Battelle scheme. Otherwise, I wouldn't be mentioning "InstaPundit or Daily Kos or Engadget" as if I knew what they were.

I'd like to claim an amazing ability to identify the "top blogs" and critique their qualities based on my sudden, disturbing and intimate knowledge of this world. But that wouldn't be honest. In truth, all I did was click on this Technorati.com website.

It tells you anything you would like to know about the blog world. Top 100 blogs? Right here. (The No. 1 blog appears to be a Chinese site; No. 2 is Boing Boing, which is Battelle's prize client.)

So don't worry about me. While blogs are certainly cheaper than all the books and DVDs and vacations I'll never be able to afford again, they're still not very interesting. Once Battelle's latest folly goes down the toilet, I'll find a new hobby. Birdwatching, perhaps.

Blogical Mystery Tour

2006-06-21T20:53:00.000-07:00

Federated Media is not competing with Google AdWords, according to Mr. Battelle ... or, it's maybe competing in a small way, but it's not important. Just an tiny, itty bitty company, as he says.

Even after all the devastation, that's a remarkably modest comment coming from Mr. Battelle. I thought I'd take a tour of his "author partners" and see what this tiny little bitty company is doing.

There's one called Search Blog. It's actually Mr. Battelle's own site, where he writes about the great search company called Google. Search Blog claims 1,300 unique visitors a day. Hey, there are tiny rural weekly newspapers that survive on 1,300 readers ....

(The math is tough to decode. Most commercial websites sell ads based on page views, and there's a known advertising model based on "impressions" and the cost per thousand of those impressions. When you see an ad, that's an "impression.")

A premier Federated Media site is Boing Boing. It seems to feature a group of tech journalists writing about the great new articles they've written for other publications, as well as some blurbs about quirky computer news. It also has big traffic for a blog, reportedly some 70,000 unique visitors a day. No Drudge Report, or even Gawker, but it's good traffic. My newspaper website friends say that's a decent number for a smaller city's newspaper site. Boing Boing writers are regularly featured on "old media" programs such as the NPR news, so this property has potential.

(I've visited Boing Boing about 20 times this month at various times of day. Maybe I've been targeted as an undesirable consumer, but I've never seen anything but house ads in the Federated Media spots ... along with a number of "button" or "badge" ads promoting various Battelle products such as his book about Google. There are also some ads for Internet-freedom "pet causes" of the Boing Boing writers and an advertisement for a watch company that seems separate from the Federated Media space. Perhaps there's a busy time of day I've missed when many Federated Media ads appear.)

Battelle's operation seems especially proud of a blog called Dooce.com, which is written by an "alternative" mom, as far as I can tell. The blog claims a daily "unique visitor" count of 26,000 people. That's a lot of people reading a blog! Again, it's no InstaPundit or Daily Kos or Engadget, but pretty good for the content.

The content is hard to describe. The woman writes about her friends getting jobs, a child (her child?) getting a sinus infection, not being able to locate a pair of shoes, a dog sleeping and other concerns. As she still has AdBrite text ads and "begging links" for PayPal and Amazon donations, I am wondering how the Federated Media advertising is working out. Also, I've never actually seen a Federated Media ad on the Dooce.com site, just blank spots that say "Advertise here."

Then there's Fark.com, which a few of my younger nephews think is "the shit." It seems to be a collection of pornography, sports and "wacky news" links submitted by readers. It leads the pack with some 173,000 unique visitors each day. I got a Howard Stern feeling from this site, if on a much smaller level. And the ads reflected that: There's an ad from a sports-news website dominated by pictures of young girls in skimpy outfits, an ad for a lesser Howard Stern knockoff called "Opie and Anthony," and some house ads from Federated Media about website tracking software.

It smells of the Rush Limbaugh/Dr. Laura talk-radio problem: There are many listeners, but they aren't considered to be especially attractive to advertisers. The nightly news on television may have a much smaller audience than Rush, yet the commercials are for high-ticket items such as SUVs. The advertisers on talk radio seem to all be selling dubious precious-metal schemes and suspicious health-food appliances. (The talk-radio business may have low-end advertising, but the scale is massive. Limbaugh claims 3 million listeners per day.)

Maybe Battelle has actually been humbled by his disastrous past and really does consider his Federated Media to be a little tiny company. It's hard to imagine this roster of publications attracting luxury-goods advertisers you see on NYTimes.com - or used to see on the glossy pages of the Industry Standard -- and it seems more difficult than the automated Google AdWords system that places relevant text ads on sites large and small.

In other words, so far this looks like an oddly humble enterprise for some hype-whore like Battelle. What's really going on here?

Google shill is Google's competition!

2006-06-18T22:17:00.000-07:00

One of the most perplexing realities of this young century is how a businessman who flopped so terribly gets re-made as ... a businessman incapable of screwing up.

That the businessman in question isn't actually a businessman at all - you could fairly describe him as a Fad Slave who flits from one geeky revolution he doesn't understand to the next geeky revolution he really doesn't understand - is just one of the stranger aspects of Mr. Battelle's curious "journalism" career.

Today, the hype-addict propagandist of the worst aspects of Silicon Valley is not remembered for the glossy technology magazine he inflated into the most vulgar Internet Bubble on record. True, he is vaguely remembered as the editor of the Industry Standard trade journal, but it's a strangely empty memory. (WikiPedia entries are known for extensively covering the Silicon Valley industry, yet the Battelle entry is comically terse and the Industry Standard entry refers only to a 1982 "progressive rock album.")

Imagine if Richard Nixon was remembered as a president (a very important job) but not as the man who stained the American presidency more than any other man who ever held that august office.

Mr. Battelle apparently re-emerged as the expert chronicler of Google, the search company. He wrote a book about Google Inc. and launched a "blog" that seems to speak of nothing but Google. The short items on the blog are almost exclusively about the glories of Google and the wonderful advertising business of Google. His book was reportedly such a celebration of all things Google that the huge Silicon Valley company bought thousands of copies to hand out to Google employees as inspirational reading.

Yet during the past year or so of this very public proselytizing for Google and especially its advertising business, Mr. Battelle was launching his own advertising business to take advantage of the very world he found through his Google studies.

The apparent revolution wrought by Google was to offer advertising revenue to those small websites that couldn't ever get a deal with the Internet Bubble-era online ad agencies such as DoubleClick. Suddenly, anybody with a website about Star Trek could make a few bucks (or a fortune) just by letting Google place advertising there.

Is there something unseemly about Battelle remaking himself as a Google cheerleader while simultaneously launching an advertising company preying on that exact same market?

Mr. Battelle has the answer, and he thinks he's quite innocent:

"I'm a big fan of AdSense and I don't think we're directly competitive. You could make the argument, but you could make the argument that everyone's competitive with everyone in the publishing business," he told Forbes magazine in March. "You could certainly argue there is potential competition that might be posited in the short-to-middle-term future."

The Forbes reporter pressed on. Isn't anyone at Google concerned about your scheme?

"Very large company, Google. We're a tiny, itty, bitty company. I don't think we necessarily merit a lot of consideration."

More on this fascinating subject, later ....

The World According to Battelle

2006-06-12T21:56:00.000-07:00

Making his regular appearance in the New York Times' technology section, Mr. Battelle fondly remembers his years as an online pioneer ... back when he was an old-school hacker.

It was a simpler, more innocent time:

"[W]e assumed the digital footprints we left behind - our clickstream exhaust, so to speak - were as ephemeral as a phone call, fleeting, passing, unrecorded."

This gem apparently comes from a weblog post he wrote "a couple of years ago," according to the NYT.

The writer of the article, Tom Zeller Jr., should be credited for using simple language to describe the growing problem of employers, lawyers and the government tracking your online activities.

It is left to Mr. Battelle to expound on his old blog post with new poetic comments delivered to the New York Times via electronic mail:

"We are living online, but have yet to fully realize the implications of doing so," Battelle wrote, according to Zeller. "One of those implications is that our tracks through the digital sand are eternal."

Ah, eternity!

He doesn't have any idea what he's talking about, again. (His prose is stinky as usual.) What online pioneers knew all too well - and they've said this often, as I've interviewed dozens of the clever geeks - was that the authorities and telecoms were always watching.

Hacker horror stories were common in the media many years before regular Americans were signing up with AOL in the mid-1990s. It was this very fear of someone watching that kept the first consumer Web users paranoid about credit-card theft or (in the Waco days) Clintonian surveillance of any message-board commenter with a vaguely anti-governmnet view.

One could say with some authority that it wasn't until this century - the past few years - that online activity became comfortable for the general public. Not that there's any reason for people to be comfortable online today; it's simply that "everybody's doing it."

'Biased and Apologist'

2006-06-06T22:51:00.000-07:00

It seems young Mr. Battelle has a convenient double standard when it comes to lifting other companies' names.

As you may recall, dear reader, Battelle didn't feel any moral tug when he named his latest bubble venture "Federated Media" - which happens to be the name of another U.S. media company that has been in constant business for three decades.

You see, Battelle is part of this "Web 2.0" trade-show business with a tech publisher. They put on these events at hotel convention halls to promote "Web 2.0" - generic jargon for the latest Internet revolution that will magically make Battelle even richer.

Like "information superhighway," the phrase "Web 2.0" is just another silly moniker used by countless nerds to describe something that may or may not exist.

(The website Wikipedia has this impossibly vague description: "As there are no set standards for what Web 2.0 actually means, implies, or requires, the term can mean radically different things to different people.")

In brief, some computer geeks in Ireland held a local, nonprofit, apparently casual conference called Web 2.0, and Battelle's vultures over at O'Reilly Media and something called CMP Media took legal action.

Red Herring, another Internet Bubble 1.0 magazine which seems to at least still exist as a website, had this to say:

A trademark dispute over the phrase “Web 2.0” ignited harsh criticism of publisher O’Reilly Media, but it appeared to be amicably resolved Wednesday ...

People who commented on a placeholder explanatory post by O’Reilly VP of Corporate Communications Sara Winge were angry and sarcastic.

“People don’t take well to heavy-handed corporations throwing their legal team on a not-for-profit,” said one comment.

“It is completely anti-Web 2.0 attitude to protect Web 2.0,” said another.

Bloggers were also harsh in their dissections of posts by Boing Boing blogger Cory Doctorow and Federated Media head John Battelle, both work associates of Mr. O’Reilly, calling the two “biased” and “apologist.”

Battelle is a biased apologist?! Shocking, simply shocking.

But is Battelle also a shameless hypocrite who happilly lifts the corporate name from a real media company that has been in business for 30+ years yet justifies his own gang cracking down on a non-profit group of Irish computer geeks for using the generic term Web 2.0?

The answer is Yes 2.0.

'Maybe I'll go look for the next big thing'

2006-06-05T20:21:00.000-07:00

It's August 2001. The "country club" magazine you ran has collapsed.

All the people who worked for you are staggering around like WTC employees after the first plane hit. Their lives are ruined, at least for the short term, maybe forever.

The San Francisco newspaper calls you. Most likely, it's a business reporter who was hoping to jump ship and start working for your luxury operation. Now he's glad he stayed put.

Nonetheless, he figures you'll slither back to prominence one way or another. Best not to cross you. Best to bury the voices of the ruined.

"His associates offer differing opinions of Battelle's role in the magazine's rise and fall," was all the S.F. Chronicle reporter could manage to report. The future, who knows where it goes?

But then Battelle is offered a chance to say something to his suddenly unemployed colleagues and underlings. He can take the humble path and tell all those people with worthless Industry Standard stock options and crushing house payments: I'm so sorry. From now on, I'll try to do something good. I'll spend the rest of my life working for those who were destroyed by atavistic railroad men like myself.

Did he? Of course not. And we shouldn't expect anything better. It's the old story of the frog giving the scorpion a piggy-back ride across the stream. ("You stung me!" cries the frog. The scorpion replies, "Well, you knew I was a scorpion when you gave me the ride.")

So the reporter asks Battelle about "long-term plans."

Young Mr. Battelle replies, "Maybe I'll go look for the next big thing."

Pajamas Media Redux?

2006-05-20T00:22:00.000-07:00

I've been poking around. Those who follow the so-called "blogosphere" talk about last year's disaster when a would-be blog-publishing empire casually known as Pajamas Media went pro with a new name, Open Source Media.

The name belonged to another Web business.

A public relations nightmare followed, but eventually Pajamas Media semi-honorably went back to its original catchy name, albeit with a bathrobe as its logo. (More recently, the operation has replaced the bathrobe logo with a pajamas logo.)

And so we wonder today, here at Battelle Watch World Headquarters, why is it that "Federated Media" is actually the name of another established media company that has been around for quite some time?

Now, we aren't bigshot venture-capitalist sponges like Mr. Battelle, but we're still a little shocked that his new media company would so brazenly steal the name of a media company that has been around for three decades.

This "selling little ads on web logs" may be an exciting new gamble, but we're wondering if the real Federated Media people -- who apparently own many radio stations like this one -- are charmed by some San Francisco Bay Area upstarts just stealing their name.

Is that how the whole Web 2.0 works? You just ignore "Earth 1.0" and do whatever you want?

Interesting.

And typical.

The mark of a bubble

2006-05-19T11:08:00.000-07:00

Here's why Nigerian spam-scams work:

Robert B. Reich, the former Labor Secretary, who has studied the psychology of market behavior, says, “American culture is uniquely prone to the ‘too good to miss’ fallacy. ‘Opportunity’ is our favorite word. What may seem reckless and feckless and hapless to people in many parts of the world seems a justifiable risk to Americans.” But appetite for risk is only part of it. A mark must be willing to pursue a fortune of questionable origin. The mind-set was best explained by the linguist David W. Maurer in his classic 1940 book, “The Big Con”: “As the lust for large and easy profits is fanned into a hot flame, the mark puts all his scruples behind him. He closes out his bank account, liquidates his property, borrows from his friends, embezzles from his employer or his clients. In the mad frenzy of cheating someone else, he is unaware of the fact that he is the real victim, carefully selected and fatted for the kill. Thus arises the trite but none the less sage maxim: ‘You can’t cheat an honest man.’"

And don't forget that "an enduring trait of Nigerian letter scammers—indeed, of most con artists—is their reluctance to walk away from a mark before his resources are exhausted."

Shuck 'n Jive

2006-05-17T06:14:00.000-07:00

After the house of cards known as John Battelle's "Industry Standard" magazine collapsed, you can guess who didn't show up at bankruptcy court to see who would buy his wreckage for pennies on the dollar.

Many of us did show up, because we didn't exactly have a lot of other things to do that week.

I found an interesting account of that day, as part of a generally compelling article by a former editor of the magazine.

The write-up is by Todd Wooley (cheers, mate!) in the Colombia Journalism Review:

The opportunity to do such work, free of corporate penny-pinching and with a minimum of newsroom politics, had begun to attract reporters and editors from The Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, and The Washington Post. Of course, the generous salaries were no small lure. As the good times rolled on, management bestowed such dot-com goodies as massages, gym memberships, and subsidized childcare. In this new California Gold Rush, it was not out of place to return to the office from a day of reporting, get a massage, and walk into the newsroom to find the editor-in-chief handing out four-figure bonus checks to celebrate a profitable quarter. Reporters, myself included, grew accustomed to jetting around the country, staying at hip hotels, and dining at chi-chi restaurants. If we ourselves weren't awash in dot-com millions, our reporting life-style offered a reasonable facsimile. "You don't know how good you have it," James Fallows, the Atlantic correspondent and Standard columnist, told us in wry understatement as we sipped a fine California Merlot at a January 2000 editorial-retreat-ski-holiday in Lake Tahoe.

But there was one perk I wish we had never received: stock options. The thud of those packets of potential riches landing on our desks was, in my opinion, the death knell of the magazine. Like the companies we covered, the Standard wanted to turn its cachet into IPO cash. That strategy would dictate an unsustainable spending spree to position the Standard as a diversified global "information services" company. If you wanted to justify a double-digit share price, simply publishing a profitable magazine wasn't going to cut it.

Yes. And how familiar that nightmare scenario sounds today.

You see, young Mr. Battelle's latest operation is also built on an IPO or buyout House of Cards.

Little birds who have examined his Federated Media contracts tell me that there's a prominent provision for buyout -- those websites that commit to Battelle's latest folly will get some kind of reward "when" he sells off the pretend company. Very interesting.

Or, I should say, "Bubble 2.0"?

Woodward and Bernstein 2.0

2006-05-12T22:52:00.000-07:00

You may recall that our beloved leader went through several failed trade-show businesses after the Industry Standard debacle and before miraculously getting a book deal to get tough and uncover what was going on at Google.

But remember, our beloved hero is John Battelle. So that book was instead an ass-kissing piece of propaganda of such blatant Google worship that Google itself bought thousands of copies to hand out to its own employees.

Google's court scribe now breathlessly reports on Google's Press Day. It's like Easter and the Gold Rush combined. And Battelle has kindly taken the time to explain just how great Google is, again, because that's just the kind of guy he is.

Vintage Computing Festival

2006-05-12T21:33:00.000-07:00

It would be nice to see John Battelle at one of these "vintage computing festivals," preferably locked inside an ancient Kaypro, from which he can sputter 1997 business slogans without hurting anybody else.

So what's that 'better boom'?

2006-05-10T23:16:00.000-07:00

This is how I got pulled back to Battelle's shitty world:

It's November of last year. I'm at a coffee place on the East Coast, reading the New York Times and eating some sugar-filled cake with my coffee.

I'm bored with the news, so I flip to the end of the front section. They call it the "op-ed" section because .... I don't remember. Opinions and Editorials?

Anyway, there's Battelle. We hardly knew ye.

He writes this thing for the New York Times about how, after all, the tech companies were right all along, about everything. Oh, also, he learned about a new world called "blogging."

John Battelle had found yet another thing he didn't understand. But with his rolodex and other people's money, he might just be able to wreck this business, too.

I e-mailed the op-ed to ___________, who still lives in Los Gatos in a house that's now worth approximately a billion dollars, and he called me back immediately.

"He has absolutely no shame," ___________ said. "You realize the Times is part-owner of his new business, right?"

Incredible. I e-mailed about a half-dozen editors at the newspaper, including somebody known as the "reader's advocate" or something. Nobody replied. I repeated the process, and even tried to get this "reader's advocate" on the phone. No luck.

And to this day nobody ever replied. My letter didn't appear in the letters section.

Later, eventually, and without ever acknowledging my complaint, the New York Times appended that column by Battelle:

Editors' Note: Nov. 29, 2005, Tuesday:

An Op-Ed article on Nov. 18 about the future of Internet companies should have included additional information about the author, John Battelle. The New York Times Company has made an investment of no more than 5 percent in Mr. Battelle's company, Federated Media Publishing.

'Building a better boom'

2006-05-10T23:00:00.000-07:00

Most likely, you've been in love and had your heart stomped. It happens. Life's rich pageant, etc.

But it's a different kind of affair when someone lures you away from a comfortable job and decent living because you are worth millions!

John Battelle actually said things like that. He hired people away from all sorts of safe jobs in the Bay Area and Silicon Valley. They were worker bees, not Steve Jobs. They wouldn't be selling patents for a million dollars or getting bought out by AOL. They were just people who wrote articles about tech businesses.

And John Battelle told them they were some kind of special.

Just like he tells these web-loggers that they are something extra special, and only he can be trusted to make them millionaires.

As a former Battelle hireling, I can tell you that ... well, you can figure it out for yourself. A fancy party does NOT equal somebody looking out for you.

Getting a few big paychecks doesn't equal you making a decent living. Trust an old dude who got dumped in Battelle's septic tank.

Where John Battelle walks, good things wither and die. He is a scam artist, and I personally know (or knew, sorry) about a hundred people who had their lives ruined by that pompous jackass.

Oh, and he doesn't know anything about that Internet he loves to talk about. There is a very nice guy who wrote a Silicon Valley column for a paper for a long time who can tell you some embarrassingly funny stories about Battelle trying to "keep up" with a certain young CTO who posted the whole incident on The Well afterwards.

I don't mean to talk in code. But you who were there will be able to fill in the details.

(To not be a hypocrite, I've opened comments on this web log to one and all, without registration. Say your piece and maybe we'll be just a little bit better off.)

$20,000 rooftop parties

2006-05-08T22:15:00.000-07:00

A party is fun, sometimes even if it's a work party.

The Industry Standard had parties.

For people who had spent their life working for regular newspapers or tech magazines and were quite used to paying $3 for a beer at some lackluster event, the Battelle parties were a shock -- almost as big a shock as our very short-lived huge salaries.

Battelle would tell people we were about to be a "billion-dollar company" and the "Dow Jones of the 21st century."

Of course, that's stupid and vainglorious -- or, I should say, that's Battelle. John Battelle was the biggest phoney of the entire dot-com collapse. He hurt a lot of people, and he was never punished. He pretty much ruined my life, but that's a story for another day. That's a story as common as fog in San Francisco.

What's crucial right now is that people avoid him at all costs. When John Battelle comes sniffing around the toilets, it's all over. Your hopes have died. Your careers are finished.

(Side note: On the day we all got fired, I was walking to my car with this pleasant young woman who had been at the magazine exactly three days. She was crying, but laughing. A lot of us were. But she was lucky; she didn't have a family waiting for her paycheck, or an appalling mortgage payment. She just had that very brief experience of having a bright future. "I've never made this much," she said. And then she got in her ratty old Ford Escort and drove away.)

So when I later found out those final rooftop booze extravaganzas weren't even paid for, I had something to laugh about again.

Sure, I couldn't make my own house payment, but John Battelle owed hundreds of thousands of dollars for his stupid parties with their Absolut bars and sushi platters.

Surely he would suffer for what he had wrought. Surely he wouldn't re-emerge nearly a decade later to dump his dumb schemes on yet another Internet generation ....

Bubbling sewage of the Past

2006-05-05T17:00:00.000-07:00

I don't want to bore you with the rotten misery of my private life since it got annihilated by the putrid rays of the John Battelle Experience, some eight years ago.

But I have to explain a little bit, otherwise this blogger.com site will never make any sense to the three or four of you who might stumble across it someday.

After getting thoroughly screwed during the collapse of the "Industry Standard" boondoggle, I made a conscious effort to get far away from the incestuous cesspool of Silicon Valley.

It is not a rare story in the valley. One day I was so fucking rich I could almost afford a house. The next day, I was watching Battelle on the PBS News Hour explaining how it was really a good thing how hundreds of us got destroyed by his lies and graft.

More later. This crap really makes me feel worse. I'm not proud. I took unemployment as long as I could get it. I tried (and mostly failed) to keep my family from drowning in the deluge. I tried to forget that miserable cocksucker John Battelle ever existed.

But ... Jesus Christ, he's really back. My personal Destroyer of Worlds. Ready to destroy other worlds I've just learned even exist.

Battelle Day

2006-05-01T00:49:00.000-07:00

It might not be quite as famous as September 11, 2001, but just a few weeks before (on August 20) John Battelle had his own little massacre at the Industry Standard.

That was a now-forgotten magazine about how John Battelle and his networking partners were really great, and how there would never be any problems again because he had met many people who knew about technology.

After he had about 180 people fired, he went on the PBS news show and said this:

JOHN BATTELLE: Well, when you have a situation like this... I think over the past four years we've built a significant asset, and certainly there has been an outpouring of both support and interest in, you know, some form of continuance. But we decided that we needed to suspend publication in order to both sort through those opportunities as well as, you know, conserve the ability of the assets to possibly be sold to somebody.

Cringe-inducing

2006-04-05T08:35:00.000-07:00

This Amazon review of John Battelle's latest book is awesome:

9 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
"Perhaps sir would prefer a classic novel?", February 8, 2006

Reviewer: Alan A. Donovan (New York, NY) - See all my reviews

What is it about journalists from Silicon Valley (especially from the Wired Magazine stable) that makes their writing so cringe-inducing?

I got a free copy of this book at work (Google), where they were being handed out. I must confess, I couldn't get past chapter 2 because it had already hit the trifecta of classic blunders of the "geek history book":

(1) egocentrism: in a book ostensibly about search engines and their cultural impact, I would not have expected John Batelle to be a big player, yet there he is, popping up in the first person all over the place, namedropping celebrity nerds and crudely rubbing our noses in his executive Rolodex.

(2) misunderstanding one's readers: gotta love this attempt to explain an unfamiliar concept using an even less-familiar one, from page 22: "The process of grokking the index is referred to as analysis." Perhaps a more useful sentence here would be to explain to a non-technical audience what the hell "grok" means.

(3) poor fact-checking: just one example, from page 26: "the household spending for media and information services in the United States rose at an annual rate of 32% throughout the 1990s, from $365 a year to $640". Right.

Maybe I'm just a Northeastern snob who prefers more scholarly writing, or maybe I'm still smarting from 'Cyberselfish' (ISBN 1891620789), but reading tech books makes me feel like such a Luddite.

All of this creates in my mind the unavoidable impression that Silicon Valley authorship today involves way too much "research" time spent typing things into Google (on a shiny PowerBook, in Starbucks, naturally: the prose style screams "too much coffee"). In all the frenzied talk of how web search is transforming our society, few people have stopped to point out the value of actual research in a good old-fashioned library.

Fire Dept. hires Arsonist

2006-02-17T15:36:00.000-08:00

Oh, right, he is creating a "blog services company."