The Infamous Josh Harris Attempts Yet Another Entrepreneurial Comeback

Some time back, I reviewed Ondi Timoner’s epic documentary of the rise and fall of Josh Harris entitled We Live in Public.

In much the same way that Pirates of Silicon Valley or Hackers should be required viewing for any self-respecting nerd, anyone who considers themselves a survivor of the Dot Com Bust should be familiar with Josh Harris and his story.

If you read my review of WLiP, you know that Ondi didn’t make the best impression on me the first time we met, and it has irrevocably colored my perception of Jeff and the film. The insight I feel I have into the mind of Josh and his sycophants carries over into a new venture announced today on Scott Beale’s LaughingSquid blog.

Josh is a serial entrepreneur who not only left a trail of carnage throughout the Dot Com era, but also represents everything I feel is despicable about those times.

From my review of the film last summer:

I knew that Josh was the posterboy for all that is wrong and destructive about the dot com era, this much was clear. When I watched Ondi’s on-screen documentation of a rape (or attempted rape, it’s actually a bit unclear) while Josh looked on seemingly unmoved, it became clear what a sociopath the man actually was.

His sociopathic delusion is celebrated in “We Live in Public” as vision and prescience by friends, relatives and the filmmaker herself, it seems.

It seems that Josh’s latest venture is to combine the aspects of the WLiP experiment with the vigilantism common to hacker and underground groups like 4chan, Anonymous and LulzSec.

The promotional video (which points back to Josh’s project on Kickstarter) trades on his micro-celebrity status created by Ondi’s documentary, and encourages viewers to compete to live in a compound dedicated to everything from “saving the whales to fixing the potholes.”

Not all participation will be in-studio, as action will also be outsourced from the “command center” to viewers at home that are broadcasting from webcams, competing on the site for attention.

There is no proposed business model, per se, but several potential business models are hinted at in the bullet point list, including MMOG elements, virtual currency and CPM monetization of the video and text output.

Could something like this work? Possibly, if anyone other than Josh Harris was at the helm. This is simply WLiP and Pseudo.com mashed together with a little game theory, vigilantism and Web 2.0.

In other words, this can only end badly.

Technology Stops for No Man

A good friend of mine is working on a film series, and has a running Facebook group to discuss the production process while it’s being made.

He posted this today:

Crazy world indeed. Technology marches on.

Read our coverage on SiliconANGLE on the Facebook Skype integration story.

MySpace’s Tom Anderson Comments on G+

The days when Tom Anderson, the iconic first friend on everyone’s MySpace account, was active on his own service have long past. Most of Tom’s old co-workers have headed over to Facebook, but Tom himself seems to enjoy what Google+ is doing for the Google ecosystem.

Earlier today, he took the time to post a somewhat lengthy rumination on where Google+ fits into the major social networking ecosystem:

Google+ seems like a "reaction" to Twitter/Facebook. But are you starting to see the ways that Google+ just makes Google a better, more integrated set of services? Google already has top-notch products in key categories–photos, videos, office productivity, blogs, Chrome, Android, maps and (duh) search.

Can you start to see/imagine what Google+ does for Gmail? Picassa? Youtube? Not to mention search? The +1 system that Google now has control of (unlike Facebook Likes) can really influence and change the nature of their search.

My original vision for [MySpace] was that everything got better when it was social–so I tried to build all the super popular things used on the web (blogs, music, classifieds, events, photos) on top of MySpace’s social layer. When Yahoo launched 360, MSN launched Spaces, and Google launched Okrut, I was shakin’ in my boots. But quickly I saw that it’s really hard to layer in social to features after the fact. At MySpace we had the luxury of having social first, and building the products on top of that layer. Then I choked and Facebook realized that vision.

But Google+ really seems to be primed to make good on that original premise–that everything gets better when its social. And unlike FB, Twitter, or anyone else, Google already has the most advanced set of products. And if I can clearly see where this is headed, then I think what we are getting is a much better Google. Does that kill FB/Twitter? Who cares? I’d use all 3, but more importantly, I’ll be using Google products I never used, or use them in new, better ways I never used them before.

Oh yah and I love my Google TV

MySpace recently sold to a company very few people know about for a price tag that decimates what News Corp. originally paid for it.

Someone Writes Another Facebook Song.

And of course they’re griping about Facebook in it.

File under: First World Problems.

Should I Create a Facebook Page for SiliconANGLE? #fail

So I’ve had the discussion with several of my staff, and several publishers that I’m on friendly enough terms to talk about their metrics with, and I remain unconvinced that devoting efforts to the maintenance of a Facebook page is in my best interests.

When it comes to traffic delivery and audience development, Facebook fails almost every time. The social network has much more critical mass than Twitter, or even Google Buzz, but consistently ranks lower than both of those sites when compared to organic traffic delivered as well as purchased traffic.

Maintaining your community on Facebook is expensive in many ways – expensive when it comes to people cost (I’d have to devote one of my personnel to being a community manager for the Facebook page), and it’s expensive in that I’m actually devoting money to letting Facebook have all the traffic from community interactions I’d be garnering.

That’s unmonetizable traffic that never makes it back to my site. Granted, we’re not CPM based, so it’s not nearly as critical as it would be for a Mashable or a Techcrunch, but it also creates a vacuum for those who would interact with the brand normally on our own properties, pushes them to Facebook, where (I’m told) the conversation will probably not revolve around our content so much as the weather and other mundane topics.

That’s another thing – I’ve talked to about two or three potential community managers. They say that creating a Page on Facebook that simply houses links and descriptions of our library of content won’t attract interaction – it’s the conversations about the mundanities of life that will attract conversation.

Why am I financing that? What does that do for my brand or my publications?

I’ve been bearish on Facebook’s ROI for third parties for ages, but now that I’m taking a much closer look, I have to say that (unless one of you convinces me otherwise), I can’t in good conscious devote company resources to maintaining a community on Facebook.

Mashable Fired Federated Media in January

Pete Cashmore went on Old Media raw data buffet Bloomberg West today, and amongst other things, let slip that Mashable fired Federated media. He followed up with a rare post on Mashable proper:

How are we fueling this growth? Among other big moves this year, Mashable took over its own ad sales at the start of 2011 – ads had previously been handled by our ad partner. This more than doubled our ad revenue, allowing us to grow the team, expand our coverage, and bring on seasoned journalists like San Francisco Bureau Chief Chris Taylor (formerly of Fast Company).

This does explain the massive personnel growth Mashable’s been displaying this year.

Here’s the problem with Mashable (without going into my petty quibbles with current and former staff members): Mashable still relies on CPM ad models, and thus severely undervalues the market position they hold.

SiliconANGLE has been functioning quite highly on our data-based revenue model for quite some time (I’d have to check my calendar, but I’d say it’s coming up on a little over a year now), and while our data-based revenue model is nascent, I’d be proud to put the financials of Mashable and SiliconANGLE side-by-side and see which one values work output more highly.

CPM, CPC, and CPA are dying models. Try as you might, you can’t compete against the likes of a Demand Media or a Business Insider. Demand has cost of content production to a fine science, and Business Insider has absolutely perfected and picked up tripe-printing where World Weekly News left off. The BI/WWN model is as profitable as The Onion; that is, when you don’t hafta waste time on research, you can print a lot of outlandish crap in great quantities.

Time for innovation. Should Mashable actually do some business model innovation, they’d be unstoppable.

Thankfully, it appears that most of my old co-workers no longer read my blog, and my new secret to success is safe for now.