Churbuck.com

While researching a chapter on railroad gauge standards for my book on the history of technology standards I was overwhelmed with the persistent urban legend that the standard gauge of 4′ 8.5″ is derived from the span of the wheels on a Roman war chariot.

It’s amusing how many technology columnists (usually writing in the IT trades) and keynote speakers have propagated this cute piece of misinformation and all deliver the same punchline that the space shuttle travels to its launch pad on rails derived from a standard set by a “horse’s ass.”

The true basis of the standard — which was based on the width of a Welsh mine’s rails and adopted by English railroad pioneer George Stephenson in 1810 — is not so interesting as the story of its spread throughout Great Britain and across the Atlantic to the United States. I was intrigued to learn that the standardization of gauges is the basis of the economic theory of “path dependence,” which posits that technology adoption is tied to the inertia of history more than specific attributes. Example: driving on the left or right side of the road. The issue isn’t why one country selected one side or the other, but the persistence of the two approaches is assured by the immense switching costs over time. In other words, a “bad” standard will live on if the cost of switching to a “good” standard is too high.

It took an act of Parliament to standardize track gauges in Great Britain as a matter of national economic interest and efficiency. In the U.S. it was the lessons of the Civil War that pushed the South to standardize its incompatible system of three incompatible gauges to the north’s 4′ 8.5″
over a single Memorial Day weekend in the 1880s. Path dependence theory says standardization of incompatible standards will occur when the economic benefits hit a critical point where cooperation and interconnection is to the advantage of all participants.

I wonder what current information technology standards live on due to path dependence. QWERTY keyboards? The Navy tested and learned that switching typists to the Dvorak system yields an efficiency payback within ten days, yet, I still type away on good old QWERTY.

Oh god. The things you learn when you google onanistically.

Back in the dark ages of the late 90s, when I was living out of a garment bag at the Yale Club and running Forbes.com, Jim Motavalli dropped by my office to interview me for a book he was researching about big media and the internet. I broke my first rule of reporters speaking to reporters — don’t do it — and spoke to him. I knew Jim for a few years. He was buddy of the ex-publisher of the magazine, Jeff Cunningham, and had been a dot.com columnist for the New York Post.

So, there in Google is a reference to me in Motavalli’s book — Bamboozled at the Revolution: How Big Media Lost Billions in the Battle for the Internet . I go to Amazon, pick up a used copy for (no shit) $0.01 and wait. It arrived yesterday. I jump to the index, find my name, and lo and behold there’s two pages devoted to my favorite person.

Me.

Motavalli sums me up this way:

Churbuck, famous for his bow ties and droll post-preppie demeanor, had had the foresight to register the domain name Forbes.com in 1994, and wrote a letter to Forbes magazine chairman Steve Forbes suggesting that Churbuck helm a Forbes Web project.”

“Droll?” Whatever. I don’t think John grasped the point that I had been writing for Forbes for six years as an associate and then senior editor. The rest of the passage makes me sound like some weird geek with a Forbes infatuation who snatched the domain name and wrote fan letters to his favorite presidential candidate looking for a job.

“If a leading magazine like Forbes could trust its web site to a complete outsider, an intellectual and computer geek who had little in common with the ambitious Forbes family, then all bets were off when it came to figuring out what media web sites were about.”

Again, John needed to check a couple facts. The reason I got the nod to start Forbes.com was because I was an insider already sitting on the masthead. Forbes.com wouldn’t have gotten out of the gate if it had been launched by an outsider. (I’ll take the sobriquet “geek” with pride, though I would have qualified it by saying I am a “geek manque”). As for “little in common” with the ambitious Forbes family. When it comes to bank balances and boats, yes, they are in an utterly different leaghe. But yes, I am a preppy. I graduated from the same little prep school that Steve Forbes did, and where he was chairman of the board of trustees. In fact, I wrote a letter to Steve in 1988 when I was suffering at PC Week, a letter which began with the line: “Not to tug on the old school tie, but here goes …”

Motavalli makes it sound like the Forbes’ were clueless about the web. That’s the thesis of his book afterall — big media was sucking its thumb and covered with drool when it came to the web. Not so at Forbes. Sure they dicked around with Prodigy and the accursed CompuServe in the early 90s — something I wasn’t happy about. But when it came time to go web, they went to the web, gave me a lot of slack, a lot of money, and a lot of encouragement.

Tim Forbes was entirely realistic about the potential of Forbes.com and the necessity for it to grow, even at the expense of the print side. The state of Forbes.com today — with awesome management in the form of Jim Spanfeller (ex-publisher of Inc. and Yahoo Internet Life), huge traffic, and allegedly strong financials — is a testament to the Forbes brothers’ foresight and patience in making their dot.com strategy central to the company.

Motavalli paints a convenient picture of a culture war between those darned web guys and the clueless suits. Sure, there were clueless suits, and sure, there were arrogant web guys. I don’t know where John got this pearl, but it wasn’t so:

“Churbuck and his counterparts would attend occasional Web-vision meetings with the executive hierarchy, but these sessions were painful for all concerned, and most of the advice doled out by the top echelon was useless and uninformed.”

There were never any “web-vision” meetings. Strategy was set directly by four people — Greg Zorthian the director of business development, DeWayne Martin the general manager of Forbes.com, Tim Forbes the COO of Forbes, and me. I was the ambassador of good will to the editors of the magazines — Jim Michaels and Bill Baldwin at Forbes, Rich Karlgaard at ASAP, and Chris Buckey at FYI. Advice was never “useless and uninformed.” There were stupid ideas, there were great ideas. There were distractions, diversions, and all sorts of day to day annoyances, but all-in-all, Forbes.com set, in my completely biased opinion, the standard for good print-to-web relations. The fact that we utterly kicked the asses of Fortune and Businessweek is testament enough for me.

Did we operate Forbes.com in a bit of a guerilla vacuuum? Sure. We had a couple operating principles: the first was “It’s better to beg forgiveness than ask for permission” and the second defined our strategy: “Ready. Fire. Aim.” Did we charge new PCs and software on our corporate cards because we didn’t want to put up with the central purchasing bullshit? Sure. Those frisky web guys. Did we think the adoption of things like the CueCat or the circulation department’s demands that we run pop-ups to sell subscriptions were evil? Yep. Forbes.com was no love fest. But it was a hell of a lot of fun to start and launch.

I don’t think I’d want to be managing it now. The crack-pipe of traffic growth will suck the life out you. But it had its days and remains one of the most fun things I’ve ever done.

“For the David Churbucks of the media world, the future was less than assured. And who wants to work in an environment where you are alternately admired, feared, resented, and, finally, viewed with contempt?”

Sigh. That’s a shitty epitaph for six years of hard work. Yeah, I expect there were people who admired me, feared me, resented me, and viewed me with contempt. I’ll get over it. There are weasels everywhere in life.

Jim Forbes, formerly the host of DemoMobile, asked me last month if I had tried Microsoft’s OneNote, part of the Office 2003 suite. I hadn’t, so I checked it out, downloaded a two-month trial, and after a month of use, felt happy enough to pay for a full license.

The app is ostensibly for note-taking, and follows a tabbed file-folder structure. I can see how it would really rule on a pen-based laptop, but being a better typist than penman, I more than happy with it without the handwriting feature.

The sweet thing about OneNote is that it is by far the best web-scraper I’ve used. You can drag URLs, full pages, and block-saves of web pages very easily. Performing research and trying to compile emails, file attachments, URLs, images, into one page is difficult. Microsoft Word is funky and while html friendly, not the best place for pulling together projects.

Any how, my endorsement. Good app that came out of left field. There’s a research functionI discovered today that points searches to MSN and Encarta along with some third parties like Thompson. Chris Locke needs to push the folks at Highbeam to get integrated there. My main beef with highbeam is how to saves documents and leaves open firefox windows all over the place. Sucking highbeam directly into OneNote would be a good thing I think.

Update 2.17.05:
Steve Weir from Highbeam emailed this info:

“Issue #1: Do we work with MSFT OneNote? We are actually integrated into all Microsoft Office products in their research pane. Unfortunately, to our continued annoyance, our old brand name (eLibrary) is still showing up instead of our new name. If you want to search HighBeam in Office, just use the research pane, and select “eLibrary” as your resource, it should work just fine..

“Issue #2: Strange blank window in Firefox. I think I recreated this on my PC, but, I want to be sure. Did this happen for you when you clicked on our “export to Office” feature? I found a similar bug, and we are working to take care of it (our Firefox compatibility isn’t where it needs to be – yet).

Thanks Steve.

One of the more frustrating things of my lunchtime reading ritual is opening up Romensko and following the links to one after another newspaper site that insists of asking for name, rank, and serial number before letting me view their precious content.

So, I use bugmenot and provide newspapers with fake log-ins.

Call me a criminal. The only reason newspaper pinheads inflict this conceited nonsense is so they can ostensibly target their ads, which my eye avoids anyway.

I just went to read a Howard Kurtz piece at the washingtonpost.com and took great satisfaction at providing the Post with bugmenot’s login:

registrationsux@effco.com
spumco

John Dvorak started the campaign.

Steve Yelvington demurs but maddeningly links to a white paper on the topic which costs $40 to read.

The news that CNET is aggregating RSS feeds within its site with Newsburst came as a relief to me as I work with Mark Cahill to develop a way for a non-technical community to participate in a community of blogs held loosely together by a common niche. After installing several feed readers I pretty much gave up using them for various reasons and wondered by I couldn’t point my subscribed feeds to a single page.

Mark came up with this prototype as an example of how a publisher can serve its users by pointing them to affiliated blogs through a master index and sub-category indices.

We’re still debugging it, but it seems essential to our strategy of providing WordPress based blogs to our 8,000 registered users while retaining the ties that bind the community together.

I expect to see other publishers leap onto the Newsburst bandwagon over the next three months to keep their users on the reservation.

No surprise. (Reuters story) Carol Loomis’ story in the recent Fortune painted a pretty bleak picture. Compaq did Carly in. One of the worst considered mergers in tech due to the inevitable commodization of boxes. No one cares anymore about PC or server brands. The things are toasters. So what did HP expect to gain from picking up CPQ? DEC’s legacy technology? The 64-bit Alpha architecture? A reputation set by Rod Canion as an innovator and attacker that was set in the early 80s?

The same generification of technology that compelled IBM to shed its PC assets to Lenovo worked to destroy Compaq’s value to HP. Carly got steamrollered by the toaster-ization of desktop and server tech and of course, a grumpy board.

Shame, she came on strong when she arrived in 1999.

I notice Google Mail is now giving me 50 invites to pass around.

Last week I was down to two.
I’ve got two accounts running, and have been noodling how to open up all 50 of the invites and stitch together 50 free (albeit very disconnected) gigabytes of online storage using a Gmail virtual drive extension.

Having read that a 1 gigabyte drive cost $3,000 ten years ago, what is 50 gigs worth? What does this say about the cost of server space?

Om Malik on Broadband ? Consumer Reluctance on VoIP%u2026 So Far

Om posted about a Forrester report slagging consumer uptake of VoIP and sought some comments on why. So, in the interests of incestuous cross-linking, here’s a link to my comment.

Full disclosure: I signed on for Verizon DSL in December to try to cut my cable modem charges (Comcast, maybe $40+ a month to DSL at $29.95) but the damn setup box is sitting under my desk, nagging at me to rip out the cable modem, replace it with the DSL box, call up Comcast and cancel, etc. etc.

Yet I can’t bring myself to do it. Call it broadband inertia but I just don’t feel like hosing my connection (pessimism springs eternal when you provide tech support for a family of completely disinterested PC users who feel compelled to junk up every computer they touch with spyware, viruses, Weatherbugs, Lycos search dogs, etc. etc.).

COAST – the consortium of anti-spyware developers – has fallen apart according to E-Week. What did COAST in? Some members say it was the proposed granting of membership to some spyware companies, , such as 180Solutions, saying that opening the standards-setting group to include the very targets it was trying to thwart would turn the consortium into a farce, lending a marketing blessing to the enermy.

Others said the revenue motivation of some members had slowed progress.

Standard-setting bodies are a tactical dance between the members — often competitors — who must strike a balance between their economic interests and the greater good of the standard. One McKinsey partner, when advising a client who had several options during the frothy hey-day of B-2-B consortia (join an b-2-b group created by a competitor, create its own or join one created by a startup), told the client to accept membership in all of them for the simple, evil reason that if the client ever wanted to insure the failure of a consortia, the best place to work its will was within the consortia, as a member.

In this case, the unique twist on this failed standard is not a dispute over the technical architecture or other fine point, but on the strange position of debating whether to permit the membership of a company the standard was trying to thwart. Hypothetically like NATO falling apart over the issue of letting the USSR join in 1960. The ulterior motive of a 180solutions — which Spyware guru Ben Edelman has blasted for having one of the most befuckticated installation routines of all — and other spyware/ad technology scum is to cloak themselves in the respectability of a consortium like your local meth lab joining MADD.

I met with a Massachusetts magazine publisher on Friday. They publish three print titles in the IT-executive leadership space and do about $40 million a year in revenue. The CEO said the goal is to have online revenues equal print by 2007 .

Ambitious? Sure, but further indication that the print world is seeing some lasting value from the online component, even going so far, as one former employer did, to predict a cross-over in their business model from paper to digits before the decade is out.

What is particularly interesting is the goal of the publisher I met on Friday, while focused on traffic and inventory development in the short term, is the need to support a very high CPM by transforming impressions into leads.

Lead generation is a tough nut to crack. It requires the pass through of contact information via registration which, past wisdom has held, is impossible unless the carrot is big enough and valuable enough to induce parting with personal details that the owner assumes will result in some form of spam — be it emails, cold calls, whatever.

While one can argue that click-through advertising such as Adsense or Overture is one primitive form of lead generation, the publisher in question, who distributes the print product on a pre-qualification basis, is looking for something far more substantive and informational than a mere adjacent relationship between a keyword and a click.

What is the content bait that needs to be set in the trap? Will users reject any lead-generation scheme, avoid registration via work-around like bugmenot.com, or can they be teased to part with valid information in exchange for something valuable?

This goes back to an observation made by Andy Kessler to me in 1994, that user information is the currency of online publishing; not eyeballs, clicks, or subscription dollars.

P.1 of today’s (2.4.05) New York Times has Markoff and Ives reporting on Google’s success with ad sales. The story is jumped inside underneath a Stuart Elliott column about Conde Nast — the publishing house with one of the more befuckticated online strategies (ever try to find a New Yorker article? try to understand why Terra Lycos owns Wirednews.com? wonder why Vanity Fair isn’t even online?) when it comes to a trying to push the power of print on advertisers.

One stat cited is that readers spend 45 minutes between the covers of a magazine.

George Sansoucy, senior vp and managing director at Initiative is quoted:

“When marketers buy media, ultimately it is about the quality of the engagement with consumers … the average time spent reading a magazine is 45 minutes … makes magazines a superior engagement medium.”

Superior to what? Buses? The roof of a cab? Banners towed over the beach in August?

I love how the noses grow on magazine ad execs faces when they start babbling about “engagement”, “pass-a-longs” and the latest Audit Board of Circulation audit. Online is the most trackable advertising medium in history and still ain’t getting the respect it’s owed.

ranting over. no blogging until this evening. off to Boston on job interviews today.

Forbes.com is running a poll on the occasion of Microsoft’s launch of MSN Search asking readers what their favorite search enginer/service is. No surprise, it’s Google by a mile, followed by Yahoo, followed by MSN.

Forbes.com: Which Search Engine Is The Best?

From the handful of searches I ran on MSN yesterday, I’d say Microsoft has a long way to go, not necessarily based on any keen insights into their methodology, but on the fact that I find the MSN site butt-ugly and cluttered beyond belief compared to good old spare Google.

Charles Ferguson had a great piece in the MIT Technology Review in December on the Microsoft/Google battleplan. It says it better than any other analysis, given Ferguson’s front row seat at Vermeer (developer of WYSIWIG web builder Frontpage) during Microsoft’s call to action against Netscape. He builds a plausible scenario for how the battle for dominance in search will come down to a classic architectual platform battle, with ISVs and APIs becoming the arsenal.

Microsoft knows that game.

I’d like to link to the Ferguson article, but even me, a paid subscriber to the digital Zinio edition of the Tech Review, can’t get the to the piece. Maybe Charles did the world a favor and has it posted elsewhere. I’ll chase it down.

Walter Wriston passed away on Jan 21 at the age of 85. While a banker, he was one of the smartest people on the subject of networks (up there with George Gilder) I’ve known, and amazingly presicent when discussing the impact of networks on quaint old notions of sovereignty and geography.

He was a banker, the father of electronic banking, the man who initiated the revolution that included ATMs and eventually online banking services. The former chairman of Citicorp, he wrote a book, The Twilight of Sovereignty, that influenced most of my thinking about the potential impact of communications networks. Based on his observations of how, in the late 60s, currency traders were able to wrest control over setting the value of any nation’s currency from its Minister of Finance, and “vote”, in real-time, thanks to the first international trading networks, Wriston came to the conclusion that old notions of borders and geography were doomed.

The rise of the European Union and the Euro were predicted by him. Telecommuting was predicted by him. He wasn’t a geek, didn’t go on about doped erbium amplifiers and dark fiber, jjust the big picture.

I had the pleasure of knowing him when he served on the board of Forbes.com. He was a very wise man. Here is Steve Forbes’ tribute.

The Twilight of Sovereignty : How the Information Revolution Is Transforming Our World. I highly recommend it.

BBC NEWS | England | Wiltshire | Drink-drive girl, 13, sentenced
Only in England would they call a drunk driver a drink-driver.

One of the worst things of going freelance (aside from paying one’s own benefits) is losing access to a professional research department like the ones I took for granted at Forbes and McKinsey. I’d file a request and a few days later a couple reams of paper were on my desk, sorted in order of relevance, with post-it flags to steer me to the good stuff.

Search engines have always been woefully incomplete for serious fact hunting, but in 2000 Forbes gave me a Factiva account and it was pretty cool, sort of an HTML Lexis/Nexis which I could abuse because the bills went elsewhere.

I did some consulting for a firm that bills its clients for every breath it takes, and so its Factiva searches had to be affiliated with specific clients. No more wandering around the archives, everytime I opened a full-text document I racked up a couple bucks in charges. I started to hate Factiva. I feared it. I thought about sliming someone else’s log-in and doing a number on their account.

Then along comes Patrick Spain (founder of Hoovers) who launches HighBeam Research (where the dear Chris Locke is “Chief Blogging Officer”. I paid my monthly fee and suddenly felt like a fat person at a buffet.

Proving what? At Jerry Michalski’s first meeting of the minds in the 90s, one of the speakers told the story of a conference he attended where everyone was given a roll of pennies in their registration packet. The deal was everytime a person entered or exited the conference hall, they had to drop a penny in a bucket or a security guard would nag them. Most of the attendees just dropped the entire roll in the bucket and told the rent-a-cop to f.o.

Moral of the story: micropayments suck. Hit me once like Highbeam and make me happy. Factiva makes me more nervous than sitting in the back seat of cab stuck in traffic on the B.Q.E. on my way to LaGuardia with only a twenty in my pocket.

I’m researching standards — how they get set, adopted, rejected — and am on the prowl for examples of stupid standards. The real dumb ones don’t even get footnoted, so they are rare and a true prize to find.

Here’s an example I caught one night, bored out my mind, watching some antique appraisal show on PBS. A guy brought in an old phonograph — the kind with the big horn that the RCA dog listened to. The appraiser said the record player was given away by a record label (I think it was Columbia) for free to customers who agreed to buy something like a dozen records.

The catch was that the spindle that held the record on the platter was smaller in diameter than the holes on all the other records sold. Hence, the only music the customer could play was music from the record label.

It didn’t catch on.

Sort of reminded me of Intel’s old approach to peripherals. They insisted through Intelian hubris on inflicting garbage standards like the CAS Fax Modem or strange video-teleconferencing formats that only worked with their gear. The world voted with its feet and stuck to the good old Hayes AT command set and H-whatever.

When you look at the history of standards — an inch was defined as “three barley corns; a yard was the distance from King Henry the First’s hose to the end of his index finger — and then look at the politicking that goes on in a modern technology standards committee ….

Can anyone tell me why countries all use different electrical sockets and plugs? I spent a year working literally on the border of Switzerland and Italy on Lake Lugano and there was no way, no how, anybody could convince me why the Swiss plug and socket was better, safer, cheaper than the Italian version. I think I spent $500 at the Logan airport Brookstone everytime I forgot my bag of adapters.

Talking on the phone the other night to an entrepeneur building a very cool web-based collaboration tool and he mentions he heard that John Batelle is raking in “$30,000 to $50,000″ a month from his excellent Searchblog.

Wow. In another recent conversation another very prominent blogger told me his efforts yielded him $2,500 last month.

That’s a pretty big gap. Both sites use Google AdSense. There’s one source of revenue. My personal experience with Google — not on this blog — has been about $300 a month from a million pageviews. So obviously I’m doing something wrong with my AdSense placement on the other site, or my audience isn’t compelled to clickthrough too much due to the niche bias of the site’s topic.

Both Batelle and my unnamed friend also use some pretty interesting “buy it yourself” ad placement services. BlogAds and AdBrite. My anonymous friend, who blogs in addition to a day job, says he has to turn away pretty lucrative sponsorship offers because of a conflict of interest with the day job. So, his financial potential could be up to $5,000 a month.

Monetizing blogs through impressions seems to me to be a short walk off a long pier. My experience with ecommerce affiliate programs is that they do not work. Period. Sorry, but my five-year’s experience with commerce affiliate program is a case study in how to piss off a partner.

And if I had to name the number of sites I see using CafePress to sell thongs with their logos on them …..

In October I posed the question about whether the online community model could evolve to associate blogs on a particular niche under a common umbrella. Jim Forbes and Chris Shipley (the duo who hosted the Demo conferences), had some suggestions.

The evolution of online community from USENET to hosted bulletin boards has, to some degree, stabilized over the past five years thanks to tools such as Ultimate BB, vBulletin, and a host of other fungible threaded tools that have brought some order to communities by providing their administrators and moderators with the tools that were sorely lacking in the mid-90s, when kludge systems such as HyperMail left moderators with few defenses again flame wars, etc.

My lack of familiarity with the web blog universe may work to my advantage in postulating that online publishers, or hosts of niche communities, can offer their users blogs and then, in the editorial role as a “meta blog” drive traffic to the individual blogs by aggregating the daily postings through category specific pages — obviating the need for less technically inclined users to configure a feed reader (which is still a bit of a daunting challenge for many users).

RSS lends itself not only to broadcast notification, but to the dynamic update of pages on a particular topic, if the individual bloggers can be conditioned to tick off the appropriate category.

Economically, the publisher can hard code the blog templates with the usual mercenary includes from Google AdSense to BlogAds to whatever the advertising model of the day is, and harvest the pennies. What needs to emerge is a tracking mechanism on the back end that will permit a split of those revenues with the bloggers.

The symbosis between blogger and publisher is simple — the blogger creates content which creates page views which yield impressions and click throughs. The publisher, if they are established enough, furnishes the community and traffic to light up the blogs.

Harkening to the Beatles lyric from Eleanor Rigby– “all the lonely people …” — an essential shortcoming of blogs is their one-way posting. I still fail, RSS feeds aside, to see what truly differentiates the typical personal blog from a Geocities or Anglefire page. Comment functions are a massive pain to manage due to comment spam. I receive a dozen notifications a day from Poker Palace.com or whatever scum is out there crawling my blog, to approve some heinous piece of crap. Blogs are not the next generation of a threaded bulletin board. However, a community of blogs — a set of silos under a common passion — could thrive if a couple tools were to be developed. Sure, the existing model of posting logs to friends or related blogs, is one step, but there is no real conduits — other than feed readers — to bring them together. Many blogs, to me, read like people talking to themselves. Quality will win out, and many have attracted significant audiences due to the quality of their content, the reputation of their owners, and the frequency of their postings. Somewhere there is a model to jumpstart an audience and I think that is the concept of the meta-blog.

Let’s for argument say bicyclists who like to drink beer are drawn to a particular niche site. For years they have regaled each other with bulletin board postings about riding bikes while drunk in a standard threaded BBS. They upload pictures of their bike, they post links to funny stories about other people drinking and riding bikes, and maybe the host of the BBS publishes a gallery of bike pictures, some articles about how to beat a breathlyzer test or evade police roadblocks.

Now say the publisher offers the faithful regulars the tools to manage their own blog. The publisher cracks the backend issues of how to automate the opening of a blog, figures out the legal issue of who owns the content, brands the template so his site is always hardcoded, adds some ad tags, develops a terms of service agreement so the bloggers don’t commit some heinous act of libel, and then turns it loose.

Ten drunk bicycle riders open their blogs. Name them, add links to the other nine blogs, and start posting.

The publisher then hosts a page which automatically is updated — like a newsfeed reader — with links to new postings. Those postings can be categorized — beer, bikes, bike parts, etc.

The better the tools for interconnecting the individual blogs, for publishing the “meta-blogs”, and, I think, the continued hosting of the BBS for those who are not inclined to blog (lurkers still dominate posters by a three-to-one ratio) could create the next generation of online communities.

I have such a scheme in development which will be unveiled in a month or two. A sneak peak is available here.

Niche communities are, I think, an organic phenemenon that spring up around passions. This is no different than an “enthusiast” or trade magazine, say Stereo Review or Water and Wastes Digest, where the subscribers, paid or qualified, flock to the content and the advertising out of professional or pure “pornographic” interest. Publishers or corporations that have tried to force the concept of community on their customers and subscribers, generally fail. We tried to go down the community path at Forbes.com by partnering with Raging Bull in the hope that the common community glue was ownership in a stock or mutual fund. The Forbes brand, I think, is too global and too broad, to build the passion that a weird little site like Fixed Gear Gallery engenders in its users.

There is no magic ingredient in building a community other than passion and good tools. Any hint of overcommercialism on the part of the host, any lapses in strict and transparent moderation will usually lead to rejection.

Bringing blogs into the equation — if the host publisher plays the role of aggregator, encourager, technical supporter, and ultimately, commercial partner — could, I think, mark the next big era in online communities.

Whoa. Thanks to my Google ad a link to “CheBlogs: A Left-Leaning Community With Room for Everybody” popped up. This is sort of what I am talking about. Woikers of the World Unite.

After nagging my son Eliot to start writing down his insights on film, I realized that the last thing an 18 year-old wants to do is keep a journal or fill Word documents, but get online.

So, in a few minutes I was able to initiate a WordPress Blog for him, customize the Kubrick template with some suitably noir black and white pictures of our mutual hero Sterling Hayden and Edward G. Robinson, and set him loose.

The results are here: Cinemania

Eliot will be attending New York University next fall, having been admitted to the Tisch School’s Cinema Studies program. He interned on the Beijing set of Kill Bill 2 over the summer of 2003 and is a walking encyclopedia on the topic of film. I’ve been hounding him to post his essay on Carl Dryer, the Danish director of

Ordet

, one of Eliot and my top five films. It is an amazing piece of film criticism.