Marc Canter, The Devil's (or Angel's?) Advocate

Last night, the Churchill Club sponsored an event entitled, "Blogging & Social Networking: Who Cares?" As it turned out, at least 250 people who attended the event care. In fact, by the time we arrived, the Crowne Plaza Cabana Hotel parking lot in Palo Alto was already filled with Mercedes, BMWs and Porsches. (Somebody must have made money during the dot com boom.)

The whole evening had a "1994" feeling to it. There was a sense of optimism and enthusiasm that we hadn't seen since we attended the first Internet World Conference held in San Francisco in September 1994 at the beginning of the Internet boom.

The meeting was a moderated discussion with the following participants.

Panelists:

• Antony Brydon, CEO, Visible Path Corporation
  
• Jason Calacanis, Chairman, The Weblogs, Inc. Network
  
• Marc Canter, CEO, Broadband Mechanics
  
• Charlene Li, Principal Analyst, Forrester Research, Inc.
  
• Ross Mayfield, CEO, Socialtext
  
• Ajit Nazre, Partner, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers
  
• David Pell, Electablog.com
  
• Mark Pincus, CEO, Tribe Networks

Moderators:

• Dan Gillmor, San Jose Mercury News
  
• Tony Perkins, Creator & Editor-in-Chief, AlwaysOn

The stage when thus set to talk about what many of the panelists described as Internet 2.0, with Internet 1.0 spanning the 1994-2002 timeframe. Dan Gillmor of the San Jose Mercury News said that blogging and social networking have now enabled the Tim Berners Lee's initial vision for the web as a "read-write" environment as opposed to the "read-only" content consumption focus of Internet 1.0.

Ross Mayfield of Socialtext put further meat on the bone by asking the question: What changes might we expect when:

1) Weblog software platforms drive the cost of publishing to zero?
2) Social networking platforms drive the cost of creating and organizing group activities to zero?

A number of the panelists pointed to the significant impact of weblogs and social networking on politics with Howard Dean's presidential campaign held up as a prime example of the savvy use of these platforms. As a San Jose Mercury News article dated 2/10/2004 said, "The forces the [Dean] campaign unleashed -- and the people who discovered they had a chance to change things -- aren't going to be rebottled anytime soon."

Dan Gillmor asked the most interesting question of the night saying, "How long will it be before a President of the United States is elected that had a weblog as a teenager?" What makes this an interesting question is that anything that we contribute to the Web is effectively "unerasable."

Staying in the political realm, David Pell of Electablog.com imagined that, "Sometime soon, maybe even now, oppressed women in Arab countries will begin using anonymous weblogs to draw attention to their plight in a way that 60 Minutes never could."

Politics aside, the real question on many people's minds was: "Can you make money doing this stuff?"

There was a significant amount of disagreement on this topic with the CEOs of the social networking companies predictably saying that "There's gold in them "thar" hills," and Marc Canter, also predictably, playing the devil's advocate, telling the VCs to "Stay away and not screw things up."

My own personal feeling is that the impact of both the social networking and weblog platforms will be significant but, speaking from a biased perspective as an entrepreneur in this space, the financial benefits will accrue to the "little guys." I believe this because, I share the viewpoint made last night that, both weblog and social networking software platforms will become open-source commodities. The value-add will come as entrepreneurs apply these platforms to under-served niche markets. These markets, by definition, will be small in scale creating many small profitable private companies but very few, if any, large public companies.

Perhaps Internet 2.0 will allow thousands of entrepreneurial flowers to bloom creating an era of "Cottage Commerce," a term coined in the early 90's by my long-lost friend, Michael Grant, formerly of Apple Computer and MacroMind, now Macromedia.

Then again, I could be dead wrong. What do you think?

Use the power of Internet 2.0 to share your comments.

-Tim Fredel, Co-Publisher, RuggedElegantLiving.com

Tim Fredel, Partner, Rugged Elegance and Co-Founder, BioSpace.com

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Hi
Great comments on the meeting. I am not sure how I found your blog but I think you are doing fantastic things. Netmodular created the alwayson zabatzu the community that Tony Perkins made. Our objective is to give every organization the abiltiy to connect via social software. I just met with some scientists at Stanford that would like to create a Always On type site for earthscience. You have done great things with bioscience. Yet I do not see personal profiles or social networking on your sites. I would love to give one.

Thank you for the great content.

Ross --

Thank you for correcting me on the group-forming comment; I've updated the body of the article appropriately. If, as you say, the costs of group-forming and web publishing are tending toward zero, wouldn't it follow that the barriers to entry for those "group-formers" and publishers be extremely low? To continue with your metaphor, how the value of "real estate" increase in this type of environment?

-Tim

The question to ask is if open source will only leave blogging to niche markets, why isn't it dominant in early markets when the demographics are filled with people who know how to work with it? Seems a more massive market has bought into ease of use. When underlying real estate values grow, people build extensions on their cottages. Form follows funding.

The cost of group forming comment is attributable to myself, btw.