the business of doing business

Just testing … 123 with a photo

Today I had one of those ‘oh sh*t’ moments when logging into the Thursday Club website.  Like a lot of other (much higher-profile) sites such as USAToday.com, ABCNews.com, News.com, Target.com, Packard Bell.com and many more, we’d been hacked with some form of iFrame injection.  Basically most of the main data had been truncated and replaced with some script code.

Thankfully the site was able to be restored reasonably quickly, and for that I’d like to give a special mention to Quadra Hosting who were very responsive and did a fantastic job.  We spend a lot of time complaining and not so much commending, so to remedy that a big ‘thank you’ to Brenton and the support folks there who saved my bacon!

Now if they can just help me hunt down and disembowel the scumbags who hacked the site in the first place, I’d be even happier!

You may have seen the news by now that eBay Australia will shortly be forcing their sellers to offer Paypal.  In addition, they will be dropping the ability to let buyers pay by direct bank transfer.  Security of transaction is cited as the reasoning behind this, but it seems to me to be a revenue-grabbing lock-in exercise.

The big sufferers will be the casual ’small-sellers’ who have also had to deal lately with increased fees and changes to the feedback system - none of which were exactly welcomed with open arms either.  As you can imagine, the Internets are buzzing with people threatening to take their business elsewhere.  eBay have one or two serious advantages though: size and seller investment in their reputation.  Sellers are reluctant to join a new marketplace where there are fewer potential buyers - for obvious reasons.

I do wonder though whether we are reaching the point where competition to eBay may start to become viable again.  Certainly sites like Oztion and the (currently seriously stealthy) yabena will benefit enormously from this move.  If you look at the success of Craigslist with a simple, no frills, back-to-basics approach to classified ad selling (which is essentially all eBay is, bar the ability to bid up the price), will we see users start to jump if the price and ease of use is right?  Take even 1% of eBay’s global business and there’s close to US$60M right there.

It will be interesting to see if eBay Australia continue to take the high-ground on this issue, and whether the noisy users will really vote with their feet.  It’s high time for some serious competition in this space though I’d say.

Yeah, yeah - I know!  It’s all gone a bit quiet hasn’t it?  Normal service resumed v.shortly just as soon as real-life stops invading my blogging time ;-)  Hopefully some interesting things to update on though.

Even in a (’non’) recession it’s sometimes a tough job to attract and retain good staff.  Re-living the good old / bad old days of the late nineties, Google has gone back to dotcom basics in its (frankly stunning) new Swiss offices.

Bean-bags, pool tables and free lattes are one thing, but how about firemen’s poles, slides, penguins and cable-car meeting pods?

Us geeks love toys, right

Yeah yeah, it’s all designed to keep people in the office - Calacanis would be proud - but if creative thinking generates creative and motivated employees, then why not?

The BBC have a great video of the new office in action.

Whilst searching around for more on the Zuckerberg/Lacy interview, I stumbled across Bitstrips. If you haven’t seen it, it’s a fantastic flash-based comic creation site. You can pick various characters (or create your own), scenes, actions, speech bubbles and so on. It’s an amazingly flexible way to easily create great looking web comic strips. I don’t have much talent for drawing (ok, I don’t have any!), but I love the way it simplifies the whole process. It’s an interesting way to create an alternate commentary on current events. How about a pure comblog?

Here’s one I did for Sarah Lacy after her interview success at SXSW.

I have just been reading the account in Wired about Mark Zuckerberg’s disastrous keynote at this year’s South By Southwest Interactive festival.

Here’s an extract:

“The 23-year-old billionaire founder of the social networking site was interviewed on stage by author and journalist Sarah Lacy. Using her unique, friendly style of interviewing — closer to two friends chatting than a straight question-and-answer session — Lacy tried to get the notoriously tight-lipped Zuckerberg to open up. But the discussion rarely strayed beyond the usual business fare and eventually descended into a string of awkward moments punctuated by the audience’s heckling.”

What I loved about this event though was not the fact that Zuckerberg and Lacy made such a pig’s ear of the keynote. Rather it was the fact that a large number of the audience members were liveblogging or Twittering about the the event as it was happening. That in itself isn’t new - most Apple, Microsoft and other industry tradeshows are now covered in the same way. It is though an excellent demonstration of both how fast this information can travel, and how the power of the crowd can influence real-time events.

Imagine giving a keynote speech and in your hidden earpiece, or in a ticker on your presenters screen, you are getting immediate feedback from the audience. How powerful - and how scary - is that concept?!

The icing on the cake was Lacy’s rebuff in her own Twitter stream: ‘ seriously screw all you guys. I did my best to ask a range of things.’

The power of the crowd can often be just the mentality of the herd, but I have to believe that there’s some amazingly useful dynamics to tap into there. The current crop of crowd-sourcing startups could really be on to something if they do it right!

Update:  video of the Zuckerberg/Lacy interview is here.

There’s a great post on Bill Marriott’s blog today about lateral thinking*

Being able to come up with creative solutions to seemingly insurmountable problems is a bit of an art, but a fine skill to have!

Here’s the link.

(*I’ve dropped the phrase ‘thinking outside the box’ from my lexicon!)

According to the good folks at Swinburn University of Technology it is!

A new study has found Bloggers are better adjusted and live healthier, happier social lives.  The research found that “people felt they had better social support and friendship networks than those who did not blog” after a two month blogging period when compared to people who do not blog.

The good news also extends to users of social networking sites, with the study finding than any online interaction makes users “feel less anxious, depressed and stressed.”

It’s not all good news however, as the study found that some “potential bloggers” start from a less socially integrated position. Professor Susan Moore told the ABC:

“We found potential bloggers were less satisfied with their friendships and they felt less socially integrated, they didn’t feel as much part of a community as the people who weren’t interested in blogging,” Ms Moore said.

“They were also more likely to use venting or expressing your emotions as a way of coping.”

“It was as if they were saying ‘I’m going to do this blogging and it’s going to help me.”

I have to say, I am a little surprised by this.  Given most all bloggers exist in a distant void  in some far-flung corner of the electronic universe you’d think the lack of readers and feedback would be very trying!  I guess, as they say, at least there’s an outlet for venting some virtual steam!

Is it sad that e-interactions are perhaps more sought after than actual interactions by a lot of people?  I suppose it’s always been easier to lean on the crutch of internet anonymity than deal face-to-face for some.

[thanks to Techcrunch for the original link]

I came across a site called ‘Biographican‘ at the weekend. It’s in the vein of Spock or BigSight (and many others) and it got me thinking: how many different web profiles do you think people have out there in the ether? All with more or less the same core information.

Here’s my list (some of these are stagnant, but as far as I know still exist):

• LinkedIn
• Facebook
• eCademy
• Digg
• Ryze
• Thursday Club
• Flickr
• Bigsight
• Spock
• Tangler
• Live Spaces
• Friends Reunited
• Biographican
• Blu

and probably a whole bunch more that I’ve added data to but never used again!

Tim-Berners Lee in a recent presentation spoke about your data belonging to you. Other services should subcribe to your central (or virtualised) data and be able to use the core parts of that appropriately whilst adding their own value to it (special interests, content etc). OpenSocial, FOAF and a number of the other initiatives underway may help with this, but something needs to give.

As of now I have an unknown number of clone zombies out there - and they’re multiplying!

PS: back to Biographican. I’m not exactly sure what they are trying to offer that is different from a multitude of competitors. The interface is simple and slick, which helps, but this is just the kind of stuff the zombie army thrives on