The TechTalk episode where I talk about the secret history of Steve Ballmer

In this TechTalk radio episode, I reveal what dark history Steve Ballmer lived out between his days at Harvard and his illustrious run as a minion of Microsoft. Here's a hint: it involved a midwestern state, pastries and another legendary Fortune 100 CEO. No foolin'.

Mercifully, we spent much more of the episode discussing Oyster and its "Netflix for ebooks" pitch, as well as the future of the prose-for-pay industry. The parts when I'm not talking are definitely worth a listen.

As always, my complete archive of podcasted misdeeds is available here.

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Kickstarter doesn't validate your product; it validates your pitch (and that's okay)

I came here to praise Kickstarter, not to bury it, but this article on major corporations using Kickstarter for product research reminded me of a lesson we covered at the Louisville Digital Association's crowdfunding workshop a few months ago: Kickstarter is sales training, not product research.

Well, that's not entirely fair. Kickstarter does provide some basic market research about your product description and maybe your price point, but only in the context of your marketing. Kickstarter can't validate a product that doesn't exist. It can only validate what you're putting in front of the consumer and all Kickstarter puts in front of the consumer is your marketing pitch.

Kickstarter validates your marketing pitch, not your product.

Some poor fools think I'm an authority on startups

Photo (Photo credit: Jay Garmon)

Here's me getting profiled by Insider Louisville, which characterizes me as...

"[A]bout as close as Louisville has to a start-up nomad. That specie of homo technicus so common in San Francisco and Silicon Valley is vital to creating, then sustaining, any city’s entrepreneurial culture. The swashbuckler who jumps from big corporation to start-up, start-up to big corporation. At the Louisville level, it’s extremely rare because there aren’t that many viable startup-to-corporate-to-startup opportunities."

It goes on from there. I'll be over here wondering who the heck they're actually talking about, 'cause surely that can't be me.

Why regulation should be about transparency, not outcomes

Image via WikipediaTake cover, there be ranting ahead.

Government regulation gets a bad rap. This is understandable, as most government regulations are pretty stupid. As I've written previously, making rules is admitting failure. That said, government regulations don't have to be stupid. As a product of political wrangling, it may be unlikely that regulations ever won't be stupid, but it is possible to make regulations effective, efficient and -- above all -- minimally intrusive. In other words, not stupid. Here's how.

Make regulations about transparency, not outcome.

Making rules is admitting failure

Image via WikipediaI'm stuck on a couple of writing projects at work, so I write this today as a mental gear-greasing exercise. Here's the TL;DR summary for the attention-deficient.

All company rules exist because of a failure of management.

I'll explain what I mean by way of example. At a place I used to work, we published a lot of online content. During one of our regular rounds of "management has a new idea to change everything" there arose the notion of updating our massive backlog of old articles to make them relevant again. Not the worst idea ever, until it came to the execution.

From Twitter 02-21-2011

Image via Wikipedia

• Why Startups Are Still Better at Attracting Rock Star Talent http://dlvr.it/H9xSY
  
• Are You An Entrepreneur Or A Business Owner? http://dlvr.it/HB1tC
  
• Steve Jobs Doesn’t Want to Kill Publishers, But Apple’s Subscription Strategy Will http://dlvr.it/HB4yr
  
• The Next Mass Consumer Social Wave: Political Expression http://dlvr.it/HB9X8
  
• RT @ColleenLindsay: OMG! @judyblume is on Twitter! I SHOULD NOT HAVE MORE FOLLOWERS THAN @JUDYBLUME! Go! Follow! Her! Now! #areyouthereJ ...
  
• Nathan Fillion Wants to Buy 'Firefly' http://dlvr.it/HBGRz
  
• PSA: How to Talk to Your Kids About Star Wars http://dlvr.it/HBN7p
  
• The SF Signal Podcast (Episode 029): An Interview with Tobias Buckell + Are Fantasy Stories More Accessible Than... http://dlvr.it/HBSv9
  
• The Future of Media http://dlvr.it/HBY7d
  
• Google's Native Client updates to Pepper API, looks set to fragment the Web http://dlvr.it/HBbyG
  
• Past due: Pressured by regulators, River City Bank exiting tax refund loan business http://dlvr.it/HBh13
  
• RT @rob_sheridan: Happy birthday to The Legend of Zelda, released 25 years ago today! It had a huge impact on me as a kid. http://instag ...
  
• Rishabh Mehrotra: Creating a movement to transform America from ‘sick economy’ to ‘well nation’ http://dlvr.it/HBlgG
  
• Life imitating sf: Criminalisation of the Female Body edition http://dlvr.it/HBqbT
  
• On the idiocy of intra-fandom genre prejudice http://dlvr.it/HBvmn
  
• Cats versus Star Wars (hat tip @sfsignal) http://dlvr.it/HByxG
  
• Apple in the Sky with Diamonds: A Cloud Based Safe Deposit Box http://dlvr.it/HC1jt
  
• Google tries new angle on hiring http://dlvr.it/HC4lJ
  
• Why I don't care very much about tablets anymore http://dlvr.it/HC83T
  
• Finding your niche http://dlvr.it/HCBcb
  
• When is a basketball game statistically over http://dlvr.it/HCFGk
  
• RT @jonacuff: Trying to make everyone happy is a great way to make sure you're not.
  
• Duh! (again) http://dlvr.it/HCJ7f
  
• Tolkien Estate In Legal Spat With Author Of Historical Fiction; Will Publicity Rights Kill Off Historical Fiction? http://dlvr.it/HCLgH
  
• Homeowner forecloses on Wells Fargo office, becomes folk hero http://dlvr.it/HCPfS
  
• New economic indicator? Plastic surgery may tell us what the public really thinks about the recovery http://dlvr.it/HCTBb
  
• Guest Post: How Online Work Can Save America http://dlvr.it/HCX1Z
  
• Borders Books: Why is Barnes & Noble performing well as a business while Borders is near (or has even reached)... http://dlvr.it/HCZb5
  
• RT @ScottCederlund: I just turned on BATMAN & ROBIN. It's just as bad as I remember.
  

Tweets copied by twittinesis.com

So you want to hire little old me?

Image by TW Collins

Because many have asked, yes, I am for hire.

I have served as a professional writer, editor, speaker, community administrator, and software product manager for over 20 years. I had a regular radio show spot, my name on a provisional patent, and citations as a source in the Wikipedia to show for it. Google "Jay Garmon" and you'll get plenty of details. (Or just check out my lengthy bio page.)

I'm a reasonably smart guy who understands technology, and I'm offering my talents in exchange for your coin. Specifically, you can hire me as a...

• Writer of blogs, proposals, ads, scripts, or pithy commentary. If you need words strung together in interesting ways, I can get that done.
• Speaker on a variety of subjects, including how to use social media, emerging technology and the like. I also wrote a trivia column for ten years, which means I have a knack for making even the most obscure topics interesting, and I can probably do the same for you on most any subject. Particularly as it relates to tech.
• Strategist for software and interactive applications. I've overseen the development of features and functions for Web sites, including revamping a multimillion-dollar e-mail marketing system. I've launched HIPAA and PCI-compliant SaaS solutions for industry-leading healthcare software companies. If you're trying to make smarter, more effective customer-facing technology, I have a few bits of hard-earned wisdom I can bring to bear.  

But before you contact me with a job inquiry, there are some things to know.

• I don't work for free. If your inquiry includes any version of the phrase "we can't pay you," spare both of us the effort, as this will only end in an awkward e-mail where I explain I actually get paid for this stuff. Reasonably well, reasonably often. I occasionally amend my speaking fees for non-profits and charities, but those are handled on a case-by-case basis and I agree to them rarely. You've been warned.
• I have a day job. This is not to say I am unavailable during normal business hours, but my undivided attention is not on the table (unless you're offering a great full-time gig at great full-time pay). 
• I am a very public geek. Look over this blog, and you'll note a pervasive interest in science, science fiction, and online media. In the current online world, you need to have a certain measure of imagination to understand how all these new tools and trends work and evolve. Moreover, as everything is now public, pervasive, and persistent, communications skills have become more important than ever. There's no better thought-leader for the current economy than a sci-fi writer. But if having a loud and proud Star Trek fan associated with your brand is a problem, it is best we stop now, because that's who you're hiring, and your customers will figure that out pretty quickly.

If I haven't scared you off with all the above caveats, we can now discuss price. My consulting rate is $250 per hour, and my per-word rate ranges from $0.25 to $0.75 based on required research for the piece. 

I typically bid jobs based on how many hours I estimate they will require, and for speaking engagements this includes preparation, especially if you want a PowerPoint presentation in addition to my words and voice. 

For recurring jobs -- such as an open-ended blogging assignment -- I discount my rate based on how much recurring work is required. 

Finally, I am available on retainer, with the regular fee negotiated based on the expected level of time investment.

Questions, comments, or proposals should all be addressed to jay [at] jaygarmon [dot] net.

What class of aircraft does the FAA consider SpaceShipOne?

Image via WikipediaOn Oct. 4, 2004, SpaceShipOne completed flight 17P, its second manned spaceflight in five days, thereby securing the Ansari X Prize as the first viable private manned spacecraft in human history. To get there, SpaceShipOne first had to get US Federal Aviation Administration approval to fly -- which was somewhat complicated given that there was no existing registry category for a private passenger spaceplane.

Scaled Composites, the manufacturer of SpaceShipOne, applied for the registry number N100KM. N is the prefix for all US-registered aircraft. The 100KM was a reference to the 100-kilometer altitude that SpaceShipOne needed to achieve to qualify for the X Prize. Unfortunately, N100KM was already listed, so SpaceShipOne instead got the registry number N368KF for 368 kilo-feet, which is roughly equal to 100 kilometers.

To get that aviation equivalent of a license plate, SpaceShipOne had to be shoehorned into an existing passenger aircraft classification.

What class of aircraft does the FAA consider SpaceShipOne?


SpaceShipOne -- the first viable private manned spacecraft -- is officially classified as a glider by the FAA.

Yes, the FAA's Office of Commercial Spaceflight licensed SpaceShipOne's rocket motor for suborbital flight. Yes, you wouldn't expect anything with a rocket motor to be called a glider. That said, for most of SpaceShipOne's independent flight, it is an unpowered glider.

After the White Knight parent launch aircraft drops SpaceShipOne, it engages the rocket motor to achieve suborbital flight. Once space altitude is achieved, the motor disengages and SpaceShipOne deploys its "shuttlecock" glide planes that allow it enter a controlled glide back to Earth. For the entire descent portion of its flight, SpaceShipOne is a glider -- if a wildly unconventional one.

That's not just some non-traditional technical taxonomy, it's an aerodynamically extraordinary example of the Truly Trivial

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What Silicon Valley legend creates "custom" versions of US currency that are totally legal to spend?

Image by ericskiff via Flickr

On July 14, 1969, The United States Federal reserve removed from circulation any denomination of US currency larger than the $100 bill. While the $500, $1,000, $5,000, $10,000 and $100,000 bills are still valid currency, they are rarely spent, as any such bill that makes it into the Federal Reserve system will be retired -- and these rare bills have collectible value well above their denomination.

Still, some idiots just can't resist counterfeiting large and/or fictional denominations of US money, even though they're almost invariably caught trying to pass these bills off. What's even more shocking are the imbeciles that try to pass these fake notes off at Las Vegas casinos -- perhaps the single most counterfeit-aware group of businesses on the planet.

Thus it's apropos that Vegas gave the most trouble to a legendary Silicon Valley businessman who creates unusual -- but perfectly legal -- "custom" versions of US currency.

What Silicon Valley legend creates "custom" versions of US currency that are totally legal to spend?

The only question that matters: What is the cost of failure?

Image by Cold Cut via Flickr

So my buddy JFP pointed me at this Harvard Business Review post about how an endless series of questions can kill innovation. It's good advice, and falls well in line with my quasi-37signals philosophy on business generally, and software  development specifically. But I like to cut to the chase, so here's the one and only question you should ask before deciding whether to go ahead with a project: What is the cost of failure?

More specifically: What would happen if you tried something and all the time, effort and resources you put into it were a complete loss? Put a number on that. Put a dollar figure on that. This is your cost of failure.

Now, decide whether you can afford to lose that amount of money. If you can, then you can withstand the cost of failure, and you're allowed to consider the project. If you can't afford to throw away that amount of money, you can't afford the project. It's that simple.

The corollary of this rule: The cost of mitigating failure may never exceed the actual cost of failure.

If modelling the likelihood of a project's success would cost more than the actual cost of failure, don't do the model. Do the project instead. You'd be surprised how often this rule is violated. Meetings have a dollar figure attached to them. Reviews have a dollar figure attached to them. A long, laborious project approval process has a huge dollar figure attached, one that is almost certainly higher than the cost of failure.

Take out the roadblocks. Yes, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. But the law of diminishing returns applies even to caution, and most businesses are applying a pound of prevention in order to save an ounce of cure.

Create a quarterly failure budget, if it makes you feel better. This is how much you can afford to write off. Keep innovating until that failure is spent. Mandate that you must keep innovating until that failure is spent. Institutionalize innovation. You should embrace the possible, not fear it. You'll be surprised how much progress you'll make.

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Healthcare reform explained using napkin illustrations

Healthcare Napkins All

View more documents from Dan Roam.

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What I've learned in the last year--the hard way

Image via Wikipedia

On March 26, 2008, I was dismissed from a job I held for seven years, where I did good work with good people and had a lot of fun and earned a decent living. If I hadn't been shown the door, I'd probably still be there. Instead, I've spent the last year squarely outside my comfort zone, for good or ill, and learned a great deal about myself. These facts include:

• Management is harder than it looks. During this past year, I was placed in an upper management position for around eight months. I was "the boss" in a very real sense for the first time. I'm rather introverted by nature, and my usual work flow is give me a task and let me go off alone and grind on it for a while. Being a leader required me to develop new skills that I had never touched on before. It was gratifying, but far harder than any actual "work" I've had to do before.
• Entrepreneurship requires passion, which I'm not known for. GameJabs, the software start-up I helped get going, has stopped going. Our funding got held up, we missed our window in the product space (others have started building products similar to those we planned, and we can't beat the head start), and my partner who fronted the money is auctioning off the codebase to recoup some of his losses. We tried, it failed, and it sucks. I liked the product, and would have used it, but I didn't live and die by its success. None of us did, and I think that played a large part in its undoing. I'm an even keel guy, and I don't rush headlong into much, and that's not the mindset that makes for a successful entrepreneur. I'm going to think long and hard before I undertake another start-up opportunity again.
• I hate sales, which makes me a lousy consultant. I've dabbled in consulting since December, when Vupal (my last day job with a different startup) folded. I've done okay, mostly on referrals from friends who had consulting work they didn't want or couldn't do. I've learned I'm lousy at chasing work, and selling myself. This, quite frankly, is the more important skill set for a consultant than actual competence at the work being done. I'm not a good consultant, and I don't like the lifestyle. I crave structure and certainty, and the freelance life offers neither. That's an important thing to know as I plan my next move.
• I'm a great souce of ideas, but passion is necessary for execution. Every company, partner, or client I've worked for or with in the last year has benefitted from my ideas. That's not hubris; that's what I've been told by these other parties, and the evidence I've seen of it. I've got a knack for coming up with viable options for almost any venture. The problem is I lack the passion to push most of them past the goal line. Like my friend Michelle (another person I've come to know and appreciate in the last year) says, your work is to discover your work. That's what 2008 has been about for me. I'm done chasing things I don't care about.
• I need to learn to say no. Lot's of people want me to help with lots of stuff (usually for free). I spread myself way too thin, and I don't like it. I missed evenings with my daughter, and weekends with my friends, and time at all with my wife, because I chased too many commitments and tried to please too many people. "No" needs to be an acceptable answer, even for people I know and like and want to see succeed. I can't do everything for everyone, even when I want to. This has been hard to accept.
• I don't want to leave Louisville. My easiest career move would have been to relocate to New York, LA, San Francisco, Chicago, DC or Austin. The kind of Web work I've done is in high demand in those cities, though the relative cost of living would have meant a rather drastic step back in lifestyle for a year or three. That's not why I stayed. I have friends and family here. My wife and I have friends in this town we practically consider family, we've known them so long and so well. I want my daughter to grow up spending at least one evening a week with her grandparents. I'm willing to sacrifice employment opportunity--and it's a serious sacrifice, because as much as I love my hometown, it is designed against innovation in almost every way--to make sure I can keep close these friends and family, in every way possible. They've gotten me through this year.
• I actually like working at home. Time was, I had trouble working from home because I had trouble separating work tasks (deadlines) from home tasks (laundry). In the last year, I've learned how to strike that balance, mostly through time management, and I've found I like--even prefer--working from home. I can get the car's oil changed and write up five blog posts in the same day if I manage my task list correctly, and I like that flexibility. If I land a day job that affords telecommuting, I plan to take extensive advantage of it.
• I'm good at writing, and I miss it. In this whole mess of insanity that has been 2008, I've done almost no fiction writing. My skills have waned. My art has been optional as I've chased work. This has bothered me, more than I expected. When I finally get settled--hopefully with a new day job--I plan to carve out a lot more regular time to write.
• I know what my dream job is now. When I was doing six things, chasing consulting work, trying to build a startup, helping a friend with her event-planning business, and had ten other balls in the air, I followed a whole host of people on Twitter: CEOs, social media experts, local ad agency people, technology experts, entrepreneurs, Web comic artists, and sci-fi writers. Only the last two groups ever really interested me. I relate more to the creatives, to the dreamers, to the folks that make ideas for a living. When all is said in done, that's what I want to do. I'm a writer, and I want to write. I'll need a day job for a while as I ramp up that line of income--and it may never be full time (Web work pays too well, and has benefits)--but that's what I want to do. I think I'm done with any other game.

I've been very lucky this last year, for all the jobs lost and stress endured. I've learned a great deal, and been pushed out of my comfortable niche to finally make some choices that I'd been putting off. My goals now: Get a day job, get my wife and daughter into a bigger house (as we're outgrowing this one), and get cracking on a writing career that has been stalled too long.

When do I cave about relocating for work?

Image via Wikipedia

So this "worst economy for three generations" is finally starting to creep into my family's fiscal standing, and thus I have to ask myself--am I willing to leave my hometown to find work? None of my many pursuits are really bound to Louisville, KY, not even my consulting business (which is slow right now--very slow). It is certainly easier to work on GameJabs when I'm in the same city as my fellow founders, but it's not required. It's also a great deal easier to be in the same place with all my family, most of friends, and even my writers group.

But this is not an economy that accommodates easy.

My family is far from destitute, but I've been without a day job since early December, and all my immediate moves to shore up income until GameJabs becomes a paying gig have stalled or fallen through. My wife has a job that she loves here, but she could likely get a commensurate position elsewhere, though if we change states she'll likely have to recertify as a therapist.

I've got eight years of experience writing and developing features for the Web. I'm pretty good at it. But for all that I love Louisville, it is not a hotbed of online enterprise. To get a job in my chosen field--especially in a reasonable amount of time--may require my relocating to a new area code. The question is, when do I finally give up on my hometown, and at what cost?

If anybody has some guidance on the subject (or knows of a kickass telecommute position), I'd love to hear it. Thanks in advance.

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Why you're going to fail at Internet video

The above is Gary Vaynerchuk's keynote speech from the New Media Expo, wherein he lays out how his Wine Library TV online video show became perhaps the most successful and well known Web show going.

Here's Gary's recipe for success:

• Production values don't matter, just the content.
• Do a show about your biggest passion, and nothing else.
• Promote your show 6-10 hours per day, 6 days per week, for at least 18 months and you MIGHT get popular.
• Promote your show on every platform, every service, every network.
• Hypersyndicate - Don't upload to one video site, upload to every site.
  
• Answer EVERY e-mail.
• Expose every avenue of contact. Publish your IM handles, your Twitter name, and your Skype number, etc..
• Court every single fan, personally, for as long as you can.
• Build your brand, not someone else's.
  
• PATIENCE!
  

Having helped build a (very minor) Web franchise from the ground up, I agree with every single one of these tenets. And it just shows how few people will succeed in Web video (or Web content in general). Vaynerchuck basically worked a 50 hour uncompensated workweek for a year and half to get to decent traffic, and another two and a half years at the same pace to get where he is now. He could get away with that because he was using video as a loss leader for his multimillion-dollar liquor sales business, from which he could draw income. Vaynerchuk had a unique monetization model, which the only way you can remotely make the argument that he got a return on his time investment.

Now, there are ways to hedge out some of what Vaynerchuk did with some rather pricey outsourcing services, but that still does not fundamentally change the math that Web video will almost never be a serious fiscal endeavor for anyone. The return on your time is hideously low. It's is the ultimate low margin business and--what's worse--it pays out slow. The question for most of us is earn a little money fast or a lot of money slowly. Video is the worst of both, offering very little money over a very long time. Standard ad models just make it not worthwhile.

And all that is assuming you've got your hands on a passionate subject matter expert who can convey attractive Web video content covering a subject that people care about in sufficient numbers that you can profitably monetize it. Trust me, those people don't grow on trees, and those subject areas are already being hotly contested in text, and video is coming up on it fast. I'm still writing Geek Trivia after leaving CNet because they despaired of finding someone who could write what I write the way I write it. It's not high art, but my fans like it and there's sponsorship behind it, so they made an exception and pay me to keep doing it. And believe me, back when I was on the CNet payroll, I looked for people who could blog the way I do (so I could take a break after almost seven years writing the column) and couldn't find them. Talent is scarce, and it doesn't scale. Blogging already has this problem, and video is going to have it worse.

But Web video is getting bigger every year, right? Experts are projecting 25 percent year over year growth in online video advertising over the next five years. Video consumption online may increase by 5 percent a month, according to some numbers I've seen, for the same period. What's going to give?

The ad numbers, probably. By this point, everyone was supposed to be dumping billions into social network advertising, and it just never materialized to the degree everyone expected at the height of the 2006 MySpace/Facebook boom. (Insider hint: Media companies are really good at publicizing all the predictions that benefit them, and few to none of those that don't. Never believe the self-referencing "people are going to give us money" hype.) Online video will likely have the same scaled-down reality come this time next year.

So where does that leave the content producers? Mostly, you better love what you do, because the odds of you getting paid anything approaching a fair wage for your work are pretty astronomical. It's becoming more obvious on the blogging front that your blog better be a labor of love, because even professional bloggers don't make much money at actual blogging and the odds of you outplaying a pro are pretty unlikely. Video will follow the same track.

More to the point, once the big boys from old media figure out exactly how the monetization model is going to work, they'll flood the available market with known brands and suck up the few available dollars for themselves. We all fondly revere the guy at the indie magazine who refuses to join the corporate machine, but he gets paid like a guy who refuses to join the corporate machine. Indie blogs and indie video shows will always exist, but the democritization of opportunity--the big guys no longer own the means of distribution, unlike the printing press and broadcast tower days--mean the artificially high margins that media used to enjoy are over, and the value associated with producing these media have declined.

Put simply, there ain't much money in online content. Plan your career accordingly.

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Steal This Mission Statement

Okay, so this is Clay Shirky doing a classic poke-the-blogosphere braindump at Web 2.0, but--in a fashion I reckon Shirky himself would appreciate--I'm hijacking it for my own nefarious purposes. See, folks keep asking what I'm doing at VuPal, the startup I joined shortly after I walked the CNet plank. Well, it's a little early to be showing all my cards as concerns VuPal, but I can appropriate some of what Shirky says here to my own ends, and basically hold up his speech as a mission statement for the venture. Hopefully, this will get some folks off my back.

Quote: "Here's what a four-year-old knows: A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken."

Put another way, there's an entire generation growing up with the notion that passive media is outdated, and that interactive media is the standard. Shirky touts the mission statement of Web 2.0 (and beyond) as a drive to make interactive what once was passive, to involve the audience and the consumer in every possible product--media particularly--that until now has been a broadcast-only proposition.

VuPal, to no one's surprise, is about video. Under Shirky's paradigm, video that you "just" watch is inadequate. So, that's what I'm trying to do at, for, and with VuPal: Convert video that was passive into video that is interactive. Moreover, we want to make the conversion easy, so that anyone can do it, and valuable, so that when you're done the end-product is worth the time it took to create and is worth more than the original video was by itself.

Now, where I'll mildly quibble with Shirky--and throw a splash of reality onto VuPal's world domination plans--is in his notion that we can convert all those passive TV-watchers into interactive post-sitcom era consumers. The average person is inclined against interaction (though there's probably an age skew there). In my old job, running an online community of computer professionals,--exactly the kind of people who are comfortable with technology and interactivity--only about one in 400 consumers ever explicitly interacted. One quarter of one percent.

That's a very slight level. Really successful interactive sites might get that up as high as one percent for actual text-based posting. For less overt acts--like simple voting--you might go as high as a third. NetFlix purports to have that percent of people rating movies on their site, which is nice, since people ostensibly come there to discover and consume movies, and the rating act is about as lightweight as interaction gets. So I'd say Netflix is the high end of the scale. And it's possible my community experience is too aggressive still, so let's slash that, too. Let's say a really demanding video-interaction system can at best hope to get one percent of one percent, or one in 10,000.

By Shirky's reckoning, Americans watch 200 billion hours of television a year. That's 2,000 times the amount of hours it took to write the entire Wikipedia in every language version it supports. Let's say we get one out of every 10,000 of those hours converted to watching Web video--plain, non-interactive Web video--simply as a shift in form factor and portability. That's 20 million hours. Now, of those passive lurkers, let's say we get the same conservative percentage of interactive participation. That's 2,000 hours of participation-enhanced video per year. That's a thousand completely remixed movies every year. That's 2,850 complete hour-long dramas remixed every year if you scrape out the commercials. About 130 complete seasons of those hour-long dramas made interactive.

Now, that's crude math, as most Web video is only about 3 minutes long, and the same video can be remixed an untold number of times. I also think those are aggressive goals for interaction, at least in the short term. But it is a model of the possible. There's a whole generation of people wanting to do more with video, and having the time to do it.

Our job is to make it easy--easier than the homemade music videos that people throw up on Youtube all day every day--and valuable. We've got a pretty good idea on how to do that. I'm excited about chasing down that possibility. When we're ready, I hope you will be, too.

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On Starting Over, or, How I Screwed 'Diesel Sweeties'

Logo of CNET. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

So last week I got canned from a job of seven years and seven days. Came as quite a bit of a shock, since my ego hadn't really prepared me for losing what was on many levels a dream job, where I got to write trivia questions, blog about science fiction, dream up Web site features, analyze interesting data, moderate a forum, and basically solve problems all day in an office with sanctioned video game systems, free decaf tea, a scandalously casual dress code, and cube mates who kicked ass and took names. Yes, there were such jobs hidden in the bowels of CNet, if you knew where to look.

I was not happy to be let go. And today it finally occurred to me that I've also--in betwixt feeling sorry for myself--accidentally kind of screwed Diesel Sweeties. I was about to expand my geekish blog franchise into video (something I was really looking forward to) and the good R. Stevens--creator of Diesel Sweeties--was all lined up to to donate some of his mega-awesome t-shirts as my on-camera wardrobe (for you see, one of the unwritten rules of video is never wear the same shirt twice).

Mr. Stevens kicked in with these two ubercool shirts just to get the ball rolling--and then I got downsized with extreme prejudice before nary a video was filmed.


Now, Mr. Stevens will scarcely feel the pinch of this setback--he's hobnobbing with Warren Ellis, so I'm barely a blip on his radar screen--but I still feel like a heel for not living up to my promises. Yes, I just got a career smackdown, and I'm worried about offending a webcomic artist whom I've never personally met.

What's really strange about all this is that R. Stevens and Warren Ellis have been top of mind of late, and not just for the t-shirt scamming. Ellis, Bastard Tyrant of the Intarweebs, and Thane of Comicdom (it's a MacBeth reference; look it up), recently spoke about why he doesn't get all gooey in the pants over the chance to, say, write Batman or The X-men:

It's as simple as this -- if I don't own it, I'm not going to spend my life on it. ...

Or, if you like: you can only paint someone else's house for so long before you start thinking that it might be nice to own your own house one day.

I'm okay with painting other people's houses for short periods, because I'm good at it and it pays well and on nice days it's fun. But I never ever confuse painting a house for owning that house. And if I spent every waking hour painting other people's houses, I wouldn't be able to build houses of my own.

I spent the last seven years painting somebody else's house, and all that work just got taken from me and dismissed as part of a corporate cost-cutting measure. I was work-for-hire, to use a publishing term, and I never thought that I actually owned anything I wrote, but it all was identified pretty directly with me personally, and when I was let go, they decided to just stop doing the column and the blog that I had toiled to build to success.

Put another way: My work was meaningless, so far as my employers were concerned. That's a bitter pill, since I spent so much of my time and passion building those things. Guess I had to learn the hard way. Time to paint my own house or, in this case, start my own blog. You're reading the inaugural post of that new beginning.

Do I expect to make money at this blog? Probably not, or at least not much. Certainly not enough to live on. I'll need another day job, as John Scalzi advises, but that day job won't be about building a personal brand around me--unless I own the brand.

It's time for me to get serious about my long-dormant writing career. My buddy Ian "Lizard" Harac just got a novel deal, and I can't let him have all the fun. I'll post some of my practice fiction here, maybe even toss out a trivia question or two, and basically try to be interesting enough that my old contacts at SFSignal feel the urge to link to me again. I invite all of you along for the ride.