Netpositive

Amy has shamed me into blogging again with this latest 5 things meme. Perhaps I’ll even write a post about why I vanished from my blog as suddenly and inexplicably as the Anasazis vanished from their cliff dwellings. But first, by the rules of the meme, I have to list five things people don’t know about me.

1. I paid for college by playing in a wedding band, covering songs by Tears for Fears and Talking Heads
2. I recently engaged in an eighteen month long email debate with an Intelligent Design Theorist over the merits of evolutionary theory
3. I would eat an unlimited quantity of ginger (candied/chocolate/pickled) if given the opportunity
4. I used to play in a poker club with Thomas Dolby
5. I have a pathological aversion to chewing gum

Let’s see, who can I torture…I’ll tag Jason Schultz, Lane Becker, Rachel, Eric Haller, and Leslie Chicoine.

Isn’t it about time for another party? It’s been six months since the last one, after all.

This one is a Hoedown. Knowing us, we’ll take it way too far.

Better not miss it. RSVP now.

Angela Gunn from USA Today’s Techspace blog had an exchange after she published her post about Valleyschwag. She started:

I remember some of the stuff that rolled through the offices of the
publication I was at during the first boom, and there was seriously a
point where the swag levels just made me nervous — we furnished an
entire chillout room with beach furniture, beanbag chairs, etc., for
instance. We didn’t know what else to do with it!

So there’s an echo there of that doomed rush for “mindshare” or
whatever, and it’s troubling deja vu. OTOH, I’m totally in agreement
with the tribal-markings nature of tech gear. (ThinkGeek: The Gap for
nerds? Discuss.) It’s been that way since long before the days of the
IBM songbook/dress code. But what does it mean now, especially if folks
*outside* these various companies are clamoring for this gear? On the
site you posit it as a rock-star thing; obviously I wasn’t going for
that, but I agree that *something* is signified, and that I would react
differently variously wearing a Google button, an MSN button (!), a
Flickr button, a company-I-haven’t-heard-of-yet button, and so on. It’s
pretty sophisticated mindslicing, too — I’d say I think of Blogger and
TypePad users as different sorts of people. (And yet I use both. Hmm.)

And then I responded:

For a lot of us Internet refugees who suffered through the shame of the post-bubble years, the Web is fun again in a way it hasn’t been since the mid-90s. Nonetheless, in everything we do we live in the shadow of that ol’ bubble economy madness. It seems like we talk more about whether or not we’re in a bubble than we talk about how to exploit the bubble! (I haven’t tested this, but I bet a Nexis search for news mentioning “bubble” will far outstrip mentions of “boom”).

So this pathological self-reflection makes the environment very different this time, despite all the talk of us repeating history. There is definitely an echo chamber (yay blogosphere!) but there’s no IPO market, a pretty mild acquisitions market (in terms of valuation), and a VC market that is dabbling at the roulette wheel.

It seems we instinctively equate Internet boom with doom. Valleyschwag’s response is to co-opt one of the very symbols of bubble excess–the schwag–and celebrate it. We like what we do!

Of course, it only works because there are Web companies with schwag (and products) worthy enough to care about. These generally happen to be either joke companies that accidentally became real, or renegade projects that are, in fact, rock-and-roll at heart. There are also those that are just aesthetically cool.

The economics of the New Schwag are also different. Anybody can have on-demand printing of their pet project set-up in a few minutes on a Web site. And for that matter, people are are building things out of the pure love of it, market size be damned. T-shirts and stickers, may be their biggest hard cost, designed for no other reason than to show the pride.

So perhaps it’s a less a bubble that we’re in than a petrie dish.

Dan Fost of the SF Chronicle starts off his article, Web 2.0 has a local address, with Rubyred’s cereal bar. Here are some of the juicy bits:

The unofficial meal of the Internet comeback is a bowl of Kellogg’s Crispix and some fresh-squeezed grapefruit juice - served with pleasure at the Monday morning “cereal bar” hosted by the six-person Internet startup Rubyred Labs.

A few dozen people gather each Monday at Rubyred’s Brannan Street offices in the resurgent South Park neighborhood, eating cereal and chatting about the latest technology, the latest conference, the latest blog postings and Flickr photos.

South Park, once heralded as the “town square of Multimedia Gulch,” and then nearly abandoned when the dot-com bubble burst, is making a comeback.

The article details the rise and fall of the first wave of South Park’s popularity, culminating with the release of a truckload of tumbleweeds in the neighborhood by an out-of-work techie in 2002.

Lots of our friends got ink in the piece, including Scott Beale, Maggie Mason, Janice Fraser from Adaptive Path, Mule Design, Matt Sanchez from Video Egg.

Dan captures something of the cooperative spirit, silliness, and frugality of our environment. While we want our jobs to be genuinely fun, we have no intention of replicating the excess of five years ago.

The new companies are also a bit more conservative in spending money…Rubyred spends $50 on its cereal bar. Almost as proof of the new parsimony, Rubyred’s Jonathan Grubb analyzed the “cereal bar graph” of cereal boxes stacked up: Crispix led by far, with Lucky Charms and Kellogg’s Pops close behind. A $9 bag of Galaxy Granola from a farmers’ market was relatively untouched after several weeks on the buffet.

The Mullers, in their early 30s, have a 4-year-old who has his own Gmail account and his own Flickr photo page. They’re dot-com veterans who fled to the suburbs after the flameout but now live in Noe Valley and run Rubyred, which, according to Amy, strategizes, designs and develops Web and mobile applications.

In the new ethos, the Rubyred team helps Margaret Mason out with her site in exchange for copywriting…

Congratulations to our friend and office-mate, Maggie Mason, who just re-launched her famous blog, Mighty Girl with a fresh, peppy design and new functionality. I’m honored to have worked with her in putting it together.

She’s a sharp girl, that Maggie.

How annoying are those web form Turing tests* that make you copy illegible characters into a field to prove that you’re an actual human. There’s a new solution: kitties.

The KittenAuth Test prompts users to distinguish between the feline cute and various other shades of cute (e.g. owls, donkeys, hamsters, etc.). Besides being fun, it might just work better.

* I think this is taking a lot of liberty with the real definition of Turing Test, but I can never remember what these random character checks are called in generic form.

Why did I give my blog the tagline, “In defense of irrational exuberance?” I don’t argue on behalf of investment bubbles, though they can have definite benefits down the road (for instance, the cheap, ubiquitous availability of broadband connectivity fueled by the over-investment in fiber networks). Nor would I ever suggest that self-delusion is a trait to be fostered. What I do believe, and what I’m saying with the tagline, is that relentless optimism and energy itself can be transformative.

Alas, many people believe that optimism is self-delusion. This was the case with the learned professor of economics I had dinner with the other night. He is a practiced skeptic about the hype surrounding the supposed benefits of the Internet. In fact, he seemed to see precious little to praise about our “network of networks” or the applications it’s spawned.

I’d heard his complaints and arguments before, but not for years:

• Email doesn’t make communications more efficient, it creates noise and adds distractions to our busy lives
• The Internet doesn’t provide access to valuable information, it misleads us with half-baked or deceptive content
• Free information and services aren’t a social good, but irrational and unsustainable
• The Internet does not make individuals and business more efficient in their primary or secondary activities

For such an erudite scholar, he didn’t offer much in the way of evidence other than anecdotes about receiving too many email requests from students, and how difficult it is to find useful information via search engines. But his immovable position was disheartening–hadn’t we proved the benefits of all this information technology? Or has our collective optimism blinded us to the folly of it all?

It seems to me his view has more in common with creationism (or, if you prefer, Intelligent Design Theory) than science. Why? Because in his line his conclusions must match his theories (economic models), no matter the evidence. People’s choices are only “rational” in context to an economy based on measurable value. But so much of our behavior is driven by a drive for intangible value. And this weirdness is particularly prominent on the Internet.

I asked him how he explained Wikipedia. Why do all those experts give their time to curate lengthy entries. For free. And without attribution. And what about open source projects?

“I can’t explain them,” he replied. “They don’t make sense in our models.” He explained that the soft, social benefits normal people would use to explain such behavior weren’t measurable, and therefore didn’t exist.

Consequently he has no intent to address the anomalies.

“I don’t read blogs, either,” he said. “If they had anything of value they’d charge for it.”

For better or worse, there is now a companion blog to Valleyschwag.

We’ll be filing dispatches on the state of the tech industry solely based on its schwag. Depending on your disposition this is either incredibly cynical or deeply enlightened. Or just plain self-indulgent.

We like indulgence.

We just launched our schwag-of-the-month club. I’m going to let others do the talking about it. Just know that we have more tricks up our sleeves on the way. (And the way things are going, you may or may not hear about them here first)

Costello played with the SF Symphony last night. It was an astonishing performance that got better with each song. During his last encore he turned off his mic and sang directly to the audience, the orchestra a delicate tremor behind him. The song was Couldn’t Call it Unexpected No. 4, the final track from Mighty Like a Rose. It’s one of my favorite songs of his, exquisitely vulnerable. Costello only could have done this–sung to a large audience without a mic–in a hall made for natural amplification. The experience was one of the most moving musical performances I’ve seen. So intimate and haunting.