Josh Dilworth

Facebook Comments: What’s Easy Isn’t Always Right

Amen to that, brother. Jordan Kretchmer on why outsourcing your comment community to the social networking behemoth is a bad idea.

Publishers who have chosen to hand over their entire communities to Facebook are likewise choosing to give up the entire value of their community. What this means is that they no longer have any data on loyal commenters, and no email addresses, which means no ability to communicate with them again. They’re no longer your users, they’re Facebook’s.

You’re giving a huge strategic and valuable asset to Facebook. They understand the inherent value of comments and community, and are attempting to take it out from underneath publishers before they even realize what’s happened.  And we’re back to where we started—publishers don’t quite understand the value of their communities yet.

Disclosure: Livefyre is a client.

The Daily Dot — And Off We Go

Owen’s onboard and we’re off and running. After last week’s all-hands meetings in Austin, I left psyched about the killer team we have put together in such a short period of time. I know everyone says that, but it’s different when it’s your baby.

You should read Mathew Ingram’s piece for the overall concept, Nova’s on the background and founding, and Owen + Nick’s first newsletter missive — an amusingly anachronistic start to a modern editorial venture. In it we’ll beta and battle-test both the voice and the venture itself, as they develop, in full view.

Disclosure: The Daily Dot is a client. I am also a co-founder and investor.

Bottlenose starts to come out of hiding

It is fun to see Bottlenose start to uncloak after many months of work — it really is the coolest demo I have seen since Siri. You are in for a big treat. I have been using it for a month now and it has totally changed my effectiveness on Twitter — both on the consumption and the creation side.

I’m especially happy for my friends Nova and Dominiek — they were each talking about similar concepts for years before their introduction, and it’s a wonderful match. 

More to come soon from the company — MG only scratched the surface of what they’ve built. The stream curation capabilities, the plugin store (full of goodies) and the rule-based autopilot/alert preferences will all be included, in addition to the annotation layer as described. There should be a fuller review out soon.

Disclosure: Bottlenose is a client.

Doug is, like, on TV and stuff

Over the past year our colleague Doug Freeman has been hard at work co-editing The Austin Chronicle Music Anthology.

Buy it, yo.

For a city that lives up to its “Live Music Capital of the World” tagline, you can image that this was quite an undertaking.  And the result is a time capsule that includes almost 30 years worth of retrospective archives of the most unique and interesting music finds from the city we call home. 

Music has long since been a personal passion point of Doug’s (even after we lured him over to the dark side) and it shows through the work he and fellow editor, Austin Powell, put into this project. 

If you live in Austin chances are you like music and if you like music chances are you like Austin – net/net you can order a copy of the book here. 

Or if you prefer to do your shopping with a beer in hand listening to what else, live music, then you can grab a copy at the official book release party this Wednesday, March 9 at Antone’s. 

Additionally, the concept of the book and music journalism will be argued in detail on that panel that Doug is moderating at SXSW. 

On a personal level, I’d like to congratulate Doug on the fruits of his labor.  Not only is it a great book but it looks fly on my coffee table as well. Thanks, Doug.

Disclosure: Doug Freeman doing his own PR is highly amusing. See video below.

Meet LiquidSpace.

So proud of LiquidSpace, from recent funding to last night’s launch.

Really proud to be a part of this team. Has been a pleasure through and through. Mark, Doug and Candice — you rock.

This says it best:

The modern workforce isn’t just becoming mobile, it already is mobile. Employers and employees both, are seeking productivity gains while at the same time increasing their use of third places including co-working sites, office business centers, hotel meeting rooms and other flexible venues. Companies large and small are adopting alternative workplace strategies to reduce their current real estate footprints and put what space they have to better use,” said Founder and CEO Mark Gilbreath.

A map of our spaces is here.

I’m also very proud of the badass splash page we did for LiquidSpace. 

Disclosure: LiquidSpace is a client.

Scoble @SRI

It was awesome to welcome Robert back to SRI, and his headline makes an important, but subtle point:

The Coolest Tech Tour Ever: How SRI is Augmenting the Human Condition

Doug Engelbart was a key figure in SRI’s history, and a great leader.

His work was ultimately about a core goal of augmenting human ability — an idea that came alive in early SRI breakthroughs like the mouse, the GUI, hypertext and beyond.

Doug’s vision for AI was one that gave us prosthetics — not replacements. Siri speaks to this distinction well. Or, take the first down marker in football — it is the earliest commercialization of truly augmented reality, and a technology developed at SRI.

Augmentation always was and still is the higher purpose that drives the organization.

SRI focuses on real/usable and moreover practical AI — not fake/dream AI. And AI is just one area of research – the SRI augmentation theme spans surgery, drug discovery and therapeutics, robotics, software security, haptics, materials sciences, and more.

The point here is that whereas more showy efforts like IBM’s Watson really strive for a kind of technology that replaces a human, SRI is, again, focused on the Engelbart-ian tradition of extending, heightening, and exploring what human can be and do with technology at their side.

That’s a big distinction.

As someone who has spent a great deal of his career bringing non-trivial “augmentations” to market, I think it’s high time we remember that, despite all of the pop-cultural associations of technology that force us into the familliar machine vs. human dichotomy, the most interesting and productive innovations are those that help us do more with less.

Technologies that seek to replace or even replicate a human capability are considerably less interesting, both intellectually and practically.

I highly recommend watching all of Scoble’s videos if you have the time — you’ll leave re-enchanted with technology and the many great opportunities in front of us.

Disclosure: SRI is a client.

Bittersweet.

Beluga got snapped up by Facebook this week, which was simultaneously totally awesome and also totally sad because our work together had really only just begun.

The plans we had made…

Major congrats to the team — Ben, Lucy and Jonathan. You guys rock hard. And we’re still going to eat everyone’s lunch at SXSW.

I feel this way every time a client gets acquired, and it’s the consultant’s curse. Siri was much the same way — Apple did the deal a mere 6 weeks after we launched. It’s good for the agency in terms of branding and track record, but it always feels too early, no matter how much sense it makes or how large the multiple.

And for the entrepreneur it’s always a tough decision too. You don’t get into business just to get out of it. It always comes down to, is this going to help be leave the world an even better place than I found it?

The very best acquirers know as much to be the ultimate bargaining chip. It’s very gratifying to see clients go on to new opportunities where 1+1=3.

Disclosure: Beluga is a client.