Bubble 2.0: Startups that will probably fail, and those that are positioned for success ...

Over the past few weeks, I have been working on a big special feature for The Industry Standard, entitled 10 'Net services that will succeed, and 10 that will probably fail. There are about 50 pieces of content in all, including slides, profiles, and predictions from the Standard's prediction market, and it required a tremendous amount of work to put together, including the writers and some behind-the-scenes folks who handled the design and programming preparations.

But writing the introduction to this special feature gave me a chance to reflect on what lessons we've learned from the last 'Net bubble, back in the late 1990s:

Twitter, Joost, and some of the other names on the list of probable failures will no doubt come as a surprise to many readers. But if we learned anything in the last 'Net bubble, it is this: Positive buzz, gold-star VC backing, breathless acquisition chatter and a solid base of registered members are not guarantees of success. Press hype and 'Net buzz have a way of turning nasty. Investors can cut off funding, or steer entrepreneurs down the wrong path. Acquisitions can be mismanaged, or left to wither and die. Revenue might fail to reach a critical mass. The public decides to switch its attention to the Next Cool Thing.

Most of the profiles were written by two contributors, Bill Snyder and Kristen Nicole, but I co-wrote the Second Life profile, which was grouped with the other "fails" (see Second Life: Interface, infrastructure and growth woes continue). Long-term readers of this blog and The Digital Media Machine will be recognize many of the complaints that were raised in The Standard -- bad UI, infrastructure problems, marketing hype, etc. In the positive camp, I was able to learn about some very impressive technologies in the 3D arena that I hadn't seen before -- check out the profiles for Modiface and SceneCaster.

A Neal Award for "Best Blog"

A post from my Computerworld blog has been recognized in the Neal Award the publication received for "Best Blog." Neal Awards recognize "editorial excellence in business media publications," so I was very happy to hear the news. Computerworld has the story:

The blog award recognized three blog posts in particular, one from the Web site's daily IT Blogwatch written by Richi Jennings, and others written by Ian Lamont and David Ramel. Computerworld participated in the categories for sites with more than 500,000 unique visitors per month.

Dave and Richi are friends and great bloggers to boot, so it is pretty cool to share the honor with them. Richi has written about this on his own personal blog, and there's a video of the award ceremony at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York.

The post that was recognized in the award and shown on the official American Business Media website (see screenshot, below) was actually prompted by something I read on Slashdot, which in turn prompted a blog post on my I, Lamont blog: MMORPGs training "Generation G" for corner-office suites. For the Computerworld follow-up, The gaming world meets the corporate world: Generation G grows up, I tightened up the thesis, did some research into the demographics, added a YouTube video, and engaged in an interesting dialogue with some of my readers. Later, I wrote another post about Generation G in Taiwan.

I am not blogging for Computerworld anymore -- I have a new job as managing editor of The Industry Standard -- but it's still pretty special.

Big Dog robot, or a big headless mule?

I don't post too often about robotics on this blog, but I thought I would share this video. It shows Boston Dynamics "BigDog" robot going through some very impressive terrain tests. Watch the whole video, because some of the best tests take place at the end. Also, be sure to turn down your volume before you click the "play" triangle, because while this thing looks cool, it sounds like a weed whacker going full tilt:

Some technical background was provided by a Slashdot commenter. The robot was funded by DARPA, a government agency that has funded scores of interesting science and technology projects over the past four decades, including early Internet research. The obvious applications of this robot include search, rescue, and resupply in difficult terrain, but some imaginative commenters on Slashdot predict military applications as well. Frankly, the shock factor and noise is enough to terrify practically anyone standing in its path.

Online news: It's not just the homepage that matters

There's a discussion on a few blogs this morning about the importance of the homepage to online news publishers. Scott Karp on Publishing 2.0 gets into the reverse-chron vs. most-important debate, and the importance of homepage updates, but I think the focus is misplaced. It's not 1998 anymore -- nowadays, most savvy news publishers know that every page is the home page, because the majority of traffic is coming through at the article level -- driven by Google News, organic Google search, references from other sites and blogs, and RSS. I think most mainstream news publishers have realized this -- besides a clear site navigation at the top of every page, one of the most important article-level tools appearing on most articles is the "most read" and "most emailed" list.

Of course, that's not to downplay the importance of homepage design and regular updates. A lot of traffic does originate at the homepage, and some people prefer to browse news that way. But if I had $10,000 to spend on a site redesign, I would make sure that resources were first allocated to the article template and site tools, as opposed to tweaking the front page.

More Second Life management turmoil: CEO stepping down

This is interesting. Philip Rosedale is stepping down as CEO of Linden Lab, the parent company of Second Life, according to Reuters . I have written some additional context for the Industry Standard, and you may also want to read some of my blog thoughts on Second Life from 2006 and 2007 -- there was a long period when the virtual world was the darling of the media and PR industries, but reality has since set in -- there are many apparent problems with the interface and architecture, growth has slowed, and a host of new competitors are on the horizon.

Former Linden Lab CTO Cory Ondrejka, who left the company just three months after disagreeing with Rosedale on the direction of SL development, has yet to publicly comment on the management shift at Linden Lab. I didn't see anything on Cory's blog, and he probably doesn't want to say anything in public, anyway -- he has found an interesting new gig in academia, and seems happy about moving on from corporate/startup life.

Excel as a 3D tool

From Gamasutra comes the news that Excel can be apparently be used as a 3D graphics engine. And all this time, I thought the most interesting use for Excel was tracking, comparing, and charting thousands of data points for a LexisNexis- and Yoshikoder-driven computer content analysis ...