Risk of failing by not being transparent in a start-up is greater then the risk of being lifted for ideas

Should I reveal all my business ideas in my blog? Or should I keep them to myself? What's the benefit of being transparent, and what's the risk? These are the questions I struggle with in my new start-up company. I think there is an answer.

Among others, I've read Jeff Jarvis' book "What would Google do?", and I was inspired by it as I'm building a new web service these days. Currently I'm working on funding and recruiting, so I'm at a very early stage.

"Why keep secrets?", Jarvis asks, and he rephrases: "Why keep more secrets than you have to?"
The most common answer is of course that we don't want our potential competitors to steal the ideas. That would also be my answer.

Illustration photo by courtesy of Andrew Magill / CC BY 2.0

But is the risk of being lifted for ideas greater than the risk of failing by not being transparent? I asked myself this question, and after some consideration my answer is "No". I'll explain why.

Yesterday I spoke to  a friend who's managing one of Norways biggest web development departments in a major media concern. He said that in his department the challenge is not the lack of good ideas. They have more good ideas than they will ever be able to put into realization. Most of the ideas rest in the heads of the employees, or as archived emails. He said their success will not depend on the amount of ideas, but their ability to realize them.

I believe he's right. I've had many ideas for start-ups through the years. But I haven't realized any of them, other than the ideas I've realized working for others. Except this time, as I've quit my job as a manager and web editor to work full time on my business idea.

OK, so having great ideas is not my biggest challenge right now. It's the ability to evaluate them, and then realize them, which will be my greatest struggle in the months and years to come.

So, how can being transparent help the ability to execute the ideas? As it is today, I can have a perfectly nice job life working as a consultant, making good money. But it won't be satisfying. I want to create, to build, to realize my ideas.

Right now I'm alone with my ideas. I don't have any employees yet. A lot of my time goes into satisfying the bureaucracy, and other practical doings. Of course I have to lay all the ideas on the table to the public and private funds I'm applying for. But I'm not able to discuss my ideas with them, instead they are right in focusing on my ability to execute them.

Therefore, I guess, the best way to get my ideas analyzed and criticized, is to let them out in the open. And what is more open than the World Wide Web?

In addition to getting feedback to my ideas, through blogs and social media, laying them out publically will also kick my butt. As long as I write in my blog, or state in an interview, that I'm going to do this and that, I make a commitment to my readers. There's no difference whether I have one or a hundred readers. A commitment to one is as binding as a commitment to two or a thousand. And if I don't fulfill my commitments, I can't be trusted, and my business will fail.

That's why I'll risk it. From now on I'll be transparent and reveal more and more of my strategy in this blog. As long as I keep making commitments, it's no way back, not until I go bankrupt (and maybe not even then).

And that's why I'll be transparent as long as you promise to kick my butt. Deal or no deal?

What do you think of this strategy? Does it apply to all businesses or to all start-ups? Should I change strategy when the business grows?

Confessions of a web traffic junkie (1995-2009)

Yes, I was, and I guess I'll always be a web traffic addict. But I'm trying to get better.

It all started with my first self made web page in 1995. I borrowed a book on HTML-language from the library, opened Notepad.exe, and started typing the code.

The first code I learned was the one for displaying the page in bright yellow. The second HTML-code I learned was:

And it's still so powerful I have to use an image to display it here, or else it as by magic transforms to a link.

At this point, in 1995, I understood that links were important. And the links were even more important if they were on someone elses home page (didn't call them web sites those days).

I rented an online account with email, with a total limit of a few hundred kilobytes, more than I would ever use in a whole lifetime. I previewed and admired the glory of my page in Netscape, and uploaded it through my 2,400 bps modem.

Then I started spreading the link through emails to the small handful of friends who had email those days. Others, whom I met or spoke to on the phone, were talking about getting themselves an email-account and internet access. I tried to get them to remember the address to my homepage, so they could pay me a visit. The slashes and dots were OK, but the problem was to explain the ~. How would you explain it over the phone? (Yes, I also had a mobile phone, but noone sent SMS's. And how would you type ~ on an early model of Ericsson or Motorola anyway).

But still, in about half a years time many of my friends told my they had visited my homepage, or -pages, as I also had a guestbook. But many of them didn't want to leave traces on the internet, so they didn't leave a message. The few who did gave me a feeling of success. Yes!

And then I discovered it on my webhosts' web page: The Counter. I tried various kinds, and chose one of the simple stylings. At first it said: 000 000 001.

I typed the URL once more and hit Enter, and the counter immediately said: 000 000 002. I was the first and second visitor, but had room for 999 999 997 more before I would have to upgrade my counter.

After a while I learned the easy way to get a high count, to press F5 repeatedly. Oh, heaven!

As my friends made their own home pages, I always checked their counter. Most of them displayed an image of a construction worker and a text that said. "Work in progress. This web page will be updated soon". Many of them still has the same text today, and the bottom line: "Last update Nov. 2005".
Others published and updated only one single article on their web page: The number of page views. That is, they wrote about the number in the counter. I could beat them all by using F5!

When I in 1997 was given the mission to make a web page for the local branch of the journalists union, I had a clever idea. I wanted all the visitors who entered the web site to stay there. That's why I never provided links to external web pages. I wanted the visitors to read all the eight pages over and over again, and never leave.

I was thrilled when I found a script that disabled the back button in the web browser, and even hid it for the visitor. I also found a script that made the web page fill the whole screen, the same as you can do by pressing F11. I didn't tell my visitors that they had to press F11 again to make the browser window normal.
I can even remember a lecture I held, where I bragged about how clever these ideas were. But I can't remember any of all the good arguments I used for it.

In 2001 I got the posititon as one of two web editors in the regional radio and TV-station I worked in. Of course I wanted to put all of my knowledge of the web into the job. And by then we had more advanced counting systems. We called it measuring, and started using terms like Unique Visitors, Page Impressions and User Sessions.

For some reason only Page Impressions seemed to be of any value to our managers, and not because of the ads, because we didn't have any as we were a regional branch of the public broadcaster Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation. But for a very short period the regional branches would each be granted funding from the central office for one more employee on the web, for every 50,000 Page Impressions they raised the monthly count. The idea was shortlived, as we the second month told the main office we were ready to hire four extra web journalists. We never got them, and the project was closed.

However, during this period we tried a number of ways to raise the numbers, without having to use words like sex, drugs and crime, or even images of such. One method was to make a quiz with time counting, and award a coffee mug to the one who was the fastest at answering all the 20 questions. One Page Impression was counted at every single click, and the numbers went sky high as people were competing against each other to win the mug. At this time I was heavily into web trafficing.

In my later jobs as web editor, I have always reported on the number of Page Impressions to my superiors on the weekly meetings. Thats because it's the only number they listen do. It's always the highest of the three compulsary numbers. And it can really boost if we get a link from a national web site to one of our image slide shows.

My superiors didn't care for User Sessions at all, although I tried to teach them over and over again that for me as a web editor, user sessions were more important. They cared a bit for Unique Visitors, although it always was the lowest of the three numbers. But often the number of Unique Visitors in one day exceeded by far the number of people who lived in our area. The advertisers who paid us to try to display their ad 10,000 times over a week, suddenly had used all their credit in a few hours.

I'm not in the online news business anymore. I run my own company, developing a business idea which might help cure traffic junkies like me, by rewarding quality instead of click magnets. But I see there are still a lot of addicts out there. Look at most general news web sites, and count how many click magnets you find in one page. The tabloids have it in their blood, but the smaller local web sites are learning.

There is a way out, and we must try to find it together, as part of the as.long.as-project. But first I have to tweet the link to this blog post, try politely to get a few retweets, and tomorrow I have to check Google Analytics a little bit.

I realize this story is far too long to get much traffic. But if you've read this far, please leave a comment below. I just have to get the feeling one more time...

Let's dig out the lost news in the Long Tail

"As long as" is the working title for this project/these projects starting in the second half of 2009. The web service which will be the result of this collaborative project may get a different name. In this first face you can participate by challenging the ideas and thoughts in this blog, adding to them or commenting them in others ways.

The basic idea is to make news and information in the long tail available to those who are interested in it, while its fresh, by systematic use of journalistic methods to filter the news and information streams.

Today it takes a great effort to feel up-to-date on news regarding you, your profession, your hobbies, your nearest and dearest, and your interests. I haven't found any web service that in a useable way filters the news and other fresh information on the web, and delivers it to my web browser without me doing a great deal of work first.

News media cares for themselves
And the traditional media doesn't help. They want people to read their stories, and if their competitor has a better story on the same topic, they'd rather borrow (read: steal) the story and make their own version. Oh, and if they remember, they'll provide a link to the competitors site.
I don't rely on a single local online news media to bring me all the stories from the area I live in. I have to check them all. This takes time. It's the same with national news media online, as well as international niche media.

Even RSS takes a lot of time
RSS-feeds can be helpful. But even they require a lot of work, and some web skills. RSS is not for everyone. On my iPhone, my Macbook and my PC I use the free RSS-readers from NewsGator. They synchronize the feeds through an online account, so when I change reading device the program knows which posts I've read. But they require some web skills to configure, they might be time consuming.

Copied news stories on RSS fool me
And theres another thing: Media that only cares for themselves (and not their readers) mess up the RSS-feeds. Let me explain how. I am based in Norway, and I read both national an international news, mainly tech and web related stories. Often these stories originate and develops in American news media. After the first media has published a story on the web, the competitors publish the same story, maybe with a different title and a slightly different angle. Then the European and Norwegian online news media translate the story to their language, and they again copy each other, but choose slightly different angles - just enough to fool me. The result is that open every single story and read the first lines, before I realize they're all variations of the same story. This is frustrating, and takes a lot of time.

The long tail of news is hidden
I'm currently reading Chris Andersons revised and updated version of his successful book "The Long Tail". Andersons expression is described in Wikipedia.org. The Pareto principle, or the 80/20-rule, suggests that a market with a high freedom of choice will create a certain degree of inequality by favoring the upper 20% of the items ("hits" or "head") against the other 80% ("non-hits" or "long tail"):

The phrase 'the Long Tail' was, according to Chris Anderson, first coined by himself. The concept drew in part from a February 2003 essay by Clay Shirky, "Power Laws, Weblogs and Inequality", which noted that a relative handful of weblogs have many links going into them but "the long tail" of millions of weblogs may have only a handful of links going into them.

In the online news production in mainstream media this principle is clearly evident. And so it will be as long as news production is fused by the number of hits on the stories on the front page. It seems like most economically successful online news sites are tabloid in one way ore another. The compose their front pages to make sure that everyone will find something of interest. News which appeal to a niche, with only a few tens of thousands of potential readers (on the international sites), or a few thousand or hundreds of readers (on regional sites) hardly ever make it to the front page. And if they're published on the front page for an hour or two, you have to scroll to find them. If we use the Pareto principle, this means that 80% of the news, which would have had dedicated and interested readers, are nearly hidden or at least very hard to find.

Filtering through web communities also takes time
Another filtering service is collaborative web communities like Digg, Mashable and Delicious, where its users gather, share and vote for links they find interestering. But these services also require some effort from me as a user. First I have to use them for some time to really understand the concept. Then I have to configure my account to filter the stories. And I can't rely on the service to give me all the stories I would have found relevant and interestering, at least not when it comes down to my local community in my part of the world. Normally I'm interested in the local news first, but hardly anyone "diggs" them.

The solution is good old journalism - in a brand new way
I believe we need services on the web that saves a lot of time for us, like the newspaper did before radio, TV and internet. The saved time we can spend on more web surfing, or doing something completely different. These services must also provide news and information of better quality than today, and correspond to our interests.
In my opinion, the only way to this properly, is to put journalistic principles to work in the filtration process. We can't leave it all to the machines (like Google). The reason people still want to pay for quality news (at least on paper), is that they are comfortable with the idea of paying journalists for doing the job of gathering, filtering and rewriting information for us. This saves a lot of time for us, as long as we trust the journalists to have us in mind when they write their stories. Thats why I want to add 50% journalistic filtering in the automatic news distribution:

We must take back control over the automated searches and filtering engines, not to be dictated by them to publish and distribute only the news that receives click traffic, but use them to distribute the lost news to the people they were intended for in the first place.

And that's what this project and this blog will focus on, and try to solve. How and when it will be solved, I don't know yet. But at least it's a mission, and we'll find a way. Let's use Google and other fantastic search systems, but let's add man power. Then we can brag about having created the worlds second best web service. At least.