Thursday, April 26, 2007

why to not say no to startup?

Paul Graham has written an excellent essay about starting a startup. He illustrated many points which a entrepreneur joggles through..
and I still maintain, one of the single big mistakes many potential would be entrepreneurs do is "not taking the first step of actually starting" the company. Too much time and energy is wasted is thinking about the process and consequences. The decision should be taken and if it is to start, company should be started asap. Failure is not a taboo, as long as you have thought about that as well.

Sunday, April 22, 2007

demographics of evolving web2.0 users

interesting stats from hitwise. I have been digging and researching to understand the demographics of evolving internet app usage post web2.0. One topic which often comes into my discussions is whether web 2.0 has entered mainstream and if yes, to what extent.

Firstly, very good work in defining customer segmentation from Claritus, which can be very useful when planning/thinking /designing your web app idea, especially in this web 2.0 era.

Secondly, when it comes to scope of web 2.0 apps today, the word is still "informainment". Is that it? How do you take this movement to the next level?

On Blogging, Dave Sifry says

Technorati is tracking 70 million blogs now, at a rate of 120,000 new blogs per day - 1.5 million new posts per day. He compares to "an enormous amoeba". He says there are 15.3 million "active" blogs (21%). He also notes the mainstreaming of these technologies - and that people may not even notice they're reading a blog. 12% of the top 100 sites 6 months ago were blogs; but now he says it is 22%. Mainstream media is still at the top (NY Times etc), but there is growth in the blogs.

He looks now at the behaviors of the top bloggers. He says these are effects, not necessarily causes. He notes that influential bloggers post more frequently, on average twice a day. Whereas "magic middle" bloggers (about 3M) post on average once a day. Also influential bloggers have been at this at least 1-2 years. Finally, 88% of the top 100 is different than one year ago - i.e. it's very fluid.

In language, Japanese is now the top language - 37%. However there are undercounts: French, Korean and Chinese. English is now 33%, only one third.

Tagging has become a mainstream acitivity in blogging, according to Sifry - 230 Million tags over two years, with 37% of blog posts using author tags.

Next Bill looks at participators vs viewers. Some 'visits to media upload' ratios: 0.16%
for YouTube, 0.2% Flickr, 4.59% Wikipedia (entry edits). Dave Sifry notes that
the creation percentage - I guess I'd call it the read/write ratio! - is
certainly a lot lower than the old 80/20 rule. Bill drills down into the
participatory figures, which shows for Wikipedia that older users are much more
likely to be participatory (35-55) whereas the younger users are the viewers.
However for YouTube it is the 25-54 yr olds that upload videos - however note
that Hitwise doesn't track <18. The gender breakdown shows that 76% of users are male on
YouTube, but a 60/40 male/female split for wikipedia.



blog it

Thursday, April 5, 2007

public blog?

I was never a writer.. I have had private blogs but never found the need to share.. until now. I guess its easier to follow the trend than to create one. A cursory look at my private blog and I knew it will need many edits before making it public, given it had a lot of propreitary knowledge of many startups I have worked for (Business Signatures, Escalate, Electron Economy to name a few). So I thought I would start my public blog from scratch.

creating blog was easy, previewing template was not. I am surprised half the URL's to preview were bad links. Either not many people care about templates or I just had too much time on my hands.

I strive to keep this simple and to the point. One of the reasons I started was not that I wanted to publish (strage isnt it), but that I wanted to find value in the feedback which will come back my way. I want to be able to blog questions and opinions and see what sticks to the wall and what is outrageously bad idea.

well for starters, this blog is ready to be lost in the crowd..