oct17.com Blog

Mary Jo Foley is coming to town

April 23, 2008 on 9:37 pm | In technology, work | 1 Comment

Mary Jo, a longtime colleague of mine and the world’s Number One blogger on Microsoft, is coming to San Francisco next month to promote her book, Microsoft 2.0. We’re trying to set up a live interview(videotaped, natch) between her and amateur tree photographer Dan Farber.

We all cooperate. We all compete.

April 6, 2008 on 8:06 am | In bnet, work | 1 Comment

I spent last week in New York, meeting with a cable network, glossy magazine, and blog network – a real buffet of business media. All these meetings were about working together with BNET, even though all the parties have substantial Web operations.

• Amusing aside: Transportation reveals hierarchy. We drove out of NY for an audience with the cable network. We cabbed it across Manhattan to visit the magazine. The blog network came to us.

Everyone we met with makes their money from advertising. In fact, there’s probably a core of advertisers from whom we all wrestle budgets. We all compete for users’ time and affection, and in some cases I bet the very same humans consume what we cook up. In every way that matters, we’re competitors. Some are incumbents, others startups; some are multiple media, others pure-play. We’re all trying to skin the cat a different way, sure, but one could argue that there’s only one cat.

Why in the world are we sitting in conference rooms trying to figure out ways to work together?

We don’t normally act like this. Normally media companies fight battles petty or grand over users, editors, and advertisers. Professionally, I think such competition is terrific. An editor who doesn’t want to beat somebody is not nearly as interesting as one who does.

Case in point: We had a brief flap over one of our contributors that very same week. Carmine Gallo, an executive coach and speaker, wrote a book — on his own time and presumably with his own ideas. (Learn more about it in the video below.) I like Carmine’s stuff. He’s the regular host of BNET’s Useful Commute podcast and frequent star in our videos. Carmine adapted from his book an article for BusinessWeek, a similar article for BNET, and collaborated with us on a fun video. Later this month he’s doing a Webcast for Ziff Davis Enterprise on the same topic.

The Webcast got us all into a tizzy. Ziff Davis Enterprise is an fierce competitor of ZDNet, which is the site I’ve spent most of my professional life midwifing. When Ziff sells a Webcast, it means my team lost money. And to think we lost money because the Other Guys used one of our contributors?! Outrage! But of course BusinessWeek.com is a direct competitor of BNET (another, ahem, major focus for my team), and nobody’s blood pressure rose over Carmine’s article there. Why not?

I think the difference is the relative youth of business media online, versus the relative age of technology media. In tech, we’ve spent the last 10 years moving the center of gravity to the Web. We’re all there, and now it’s time to fight for turf. In business media, however, the same transition has just begun. The game is to survive through the inevitable shake-up and still be around 10 years from now. Then we’ll fight.