Brian Alvey

Eric Snider used to work for Cinematical before AOL bought The Huffington Post to improve AOL’s leadership position as the place where brands go to die.

I was just going to link to his scathing Leaving in a Huff post on Twitter, but there were too many great quotes for 140 characters:

• “Say what you will about AOL, but when you perform work for them, they pay you. They’re old-fashioned like that.”
• “That’s how newspapers operate, and goodness knows that industry is running smoothly.”
• “We were like stewardesses handing out peanuts on the Hindenburg.”
• “He knows that when space aliens invade, and a weaselly human swears allegiance to them in exchange for not being killed, the weaselly human always winds up getting killed anyway.”
• “We may be whores, but we are not sluts.”
• “You will note that, as with most professional communiques regarding the termination of a subcontractor’s services, this one begins with the traditional ‘Hi there.'”
• “You’ve got fail.”

And many, many more. It ends with a recap of the wild email thread where people at AOL were still asking bloggers who were fired or resigned to pitch posts. For pay. I think.

Enjoy.

Note: While I’m against a lot of things that are going on and it’s easy to jump on the AOL hating bandwagon, I understand that there is always a logical consolidation of overlapping divisions and brands in a merger. And sometimes companies take the opportunity to trim profitable divisions that don’t overlap with newly merged brands under the pretenses of that merger. Which is probably what happened to Download Squad. There is psychic organizational overhead in trying to manage 100+ brands, so sometimes sites get shut down for reasons other than profit and traffic.

I also don’t believe the unpaid HuffPo bloggers deserve a financial settlement. “Implied contracts” aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on. Mathew Ingram said it best in Blogging for HuffPo Is Like Writing Open-Source Code. The only settlement Arianna Huffington will face on this front is with karma.

[This press release originally appeared on the Crowd Fusion website, which has been replaced by ceros.com.]

Crowd Fusion Announces it is the Content Management System for The Daily

New York, NY, March 16, 2011 — Marking a little over a month since The Daily was revealed, Crowd Fusion officially announces that it is the content management system behind the industry’s first national daily news publication exclusively available on the iPad. The editorial and production staff of The Daily use Crowd Fusion as a key part of their next generation digital newsroom. Crowd Fusion is responsible for building and maintaining the infrastructure to support the rich media content for The Daily app as well as its website, http://www.thedaily.com. Additionally, after working with Apple and The Daily to offer a subscription option on the iPad, the Crowd Fusion platform now supports Apple’s new subscription model as an integrated enterprise plugin.

“To successfully launch a product as ambitious as The Daily, we knew we’d needed to build so much more than just the app itself,” said Ariscielle Novicio-Ablan, Vice President of Technology for The Daily. “Crowd Fusion was the perfect partner for us, offering a full set of software and infrastructure solutions for both the scalability and flexibility that this project needed.”

“When News Corp first approached me about this project, I found myself listening to all their needs and saying, ‘We could do that, too,'” said Crowd Fusion CEO and co-founder, Brian Alvey. “For The Daily, our platform provides an end-to-end solution for their newsroom’s writing and workflow. We’ve built media management tools that pull in videos, photos, wire articles and custom data feeds from a large number of sources. All of this in a  publishing platform capable of handling millions of subscribers downloading new issues, sharing content on Facebook and Twitter, and posting both text and audio comments.”

“One of the more interesting aspects of this project for us has been marrying the old with the new: building a workflow system and tools for a team of editors and designers accustomed to working in print, television and online who are now able to re-imagine their craft for the first time,” said Craig Wood, Crowd Fusion COO and co-founder.

“The Daily is all about the user experience and bringing first-rate content to our readers in the most effective and compelling way,” said Greg Clayman, Publisher for The Daily. “Every step of the way, Crowd Fusion has helped to make this vision a reality, successfully building the foundation and tools for our storytelling capabilities.”

About Crowd Fusion

Crowd Fusion is a high-end publishing platform for media companies and brands. Crowd Fusion’s cloud-hosted CMS makes it easy for large teams to collaborate on original content, aggregated content and topic pages. Crowd Fusion’s unique rendering engine enables customers to build personalized, engaging mobile applications in addition to traditional websites. Founded in 2007, Crowd Fusion raised $3 million from Velocity Interactive Group, Greycroft Partners and Marc Andreessen in July of 2008.

There’s a great post by C.K. called Dear Apple: You’re not “Post-PC” until you cut the cord.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m loving everything I’ve seen about the iPad 2 and I plan on grabbing one next Friday when they become available, but watching the event from Wednesday, the use of the phrase “post-PC” was just blatantly incorrect.

I agree with C.K. that it’s really hard for Apple to declare PCs dead when you have to plug your iPhones and iPads into computers running iTunes to do anything, but I have the feeling that Steve Jobs has already planned all of this stuff out so perfectly that if it isn’t true today, it will be true soon.

You know how Apple designs iPhones and iPads with copy and paste, cameras, dozens of ports and 3D laser sensors and then they trim out the features so they can sell you a new iPad every year for the next 3 years?

I have plenty of faith in Apple to carry us into the magical post-PC age. I’m sure we’re just a software update or two away from full-on iTunes on my iPad without no PC required. When I close my eyes, I’m already there — waiting for C.K.

I’m in the second row of the paidContent 2011 conference at the amazing TheTimesCenter and I just watched a panel called “Quality, Quantity and Mass Content.” Larry Dignan from ZDNet hosted a panel that included Jason Rapp from Mahalo, Chris Ahearn from ThompsonReuters, Luke Beatty from Yahoo’s Associated Content and Lewis D’Vorkin from Forbes and True/Slant.

The feedback I got from other audience members is that Larry asked a couple of tough questions, but the panel was mostly evasive, especially on the topic of Google’s “Farmer” update.

Felix Salmon told the panel that Twitter is his best place to find news and links and asked when these publishers’ sites are going to be as good as Twitter. I’m not really paraphrasing. There were no great answers from the panel because the question was flawed. Of course Felix’s Twitter stream is full of golden content, he follows really smart people who like many of the same things he likes!

A comparison of Felix Salmon’s personalized Twitter stream vs. content farms is apples and oranges. If Felix was forced to spend an hour watching the straight not-signed-in stream of every tweet ever, he’d say it was way worse than *any* content site, especially if he was comparing the generic Twitter firehose to a content site in a vertical he cared about. We all see low quality content on Twitter every day in Twitter’s trending topics list. Lady Gaga is not on that list because she’s the best content, she’s in there because she’s liked a little bit by a really wide audience. The top ten of all topics on earth will always be the lowest common denominator content, not the highest quality content. It’s not targeted and neither are Google results.

A better question for that panel would be:

When are you going to let me personalize my experience of your content into a format that looks like my Facebook/Myspace/Twitter stream — filled with the topics I care about and devoid of the content I despise?

I don’t think any of those publishers are working on that.

TechMeme comes really close without exposing actual personalization controls because they made topic and source constraints that already matched hardcore tech/investor preferences: TechCrunch, Engadget, Boy Genius Report, The New York Times, ReadWriteWeb and the WSJ’s MediaMemo and BoomTown. Oh my god, it’s like TechMeme knows me.

It will be a real shame if publishers are waiting on a combined Bing and Facebook to deliver everyone a useful, personalized view into their content. Big publishers are worrying about giving up 30% cuts and all kinds of control to Apple, but they’re not looking at content consumption preferences and taking control of their own destiny.

I was a grand jury judge for my buddy Jason’s LAUNCH conference in San Francisco last week. There are two kinds of LAUNCH judges: celebrity judges who spend a half day on stage judging live presentations and the grand jury kind that watch all of the presentations and then pick winners for LAUNCH awards. I was one of the working judges.

There were three groups of presenting startups. 1.0 companies were all companies launching for the first time. 2.0 companies were announcing a new product. LAUNCH Pad companies were not scheduled to present on stage. They rented tables and tried to catch the attention of people passing by for a quick demo. If they caught the attention of a judge, they could be nominated to actually spend three minutes on stage pitching their product.

From the LAUNCH Pad companies, I picked an Amazon cloud-hosted GoToMeeting/Webex competitor called MeetingBurner. Not surprisingly, Joyent CEO David Young told them they were using the wrong cloud. That never gets old, right? LAUNCH Pad winners included GreenGoose, whose wireless sensors can track daily activity, and fluidinfo, an openly writable shared meta data service for everything. GreenGoose closed a $500K angel round that Friday and fluidinfo was voted “most likely to need Crowd Fusion as an interface.”

In the 2.0 group, Disconnect won for best technology. It’s a browser plugin that monitors how much of your personal data is being shared with third party sites, like what gets sent to Facebook when you’re visiting ESPN. I spent some time with Disconnect’s genius creator Brian Kennish on Friday and told him I hoped Disconnect would fail so I could hire him. Seriously!

The overall winner in the 2.0 group was Stack Overflow. I sat out on this vote because I was quoted in Joel’s Careers 2.0 press release.

Some of the 1.0 winners were Room77 (best overall, see the view from your hotel room before you book it), NeuAer(best tech, automate your digital life) and Cabana (best design, a Photoshop/Pipes-style interface for making apps without coding). The NeuAer example that really stuck with me was how you can script your devices so that every time you turn your car off, your smartphone can drop a map pin so you don’t have to remember where you parked. Very slick.

All of the winners are listed on the LAUNCH blog. Between the 1.0, 2.0 and LAUNCH Page companies there were 140 great companies competing for 13 awards. What a fantastic event.

A long, long time ago I saw the Chevy Chase and Goldie Hawn’s Foul Play in a Virginia movie theater with my sister Jennifer and my cousin Kimberly. To this day I vividly remember the car chase scene over the hills of San Francisco. Chevy had stolen a cab and it turned out there was a Japanese couple in the back. They didn’t speak any English, but Goldie explained they were police, you know, like Kojak. Bang bang. Then the tourists went from scared hostages to thrilled participants. I’ve never seen the movie since that first time, but I can tell you all of those details from that scene.

A cab ride in SF prompted this tweet:

My evening cab ride through SF was insane! Cab left the ground 3 times going over hills and screeched to a stop once. #foulplay

Over on Facebook, my sister sent me the YouTube video for that scene. The first thing I noticed was that they were playing music from The Mikado. Wow! Then they were cutting to scenes of the actual Mikado being performed. It’s where they were racing to, to prevent a murder or something.

I was turned on to The Mikado by an issue of The Question I read in high school. Written by Denny O’Neil and edited by my ComicMix partner Mike Gold. In college I bought the double disc musical and many years later Niki and I saw The Mikado live in New York City.

My object all sublime
I shall achieve in time
To let the punishment fit the crime
The punishment fit the crime.
And make each prisoner pent
Unwillingly represent
A source of innocent merriment
Of innocent merriment!

I often love Fred Wilson‘s blog, A VC, but sometimes it’s not so easy to love. A few days ago Fred posted a dismissal of marketing. He said marketing is only for companies with lousy products or companies like Zynga, Budweiser or Viagra who can only grow their businesses marginally through customer acquisition. I’ve been on the road for LAUNCH and let it go after he admitted his first post had many bugs, but then I saw one of Fred’s commenters on his third post on marketing dropping Peter Drucker into the fray. James Harradence, said:

Peter Drucker, I am paraphrasing, basically said that every oganization needs to recruit and retain customers (although that is not always what they call them). Anyone who faced a customer was in marketing. He also said that anyone who was not directly related to that function, who was below the C-level, could be outsourced.

Interesting. I can’t imagine that this “outsource everyone below C-level” strategy has ever worked, but I had to add my own Drucker-infused take on the importance of marketing:

The Drucker quote that always sticks with me (paraphrased here from memory) is that “companies have only two functions: innovation and marketing. All the rest are costs.”

“Innovate and market” means “create something amazing and then go tell people about it.”

Fred Wilson is smart, but his original post that said “marketing is for companies with terrible products or companies that need to squeeze profits out of new customers” is flawed. I’m sure he has seen plenty of startups who believe that marketing spending will make up for failing to innovate, but marketing simply means telling a story to an audience.

I market to customers. I market to investors. I market to talent. I market to partners. I don’t just throw a budget line at marketing after failing to create something attention worthy. There is a difference.

After a little digging, I found that the actual quote is:

Because the purpose of business is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two—and only two—basic functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are costs. Marketing is the distinguishing, unique function of the business.

It’s not so easy to dismiss the importance of marketing — even in startups!

Rand Fishkin has a great, longer rebuttal to Fred’s flawed post on marketing over on SEOmoz. He points out that marketing is for companies that have great products. Some of this was referenced in Fred’s third marketing post.

My best friend in Texas, Chris Nottingham, asked me about an old computer wargame we used to play in college. He said his mother just got an iMac and he wanted to put that old game on there.

A quick Google search for “old mac game destroyer tank island” uncovered Strategic Conquest.

I spent so many days playing that game in college, sending airplanes on patrol, building factories and conquering cities. Chris and I were even co-generals for an epic war that lasted more than a weekend. We played the computer on its highest difficulty level and while we seemed like we were going to lose early on, we stuck it out and won. I think we took turns sleeping.

According to Wikipedia, Strategic Conquest wasn’t updated after 1998 and stopped working on the Mac OS a few years ago. It was amazing to read all about this long-gone game on Wikipedia. I’d never heard the phrase “fog of war” until now, but that’s exactly how it worked. Every location was dark and hidden until you explored it yourself — revealing land, sea and maybe an enemy unit.

Lots of people are complaining about how everyone worked on The Huffington Post for free and how they should get paid now that AOL has paid $315 million for their work. Some have suggested $50 per post. Comedian Andy Borowitz tweeted:

My share of the Huffington Post sale, zero dollars, was a little disappointing.

This is nuts.

First, everyone who blogged for free on Huffington Post understood that they were being paid in exposure. Plus many of the famous people who blogged on it — like Larry David, Madonna, Harry Shearer, Robert Redford and Craig Newmark — don’t need the money. When Blog Maverick was at Weblogs, Inc., no one paid Mark Cuban to blog. In fact, we never considered running ads on his blog because readers would think, “Does Mark Cuban the billionaire really need to make a nickel when I buy a DVD he links to?” Very tacky.

Second, the Huffington Post has a large paid staff. All of that viral, aggregated content on their site isn’t being cranked out by Bill Maher and Neil Young.

Third, Jason and I should apologize to Arianna for setting a bad precedent. When we sold our own blogging company to AOL back in 2005, we gave hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash bonuses to all of our active bloggers — and none of them had contracts for that.

For one simple reason: I was sick of being the guy who runs the second hottest company in Greycroft’s portfolio.

Recently, Greycroft partner Ian Sigalow wrote a blog post comparing VC exits to baseball hits. He said an exit of 2-3x is a double. 5x is a triple. I asked Ian if the AOL/Huffington Post deal was a double, triple or home run — knowing it was at least a home run. I’m surprised he even sent me a serious reply.