I’m looking forward to speaking at an upcoming conference, Web 2.0 / Enterprise 2.0 in the Capital Markets Industry, on September 17 in New York.

Liz Abraham of Financial Markets World reports that they still have slots for a few speakers with experience in using or implementing Web 2.0 in the capital markets industry. If you’re interested and qualified, contact liz.abraham(at)FMWOnline.com .

My topic is How to Source Deals Using Web 2.0 Technologies, focused on how investment bankers, hedge funds, and private equity funds source investments.  I also will be on a panel on Web 3.0.  Preliminary outlines of my presentations are at the preceding links.  If any readers have suggestions on this general topic, I would welcome them.

More and more we’re seeing this trend in social media… revenue sharing with the social media and social networking content providers who are really the ones bringing eyeballs to these sites. The latest really cool addition to this that I’ve discovered is TheNewsRoom.

TheNewsRoom allows you to embed individual stories or a player featuring multiple stories, like the one you see to the right, on your site. Then they embed advertising within the player and you get a revenue share from it. What’s especially interesting about this is a couple of things.

First, small publishers generally haven’t had free and easy access to this kind of content in the past. In fact, you’ve generally had to pay for it. Secondly, this advertising is CPM advertising, not CPC. In other words, you get paid for impressions, not clicks. Again, this is something that has been largely unavailable to smaller publishers.

The site is in beta, and while so far everything I’ve used has worked well, the user interface leaves much to be desired, and the training videos they have aren’t consistent with the current user interface. Also, the ability to create a player with multiple stories like the one at right is currently limited to video features, not all content on the site. I’m sure that will come soon, but for now it’s just video.

Here’s another thing that’s very cool about it… it’s viral, and you get paid for the viral effect. In the player on the right, you’ll see a “Mash” button, which will allow you to post that story to your own site. Whenever someone mashes a story onto their site from your player, you get paid on that too, though at a lower rate.

Anyway, I’ve hand-picked some interesting video stories about social networking into this player — I hope you enjoy.

It’s amazing just how anti-social some people can be in social networking sites. I suppose it comes with the territory when you have a site with millions of visitors. That doesn’t mean I have to like it, and it is why, generally, I spend more time in the business-oriented sites than the huge public behemoths like YouTube and MySpace. What really baffles me, though, are the two recent reports I’ve heard of people getting “F-U” responses from people on LinkedIn.

OK, that’s not funny. But this cartoon is:

(more…)

Seems like a simple enough concept, right? If you want to be thought of as an expert in your field, besides just knowing your stuff, if you could figure out how experts — not wanna-be experts, but true “A-list” experts that people respect, quote and hire — act, then acting like them, rather than acting like a wanna-be, should boost your credibility even more.

Fortunately for you, there actually are a few things that those A-list experts have in common regarding how they behave in online communities, and this has been a key focus of my study over the past five years. I’ve been wanting to write about this for a while and finally have as part of the launch of the new collaborative blog, Tribal Seduction:

5 Ways to Act Like an Expert in Online Communities

Now please understand… this isn’t about gaming the system to pretend to be an expert when you’re really not. This is about making some smart decisions about how you use your time and how you engage people in online communities. You’ll find, as you put these into practice, that not only will they slowly but surely enhance your reputation, but they’ll also give you more time than your typical engagement pattern. You can use that time to go do the same thing in another community, or to go do other things to enhance your expert reputation, like write a blog or better yet, a book.

What happens when the “old new world” of internet marketing (and by that, I don’t mean the general sense of marketing on the internet, but more specifically the world of affiliate marketing and information products) collides with the “new world” of Web 2.0?

Well, the result isn’t always pretty. It seems that all the internet marketing gurus are trying to get their head around (and their fingers in) Web 2.0, and sometimes, the fast-talking, hype-laden, list-building mentality just doesn’t jibe with the authenticity and relationship-driven approach of Web 2.0.

Case in point… I recently saw an ad for The Authority Black Book (note: this link does not constitute an endorsement - I’m providing it so you can see for yourself), promising “The Best Web 2.0 Resources for Generating Traffic and Winning Customers”.

See, here’s the thing. Web 2.0 isn’t just about technology. Web 2.0 is about technology enable authentic relationships — people connecting with other people over some common interest. So when the whole sales process for something like this completely violates that promise, it kind of makes you wonder just how much the people behind it really “get” Web 2.0.

You can read the first in what I plan to be a 3-part series reviewing this e-book and related programs on my new blog, Revenue River:

Pet Peeve: Web 2.0 Gurus Who Really Don’t Get Web 2.0

Be sure to leave a comment… when one of the people behind this thing finally discovers that blog post, I’d love to have a show of force there.

Shara Karasic is an online community consultant and currently the Community Manager for Work.com (where I’m Community Leader for the Sales & Marketing Channel). Shara is a heavy user of social networking / social media sites (she maintains an extensive, up-to-date list here).

Shara was recently interviewed for Tech PR War Stories about social media strategies and sites PR professionals should be exploring for their clients.

Download and listen to the interview here (16:05 MP3)

Work.com has a ton of how-to guides on social media and social networking you might want to check out:

• Web 2.0 for Business - Shara Karasic
• Online Networking - Dr. Ivan Misner
• Online Business Networking - Scott Allen (me)
• 5 Steps to Writing a Successful Corporate Blog - Barbara Payne
• Marketing Your Business With a Blog - Brian Brown
• Business Blogging - Scot MacTaggart
• Small Business Blogs - Shara Karasic
• Using Technorati to Find Blogs About Your Industry - Brian Brown
• Hiring a Ghost Blogger - Greg Brown
• Producing a Video Blog - Lou Bortone
• Start Podcasting for Your Small Business - Hendry Lee
• RSS for Small Business - Lou Bortone
• Letting Customers Contribute to Your Web Site - Charles Dervarics
• Doing Business in Second Life - Deborah Kurfiss
• Marketing Your Business in Second Life - Deborah Kurfiss
• Increasing Your Online Visibility Using Work.com - Shara Karasic

I’ve written before about the challenges of being incredibly busy. I will readily admit to being chronically — perhaps even pathologically — over-committed.

One of those many commitments is our monthly Fast Company column. Fast Company is getting ready to make some big changes in their site, expanding on the social media and social networking functionality. And our editor sent out a call to those of us who are FC columnists and bloggers to beta test the new site. Needless to say, I couldn’t resist.

So maybe you’ll understand why I laughed so hard I spewed my drink when I read the following reply to the same request from Dr. Mark Goulston (who has a great blog, by the way):

Count me in. When you’re overextended like I am one of the best things to do is shift into denial with a twist of manic grandiosity and take on more. God forbid I should leave any synapse or receptor site unused. Best to all, Mark

Funny, funny stuff. I look forward to reading more… and thanks, Dr. Mark — you made my day yesterday.

Robert Peck of Bear Stearns recently presented on the theme “Yahoo should buy Facebook“, with a rough valuation of Facebook. I have to admit my skepticism of this argument. Yahoo has a history of not taking advantage of its acquisitions (Broadcast.com…).

Far cheaper than buying Facebook would be to provide a systematically integrated user experience across all of those different brands. Most noteably, Yahoo owns Yahoo Groups, which to this day has one of the most active user bases of any online community. There are roughly 6 million Yahoo groups, with an average of perhaps 10 users each, and many of those users (including me) are not impressed with the quality of their current user experience. (The 6 million figure comes from Jeff Weiner of Yahoo, but the figure of 10 users each is only a rough estimate.)

Yahoo already has tremendous reach and many of the most noteworthy brands in the Web 2.0 space (Flickr, Delicious, etc.). Integrating all of these brands is a mammoth missed opportunity.

There’s some talk going around the blogosphere, being pushed by David Krug of Telegraphik, of unionizing blogging. Krug makes it sound like this is the predominant sentiment in the blogosphere, but in reality, reading the backlash in the blogosphere, it seems that most bloggers are overwhelmingly opposed to the idea.

b5media founder Jeremy Wright offers his ensight, er, insight on it, explaining that the economics of turning bloggers into traditional employees simply wouldn’t work. My fellow b5media blogger Mark W. is a little more vehement about it, calling the idea freaking insane. I think Shane of Zoomstart, commenting on Ryan Caldwell’s post, said it most succinctly:

Blogging is an entrepreneurial endeavor and a creative endeavor.

Here’s my take on it. The way I see it, bloggers fall into five categories:

1. Rock stars - the handful of people who can make a living at it in the free market purely on their own merits.

2. Corporate bloggers - people who blog as a small part of their corporate (or small business) job.
3. Professional writers - people who write for companies that can’t blog for themselves.
4. Experts - people who use blogging as a way to build their personal brand, demonstrate their expertise, grow their business and advance their career.
5. Hobbyists - people who are passionate about their topic and blog as a way to express themselves and share their passion with others.

Group 1 doesn’t need a union - they’re already doing fine financially.

Group 2 doesn’t need a union - they’re already on salary and benefits.

Group 3 is maybe the only group that could use a union, but even so, in the vast majority of these cases, they’re being paid just fine.

Group 4 doesn’t need a union - the blog is a marketing vehicle for them. The fact that they’re getting paid to market themselves, rather than paying to market themselves is more than compensation enough. Those of us in this category make our money from selling products and services, speaking engagements, etc.

Group 5 doesn’t need a union - these people would already be blogging anyway. The fact that they’re getting paid for it is icing on the cake. And basically all they have to do is commit to posting volume.

So you either do it because you love it, or you excel at it and make some decent money from it. What I certainly don’t want to do is be supporting a bunch of half-assed hacks on basically some kind of blogger welfare.

Those who blogging doesn’t work for economically should go find another job. It’s not like anybody is sticking bloggers in a sweatshop and forcing them to write for pennies for blogging networks.

I enjoyed tonight’s talk by Peter Thiel at NYC Junto, on “How New Technologies Thwart Government and Promote Freedom”. Junto is a libertarian-focused discussion group organized by Victor Niederhoffer. I’ve been following Peter’s writing for a while, since we overlap directly in our interests in investing and in online networks. Peter is President of Clarium Capital Management, an investor in both LinkedIn and Facebook, and was co-founder and former CEO of Paypal.

Peter started with two questions:

1) Let’s assume libertarian view is correct. Why aren’t more people libertarian?

2) What do we do about it? How do we make the world more libertarian?

Answers to question 1

- maybe libertarianism is not in peoples’ interest

- lack of education

- [Cf. Bryan Caplan’s book, The Myth of The Rational Voter]

Answers to question 2

When Peter was an undergrad, he might say:

- Education

- Go door to door

- Convince people to vote for candidates

But as he got older, he saw this is very hard to do.

(highlight of the evening: Victor Niederhoffer’s toddler son wanders around Peter’s legs at this point)

An IQ test for libertarians: ask them how optimistic they are. The more pessimistic they are, the smarter they are.

One solution: move control of money from the government to individuals. But you cant do this via plebiscite. If there was a form of money that government couldn’t measure or track, you’d have a powerful alternative. This insight was genesis of Paypal in late 1990s.

In mid 90s, several companies were creating alternative currencies: Cybercash, Digicash, etc. All of the initial attempts were going out of business. Money has a network-like aspect. How do you create a new currency when no one else is using it?

All these efforts had run aground against this rock. So Paypal started by leveraging against existing systems: credit cards, checks. Send money to anyone with an email address. Started with 24 employees at Paypal. Preloaded accounts with $10. Started to spread. We grew at 5-7% compounded daily.

Einstein, “Compound interest is so miraculous it could only be created by G-d”.

Initial theory was very idealistic. In reality we ran up against many obstacles, the first of which were customers. Massive amounts of emails/customer service inquiries.

Spring/summer 2000: discovered bad people are out there. Whole wave of fraud, including Russian mobsters, tried to exploit Paypal. Someone threatened Peter’s mother unless PayPal unfroze his account. Then that person ended up shot dead.

Found dystopian website in Former Soviet Union: “Carders World”. A carder is someone who steals financial information on people. This was a marketplace for personal financial information. They had a manifesto saying that they were going to take down the capitalist system. Paypal information was there.

2001 period: next obstacle was government. Initial Paypal strategy was to ignore government regulations—’we are not a bank’; ‘ none of these laws apply to us’. If we rolled this out quickly enough, the government couldn’t stop us. “If you have a world where everyone is a criminal, you have to change the law.”

Visa/Mastercard tried to come up with rules to prohibit Paypal from using their service. Government was even slower. Radical technological change must be fast.

In 2001/02, when company went public, things really hit the wall. The person investigating their S-1 thought that his job was to stop companies from going public. “He was demoted in government, which is a really extraordinary thing to happen.”

Businessweek article said that state of Louisiana hadn’t quite signed off on this. SEC investigator told Paypal management that state of Louisiana was going to shut this down. So in middle of roadshow, Peter had to track down government regulators in Louisana and convince them that Louisana did not want to get reputation as a particularly backward place. “So within 2 days, we managed to get that stopped. At the time we had 100,000 Louisana users.”

“We are now in 100 countries. 3^rd largest payment brand after Visa/Mastercard in the world. “

How successful were we? Paypal currency is still denominated in national currencies. If you only have one form of currency, you’re beholden to the issuer of that currency. Our initial vision inspired in part by Argentinean economic turmoil. If you can force competition between governments, you’ll have stabler currencies.

Early 1980s: high inflation rates all over the world. Since then, it’s gone down almost everywhere. Forms and symbols can persist well after the substance is gone, e.g., Queen’s face is still on UK currency. Technology has been a very powerful force for decentralizing things.

1960s Time magazine cover: picture of 1 big computer that could run the world. Cf. Hal 2001. Computers as a force for centralization is a classic image. In the 90s, power shifted to individuals.

Famous early example: Soros distributing fax machines throughout Eastern bloc.

If everyone becomes a currency dealer thru Paypal, it changes the world.

So much has changed. For example in 1971: it was illegal to own gold and other currencies in the US. 1971 Treasury Secretary said, “It’s our money—we can print as much as we want and it’s the rest of the world’s problem”. You can’t imagine Hank Paulson saying something similar today.

Power is shifting ineluctably away. Will technology continue to be a force for decentralization?

Why did 1960s vision of centralized computer not happen?

Peoples’ ability to process information is flat, but the amount of information has gone up dramatically. So the only solution is decentralization. This is also why Moscow can’t set the price of potatoes in Vladivostock.

You may be able to approximate information processing to a problem solveable in polynomial time—and then you have AI, and the 1960s vision of a centralized computer processing everything.

By 2050, we could have thousands of different countries. We have 10-20 years to push as hard and far as we can in direction of more liberty.

Q: How do you prevent Paypal from being used as electronic hawalla—form of terrorist financing?

A: We have protections in place—abide by Patriot Act.

2002: first year number of printed checks in US went down.

Q: question about Second Life and inflation

Q: question about goldmoney.com

A: The problem with gold is that when you really need it, it’s not there. In 1933 the government confiscated all the gold bullion in the US.

Q; How do you promote libertarianism?

A: When I was young I tried to reduce the demand side (demand for regulation), but then I saw it was much too hard. So now I focus on the supply side. If I expand the supply side (e.g., more options for currencies), I reduce the amount of government in the system.

I want to promote change without being obliged to go through an election or plebiscite.

Governments are losing power to inflate because of technology. The risks are now tilted to deflation, not inflation. A deflationary environment is hard to invest in, because you can’t just lever up and pay things off in cheaper dollars. Private equity and real estate are bad ideas in a deflationary environment. Donald Trump’s argument is that you should be short dollars by going long real estate, is disastrous.

Q: How does Facebook promote libertarianism?

A: Facebook will be the dominant next media company . Since the old media companies are non-libertarian, this in itself is good.

Hedge funds are a way to bet against stupidity of governments.

Q: Could you comment on US visa policies and their impact on competitiveness.

He commented that once a tipping point happens, it’s impossible to go back. Once the camel’s back is broken, it can’t be healed. Right now the marginal tax rate in NY is ~50%. In London it’s 0%. So it’s compelling for a hedge fund to set up shop in London, not NY.

There’s a definite shifting of centers of quality overseas. It’s happening faster in finance than in technology, but it is happening. (Audience member mentioned that Microsoft is setting up research centers in Canada and elsewhere specifically because they cant bring the researchers they hire into the US.)