The fall of Corzine, in the New Yorker

Embed­ded Link

News Desk: Corzine’s Down­fall
The col­lapse this week of the broker-dealer MF Global and the come­up­pance of its chief exec­u­tive Jon Corzine, who resigned Fri­day, have been and will be put to many polit­i­cal and rhetor­i­cal purposes.…

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One of the big bits of tech news yes­ter­day was a leaked slide show­ing that Yahoo was clos­ing down Del​.icio​.us,
the social book­mark­ing sys­tem that helped define. Yahoo must not do
Twit­ter because it took them till today to finally respond. They now say
that Del​.icio​.us doesn’t fit their strat­egy and that they will be sell­ing it.

Do
we care? Should we care? When it started in 2003, Del​.icio​.us was some­thing
inno­v­a­tive and quirky. It helped teach us that our online behav­ior
didn’t need to be secret and locked away on our hard dri­ves but could be
shared. Indi­cat­ing that you thought a web­site was wor­thy of a book­mark
could be a rec­om­men­da­tion to friends. Even peo­ple book­mark­ing a site was
an indi­ca­tion of it’s real world value. For us techies, Del​.icio​.us
opened our eyes up to a world where every­thing could be an RSS feed and
in 2006 I jig­gered the social aspects to cre­ate a human-powered
edi­to­r­ial aggre­ga­tor Quak​erQuaker​.org.

When Yahoo bought it we
were all a bit ner­vous but it seemed like a good move. Yahoo could bring
server resources and a user­base and take Del​.icio​.us to the next level.
When cor­po­rate decided to rename it Deli​cious​.com, it stripped the
quirk­i­ness but per­haps sig­naled a will­ing­ness to take this more into the
masses.

Screen­shot of my revived
Diigo account, show­ing
Deli­cious imports.

Alas, it didn’t turn out that way. Deli­cious set­tled in
and stopped inno­vat­ing. Even­tu­ally the founder left Yahoo. Things got so
bad that it seemed excit­ing when it essen­tially got a design make-over a
few years ago. Com­pet­ing ser­vices sprang up but none were dif­fer­ent
enough to make many of change our habits.

So yesterday’s news is
per­haps a good thing. I’ve been look­ing at those other ser­vices. Diigo​.com looks really fab­u­lous. I tried it when it launched in 2006 but wrote it off at the time as a Deli­cious clone with high ambi­tions. But they’ve been work­ing hard. They’re onto ver­sion five now and they’ve been
adding the kind of cool fea­tures that an inde­pen­dent Deli­cious might
have pursued.

For exam­ple, you can add a note to a web­page that you’re book­mark­ing and then send a spe­cial URL with the site and note. They make it really easy to Twit­ter this. Last night I book­marked and tweeted about an online radio ser­vice I’ve been using:

Lis­ten­ing to a lot of Radio Par­adise lately. Good back­ground work music, inter­est­ing selec­tions: diigo​.com/​0​e​8gw

That Diigo link will take you to Radio Paradise’s home­page with the note I added. That’s really useful.

Diigo just a few moments ago put out a Tran­si­tion to Diigo FAQ. Export­ing from Deli­cious is really easy and import­ing it to Diigo is easy too–though not instant, it was about twelve hours. I’m con­fi­dent enough about Diigo that I’ve upgraded to the $40/year Pre­mium account–partly chip­ping in since I imag­ine they’re being hit with lots of new accounts today.

Metrop­o­lis is a “news, analy­sis and com­men­tary” site from vet­eran Philadel­phia reporter Tom Fer­rick (Wikipedia). An alum of The Philadel­phia Inquirer, Tom’s spent the last half-dozen years talk­ing to every­one who will lis­ten about the future of print and Philly news. He’s done talk­ing and is show­ing what can be done on a bud­get bud­get. From “This is Metrop­o­lis,” the lead article:

Local news­pa­pers, TV and radio sta­tions are retreat­ing from in-depth cov­er­age of regional news either due to eco­nomic or audi­ence considerations.

The retreat has been grad­ual, but no one expects it to stop. The com­pany that owns the region’s largest news­pa­pers — the Inquirer and Daily News — is in bank­ruptcy. The size of the edi­to­r­ial staffs at the papers con­tin­ues to shrink. The prog­no­sis for metro dailies here and else­where is not good. The jour­nal­ism prac­ticed by these papers is still robust, but the eco­nomic model that has sus­tained it is erod­ing. If these tra­di­tional sources of news fal­ter or fail what will take their place?

The site was built in Mov­able Type. The most promi­nent fea­ture is the slideshow dis­play of fea­tured arti­cles. Tom has seen a sim­i­lar effect on another jour­nal­ism site and a search found the “Slid­ing Hor­i­zon­tal Ban­ner Rota­tor” at Active Den, a great site to pur­chase pre-built Flash files. Mov­able Type entries are out­fit­ted with cus­tom fields to enter images and links. Mov­able Type then cre­ates a cus­tom XML file for the “Main Sto­ries” feed, which is then picked up and dis­played by the Flash ban­ner. In addi­tion, the site uses Google Adsense to pro­vide income.

Visit: Philadel­phia Metropolis

Con­tinue…

Over on my O’Reilly Media blog, I’ve writ­ten “Will Face­book (all but) replace cor­po­rate web­sites?,” a look at where I think the third-party social media web­sites are going. Here’s a taste:

The goal of most web­sites is to extended the inter­ac­tion with the vis­i­tor beyond this one visit: we seek to sell them a prod­uct, join our mail­ing list, buy tick­ets to our event or sub­scribe to us in a news reader. Face­book is quickly becom­ing the most impor­tant email list and news reader. If it con­tin­ues to inno­vate (and bor­row ideas from inno­v­a­tive com­peti­tors) it could quickly become a major com­mer­cial por­tal as well. As its adop­tion rate climbs within the ranks of our tar­get audi­ences, it becomes an effec­tive way to extend vis­i­tor rela­tion­ship and build more inti­mate brand identities.

This will change company’s inter­ac­tions with cus­tomers, who will start to expect and then demand real-time inter­ac­tion. This can take many forms–status updates, cal­en­dars, videos–but the empha­sis will be on imme­di­acy. The style will shift from slickly-produced mass mar­ket­ing to a one-on-one respon­sive back and forth. Smart mar­keters will think less in terms of sell­ing and more in terms of rela­tion­ship build­ing. Ana­lyt­ics and constantly-rolling A/B tests will give us a near real-time gauge with which to mea­sure the suc­cess of these rela­tion­ships. The reces­sion is bring­ing a new urgency for mea­sur­able results and might actu­ally help shift cor­po­rate and non-profit bud­gets away from high-price opin­ions and toward this new style of social-network-mediated marketing.

It will be inter­est­ing to see how orga­ni­za­tions adapt to social media’s evolv­ing role.

Strangely enough, the Philadel­phia Inquirer has pub­lished a front-page arti­cle on lead­er­ship in Philadel­phia Yearly Meet­ing, “Friends frus­trate some of their flock, Quak­ers bogged down by process, two lead­ers say”. To me it comes off as an extended whine from the for­mer PhYM Gen­eral Sec­re­tary Thomas Jeav­ons. His cri­tiques around Philadel­phia Quaker cul­ture are well-made (and well known among those who have seen his much-forwarded emails) but he doesn’t seem as insight­ful about his own fail­ings as a leader, pri­mar­ily his inabil­ity to forge con­sen­sus and build trust. He fre­quently came off as too ready to bypass rightly-ordered decision-making processes in the name of strong lead­er­ship. The more this hap­pened, the more dis­trust the body felt toward him and the more intractible and politi­cized the sit­u­a­tion became. He was the wrong leader for the wrong time. How is this wor­thy of the front-page news­pa­per status?

The “Mak­ing New Friends” out­reach cam­paign is a cen­tral exam­ple in the arti­cle. It might have been more suc­cess­ful if it had been given more sea­son­ing and if out­sider Friends had been invited to par­tic­i­pate. The cam­paign was kicked off by a sur­vey that con­firmed that the great­est threat to the future of the yearly meet­ing was “our grey­ing mem­ber­ship” and that out­reach cam­paigns “should tar­get young adult seek­ers.” I attended the yearly meet­ing ses­sion where the sur­vey was pre­sented and the cam­paign approved and while every Friend under forty had their hands raised for com­ments, none were rec­og­nized by the clerk. “Mak­ing New Friends” was the per­fect oppor­tu­nity to tap younger Friends but the work seemed designed and under­taken by the usual sus­pects in yearly meeting.

Like a lot of Quaker orga­ni­za­tions, Philadel­phia Yearly Meet­ing has spent the last fif­teen years largely rely­ing on a small pool of estab­lished lead­er­ship. There’s lit­tle atten­tion to lead­er­ship devel­op­ment or tap­ping the large pool of tal­ent that exists out­side of the few dozen insid­ers. This Spring Jeav­ons had an arti­cle in PYM News that talked about younger Friends that were the “future” of PYM and put the cut-off line of youthfulness/relevance at fifty! The recent polit­i­cal bat­tles within PYM seemed to be over who would be included in the insider’s club, while our real prob­lems have been a lack of trans­parency, inclu­sion and patience in our deci­sion mak­ing process.

Philadel­phia Friends cer­tainly have their lead­er­ship and author­ity prob­lems and I under­stand Jeav­ons’ frus­tra­tions. Much of his analy­sis is right. I appre­ci­ated his reg­u­larly col­umn in PYM News, which was often the only place Christ and faith was ever seri­ously dis­cussed. But his approach was too heavy handed and cor­po­rate to fit yearly meet­ing cul­ture and did lit­tle to address the long-term issues that are lap­ping up on the yearly meet­ing doorsteps.

For what it’s worth, I’ve heard some very good things about the just-concluded yearly meet­ing ses­sions. I sus­pect the yearly meet­ing is actu­ally begin­ning a kind of turn-around. That would be welcome.

Don’t miss:

• The Inquirer has an inter­est­ing com­ment thread on the article
• More blog chat­ter via these tech­no­rati links: Here and here (stu­pid blog-unfriendly Inquirer URL system)