Entries Tagged 'layoff' ↓

While no one doubts that there are a lot of folks who hang around social web sites, and do things, stay in touch with friends, stalk former friends, the idea of social networks as a gaming platform might not be a bad idea. You go where the folks are, and gaming is one way that people choose to waste their time, and anyways games can be more fun.

The idea of social gaming is nothing new; variants on the theme seem to work well in communities like FFXI and Halo series that allow for cooperative gaming in a virtual environment. Even non game games like Second Life and others also do well. The issue before us now becomes who is investing in social games, and the bigger question is where is the money going to come from. In game ads spring to mind, but these would be more of a subliminal product placement in game, rather than a click – sale form of advertising that we are so used to seeing. Are product placement ads really the way to go here, well if you follow the investment front, Jeff Bezos who is sinking his money into social gaming might be onto something here.

It all depends on how well the money model will work out. With the economy in the tank right now, and people worried about layoffs and other things, people while not looking for a job, will be spending more time on facebook, linked in, myspace hoping that maybe one of their friends might know of something. Job hunting Web 2.0 style, and when the job hunt gets boring, go play a quick game of something while waiting for people to get back to you.

Maybe not a crazy idea after all, as people struggle to find anything, the idea of product placement ads in game make much more sense.

66 University of Washington tech workers are going to be hitting the streets on the 30th of June 2008 due to a “perfect storm of events” that has lead to the largest layoff at the University in near a decade. The scary part is that this is a two part issue, one financial, one technological. On the technology side, a state run institution is finding that they can not compete against the likes of free services provided because web 2.0 is so very effective in delivering commodity services. Even some of the homeless in Seattle have e-mail, it is not surprising then that UW Technology Vice President Ron Johnson would state:

UW Technology Vice President Ron Johnson said the increasing availability of free or low-cost services on the Web through companies such as Google, Microsoft and Amazon.com are rendering some UW services — such as e-mail and document sharing — obsolete. He said annual revenue has dropped by $10 million, to $40 million Source: Seattle Times

The problem with commodity services is that they do what they do very well, provide an excellent service for a very low cost. The advent of Google Docs, and their competitors like Zoho means that the collaboration spaces are not needed for students, students will use their Google mail over the WebPine system that the university uses internally. As the university was unable to afford or find an alternative to the primitive WebPine system, their service infrastructure was doomed. The other perfect event according to Ron was:

Johnson said a “perfect storm” of events meant he wasn’t aware of the dire revenue situation until late February or early March, about six months after the problems began. That perfect storm included a restructuring of the financial reporting process and some key people who were “not on top of the situation in the way we would have liked,” Johnson said. A couple of people have resigned or retired as a result, he added. “There was a lot of denial going on in this,” Johnson said. “Everybody wanted to assume the rosy scenario, not the bad case.” Source: Seattle Times

Financial systems, they need those, but also explains many other issues within the university of Washington system. While the university has little room to grow because the state cannot subsidize them to a level that would allow them to grow, money had to come from somewhere. If the cross over to a new financial system caused a major disruption of the budget, then the easiest way to recoup money is to lay off people. This is money that can be gotten quickly, but the real tragedy is that many of the people coming out of the University of Washington system are going to have a very hard time competing with the modern systems that many other companies use.

Essentially, given knowledge of the systems in place, and not knowing anything else, those that are laid off will have an extraordinarily hard time being employed somewhere else. That is the real tragedy, not a perfect storm of events, but out dated technology skills in a super hot market, with no one wanting to buy them.

Tags: university of Washington, Ron Johnson, technology, layoff, sad, skills, unhappy

More disturbing news coming out of the information security business today about the McAfee hacker safe program that is fairly disturbing in the longer run. Not just for the industry at large but for people who tend to trust that web sites and other sites are doing the right thing to keep their customers safe.

There are just some ideas that are fundamental to hiring someone, and that is the background check. Only to find out that there is yet another security person who has been indited for securities fraud. I wrote about that here.

This is more my general thoughts on things, like run a background check on those you hire. Not everyone is going to want to work for your shiny new company who has your companies best interests in mind.

There is a long trail on friend feed about this one as well right here.

While there are a lot of folks who are generally decent, but you can not trust everyone you hire, you want to, but some folks have motivations that can destroy a team, a company, a group, even a product, there are far too many examples of this kind of behavior.

This story here is one of those “prime examples” of otherwise good employee causes company lots of pain. These kinds of stories are far too common.

I keep on saying to just about anyone who will listen that people who are in the security industry have the same ability to mess with someone’s life as a bad lawyer, a bad doctor, and a bad nurse. Maybe it is time to clean the industry up, bring some real professionalism to it, so we can catch people like this earlier. Of course this takes a lot of due diligence on the part of an employer, we might not get there.

Tags: hire, information security, trust, false, sense, security

As we struggle through being labeled by Google as a malware site, we are having a crash course in what to do when the Google Gods of search think you are dangerous. Now there is an even bigger problem, as we work on the web site, and write cool stuff, there are things that people need to do to get the Google Gods to bless you again.

Asking for a review via the Web Master Tools is just the beginning, the problem intensifies itself when you need to figure out that Google is going to take its own sweet team cleaning up the disaster in their index.

It does not matter how fast you clean it up…what matters is how fast Google can clear an erroneous flag in their database.

Struggling through the whole Google banning malware issue has been interesting. It took less than five hours for Google to work out and effectively kill the site in the Google search results. We figured it out in about another five hours and got the whole thing cleaned up in conjunction with the hosting company.

Now Google comes up with this friendly message in their web master tools.

Two weeks, for what took hours on our part to clean up, it will take a minimum of two weeks for Google to get the site killing malware link down.

Quick to damn, slow to fix, that is an issue for any one who runs a web site or blog, or anything else that gets dinged by the almighty gods of Google.

For someone who is extremely quick to fix things, Google should be as timely as well, since they essentially hold the keys to the kingdom for sending traffic your way, if the site is doing due diligence, then they should be as well. No one should have to wait two weeks with a false representation of their web site, blog, or otherwise.

Killer, wrong, and dead wrong. Come on Google, if you are going to kill off a web site, at least have the courtesy to respond at Internet speed. Taking two weeks to check to see if we are “ok” is absolutely unacceptable, especially when it takes less than 5 minutes to come visit the site and clear the flag.

Keywords: Google, malware, label, site, web master tools, messages, stopbadware.org, due diligence, Internet

I know this is old news, but there is much to think about, and wired hits the nail on the head, have mega blogs, those semi-corporate entities that have been giving the papers a run for their money started to top out. Have they effectively gained all the market share they can in a world of fickle media consumers. While it is one thing to deliver value and pray you make it on advertising revenue, the mega blogs are a different matter altogether.

Gawker media is one of those mega blogs, owning multiple sites, three of which have recently been sold to other parties so that they can focus on those properties that are doing very well. This bodes for a recession in the Web 2.0 social space, but it can also bode for some very interesting ideas behind the idea of profit or potential of a blog.

While few are surprised that Nick Denton sold Idolator and Gridskipper, the surprise was with Wonkette the political blog. The idea behind that sale was that in six months Americans will elect a new president. This does not mean that political news will stop, but with a long drawn out contest on the democratic side, frankly the election process is getting a bit dull. No one thought that there would be two huge strong political contenders on the democratic ticket, the republican ticket nominee has been solved for months now.

The conventional take as been that Denton smelled a recession and chose to cash out before the recession hits, as he told SAI. Perhaps he’s hunkering for good reason. Conventional wisdom is that in recessionary times, advertisers will flock to tried and true brands, which could exclude many Gawker properties, however influential they may be of the media. “In a difficult market, there’s often a flight to quality and a flight to the familiar,” Mark Kingdon, chief executive officer of Organic, told us in an interview at ad:tech, a digital advertising conference in San Francisco. Source: Wired

For small niche bloggers, the recession will have some influence on the quality of advertising on the web sites that they write at. While we are not John Chow, telling you I make 30K a month, really I make about > 1% of that, the idea of selling out a semi-hot property before the bad news hits is always a good business decision.

What surprises us is that Valleywag is not on the chopping block. We have talked a lot about valleywag and looking at their websense numbers. There is also that nagging pay cut that people who write for gawker media are trying to cope with. Deep linking is the salvation of a web site, people who are just hitting the main page and not interacting with the site is something that should be causing worries in Gawker head office.

It will be interesting to see if anyone else in the mega blog business will try to sell other under performing blogs, or blogs that have a freshness dating on it. It will also be interesting to see if any other properties in the Gawker Media empire will be sold as the recession really starts to hit middle and upper America in the next six months.

Related entries to Valleywag

Hacker News Bans Valleywag
We knew there was something funny with Gawker Media
When Bloggers cross the ethical line

Keywords: valleywag, nick denton, gawker media, deadpool, sites sold, wonkette, idolator, gridskipper, recession, advance sales, marketing, google adsense, advertising

Reading through Bloomberg this morning and realizing that we have a “perfect storm of doom” that is going to color how people invest, take advantage of new technology, and otherwise support the IT industry as a whole. Add to that companies cutting back on budget, firing people, a true lack of desire to hold back the tide, we are hitting the point where the weight of what we have created is going to alter the next generation of web technologies and people who start them up.

A surge in defaults among subprime borrowers, those with poor or limited credit, spurred the collapse of the U.S. home loan market and has led more than 100 mortgage companies to stop lending, close or sell themselves. As the value of securities tied to mortgages plummeted, lenders and securities firms have reported writedowns and credit losses of at least $245 billion since the beginning of 2007, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Source: Bloomberg

When Bear Sterns can be sold in a weekend fire sale, the larger banking institutions where we keep our money for our companies might be having real issues, you can’t write off 245 billion without pain. That pain will come in reduced savings, reduced purchases of stocks, a greater disparity between economic classes, as well as a host of other issues that will crop up that will influence Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 companies.

It might be the best time to stay stealth and work out the technology before going live and seeing how people adopt your technology. It will not be because they do not want to, but as people cut back on things they want to purchase things they need like food, gas and housing payments, it is going to be a lot harder to find money to invest, or money to be on the Internet.

Picture courtesy of Guerilla-Photographer

Keywords, perfect storm, doom, recession, money, fire sale, bear sterns, billions, write down, bad, banks, banking, money

There is a certain amount of Humor here as chinks in Gawker media begin to start showing up outside the organization. We still think that this is “on the road to deadpool” information. Techcrunch is reporting that Hacker News a Ycombinator group took an informal poll to see if people where interested in a banning news from Valleywag. The answer was “yes”.

Y Combinator founder Paul Graham wrote “Several users have suggested we ban Valleywag, not for anything in particular that they write about, but because their articles are always such deliberate linkbait. I personally agree. In 99% of Valleywag articles, the most interesting thing is the title. But I don’t want to be accused of censorship, so I thought I’d ask for opinions first.” Source: Techcrunch

There is a certain amount of humor here. Earlier we reported that there is something seriously wrong with the Gawker Media numbers for their web sites. While the media empire building might be fun, there are obvious lines in the sand that people are willing to draw.

Techwag might not ever be the most popular blog on the face of the planet, but when you have intentions of running a media empire, it is about traffic, it is about deep linking to articles. Those deep links are what provides the long tail, systems like Hacker News, Digg, stumbleupon and others help with those deep links by providing an alternative search process.

Being banned by one startup system is not going to hurt valleywag, what will hurt is all the news now being generated by the ban, good for hacker news, and a good traffic spike for valleywag, but in the longer run, already the damage is being done. People will go find out why, and never go back, remember that Valleywag’s average time on site is 14 seconds last month, that is not enough time to even register an advertisement.

This is where things get interesting, for us 87% of our traffic is on site for 30 seconds or less, 3.7 is on for upwards of five minutes. We love every one of you who actually stayed on site for those five minutes. We use digg, stumbled upon, etc when we have time and energy to do so to highlight what we think are the best articles. But even that process can back fire like it did for Ask the Admin, who also got banned by Digg in a row similar to what is happening on Hacker News with valleywag.

Bans happen, people get over it, and in the longer run ATA (Ask the Admin) was not damaged by the event, they went somewhere else. That is the charm and beauty of Web 2.0, being banned by one social service is not the same as being banned by Google. There are others, and Valleywag can shrug this off, what is interesting and more important for valleywag as a whole is that people are actively willing to boycott the site. That is what they need to fix, the attitude is cute when you are 2 years old, but the older you get, the harder it is to think the attitude is “cute” or valuable.

Keywords: Ask the Admin, ATA, valleywag, ycombinator, hacker news, techcrunch, banned, ban, traffic stats, blogging, blog