Author: David Churbuck

Oh god. The things you learn when you google onanistically.

Back in the dark ages of the late 90s, when I was living out of a garment bag at the Yale Club and running Forbes.com, Jim Motavalli dropped by my office to interview me for a book he was researching about big media and the internet. I broke my first rule of reporters speaking to reporters — don’t do it — and spoke to him. I knew Jim for a few years. He was buddy of the ex-publisher of the magazine, Jeff Cunningham, and had been a dot.com columnist for the New York Post.

So, there in Google is a reference to me in Motavalli’s book — Bamboozled at the Revolution: How Big Media Lost Billions in the Battle for the Internet . I go to Amazon, pick up a used copy for (no shit) $0.01 and wait. It arrived yesterday. I jump to the index, find my name, and lo and behold there’s two pages devoted to my favorite person.

Me.

Motavalli sums me up this way:

Churbuck, famous for his bow ties and droll post-preppie demeanor, had had the foresight to register the domain name Forbes.com in 1994, and wrote a letter to Forbes magazine chairman Steve Forbes suggesting that Churbuck helm a Forbes Web project.”

“Droll?” Whatever. I don’t think John grasped the point that I had been writing for Forbes for six years as an associate and then senior editor. The rest of the passage makes me sound like some weird geek with a Forbes infatuation who snatched the domain name and wrote fan letters to his favorite presidential candidate looking for a job.

“If a leading magazine like Forbes could trust its web site to a complete outsider, an intellectual and computer geek who had little in common with the ambitious Forbes family, then all bets were off when it came to figuring out what media web sites were about.”

Again, John needed to check a couple facts. The reason I got the nod to start Forbes.com was because I was an insider already sitting on the masthead. Forbes.com wouldn’t have gotten out of the gate if it had been launched by an outsider. (I’ll take the sobriquet “geek” with pride, though I would have qualified it by saying I am a “geek manque”). As for “little in common” with the ambitious Forbes family. When it comes to bank balances and boats, yes, they are in an utterly different leaghe. But yes, I am a preppy. I graduated from the same little prep school that Steve Forbes did, and where he was chairman of the board of trustees. In fact, I wrote a letter to Steve in 1988 when I was suffering at PC Week, a letter which began with the line: “Not to tug on the old school tie, but here goes …”

Motavalli makes it sound like the Forbes’ were clueless about the web. That’s the thesis of his book afterall — big media was sucking its thumb and covered with drool when it came to the web. Not so at Forbes. Sure they dicked around with Prodigy and the accursed CompuServe in the early 90s — something I wasn’t happy about. But when it came time to go web, they went to the web, gave me a lot of slack, a lot of money, and a lot of encouragement.

Tim Forbes was entirely realistic about the potential of Forbes.com and the necessity for it to grow, even at the expense of the print side. The state of Forbes.com today — with awesome management in the form of Jim Spanfeller (ex-publisher of Inc. and Yahoo Internet Life), huge traffic, and allegedly strong financials — is a testament to the Forbes brothers’ foresight and patience in making their dot.com strategy central to the company.

Motavalli paints a convenient picture of a culture war between those darned web guys and the clueless suits. Sure, there were clueless suits, and sure, there were arrogant web guys. I don’t know where John got this pearl, but it wasn’t so:

“Churbuck and his counterparts would attend occasional Web-vision meetings with the executive hierarchy, but these sessions were painful for all concerned, and most of the advice doled out by the top echelon was useless and uninformed.”

There were never any “web-vision” meetings. Strategy was set directly by four people — Greg Zorthian the director of business development, DeWayne Martin the general manager of Forbes.com, Tim Forbes the COO of Forbes, and me. I was the ambassador of good will to the editors of the magazines — Jim Michaels and Bill Baldwin at Forbes, Rich Karlgaard at ASAP, and Chris Buckey at FYI. Advice was never “useless and uninformed.” There were stupid ideas, there were great ideas. There were distractions, diversions, and all sorts of day to day annoyances, but all-in-all, Forbes.com set, in my completely biased opinion, the standard for good print-to-web relations. The fact that we utterly kicked the asses of Fortune and Businessweek is testament enough for me.

Did we operate Forbes.com in a bit of a guerilla vacuuum? Sure. We had a couple operating principles: the first was “It’s better to beg forgiveness than ask for permission” and the second defined our strategy: “Ready. Fire. Aim.” Did we charge new PCs and software on our corporate cards because we didn’t want to put up with the central purchasing bullshit? Sure. Those frisky web guys. Did we think the adoption of things like the CueCat or the circulation department’s demands that we run pop-ups to sell subscriptions were evil? Yep. Forbes.com was no love fest. But it was a hell of a lot of fun to start and launch.

I don’t think I’d want to be managing it now. The crack-pipe of traffic growth will suck the life out you. But it had its days and remains one of the most fun things I’ve ever done.

“For the David Churbucks of the media world, the future was less than assured. And who wants to work in an environment where you are alternately admired, feared, resented, and, finally, viewed with contempt?”

Sigh. That’s a shitty epitaph for six years of hard work. Yeah, I expect there were people who admired me, feared me, resented me, and viewed me with contempt. I’ll get over it. There are weasels everywhere in life.

Jim Forbes, formerly the host of DemoMobile, asked me last month if I had tried Microsoft’s OneNote, part of the Office 2003 suite. I hadn’t, so I checked it out, downloaded a two-month trial, and after a month of use, felt happy enough to pay for a full license.

The app is ostensibly for note-taking, and follows a tabbed file-folder structure. I can see how it would really rule on a pen-based laptop, but being a better typist than penman, I more than happy with it without the handwriting feature.

The sweet thing about OneNote is that it is by far the best web-scraper I’ve used. You can drag URLs, full pages, and block-saves of web pages very easily. Performing research and trying to compile emails, file attachments, URLs, images, into one page is difficult. Microsoft Word is funky and while html friendly, not the best place for pulling together projects.

Any how, my endorsement. Good app that came out of left field. There’s a research functionI discovered today that points searches to MSN and Encarta along with some third parties like Thompson. Chris Locke needs to push the folks at Highbeam to get integrated there. My main beef with highbeam is how to saves documents and leaves open firefox windows all over the place. Sucking highbeam directly into OneNote would be a good thing I think.

Update 2.17.05:
Steve Weir from Highbeam emailed this info:

“Issue #1: Do we work with MSFT OneNote? We are actually integrated into all Microsoft Office products in their research pane. Unfortunately, to our continued annoyance, our old brand name (eLibrary) is still showing up instead of our new name. If you want to search HighBeam in Office, just use the research pane, and select “eLibrary” as your resource, it should work just fine..

“Issue #2: Strange blank window in Firefox. I think I recreated this on my PC, but, I want to be sure. Did this happen for you when you clicked on our “export to Office” feature? I found a similar bug, and we are working to take care of it (our Firefox compatibility isn’t where it needs to be – yet).

Thanks Steve.

One of the more frustrating things of my lunchtime reading ritual is opening up Romensko and following the links to one after another newspaper site that insists of asking for name, rank, and serial number before letting me view their precious content.

So, I use bugmenot and provide newspapers with fake log-ins.

Call me a criminal. The only reason newspaper pinheads inflict this conceited nonsense is so they can ostensibly target their ads, which my eye avoids anyway.

I just went to read a Howard Kurtz piece at the washingtonpost.com and took great satisfaction at providing the Post with bugmenot’s login:

registrationsux@effco.com
spumco

John Dvorak started the campaign.

Steve Yelvington demurs but maddeningly links to a white paper on the topic which costs $40 to read.

The news that CNET is aggregating RSS feeds within its site with Newsburst came as a relief to me as I work with Mark Cahill to develop a way for a non-technical community to participate in a community of blogs held loosely together by a common niche. After installing several feed readers I pretty much gave up using them for various reasons and wondered by I couldn’t point my subscribed feeds to a single page.

Mark came up with this prototype as an example of how a publisher can serve its users by pointing them to affiliated blogs through a master index and sub-category indices.

We’re still debugging it, but it seems essential to our strategy of providing WordPress based blogs to our 8,000 registered users while retaining the ties that bind the community together.

I expect to see other publishers leap onto the Newsburst bandwagon over the next three months to keep their users on the reservation.

No surprise. (Reuters story) Carol Loomis’ story in the recent Fortune painted a pretty bleak picture. Compaq did Carly in. One of the worst considered mergers in tech due to the inevitable commodization of boxes. No one cares anymore about PC or server brands. The things are toasters. So what did HP expect to gain from picking up CPQ? DEC’s legacy technology? The 64-bit Alpha architecture? A reputation set by Rod Canion as an innovator and attacker that was set in the early 80s?

The same generification of technology that compelled IBM to shed its PC assets to Lenovo worked to destroy Compaq’s value to HP. Carly got steamrollered by the toaster-ization of desktop and server tech and of course, a grumpy board.

Shame, she came on strong when she arrived in 1999.

I notice Google Mail is now giving me 50 invites to pass around.

Last week I was down to two.
I’ve got two accounts running, and have been noodling how to open up all 50 of the invites and stitch together 50 free (albeit very disconnected) gigabytes of online storage using a Gmail virtual drive extension.

Having read that a 1 gigabyte drive cost $3,000 ten years ago, what is 50 gigs worth? What does this say about the cost of server space?

Om Malik on Broadband ? Consumer Reluctance on VoIP%u2026 So Far

Om posted about a Forrester report slagging consumer uptake of VoIP and sought some comments on why. So, in the interests of incestuous cross-linking, here’s a link to my comment.

Full disclosure: I signed on for Verizon DSL in December to try to cut my cable modem charges (Comcast, maybe $40+ a month to DSL at $29.95) but the damn setup box is sitting under my desk, nagging at me to rip out the cable modem, replace it with the DSL box, call up Comcast and cancel, etc. etc.

Yet I can’t bring myself to do it. Call it broadband inertia but I just don’t feel like hosing my connection (pessimism springs eternal when you provide tech support for a family of completely disinterested PC users who feel compelled to junk up every computer they touch with spyware, viruses, Weatherbugs, Lycos search dogs, etc. etc.).

COAST – the consortium of anti-spyware developers – has fallen apart according to E-Week. What did COAST in? Some members say it was the proposed granting of membership to some spyware companies, , such as 180Solutions, saying that opening the standards-setting group to include the very targets it was trying to thwart would turn the consortium into a farce, lending a marketing blessing to the enermy.

Others said the revenue motivation of some members had slowed progress.

Standard-setting bodies are a tactical dance between the members — often competitors — who must strike a balance between their economic interests and the greater good of the standard. One McKinsey partner, when advising a client who had several options during the frothy hey-day of B-2-B consortia (join an b-2-b group created by a competitor, create its own or join one created by a startup), told the client to accept membership in all of them for the simple, evil reason that if the client ever wanted to insure the failure of a consortia, the best place to work its will was within the consortia, as a member.

In this case, the unique twist on this failed standard is not a dispute over the technical architecture or other fine point, but on the strange position of debating whether to permit the membership of a company the standard was trying to thwart. Hypothetically like NATO falling apart over the issue of letting the USSR join in 1960. The ulterior motive of a 180solutions — which Spyware guru Ben Edelman has blasted for having one of the most befuckticated installation routines of all — and other spyware/ad technology scum is to cloak themselves in the respectability of a consortium like your local meth lab joining MADD.

I met with a Massachusetts magazine publisher on Friday. They publish three print titles in the IT-executive leadership space and do about $40 million a year in revenue. The CEO said the goal is to have online revenues equal print by 2007 .

Ambitious? Sure, but further indication that the print world is seeing some lasting value from the online component, even going so far, as one former employer did, to predict a cross-over in their business model from paper to digits before the decade is out.

What is particularly interesting is the goal of the publisher I met on Friday, while focused on traffic and inventory development in the short term, is the need to support a very high CPM by transforming impressions into leads.

Lead generation is a tough nut to crack. It requires the pass through of contact information via registration which, past wisdom has held, is impossible unless the carrot is big enough and valuable enough to induce parting with personal details that the owner assumes will result in some form of spam — be it emails, cold calls, whatever.

While one can argue that click-through advertising such as Adsense or Overture is one primitive form of lead generation, the publisher in question, who distributes the print product on a pre-qualification basis, is looking for something far more substantive and informational than a mere adjacent relationship between a keyword and a click.

What is the content bait that needs to be set in the trap? Will users reject any lead-generation scheme, avoid registration via work-around like bugmenot.com, or can they be teased to part with valid information in exchange for something valuable?

This goes back to an observation made by Andy Kessler to me in 1994, that user information is the currency of online publishing; not eyeballs, clicks, or subscription dollars.