Why did Google Apps choose Django and not TurboGears?

Anyone? I mean, after teaching myself TurboGears. Sigh.

Kids on the Internet

This is completely off-topic, so I'll keep it short.

A friend just sent me a copy of the "Shannon" email that's been circulating for the last many years. The email talks about the dangers of kids being online, how offering any identifying information at all can make them a target for assault or murder.

My nine year old daughter uses the internet so I am very sensitive to the threat. I've given her the talking to about giving out personal information so many times she now recites it along with me. But in an effort to avoid substituting ineffective worrying for actual parenting, I offer this article, Online "Predators" and Their Victims, from the Crimes Against Children Research Center. Just published under the auspices of the American Psychological Association, it's a meta-study that offers guidance to the real dangers to kids online and what we can do about them.

Required reading, if you have kids.

I own a lot of cookbooks; A couple I even own for the recipes

The Times has an interesting internet-killed-old-media article, Internet book piracy will drive authors to stop writing. I'm almost old enough to remember when The Times was called The Daily Universal Register, so take it with a grain of salt when I say that these types of articles always strike me as intentionally hyperbolic. The death of TV, the death of music, the death of newspapers (and even Mark Cuban's dadaist proclamation of the death of the internet) all make good copy, it's true. But even now, ten years after print was declared dead for the first time within my earshot, it still accounts for almost a third of advertising revenue (look at the Jack Myers numbers I referenced yesterday.)

We like to talk about growth, positive or negative, as if the world were all straight lines. Maybe because so much of our business news is investment oriented--where future growth is the primary driver of changes in company value--while the real impact of business on our everyday life is pretty much everything except stock prices.

The best quote in the article, from Tracy Chevalier, author and chair of the Society of Authors (proving, btw, that US journalists are not the only ones too lazy to try to find unbiased sources):

It’s hitting hardest the writers who write books that you dip in and out of: poetry, cookbooks, travel guides, short stories – books where you don’t have to read the whole thing.

Although people still buy [books by] Nigella and Jamie Oliver and Delia it is because of their celebrity. Cookbook authors are really struggling. I do it myself – if I want a recipe I go online and get it for free.

For a while it will be great for readers because they will pay less and less but in the long run it’s going to ruin the information. People will stop writing. There’s a lot of ‘wait and see what the technology brings’ but the trouble is if you wait and see too long then it’s gone. That’s what happened to the music industry.

I look up recipes on the internet all the time. When I want to make something, I usually look up four or five and compare them. So, why do I still buy cookbooks?

Chevalier is confusing two issues: medium and packaging. While it may be true that we no longer care so much about which medium our information comes through, we still care deeply about the packaging. Information may want to be free, but nobody buys media for the information.

My favorite cookbook right now is David Rosengarten's It's All American Food. Rosengarten collects a ton of disparate recipes, each easily the best in its class: I trust this cookbook; when I don't know which recipe to use, I use Rosengarten's. I'm sure I could find recipes as good as Rosengarten's on the internet. But how would I know when I did? I need someone I trust to help me choose, someone who has actually tried the many recipes and has taste similar to mine. I've found that person, and I bought his cookbook (and given it as a present to family members.)

It's simply more efficient to pay $25 for a cookbook with hundreds of well-chosen recipes than to spend an hour online sorting through recipes every time I want to try something new.

Ad Spend Numbers

ReveNews links to Jack Myers' 2006-2009 media spend estimates. Jack's got a great breakdown of media spend by category. Nothing surprising, but it's always nice to look at numbers.

The big growers in 2009? Mobile ads (120% growth from 2008), videogame ads (60%), satellite radio ads (35%), and branded entertainment/product placement (30%) are the top four.

The internet wheezes in at number five, with 28.5% growth over 2008. How so very old media of it.

Handipoints Launches

Viva Chu, a colleague at my last startup, has finally launched Handipoints, his chore tracker/virtual world for kids. He also snagged a nice review in TechCrunch.

Handipoints is a site where parents can create printable chore charts and setup an allowance program that is tied to teaching responsible habits. Kids earn points from doing their chores, homework, and staying healthy. They use their points to buy rewards from their parents or to play games, watch cartoons, and adopt and dress up a cartoon cat in HandiLand.

Congrats, Viva, I look forward to trying it out with my kids.

And then We'll Teach the Saudis How to Farm

While the rest of us are trying to figure out how to make internet brand ads ($5 CPMs, if you're lucky) as engaging as TV ads ($50 CPMs), TechCrunch is trying to figure out how to bring internet style ads to TV.

I'm sort of at a loss for words on this one.

'Pimp' is an Uglier Word

Henrik Torstensson points out an article on BubbleGeneration called Companies Are Not Pimps. Their beef? LBS was holding a conference called Monetizing Social Networks.

Here's BubbleGeneration's take:

MBAs come to B-school wanting to do cool things - and they get crushed into thinking business is about "product" and "monetization"... It was, at least a little bit - in the industrial era... But that was yesterday... If there's one single lesson you apply at the edge, let it be this: business models happen... What that really means is: we don't "monetize" resources. We co-create and co-produce value... Monetize is an ugly word.

Well, this is just dumb. Okay, monetize is an ugly word, in the sense that it means turn into money. You don't want to turn your users into money, Mr. Midas, you want them to compensate you for the value you are providing to them. There is nothing wrong with this. In fact, it seems sort of fair.

So: (1) create value, (2) get your customers to pay you. [Furiously trying not to bring up South Park Gnomes... failed.]

It's amazing the value you can create if you don't need to make any money. But unless you're going to set up as a non-profit and get kind-hearted people to give you cash, you probably can't create value for very long. While I believe people who are willing to create tons of value and not get paid for it are the secular equivalents of saints, I doubt that's what BubbleGeneration meant.

Creating value is not enough. As the Economist notes,

A great paradox of the internet... is that a next big thing—web-mail then, social networking now—can indeed quickly become something that consumers expect from their favourite web portal. The non sequitur is to assume that the new service will be a revenue-generating business in its own right... Web-mail has certainly not become a business... Social networking appears to be similar.

Webmail and social networks create a ton of value. While it may be too soon to tell with social networks, webmail has certainly proved to not be especially "monetizable." But, so what? It makes a little money, it's incredibly useful, it's great. But it shows that you can't map value to money. The belief that value and money are inherently interchangeable is one of the great lies of our capitalist society.

I don't believe that companies should be started with making money foremost in mind. They should be started with some way of solving a problem, making peoples' lives better, resolving an inefficiency: some way of creating value. But after deciding to make the world a better place, the next question company founders need to ask themselves is "how will we make enough money to pay our developers, pay for our overhead, and provide a decent return to our investors for being foolish enough to believe in us?"

If you're not creating value, well then you shouldn't be in business. But if you don't intend to monetize then what you're doing wasn't a business in the first place.