Oprah Sucks!

I was thinking today of who was the most untouchable person in America, the sacred cow that must be bowed down to.  It’s got to be Oprah Winfrey.

Somewhere along the way Oprah did more than find the tipping point to massive popularity; she found the tipping point to sainthood on earth.  You just don’t hear anyone badmouth her anymore—maybe they just all are hoping to get on her show someday.

When I was living in Chicago, I sort of tangentially knew a producer on the Oprah show.  You should have seen how people treated her when they found out she had close, personal access to Oprah.  They thought she was the bee’s knees, just for working there.

It may be hard to remember now, but it wasn’t horribly long ago that Oprah was OK with scrabbling around in the gutter with Jenny Jones, Sally Jesse Raphael, Rikki Lake (and let’s not forget Rolonda) to find guests that would tell their circus sideshow stories.  She wasn’t in Springer territory necessarily, but she hadn’t gone all Dr. Phil on us yet.

And then she shed the pretenders and now is Queen of All Media.  My favorite line to my wife while in the checkout line at the grocery store: “Guess who’s on the cover of Oprah magazine this month?”

I have nothing against Oprah.  I think she’s entertaining and it’s obvious why people are drawn to her personality.  But what was it that pushed her over the edge to become an untouchable?  When did it become bad personal policy to say an unkind word against Stedman Graham’s main honey?

More important, how can I and my business get me some of that?

A Campaign of Hope

I went to college with the guy who is using this ad against his opponent in a bid to retain his seat as an Ohio state senator. Guess which party he is from.

3-Way Plug By Claes Oldenburg

Quotable

Stephen J. Dubner:

“For the past several years, newspapers have been reporting on their own circulation declines with a strange degree of intensity. They write prominent, mournful, self-flagellating stories of their own decline that remind me of a friend who used to sniff his own underarm when he knew it was particularly randy.”

The Latest Bessed October 31, 2006

Every day Bessed adds new topics, updates others and expands the information you can tap into…

Reese Witherspoon is divorcing from her husband of 7 years, Ryan Phillippe.

Violent Acres is a new blog that is attacking “mommybloggers” and creating some blogosphere drama.

Mariah Carey had a show canceled in Hong Kong due to poor ticket sales and possibly some diva-ish behavior.

By request, we added Mammoth Lakes Real Estate, Online Advertising and Spa Vacations.

Other additions: Deborah Harry, Gawker Media, Healdsburg California.

Also, updates to Golf, Michael J. Fox and Search Engines.

Got a site that needs attention? Add yout URL to Bessed. We might not have a category that fits your site—if not, we’ll be happy to make one.

So Many Details, So Little Time

I’ve become a regular reader of the blog Sack of Seattle. It’s from Andy Sack, the head of Judy’s Book, which is a consumer review/shopping deals site that is still ramping up and to a certain extent trying to figure out what it’s final business model is going to be. The reason I’m enjoying it is because Judy’s Book is trying to create something big while working with a relatively small staff, and what they are doing is rather time-intensive—it’s not simply creating a piece of technology and letting it loose; it requires a lot of human effort. Much like my own company, Bessed.

Sack wrote yesterday about getting some difficult feedback from a customer who likes Judy’s Book but is frustrated with some changes that the site is undergoing. If I understand correctly, though, some of the changes are necessary if Judy’s Book actually wants to make some money.

Sack responds to the customer’s comments well, but in listening to the complaints, I’m reminded of how difficult it is to create something that people want to use while simultaneously making a profit from it.

It’s easy to create something that people want, whether it’s a product or service. The question is, are people willing to pay, and, if so, how much? If they’re not willing to pay, can you translate the bodies/eyeballs into a workable business via advertising revenue? If you can, how much work will it take to make that process happen, both in terms of finding the advertisers and figuring out how to make their advertising pay dividends so that they continue to want to be associated with you?

In many startups, especially Internet startups, the first step is in building the offering. If it’s good enough to attract attention, you then have to convert some of that attention to actual money. And while you’re trying to get to a healthy monetization level, you still need to provide all the things you provided to begin with that brought you the visitors/customers in the first place. And you have to do this double work with the same staff you had when you were doing half the work, which already seemed like more than twice the work that most humans could reasonably handle.

Even more difficult, if your business has ramped up to a decent level but not home-run territory, and the money’s starting to run low, you may have to shift gears to monetization before you’d like to, thus forcing you to somewhat take your eye off the ball in terms of providing the service or product that brings you customers in the first place.

It’s no wonder that sometimes the details get lost in the shuffle, or that as a business owner you simply have to choose what is the most important thing that needs to get done at a particular time, and live with the fact that there is something else that needs attention but will not be getting it at the moment.

And yet everyone wants to be an entrepreneur these days.

e-mail me: adam@bessed.com

Adam Jusko is founder and CEO of Bessed, a Web site promising “search without spam”, thanks to human-edited search results and ongoing visitor feedback. Do a search, offer your comments, submit your site–help create the “bessed” search site in the world. 

The Latest Bessed – October 26, 2006

Every day Bessed adds new topics, updates others and expands the information you can tap into…

Sasha Baron Cohen’s alter ego Borat is coming to theaters soon, and the buzz is growing.  Check out the first four minutes of his film and you’ll see why people love him and why others are horrified.

Lost had its best episode of the season last night, IMO. In fact, it drew me back in after a couple of weeks of starting to feel a little apathetic about the show.  Regardless, they need to wrap it up this year.  I won’t be watching the show for another season if they drag it out further. End it this year and it goes out on top.  String us along any further and you’ll end up talking to yourselves.

Dancing With The Stars kicked off Jerry Springer.  Has any show ever got by with so little content, and so many has-beens or never-weres,  as this one? I mean, other than The Love Boat?

By request, we added Astrology, Exercise Journals / Exercise Logs, Jewelry, Classifieds, How-To Videos and Florida Title Insurance.

And let’s not forget Harry Potter.  It’s almost Halloween after all.

Book Review: The Joke’s Over by Ralph Steadman

Ralph Steadman met Hunter S. Thompson at the 1970 Kentucky Derby and for the next 35 or so years his artwork helped drive the success of some of Thompson’s most important works. While Steadman’s name may not ring a bell with the average American, his work is immediately recognizable to Thompson fans, and it’s safe to say that neither of their careers would have been the same without the other.

Nevertheless, in his new book The Joke’s Over, Steadman says his first reaction to Thompson shooting himself to death in early 2005 was “About bloody time!” While it’s clear that Steadman loved Thompson and that this was a bit of black humor (or maybe Steadman didn’t at first believe the news), it’s also clear that Thompson could be difficult, defensive and selfish. Whether it was their shared love of “gonzo” journalism that kept them together, or whether once united their highest worth to the outside world was as a team, their relationship endured to the end. It was a wild ride and not always an easy one.

The Joke’s Over is a must-read for any Hunter S. Thompson fan, and for the many Ralph Steadman fans as well. Built on anecdotes from both their famous collaborations and from good ideas that collapsed under the weight of their drug-addled revelry, the book offers almost 400 pages worth of stories that only someone in the midst of the gonzo action could tell you.

In 1970, Steadman was paired up with Thompson to illustrate Thompson’s take on the seedier side of the Kentucky Derby for Scanlan’s Monthly magazine (which would fold soon after). While Steadman wasn’t Thompson’s first choice, it soon became clear that Steadman was willing and able to roll with Thompson’s pace and idiosyncracies, and that Steadman’s garish art was the perfect complement to Thompson’s caustic words.

So it was natural that Steadman would be the choice to illustrate the story that would be Hunter’s biggest break, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas for the still fledgling Rolling Stone magazine. The story was a big success, but even today Steadman has some hard feelings about being short-changed in the money department: “Where is Winnie the Pooh without its illustrations? Where is Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas without its Gonzo drawings?” On the other hand, he says, “I wouldn’t have missed the trip for the world.”

In the years that followed, Thompson and Steadman worked on a variety of high-profile projects, including covering the 1972 political conventions and Watergate. Perhaps the most interesting story Steadman tells, though (other than the initial Kentucky Derby episodes), concerns the “Rumble in the Jungle”, the 1974 fight in Zaire between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman. The combination of the surreal setting and the general “anything goes” nature of working with Thompson makes for a bizarre trip in which Steadman learns that George Foreman wanted to be a baker, Thompson sells their fight tickets and the story of it all never sees the light of day.

Because Steadman lived in England, communication between he and Thompson was often via mail or via fax, and that happy occurrence means that many of those words still exist and are reprinted here. In his letters, Thompson comes off as suspicious of people hitching themselves to his star (even accusing Steadman of it) and he is sometimes straight out mean. At the same time, he can be hilarious and often tempers his harsh words with a buddy-buddy tone that gives the impression it’s all a big joke. It’s a style that seems to have kept people off-balance, which may be appropriate as Thompson was more than a little unbalanced himself.

Steadman sees in Thompson a man who was continually hurt by the injustices of the world and created a strike-first persona as a defense mechanism. In fact, he opines that Thompson’s eventual suicide was driven partly by his disillusionment with what he saw as the lies and corruption of the Bush administration, or more precisely his view that his America was no longer. Whether that is true no one will ever know, and in a concluding letter Steadman writes to Thompson questioning why he did it and conveying his sadness that Thompson felt it had to be done.

It was a wild, sometimes difficult trip, but Steadman seems aware that it’s not often you come across a personality like Hunter S. Thompson, and his gratefulness at having had the opportunity to play sidekick on some of Thompson’s great adventures comes shining through. Pick up The Joke’s Over and you’ll get one last chance to eavesdrop on a world that only Hunter S. Thompson could have created.

e-mail me: adam@bessed.com

Adam Jusko is founder and CEO of Bessed, a Web site promising “search without spam”, thanks to human-edited search results and ongoing visitor feedback. Do a search, offer your comments, submit your site–help create the “bessed” search site in the world.

Reporting the News in a New Way

My biggest concern in creating Bessed (other than money, time and resources) has been to differentiate it from what other search services offer.

We can not compete with the major search engines on their turf. We’ll never be able to supply the phone number of your local pizza place in every city of the United States. There is an inherent limitation to using human editors.

We can easily become the best Web directory, but that’s a short hurdle. It will take time, but I have no doubt Bessed will outshine the Yahoo Directory and the Open Directory over the long haul.

But that’s not enough. To be more than a small, marginally profitable entity, we have to offer something no one else is offering. To do so, I’ve looked at Wikipedia for inspiration. Bessed is very different from Wikipedia, but we can learn from it in building our site.

People love Wikipedia because it’s one of the few places online you can go to get a complete overview on a topic. Want to know about the magician David Copperfield? (Just pulling a name out of the air here, couldn’t say where it came from.) Wikipedia will tell you where David Copperfield was born, his life history and a few other interesting tidbits. Sure, the nature of Wikipedia means that someone could come in and write that Copperfield sleeps with 75 snakes each night, but in general you’re going to get pretty accurate information from the site. And no one other site is as thorough on so many topics.

What does Bessed do to similarly differentiate itself? We first must understand that to be a different kind of search service it won’t be enough to just offer a bunch of links. Instead, we have to paint a picture on each search results page. Someone should be able to come in and within the first dozen links have a great overview of a topic. Then, if they want to delve further, they can use the links further down the page. In the end, they should feel like they got everything they needed in the shortest amount of time possible.

No search engine or directory does an adequate job of this. Search engines use an algorithm that often gives you the almost identical content from 10 different competing sites, forcing you to keep looking and looking to get a clear picture of a topic you’re researching. Web directories give you a bunch of static links listed alphabetically and tell you to do with them what you will. Search engines aren’t ideal, directories aren’t even close.

Bessed has the opportunity to paint that picture. As an example, see our World Series 2006 results. We start with the official site of the World Series from Major Leage Baseball, but then the links are sort of a backward-looking view at the Series as it progresses. Right now that means that you’re getting Game 2 highlight links, including multiple links from news organizations and blogs about the controversy over whether Detroit Tigers pitcher Kenny Rogers was using an illegal substance to get a leg up on the Cardinals. Further down are select links on Game 1, further down from there are links to articles that previewed the Series. Interspersed among those links are links to commentary on the Series overall. By the time the Series is over, a visitor will be able to come in and quickly find just about everything he or she would want to know about this World Series, from the big picture to the game-by-game highlights to the opinions of both journalists and fans who followed the event.

We’re not creating content, but by artfully putting the story together through the use of timely, relevant links, it becomes a comprehensive look at the many aspects of this World Series.

Our goal is to do this as much as possible, to become the go-to site for anyone who wants a well-crafted overview of an event, person, subject, etc. Some topics will lend themselves to this better than others. The World Series has more depth than the subject of air compressors, unless you’re really, really into air compressors.

If we can become the go-to site for the best links on topics people are looking to really dive into, we will also get the less deep searches as well, and that’s what will ultimately drive our success.

I mentioned to someone not long ago that what Bessed is doing is what a smart newspaper would do. A smart newspaper would continue to report stories, but backfill those stories with links to other newspapers, blogs, sites of interest that provide an overview of the subject being reported on—each story offers the reader a chance to get the big picture. No one does this because they don’t want to give up the eyeballs. (To be fair, some newspapers have begun to include blog links alongside stories, but it’s an automated, hit-or-miss affair.)

We’re certainly not going into the newspaper business, but we’re going to fill that gap where search, news, blogging and wikis intersect—or where they would intersect if anyone was willing to put the work in to make it happen.

Is Google Custom Search a Revolution or Just Keeping Up with the Yahoos?

As part of its Google Co-op offering, Google is now offering you the ability to “roll your own” search engine. Basically this means you can create a custom search engine for your site that can limit the search to certain URLs, or give certain URLs priority in the results. This can be used simply as a site search to allow people to search your site, or you can include many multiple sites in your engine that are authority sites for whatever niche you might be interested in. For example, you could create your own Beatles search engine and give priority to sites you know do a good job of focusing on Beatles content. And, Google’s offering will add Adsense ads to the search engine, giving Webmasters a share of revenue if site visitors click on the ads.

It’s a nice offering, but I imagine it will have limited adoption. Why? Because it takes work to create a custom search engine in terms of deciding which URLs are more important than others, and unless you really see this search engine as providing a service to your visitors, you probably won’t bother. Yes, there is the revenue share aspect that will drive some people to it, but God knows Google ads are already everywhere. Webmasters don’t really need a new custom search engine as a way to increase their Adsense income–the result is more likely to be a shift in terms of where the revenue comes from than an increase in revenue overall.

The most obvious application is for Webmasters to use Google’s search interface to offer visitors the opportunity to search their own sites, something Google’s already been offering for a long time.

I don’t know if this is really seen as a big idea inside Google or simply a way to keep up with Yahoo’s Search Builder and similar offerings from companies such as Rollyo.

The fact is that in most cases when you do a search, you don’t want it limited to just a few sites. Although it may be true that you’d like to see sites come out on top that you consider most trustworthy, you don’t want to shun sites that are little-known but happen to cover small niches really well. And it’s not always readily apparent where a good search result is going to come from. A site that spends a lot of time talking about hockey might suddenly write a very informative page or blog post on the best places to visit in Toronto. If your personal search engine excludes certain sites or always makes others more important, you might miss out on the good stuff from unlikely sources. Some will be willing to pay that price, but most will just continue to let the search engines sort it out, even if at times the results they get are frustrating.

TechCrunch and GigaOM both covered this, and neither seemed to think it was overly earth-shaking.

Via Brewed Fresh Daily, here’s a Google Custom Search just created for Cleveland, Ohio information.