When I was a senior in high school, I was fortunate enough to attend a leadership camp that taught me that we all have prejudices, but those prejudices don’t make us racists. There’s a huge gap between those two things that I fear gets terribly lost when discussions of race come up.

The Tech Is Too White Debate

This is all on my mind because of a debate that hit my Twitter stream today. Jamelle Bouie wrote a piece talking about how tech writers seem to be mostly male and white and reasons why that might be. Tech entrepreneur Jason Calacanis is making waves from a series of tweets that suggest anyone can break in with hard work. These are recapped at The Atlantic and Current Editorials, and Jason did a further post here.

I’m going to stay (mostly) out of the argument over why the tech press is apparently so male and white, and what can be done to fix that. I would agree that it does seem to be that way. Then again, I see TechCrunch co-edited by Alexis Tsotsis; I see AllThingsD co-edited by Kara Swisher. Those are at least encouraging on the “it’s all male” front.

What I want to instead focus on is the idea that’s voiced in several comments that I’ve seen, the idea that white people can’t understand racism. They probably can. It’s just that I’d say in the America (and Britain) that I’ve lived in, they don’t encounter it much.

Much more important, there’s a huge, huge difference between racism, prejudice and discrimination.

How I Learned We’re All Prejudiced

Now I’m going to tell my story of that leadership camp to explain some of this more personally, then I’ll get back into the more generic discussion.

The camp was sponsored by what was then called the National Conference of Christians & Jews. Today, it’s the National Conference for Community and Justice — keeping the same acronym, NCCJ.

I was one of the few campers from Orange County, California. I grew up in the city of Westminster, where my school population was mostly white, with a big proportion of asians and latinos. Blacks were a tiny percentage.

(By the way, I’m going to use lower case for all races, ethnicities and religions as I write this. All those caps for White and Black leap out at me, and if I lower-case those races but not Asians and Latinos (as I learned all those years ago as part of AP style), that also seems strange.)

The camp was pretty evenly divided: 1/4 white, black, asian and latino, with maybe 200 campers in all. Those were the major groups we found ourselves constantly divided into. Within the white group were also jews, many of whom didn’t consider themselves to be white — but those who were not white did consider them to be so. That was just one of the many lessons the camp taught us all.

It’s Prejudice Day

After some lead-up, we had what I came to remember as prejudice day, where we had to explore different prejudices that we all held about each other.

I, being a fairly liberal-thinking teenager, didn’t believe I had prejudices. I didn’t see race, as far as I felt. The whole prejudice day wasn’t going to have much to teach me!

A key part of the day was when one of the races was asked to leave a big room we were in, while those left behind wrote all the prejudices they had or thought about the other races. For example, all the asians would leave, and the other races would write what they thought about that race.

That was the first instructive thing for me, the first revelation — that white people weren’t the only ones with prejudices.

Understand that I grew up in the post-Civil Rights era. Roots was the big TV show when I was in elementary school, and the whole country — to me — was abuzz with the idea of racial equality, of rectifying a situation where a white majority, however it happened, seemed to hold back other races. I had good teachers who taught the salad bowl rather than the melting pot, too.

I’d really been brought up thinking white people were to blame, that white people had so much prejudice to overcome. So the idea that other races had prejudices about each other? That was eye-opening.

White People Have Herpes?

The next revelation was coming back into the room with my white group, to see what prejudices had been written about us. I didn’t think there would be many. I guess as a white person, I never spent much time trying to overcome those types of prejudices, living in a mainly white world with mostly white friends (thought I had a large number of asian friends, which I’ll return to in a bit).

Oh, there was a list. One of the items I’ll never forget was that white people have herpes. Really, this was apparently a fear other races had of whites. Wow.

Prejudices Don’t Equal Racism

Everyone learned from this exercise that we had prejudices of each other — and importantly, that it was almost natural for us to have these prejudices. We picked them up in various ways. They didn’t make us bad, not the having them. It was the not recognizing them or worse, believing them and acting on them in the form of discrimination or racism.

I’ll get back to that, but next, the story gets even more personal. At the end of the day, we had to go around the room and talk about a particular prejudice we might have had in relation to a particular camper. You couldn’t dodge with a safe answer — all the other campers could tell if you were being real or not.

I dreaded when my turn came around. As I said, we were a mixed race group at the camp, and that went down the cabin level. In my cabin were several black boys, one who was very large and to me, threatening. My prejudice. I didn’t know him. I just knew he was a large black guy, and my experience around large black guys was pretty much nil. In elementary school, we literally had one black kid — who, by the way, I was friends with. But after about a year, he left, and I was back in my mostly white world.

Not having known many blacks — and having been raised by a father out of the South who had not just prejudices but also racist attitudes about them — I just wasn’t comfortable. I was afraid. And that’s what I said, that I was afraid of this other camper in my cabin, because of those prejudices. OMG.

The camper stood up and asked if I was afraid of him now. I said I wasn’t. Why? Because I knew him. He wasn’t an unknown quantity to me, where my prejudices could build in my mind. He was just another camper.

That’s prejudice. That’s when you literally are doing what the word comes from, making a prejudgement. That’s not racism. That’s not discrimination. And despite me having that prejudice, it would never be my belief that he was somehow inferior to me (which is racism) or that I wouldn’t want to hire him for something (which is discrimination).

What Racism Is

Racism is a terrible thing, and I hate to see that word used without precision. I’ve seen it today, in arguments about whether we’re living in a “post-racist” world or whether someone has racist views.

In my book, someone only has racist views if they believe other races are not equal to their own. On an industry basis, I don’t know that a tech industry (or any industry) that doesn’t seem diverse is “racist,” especially given that the industry itself might not be actively trying to somehow keep out a particular race, based on some idea of superiority.

That’s where some of the disconnect in these types of arguments come up, I feel. Jason might not feel there’s any racism in the tech space because he’s not overtly thinking it, or seeing it and also, because there probably isn’t much of it. I find it hard to believe that any major tech site is overtly excluding people because of their race.

What Discrimination Is

There certainly seems to be discrimination however, as opposed to racism. That leads into two types that I’d characterize: overt and, for lack of a better word, institutional.

I don’t think there’s a lot of overt discrimination going on. As with racism, I find it hard to believe that tech news sites are overtly trying to hire people of one race but not others. But institutionally, that seems to be what’s happening.

Why? That’s part of the discussion that’s going on now. I suspect a big part of it is like-hires-like. If you’re white, there’s an excellent chance you know other white people, and you likely seek them out for hiring, if you’re not doing a big search.

It can work other ways, too. Last week, I did a lunchtime talk at the LA office of the Huffington Post. Of the 20 people who came, 19 were women. It was amazing, encouraging, that there were so many women editors there. But was it some overt effort to hire only women? I doubt it. It might be that the operation, begun as I understand it by two women, continued on with like-hiring-like.

I think diversity is important. I think whatever can be done to improve it is good. But I have to say, we’ve got three full-time jobs open right now with Marketing Land and Search Engine Land, and ensuring that we have a diverse workforce isn’t top of my mind. Our editors are all pretty white, though largely split male-female. That’s going to look bad to anyone wondering why we don’t have a latino, or asian or black editor employed.

But while I’m sure the entire staff would agree we’d like to be more diverse, the bigger priority right now is just finding good people. We need an editor who understands marketing and working with columnists. We need a writer who understands paid search and social. We need a general assignment reporter who understands internet marketing.

Finding those qualifications is tough enough, but while doing it, we also still have to keep working extremely hard on the day-to-day activity of being still a relatively small start-up, with no outside-funding making it on our own. Oh, and can those people be in one of the 11 states we’re already registered to do business with? Because the regulations of starting up in a new state are pretty killer.

There are obviously some type of barriers that have prevented the tech press from being more reflective of the diversity out there, ranging from like-hiring-like to not making the time to look further afield. I’d also agree that for the white people who have been successful, they might not understand or even be aware of all the challenges, because they just don’t encounter them. That’s not to take away from the fact people of all races can and do make it, of course.

How Prejudice Can Sneak Up On You

A little side-note now on how subtle prejudice can be.

Until I went to my camp, I had no idea about the stereotype that jews are supposedly cheap. That was introduced to me there. Not that I believe it, but I sure would have been happy to never hear it.

As an adult, I watch how jokes about racial stereotypes come up in television shows that my kids see. I find myself pausing the TV when these happen, to make sure they understand that different types of jokes or references are merely that, jokes. But part of me wishes the jokes weren’t made at all, because it’s almost by making them, the stereotypes are reinforced.

In another example, I purposely avoid referring to someone by their race, if I’m talking with my kids (or really, most anyone). If there were a group of people, I wouldn’t say, “Go ask that black guy.” I’m making a conscious decision not to do that, not to characterize someone by their race. And it’s hard. If you want to understand how hard, try it. Try to reference someone of a different race in a group. It’s really easy to reach for the race description, and perhaps that subtly reinforces some of the divisions between us.

You can see this in books all the time, by the way. Go read a book, even by a super-liberal fiction writer. Chances are, they’ll not refer to the white people as white. It’ll be assumed you know this. But black people are often described as black, and it happens with other races, as well. Of course, most of my fiction tends to be written by white guys (I guess they’re big in sci-fi), so maybe it’s different when reading authors of other races. But really, every person’s race should be described — or no one should. Damn racist authors!

As for not understanding racism as a white person, in college, I was once denied entrance as a reporter to a meeting at the Cross Cultural Center because I was white. It was the only reason I wasn’t allowed in. If I hadn’t been white, I’d have been admitted. That wasn’t racism. It was discrimination, and I sure didn’t like it. But it’s about the only time in my life I’ve knowingly been discriminated like that. It gives me no great insight into what it must be like for someone who encounters discrimination, prejudice or even racism on a regular basis.

When Races Turn Into People

A few other things. I think when you do grow up around other races, the differences are amazing. I know people who fear asians. I find that odd. I grew up with them, had many asian friends. I don’t tend to look at asians as “asians” perhaps because they were so ubiquitous in my life.

One of my best friends (OK, Greg, you’re my best friend) is latino. But with us both having grown-up in a similar area of middle-class Orange County, there’s not much difference between us. He’s less latino, and I’m less white, and we’re both much more North Orange County boys.

He’s also gay — which leads to an entire other areas of discrimination and prejudice, one that to me grows largely out of people who simply don’t know gays. I could never imagine not wanting gays to have equal rights because I have so many gay friends. As I wrote before:

These are all good friends. They are all good people. It has pained me to see them have to keep some part of them back, to not be complete out of fear or concern of not being accepted. I have no problem with homosexuality. Clearly, many people still do. I hope those that do can be more open, to understand the pain fellow human beings feel when they have to remain closeted. At the very least, understand that they are not gay people — they are real people with feelings who happen to be gay. They are godparents to my children; good friends I’ve known for years and people I hate to see feeling excluded in so many ways such as with marriage laws.

I don’t know that we’ll ever be in a post-prejudiced world, but a big step is acknowledging that we have prejudices, understanding that’s not the same as being racist and most of all, that we begin to really know other people as other people, not as other races. That doesn’t mean not seeing race, not understanding the complex challenges of race in the world, but more that we have friends and coworkers of all races.

Related Articles

TechCrunch has lost its first writer, Paul Carr announcing his departure following Mike Arrington heading off. Let the echo chamber echo! The death of TechCrunch! No. Harmful to TechCrunch? Maybe. Publications don’t just go poof. Believe me. I know. I’ve resigned, restarted, been there & done that.

Watching Mike struggle with the loss of his baby, TechCrunch, has really resonated with me. I had my own baby that I built up, Search Engine Watch. I sold it early, within a year of launching it, then had a great relationship running it for Alan Meckler’s then-named company Internet.com.

In 2005, Alan sold Search Engine Watch, along with the SES conference that I helped build, to another company: Incisive Media. Suffice to say, I didn’t have a great relationship with them.

There are perhaps some lessons to be drawn, watching AOL struggle with Mike and TechCrunch in the aftermath of his departure, compared to how Incisive struggled with me. Neither seems to have done particularly well. Let me revisit my story first.

How I Learned To Quit My Job

When Incisive purchased the site and conference, I was still very much seen as the prime force behind them both. Some considered me synonymous with the two. Incisive loved that I was seen as such a big presence in the search marketing space. Only days before announcing my resignation, in a USA Today profile about me, one exec even called me a “rock star” in the space (personally, I dislike that term nor think of myself that way).

Incisive’s problem — and as far as I could tell, really Incisive chief executive Tim Weller’s problem — was that it had a “rock star” that it wanted to treat like any other editor of any other publication it operated.

I’d been pretty clear right after the purchase. I was happy to stay on, happy to help the company continue to build and succeed with what I’d created, but I wanted some type of long-term stake in case years later, Incisive decided it was time to sell off something I’d further built up, leaving me again on the sidelines.

I never actually got an offer at the time I quit, in July 2006. See, Incisive had taken so long to migrate SEW off the Internet.com servers that when it did, things started breaking — including our paid subscription service which had rarely been down since the days I’d ran it myself. It stayed down for at least two months; it no longer exists today. All my long, detailed articles that were part of that also have gone poof.

That was enough for me. Since the company refused to delay the migration, I felt it was so inept that I didn’t want to stick around. I gave my notice — and that’s what finally started a round of negotiating whether I’d stay on. That went downhill, since it began with an offer that had provisions for me to earn less than what I had been earning.

Weller felt I earned way too much, later suggesting my demands (I hadn’t actually given any figures at all) were a threat to his shareholders. Ironically, not meeting my supposed demands didn’t prevent Incisive from later being cut in half after having “overstretched its balance sheet.”

At one point, Weller asked why I would think I should have a deal different than from other editors he employed on his other publications. My answer was simple: because none of those other editors was potentially going to walk off and start a rival publication.

After I announced my resignation, panic on the Incisive front really set-in. Was there anything that could be done? They really, really wanted me to stay. So I went back to negotiating. I separated the two things, asking to discuss staying on to do their SES conferences first, then we’d revisit whether I’d stay on to continue editing SEW.

In the end, we struck a deal on SES, on October 23, 2006. It was one that suited me. It allowed me to keep running those conferences for a year, but nothing prevented me from starting up my own series. With the deal done, I also declined to negotiate over SEW. Instead, I said that I was going to head-off and do a new search publication.

How They Failed To Manage My Departure Well

From my public post at the time:

November 30 remains my last day. Instead, I expect to continue writing about search as I always have via a new search blog. I should have more news on this in about three or four weeks. Similarly, I plan to do some search-related events of my own. Stay tuned, and I promise to bring more details when I can share them.

Now, Incisive had more than a month to know I was leaving SEW. Indeed, I’d formally quit back in July, so they had half-a-year to prepare for the worse. What happened? From best I can tell, apparently nothing.

Indeed, on November 16, 2006, I announced that two of my senior editors — Chris Sherman and Barry Schwartz — were going to join me at a new site that I was launching called Search Engine Land. Neither of them, as I recall, had been approached about staying on or potentially taking over the site. Not that they would have stayed, but you know, it’s always nice to be asked.

Now Incisive got even more panicked. I was still running their SES series, and the SES Chicago event was only two weeks away. I quickly got a legal nastygram telling me that my recently signed contract had provisions that prevented me from talking my other ventures. Or something like that. It was a stupid legal letter, one of several I endured over the remaining year I worked with the company. I ignored it.

Instead, I ran the show and, at the end of my traditional keynote about the state of search that year, had one single slide where I mentioned the news of my departure:

I didn’t dwell on this; my keynote (as you’ll read here) had already run long, and I tried to keep things as matter-of-fact as possible. I didn’t mention my new conference series, even though I could have.

The slide mentions a new editor in chief. That was Rebecca Lieb, who was already running the ClickZ site, which Incisive had also purchased (and Rebecca has since left). If I recall, she was named at the very last minute. I also had the bizarre situation of being asked by Incisive a day or two before my talk if I’d agree to give a quote to go in the announcement about her taking over.

Weird, given we weren’t parting on happy terms. But you know? I did. From the release:

“Rebecca is an outstanding journalist and editor who has taken ClickZ to new heights. She has always understood the important and unique role of search in the interactive marketing space. Her promotion is well deserved, and I look forward to seeing her guide Search Engine Watch into its next generation,” said Sullivan, editor-in-chief of SearchEngineLand.com.

For me, it was in keeping that I really didn’t want to cause a rift in the then still small search marketing community. I hadn’t planned to leave SEW and SES. I was happy with what I was doing. But if I had to leave, I wanted to get on with what I was doing elsewhere.

I stuck with a similar conciliatory tone when I posted my goodbye message on the SEW site itself:

I have absolutely no intention of going over to the new place with any type of “us versus them” type of attitude. I’ve always tried to be inclusive of good content and communities regardless if they might be seen as competitive to SEW. At SEL, I plan to continue the same. If there are good discussions here, I’m going to be pointing at them. If there are good opportunities for the mods with SEW, I honestly want the best for you. By no means do I want anyone thinking that staying on here, or perhaps doing other things with SEW, is somehow something I won’t like or perhaps “disloyal” in any way. I don’t know if anyone was even thinking like that — but if so, don’t!

But also in that post, you can see that Incisive still hadn’t figured out what to do with the site. All the correspondents who worked there — who no one had talked to — also decided to leave. As I wrote:

My goodbye is less tearful because writers I’ve worked with day-in and day-out are joining me at Search Engine Land. Barry Schwartz (he told me to say goodbye to everyone), Phil Bradley (despite having a name that doesn’t end in S), Bill Slawski, Jennifer Slegg, Brian Smith and Greg Sterling will be writing with me from December. Chris Sherman joins us in January. I’m naturally thrilled to continue working with them.

Elisabeth [Osmeloski], who I mentioned already, stays on here at Search Engine Watch as managing editor and is working on plans with Incisive to take the site into its new life without me at the helm, a new generation for Search Engine Watch. She’ll be along later with a post of her own on this.

Elisabeth, by the way, I’d talked to earlier about coming over (Incisive hadn’t), and I told her it probably made more sense for her to stay on there, since SEL wasn’t going to pay well until it got up and going. After she later left SEW, I was thrilled to have her decide to work with me again in September 2008.

Why Did It Go So Badly?

For about a week, if I remember correctly, SEW largely ground to a halt. There was even a post — I can’t find it now after much looking, I’m afraid — where a media analyst wrote about Incisive needing to do something, to do anything, to make it stop looking like a train wreck.

How on earth had Incisive allowed things to get to this point? Rory Brown was reflecting about this on his The Media Briefing site recently. He’s got a particularly good viewpoint, as he was my day-to-day boss when all this went down. Rory wrote (and the bolding is his):

Whilst the circumstances are not exactly the same, there are clearly some parallels. I won’t go into the detail of what happened at that time, beyond saying that we clearly mismanaged some of the integration issues and also came up against a key personality in the new media space who believed his personal brand was larger than the underlying property we had bought.

The split became messy with Danny eventually standing up on stage at one of our events in Chicago and (in front of our delegates) announcing that he was setting up a directly competitive business. There was nothing we could do short of rugby-tackling him from the stage…

The lesson I took from this experience was: what motivates a blogging entrepreneur is not money — especially once they have either cashed out or become financially secure through contracted deals. It became all about control. They were never going to be suited to working in a large corporate.

As an aside here, I like Rory. I liked him a lot when I first started working with him at Incisive, and life sure would have been a lot easier if they’d simply put him in charge of the new operation Incisive had purchased, instead of naming a new director who wouldn’t actually report for work until six months later — which is like 6 years of internet time. After my departure, I had a few run-ins with Rory that perhaps were inevitable, as both parties found their feet. But that’s water under the bridge, and I’m happy to see his new venture doing well.

Back to his post. I think plenty of people are motivated for things beyond money. In my case, I quit before I’d had a contact offer at all. It wasn’t even about trying to influence that. I simply did not like all the signals I had that this particular company wasn’t suited for ensuring a fast paced blog could succeed. So maybe bloggers don’t like bureaucracy? I don’t know — though I do know watching some of Mike’s posts, such as filing for expenses, that’s probably among many factors he probably disliked.

Don’t Be Too Controlling?

Maybe control was a key point. I had a vision of how I wanted to run the blog. I especially had a vision that we could run a conference where attendees were given nice meals (not boxes) and a better overall experience. That continued to be the chief complaint I heard about, when I was running things, and nothing I could do got that to change.

Unlike in Mike’s case, I never had the parent company swooping in to debate how I should run the blog (and debating whether Mike had conflicts that meant he couldn’t run TechCrunch is swooping in). That’s probably one of the mistakes AOL has made in all this, if it wanted to keep him. Despite Arianna Huffington’s “there was no culture clash” post, there very clearly was.

Arianna was technically Mike’s boss. She clearly felt like he had conflicts with the venture fund that didn’t make him suited to be editor. Someone had to win, and she did.

Could that have been avoided? Perhaps. Remember when Tim Armstrong said this:

“TechCrunch is a different property and they have different standards…

“We have a traditional understanding of journalism with the exception of TechCrunch, which is different but is transparent about it.”

I found that laughable. If you have standards, then they’re a standard — they’re not a standard when you start issuing exceptions. However, perhaps Tim might have expressed that better — and perhaps it might even have worked — if TechCrunch weren’t just a different property but a standalone one.

After Arianna was hired, AOL went through this consolidation process, where everything was supposedly under her, and everything was going to be standardized. That would be about the same as saying that because News Corporation owned The News Of The World and The Wall Street Journal, both had to have the same overall editor dictating how they’d operate.

TechCrunch could have been a more direct report up the AOL food chain. It really could have been an independent publication within the group; really could have done whatever it wanted. If Mike felt he was doing disclosures OK, let the readers decide could have been the policy there.

Independent to some degree, of course. No publication owned by any major group just gets to do what it wants. Ultimately, the owning company is the publisher, the one held responsible in case there are libel cases or other issues that come up.

Back to my case, more control might have helped. Certainly feeling like that I could keep doing what I had been doing would have been a big plus.

Certainly Get Your Act Together

Even if there’s some inevitable conflict between a big company and founding editors, at the very least, big companies should have some type of a game plan. How did Incisive let so much time pass without assuming the worst and planning for it?

Similarly, how on earth did — when the news came out about revisiting whether Mike should still run TechCrunch — did AOL say nothing for so long, especially when we kept getting all the back-and-forth rumors. He’s in. He’s out. He’s in. Geez.

And how on earth do you allow things where the TechCrunch staff clearly has some unresolved issues. That Paul Carr wasn’t happy had to have been known. Do we sit around now and wait to discover how many other TechCrunch staffers aren’t happy and await further resignation letters?

And maybe I missed it — I was running my own SMX conference this week in New York (our biggest ever!) — but has there been a distinct lack of any post on TechCrunch explaining the new direction or anything other than that short statement of Mike going. Maybe an update to the About page is in order, where Mike’s still listed as running things, perhaps?

No, The Old Brands Don’t Die

As all this has unfolded, there’s been plenty of “TechCrunch Is Dead” speculation as well as “Nah, it’ll survive.” Fred Wilson had a fairly balanced post on this last week.

As someone’s who’s actually been there, it’s exceedingly unlike that TechCrunch just goes “poof.” For one thing, you simply do not understand how powerful domains can be in Google, once they are established. You don’t take that reputation to your new place.

If everyone literally left TechCrunch tomorrow and started a brand new blog, Google would still reward TechCrunch with all the same authority it had before — as well as the traffic — while the new blog would have to (and slowly) build all that up. I wrote about this more last year here:

• How The “Focus On First” Helps Hide Google’s Relevancy Problems

Meanwhile, new writers would come on to TechCrunch. They would. That’s inevitable. And while some, perhaps many, maybe even most of the writers might decide to follow Mike and the former team wherever they might go, plenty of readers will simply keep going for a variety of reasons (they follow on Twitter, they have a feed, they do searches) back to TechCrunch.

Consider that Engadget lost Ryan Block in 2008, then Joshua Topolsky in April of this year. Joshua is particularly interesting, as he’s gone on to start a competing publication, This Is My Next, which will become The Verge. Several editors went with him.

How’s that going? Here’s what Google Trends reports on visitors:

Yeah, Engadget’s taken a slam. But the new site is barely registering. The new site also has around 17,000 Facebook fans, about 10% of what Engadget has.

Don’t get me wrong. Over time, The Verge might eclipse Engadget. Believe me, I’m rooting for Joshua as you might expect from someone’s who’s been in a similar situation. Likewise, some new tech publication, perhaps founded by former TechCrunch writers, might eclipse TechCrunch.

If so, it won’t just happen over night. People just don’t immediately follow writers over to a new place. If that were the case, This Is My Next/The Verge would have all the same fans that Engadget has. All the same traffic, or at least a not more.

It Takes Time To Start Again

Instead, it take time to change habits, both human and in what Google rewards. But you can get there. I know. Here’s another chart:

That’s Quantcast global traffic for both Search Engine Land and my former publication, Search Engine Watch. Both publications “Quantify,” which means you get a direct comparison. SEW started reporting fully around February 2009, which is why you see that sudden spike from nowhere up.

The pattern is pretty clear. Search Engine Land got a huge boost compared to perhaps some new site that might have covered search, thanks to the reputation of our writers that came over there. And in my view, Search Engine Land quickly won in terms of the quality and depth of our coverage. But the traffic rewards took longer.

(By the way, none of this is to say that SEW doesn’t have good stuff. It does. I just think we’re better, and as editor of our publication, I’d better damn well believe that or make that the case).

So, as Paul leaves TechCrunch, I’m sure another round of “TechCrunch is dead” articles will begin again. It’s not, and it’s unlikely to be. But it is likely that something might eventually surpass it, especially if AOL can’t convince good writers or good editors with a vision for coverage and the ability to provide a solid voice for their publications that TechCrunch is the place to be.

If you made it this far, you might also like some related thoughts I wrote on this topic about two weeks ago:

• Lessons & Thoughts On My Five Year Anniversary Of Starting A New Business

Postscript: After I wrote this, MG Siegler posted a piece on how out of the loop he is, including:

AOL has not reached out to me once in this entire situation. You’d think they might care about something like that. Evidently, they don’t. I’m not losing any sleep over it, but it’s curious.

I appreciate the outpouring of support from everyone. No matter what happens, don’t worry, I’ll be fine. I’m just sincerely worried about the state of AOL that they seem to have a total disregard for the actual situation. TechCrunch is a key property and one of the few bright spots in their portfolio. But to them, it’s apparently just numbers….

Everyone still at TechCrunch knows this. That’s why Paul’s post is dangerous. He’s shining the spotlight on something, but he’s missing the mark. There is exactly one person to blame for all of this — and her name is not Erick.

And from Robin Wauters

Siegler writes that AOL hasn’t yet reached out to him about this whole mess. What a shocker. I have been working for AOL for nearly 12 months now and I’ve never - not once - heard from anyone at AOL apart from some HR staffers to get my contract switched over (which took them 9 months, yes months, but that’s a different story for another day).

AOL clearly doesn’t care about TechCrunch and the people that have built it as much as they probably should, but that’s just one of the struggling Internet giant’s many, many issues.

It really is unbelievable. No one is talking with the writers?

Five years ago, I found myself heading down an unexpected path, starting a new business to carry on the work I had been doing writing and speaking about search engines and search marketing. On this anniversary, a few thoughts on life along the way.

My First Founder’s Story

For those unfamiliar, I’ve been covering search engines for 15 years now, since I first wrote a publication back in April 1996 called “A Webmaster’s Guide To Search Engines.” I later developed that into the Search Engine Watch web site, which I sold in 1997 to Internet.com — the company today known as WebMediaBrands.

While I sold the site, I continued to be the editor. I also was instrumental in helping to develop, in 1999, the conference series that was then called Search Engine Strategies (it was rebranded last year as simply SES). If you want more background on both of these, and my roles with them, see the links below:

• Happy 10th Birthday, Search Engine Watch – A History Of The Site
• 10 Year Retrospective: Search Engine Strategies To SMX: Search Marketing Expo

Things unexpectedly changed for me in 2005. The web site I founded, and the conference series I helped create, were sold along with the ClickZ web site to a company called Incisive Media. I wasn’t unhappy with the sale. I found it worthwhile to agree to stay on when the deal was made.

A year later, when my contract was up for renewal, I no longer felt it made sense to stick around. That made for an interesting day:

If you want the backstory about that, see my previous posts below:

• Leaving Search Engine Watch
• The Day After & Many Thanks!
• Pondering Next Steps — Making No Fast Decisions
• News On My Plans For Next Year

I announced my departure on August 29, 2006 — hence my five year anniversary today. Well, a few days off — I was on vacation when the actual date happened. Being on vacation, totally unplugged for a week, is a pretty great sign that things have grown well.

My Second Founder’s Story

In the end, I felt I could produce a better web site and a conference series, as well as have a long-term interest in these, if I went out on my own. So I did. Search Engine Land became my new home; SMX: Search Marketing Expo my new conference series. But by my home, I mean these were the new places where I was continuing to do the work I’d always done, not that these were creations solely on my own.

Instead, these — along with Sphinn, Search Marketing Now and our recently launched IMT Courses, are creations of a new company I cofounded with partners Chris Sherman, Sean Moriarty and Chris Elwell: Third Door Media. Our little company now counts over 15 employees and recently made the Fortune 5000 list, ranking at 1,585 overall and 147 the Advertising & Marketing category.

Later this month, we’ll hold what’s firmly on track to be our biggest search marketing conference ever, SMX East, with record attendance. Our first ever show, SMX Advanced, has sold out ever year we’ve held it, five years in total, now. Search Engine Land keeps having record traffic.

How did we get here? Well….

Good People

It sounds easy. Just have good people. Finding good people, however, is hard. I wish I had great insights to share on how to find them, but most of our staff has come about because someone knew someone else. Maybe that’s a good lesson. Your best recruiting tool might be your existing employees.

Trust Your People

Having started originally 15 years ago by doing everything myself, there’s a part of me that always thinks I should be mapping out exactly how everything should be done. But I’ve learned, fortunately, to largely let that go.

For one thing, there’s simply no time. If you try to do everything, you’ll either get nothing done or a lot of things done badly. Trust in your collegues, and you can focus on the things where you’re really needed — as they can too.

React Quickly

One of the biggest surprises in our growth story was the economic downturn of 2008. Suffice to say, we hadn’t planned on one of the worst economies since the Great Depression to happen.

Our plans for growth in 2009 quickly changed to adjusting to the new normal. We locked down thoughts of expansion and stayed extremely cautious on what we forecast. By battening down the hatches quickly, we came through the storm.

Embrace The Virtual World

Someone asked me recently where Third Door Media was based, and I didn’t have a good answer. We’re incorporated out of Delaware. Many of our employees are based in Connecticut, for no particular reason other than that’s where they already lived. But we’re also spread out across the US, and virtually all of us work from home. We have one really small leased sales office.

The same person found that really odd. Really — no office? And we all manage to communicate and get stuff done?

Yes, we do. For me, having worked from home for 15 years, this feels completely normal. It’s easy to forget that most companies do not operate this way.

I’m not sure how many companies could do so, but I’m glad we can. Having no commute is a huge employee benefit. I sure don’t miss all that wasted time driving in a car or getting to-and-from work each day in some way.

How we do it varies. It turns out that old school Web 1.0 technology — email — works pretty well. So does pre-web phone calls.

Still, the ability to collaborate through shared documents via Google Docs is a huge help. Not having to run our own web servers but instead outsourcing that to the amazing Tiger Tech is also fantastic. Similarly, having our stats churned by Google Analytics and ChartBeat, or our ads served through DoubleClick For Publishers, saves us time to spend our technical development on things that can easily be outsourced.

Self Grown

I don’t have any tales to tell of navigating the world of venture capital. That’s because we’ve never taken any. We bootstapped ourselves and have grown based on the revenue we bring in.

(Note: I meant to put this in earlier, but if you do like stories of investment lessons, definitely check out Rand Fishkin’s recent, excellent piece Misadventures in VC Funding: The $24 Million Moz Almost Raised).

In some ways, I think that has made us a stronger company. I’m a big fan of SimCity. Sometimes I’d play using the code that let you start off with a huge wad of cash. I’d zone tons of stuff, add in streets everywhere and build out in a way I couldn’t do when limited to the cash I generated naturally. Usually, these types of cities didn’t do as well as those that grew organically.

Because we’ve grown to our revenues, I feel like we continue to have a solid base. Don’t get me wrong. I know there are reasons why a company might want to have outside investment. I recognize that investment might allow for new things that you simply can’t do on your own.

Still, I always feel a little sad when you read about some company on the tech blogs that’s sounds like it must be amazing because it has had a first, second or third round of investment. Companies that are doing great without taking or needing investment don’t seem to get the same attention.

Starting Over

I’d helped build my old site and conference series into a well oiled, humming machine. Then I walked away from all that, to build afresh. I knew it would be a lot of hard work, but there were things I totally didn’t anticipate.

For one, there were a billion little things that had to be put in place. I remember having to write our privacy policy at Search Engine Land, and spending huge amounts of time thinking about it, even though it really wasn’t a major part of my job. But it wasn’t necessarily anyone else’s job, either — and I wanted it to be right for our new site.

Another was discovering how, despite years of having a “personal brand,” that could be easily lost within the corporate brands I helped build. I wrote about this two years ago, how people thought I was still writing for SEW or running SES.

Yet another was discovering how hard it is for people to break habits. On one occasion about two years ago, I had someone complaining to me about SES. I explained that I no longer ran that show, in case they didn’t realize that. Yes, they knew, they said. I suggested that they might want to attend our SMX event. Maybe — they knew of them — but you know, they explained, they always went to SES at that particular time of year.

Perhaps someday, I’ll finish a piece I’ve long planned to write about making the right choice about search marketing conferences. The short story is there’s no “right” choice anyone can tell you. Each person ultimately will decide what’s the right fit for them and their needs. But suffice to say, if you’re not happy with ANY event, perhaps it’s time to broaden your horizons!

For us, the good news is that over time, more and more people have developed the SMX habit. That makes me pretty happy, because we put a huge amount of work into everything that goes into those shows, from the programming to the food.

The other good news is that you learn a lot going all the way back to the beginning. It causes you to reassess everything you do, to cast aside your assumptions or heavily test them. It’s an experience, despite all the work, I feel fortunate to have gone through.

Going Forward

In the end, I’m really happy and proud of the team at Third Door Media and the team at Search Engine Land for helping get the company to where it is today. I’m also grateful to all the writers and speakers who have worked with us, especially those who jumped in and gave support early on.

Just a quick update from the work-side of my life. Our SMX West search engine marketing conference happens this March 2-4 in California. Working with my co-chair Chris Sherman, we’ve assembled over 50 sessions of search marketing goodness. Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer is also keynoting — his first time ever speaking at a search marketing conference!

If you know someone who needs basic education, we even have a special SMX Boot Camp track with introductory pricing.

Speaking of pricing, the early bird rate expires this Saturday. So get registered!

To learn more about the show, see the Agenda-At-A-Glance or check out my virtual tour at Search Engine Land, Why You Should Attend SMX West 2010: A Personal Preview, From Danny Sullivan

If you’re link spamming, you suck. If you know someone who is link spamming, they suck — and you should tell them so. If you don’t know why you suck, here’s a story about the human impact of what you do.

About a year ago, my wife Lorna Harris launched a social news site for woman called Boudica. You won’t find anything there now. The site’s closed due to a link spamming attack and will probably never reopen.

Lorna wanted a place where women could share stories relating to women but without a predominance of “mommy” content she’d found in some other places. Not finding what she wanted, she dived into creating Boudica.

She assembled the site entirely on her own, finding a programmer, working to develop the features and watching over the small community that made use of it.

Most of her time was spent dealing with the inevitable spam attacks that a community site faces. While her site had some defenses, this latest attack was too much. Someone decided the world needed another 500+ links about discount prescription drugs.

Wiping the links out would be fast work for a programmer that knows Drupal, which her site was based on. But that’s still time and money for a small site that hasn’t generated income. Plus, the version of Drupal that she’s running really needs to be upgraded to prevent future attacks. That’s more time and money that’s not likely worth spending.

If Boudica had been more successful, doing the work would make sense. But it has remained small, and the link spam attack will probably tip her over to a decision she’s already been debating, of whether it makes sense to continue working at it. She doesn’t want to feel a failure if she abandons it; my feeling is that she’s learned much from doing it, so look at it as a building block for future success.

Still, being small doesn’t excuse the attack. Nor do other excuses that typically get trotted out carry much weight with me, such as “You get what’s coming if you don’t have strong defenses” or “it’s Google’s fault — they created the link economy that drives this demand.”

No, the core problem is that the web has people who think nothing of vandalizing other web sites. That’s what link spamming is. You’re not adding value to a site. You’re simply spray painting garbage on someone else’s property, for your own personal benefit. You have no manners. You have no morals. You ought to be ashamed.

Ironically, I was in a debate this week where I was sticking up for the SEO industry (see SEO FAQ That’s Not From The Land Of Unicorns). To some, that means I’m sticking up for link spamming, since they see the SEO industry as synonymous with link spam.

SEO doesn’t mean link spamming in my book. There are SEOs who also link spam, clearly. Aside from hurting individual site owners, you give the entire SEO industry a bad name. You should stop. Or call yourself something else — perhaps link spammer would be a good title?

I’ve written against link spam before. Back in 2005, I tried to get some consensus that automated link spam ought to be condemned by those in the industry overall. One example I pointed out during that campaign was Mike Grehan’s classic story of fending off link spam of a memorial web site in 2004.

Seriously, who wants to stand up in defense of dropping links on a site dedicated to a dead man?

Who wants to stand up for causing someone (me) to take time away during Thanksgiving last year to deal with link spam (see Crappy MP3 Sites, Comment Spamming & Enough Already)?

Who wants to stand up for killing a site that a mother was making time for in between the already full-time job of watching her kids?

In the US, we got CAN-SPAM primarily to help get junk spam email in control. It’s helped, though clearly spam email hasn’t gone away. Still, I think the time is overdue to look at updating CAN-SPAM to include link spam. I intend to explore that further.

We shouldn’t need laws as a deterrent, of course. Basic human decency ought to be enough. Those who are link spamming should be able to ask themselves one simple question about what they’re doing and know they shouldn’t go forward:

Is that the type of thing you’d be proud to tell your own mother about?

Postscript: By link spamming, by the way, I include comment spam as that’s often done solely to gain a link.

Postscript 2: Peter, below in the comments, sees this as a crybaby post. It’s not. Let me clarify a bit more, if my points above didn’t make this clear.

I’m not naive. I understand that sites should have anti-spamming filters in place. Lorna’s had some. It could have more. But I’ve also seen spam get through anti-spam filters on my own Sphinn social news site. That site employs multiple-CAPTCHA barriers, along with an array of other deterrents. It also has human moderators. Link spammers still attack it. Link spammers will attack ANYTHING out there, and nothing is foolproof. The first programmer that tells you they have a perfect anti-spam solution will soon after encounter another programmer who will blow that fallacy out of the water.

For success with a social site, or any site that allows user-generated content (such as a blog allowing comments), you have to be prepared to fight spam. Lorna expected it and has been fighting it. She could, if she wants, get this latest huge barrage of spam cleared out on Boudica and improve spam filters going forward, if she choses. She’s currently debating this. It just may be, as I explained above, that this was the thing that tips her toward closing the site, something she was already considering because of low usage.

But the main point is that decision shouldn’t be something forced upon her through an act of vandalism. That on the web, I feel we kind of accept that this type of spam happens, and you have to live with it. It does, you do — but I’m hoping for more than the usual rant that is all those impacted by it feel they have. I’m hoping in a small way that some of those who engage in these actions take a moment to think further about what they are doing. Or that perhaps some who know others who link spam will send a message out to knock it off.

One of the disadvantages of having built up someone else’s brand over a decade is that it can be very hard to be disassociated with it. Case in point: three years after having left Search Engine Watch to start Search Engine Land, I still get people who think I work at the old place.

In the past week, I’ve had it happen to me three times now. Once during an media interview, another during a press briefing and once just talking with someone in general.

I understand. It took ages for me to stop saying “GoTo” instead of “Overture” or to adjust to other branding changes I’ve personally encountered. But, I figured a reminder was in order on my personal blog.

These days, I write at Search Engine Land. It’s a site I started back in December 2006, so if you haven’t been by, visit! And if you’re not linking over yet or having updated your set of links for some time, please consider it!

On the conference side, I left Search Engine Strategies some time ago and instead run my own Search Marketing Expo conference series these days.

As many readers here know, I left the Search Engine Watch site I created in 1996 and the Search Engine Strategies conference series I helped start in 1999 soon after Incisive Media purchased those properties in 2005 (I do my own rival Search Engine Land web site and SMX: Search Marketing Expo conference series now — next show is SMX East in New York this Oct 5-7, check out the agenda!).

Incisive wasn’t done with the buying. In 2006, it managed to get enough investment to effectively buy itself back into being a private company, then digested American Lawyer Media. But it turns out that it apparently couldn’t handle all it ate. Last week, a deal was cut splitting Incisive Media into two. ALM went back to being ALM; Incisive Media seems to have kept what it had before that purchase, along with the SEW site and the SES series.

PaidContent has a nice rundown on the situation here plus an interview with Incisive chief Tim Weller who says despite having “overstretched its balance sheet” on going private and buying ALM, he still sees this period as the most optimistic in Incisive’s history.

For background on me and Incisive, see:

• Leaving Search Engine Watch
• The Day After & Many Thanks!
• Pondering Next Steps — Making No Fast Decisions

For more about the history of Search Engine Watch, see my Happy 10th Birthday, Search Engine Watch – A History Of The Site post from 2007.

Postscript: The Sunday Times has an interview with Weller where the blame apparently is down to his investment backers:

With an Aston Martin in the drive, a ski chalet in France and £11m in the bank, Tim Weller was enjoying life after striking a £275m deal with Apax, the private-equity giant, to take the listed company he founded private….

Apax persuaded Weller and management of the merits of its go-private deal using a presentation with a slide entitled “The Benefits of Debt”. Over the next six months under Apax, Incisive used cheap loans to buy four businesses and by August 2007 the group had doubled in size….

Weller is scathing about private equity. “The amount of debt was never discussed at board meetings,” he said.

It was all so much more positive when the go-private deal was announced back in 2006. From a Guardian article back then:

Mr Weller, who set up the business 12 years ago, said yesterday he was disappointed to have to take the company private, but an inability to raise cash in the public markets had prevented Incisive from taking part in the industry’s consolidation.

“We have made concerted efforts to try to consolidate the market and yet, even with our outperformance, our share price relative to our peer group has been discounted,” he said. “Apax [however] has made it clear that they want to invest in the business to get it to the next stage.”

I got a kick out of seeing how the proposed Microsoft-Yahoo search deal is currently playing out on Google News versus Yahoo News. Google News is supposed to be all automated, but I guess the machines don’t like the story. At Yahoo News, they have editors — and if they’re doing the picking, they’re happy.

Look at the current home page from Yahoo News:

Lead item about the story? That Microsoft and Yahoo have agreed to a deal. Happy!

Over at Google News?

Scrutiny! The pact is to attract scrutiny!

I don’t know whether an editor picked the happy headline at Yahoo or not. I just liked the contrast, however it happened.

We’ve got tons of coverage about the deal over at Search Engine Land, including my A Search Eulogy For Yahoo post.

I’ve been without business cards for about seven months now, and I’m finally gotten around to getting new ones printed. In doing so, I realized I wanted my Twitter address on my card. Last time I had some printed, at the end of 2005, I don’t even think I had a Twitter account! But now, I was amazed to realize that Twitter has become so important to me as a communication tool that I wanted it included along with my “old school” contact info such as a snail mail address, phone number and email.

OK, despite my headline, I’m sure few believe listing their Twitter address as mandatory information a business card. Still, was I alone in feeling I should include it? Apparently not. I twitted about getting it added and got a stream of responses from people who were doing the same, such as:

• jtobin @dannysullivan Brian Chappell (@brianchappell) wants me to reprint his cards b/c they don’t have his Twitter name on them. It’s a trend.
  
• chriswinfield @dannysullivan was thinking the same thing yesterday about biz cards & twitter
  
• Matt_Siltala @dannysullivan glad I am not the only one http://www.kewlurl.com/twitter
• rickgalan @dannysullivan i was impressed by the back of @leeodden‘s business card.. just says @leeodden in big letters
  
• ciaranj @dannysullivan I used to have blog, linkedin, email & mob. Ditched linkedin last time I did ‘em. All on front with @gapinvoid ‘toon on back
  
• chiropractic @dannysullivan @JohnCarcutt had one of the best (first) cards I’d seen w/social profiles. Great model to follow.
  
• melbolton @dannysullivan I started putting my twitter handle on my cards a few months back, got some giggles initially but added followers
  
• khalidh @dannysullivan I just added my twitter id to biz cards as well
  
• kid_disco @dannysullivan @chriswinfield @Ciaran – Front: http://bkite.com/04iPX & Back: http://bkite.com/04iQ0

Ah, but where to fit in my address? I felt like my card was already crowded enough with my ordinary information, but the back was open and free. Rex Hammock shared a good example shared a good example of what he does with his social profiles for the back of his card:

I pondered listing all my social networking profiles on the back as well, similar to what I do with the sidebar here on the blog. But I figured minimalist would work for me. Hit my blog, all my profiles are listed there. But Twitter among the rest stood out as special for me, deserving its own place.

From time to time over the years, I’ve had various investment analysts want to talk to me about my thoughts on how a particular search company might do. What cracks me up is that invariably, they think I should provide such advice for free. I have peers in the search space and other areas who also are in the same situation.

My gripe isn’t about not earning money, however. Rather, it’s more about how being so cheap perhaps reflects the “quality” of the work these analysts are supposed to do. Since few of them seem to pay for quality advice, is it any wonder we get things like the financial meltdown we’re going through now?

An email I got yesterday is a wonderful case in point and got me thinking about this post. I won’t name the companies involved, but this is what I received:

I work with a private investment company in New York. We’re currently kicking the tires on a potential investment in [removed]. An important part of our research process is to speak with customers, competitors and other industry experts in order to better understand the company’s strengths and weakness and the industry dynamics. As one of the foremost experts on search. you clearly have a valuable perspective to share.

If you are willing to share your thoughts, I promise not to take up too much of your time. Also, rest assured that any conversation would be entirely confidential, with its sole purpose to help us make a smarter investment decision. We are not looking for any non-public information, nor are we seeking any investment recommendations. We are solely interested in having a high level conversation about the key issues. Simply put, we are trying to do our homework on this potential investment we’e considering.

Let me know if you can help. If so, we’d be happy to circle back with you after our exhaustive research process is complete and share with you our conclusions.

Notice there’s no mention of paying me for this time. And I promise, having done a number of these, it does take up time. Easily an hour. So what’s my incentive here, when I’ve got plenty of things to do? I’ll get the conclusions of their research [helpful if I want to invest in a search company I guess, except I don't to avoid conflicts of interest].

OK, there is value in such research reports, even if you’re not an investor. I have talked to many financial analysts freely because the exchange of information can indeed be valuable. I’ll call out one particular analyst, Mark Mahaney of Citigroup, who is always in this category with me. He does a lot of homework, gets out to trade shows (I’ll come back to this in a bit) talks to tons of people, publishes investor notes that often mention the people he’s spoken with or shows he’s attended — it’s well worth my time to talk with him. I learn back.

But bumpkiss private investment company I’ve never heard of, that it if publishes notes, I’ve never seen them? No, that’s not worth my time. So I replied that I’d be happy to talk, but that’s a service they’d have to pay for. That got me back this in return:

While many do, we typically do not pay for this type of research. In addition, since I haven’t spoken with you before, it is especially hard to know how valuable the conversation might be to gauge whether its worth paying for. I propose the following: lets set up a 45 minute chat at no cost. If I find that conversations valuable, I will be happy to pay for future conversations. In addition, I have peers that are more inclined to pay for their research and I would be happy to point them in your direction if I find the conversation productive. Lastly, I would be willing to share the conclusions of our in-depth research when we are finished. While we don’t publish our work, I would be happy to exchange it with you verbally. Let me know how that sounds…

It didn’t sound good at all. In fact, it went to undermine how much faith I thought anyone should have in this person’s research, when concluded. To detail:

• No, most firms do NOT pay for this type of research, part of the problem, I think.
• How did I go from being “one of the foremost experts on search” to “since I haven’t spoken with you before, it is especially hard to know how valuable the conversation might be to gauge whether its worth paying for.” Remember, this person came to me. I’m just sitting here minding my own business, get approached about a conversation, then get told that my time might not be valuable at all?
• A 45 minute “chat” is about how long a typical phone consultation goes.
• Yeah, tell me who your peers are that pay for research. Perhaps I’ll want their reports as being more valuable.

Bottom line, we’re not talking. So this person will do their report without an expert they originally thought it was important to include, because they don’t want to pay for advice.

I’m not saying I have the best advice in the world. I’m not saying that they can’t find others that will give them a solid report. But it’s absurd. They’re making a financial investment. Or others like them are recommending investments. Spend the money for the right advice, because if you’re not, what kind of advice are you getting?

It reminds me of a situation that happened ahead of our first SMX West search marketing conference last year (the next one happens this Feb. 10-12 in Santa Clara, by the way — check out the agenda!). We had a financial analyst request a press pass, which we denied.

Look, there’s no such thing as a “free” conference pass. Every ticket we give out, there’s like $250 or more in food costs alone associated with it. I kid you not — we provide good food at our shows, and it costs a ton. Hotels are a giant rip-off, as any conference organizer will tell you. So we have to be pretty selective with who gets passes. Places with broad circulation make the cut, because of the exposure they bring. Small trade publications often make the cut, because of the targeted audience they reach. Some live bloggers make the cut because we think it’s a valuable way to spread knowledge from the shows to people who simply cannot afford to attend.

But a financial analyst? We need to subsidize the cost of a financial analyst to attend? No offense, but shouldn’t they be able to buy a ticket?

The person came back to us saying we’d get visibility in their reports that go out to institutional investors (people unlikely to come to a show or if they do, might request free passes themselves). They added that everyone else gives them passes and then tossed in this closing part:

Please note that we will be attending your conf only if we do get free passes because we do not have budgets to pay for the industry conference (in other words you will not cannibalize your revenue by giving us free passes).

As I said, we do cannibalize our revenues by giving a “free” pass that has lots of associated costs to it. But more important, a financial analyst firm that advises institutional investors should have a conference budget – at least if they find the information at conferences to be good “feet on the ground” information about what’s happening in the trenches. If they don’t attend, because they can’t get a freebie, then aren’t they potentially missing out on key information? And isn’t that pretty cheap, for companies that influence the spending for so many others?

Of course, even gathering all the information in the world doesn’t mean anyone can predict anything. I remember going in once to talk to a large banking firm, with about 20 analysts gathered in the room (naturally, it was a free gig — but I thought it would be interesting to do). One of them was semi-hostile when after telling me about how he’d plotted out the number of ads on Google over time, he then thought he could project what their revenue was going to be. My response was you can’t predict anything about Google.

I then ran through factors he wasn’t considering. Number of ads doesn’t mean how much revenue each ad is generating. And what if Google shifted to a new payment model (as it turned out, soon after they did add CPA ads). And what if Google added more ads to the page (they did later). Or decide to take some of them away (further down the line, they did that too). Or the founders decide to do one of the unpredictable founder things and launch some new product no one is thinking of.

He was pretty frustrated, but I didn’t know what else to say. I still don’t know how anyone can project what Google’s going to do. Indeed, I remember seeing Jim Cramer for the first time on TV a few years ago. Since I lived outside the US at the time, I hadn’t really realized who he was. Here I watched a guy making predictions that sounded OK about lots of different companies, all at once. And later on at a future point, I saw him make a prediction about Google.

Woah. I pretty much eat and breathe Google, right? It’s my full-time job. Meanwhile, here’s Jim Cramer who I cannot believe knows the company much beyond its published financials, since he also has to cover a million other companies. There’s just no way he can have a high level of expertise about Google from a product level. But if you don’t know the products of a company, what do you know about a company? Financials only tell part of the story. But he can make recommendations off of that?

It’s insanity. But hey, maybe that’s just my astrological sign, Libra. You know, the scales. I rarely feel I can say something is absolutely one way or the other. I think Google’s got a bright future ahead of it, but who knows. And from an investment standpoint, I guess I wish maybe some of these recommendations were more wishy-washy, so braindead investors might wake up and do their own homework (newsflash Yahoo investors — you’re Pepsi, Microsoft is RC Cola, so when RC Cola says it wants to buy Pepsi, you’ve got a good stock until you stupidly question its own value). And I certainly think any firm that’s supposed to do research might actually pay to talk to real experts, to ensure they have good research. Not for me — I could give a toss for myself. It’s just that it’s the right thing to do.

And if you are an investor getting a report? Go ask for a list of all the experts that were considered — those that were actually consulted — who wasn’t consulted and why — and how much was spent on obtaining external research. Bet you find it surprising.