Don Dodge on The Next Big Thing

The top 100 web search engines no one ever heard of

Charles Knight at Read/Write Web has an interesting post about the top 100 alternative web search engines. That's right, the top 100...there are many more that didn't make the list.

I took Mr. Knight's list plus my own list, mashed them together and categorized the search engines by major area. Entrepreneurs are trying everything they can think of to beat Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft Live. Here are some of the approaches and the companies that are trying.

User Interface (UI) enhancements attempt to improve the user experience and visual representation. Companies working in this area include; Snap, Live.com, and SearchMash. Another, Quintura, presents search results in a "visual cloud" that clusters results by meaning and intent. AskVox and Ms.Dewey use talking females to coach you through your search.

Technology advancements include; Hakia , Powerset , Lexxe, Mindset, Surfwax, Swoogle, which search based on meaning or intent. I have seen the Powerset demo, and if the model can scale to handle billions of documents on the web, Powerset has a good shot at breaking out and becoming a star.

Cluster Search - Vivisimo and Ask.com present results in clusters that allow you to refine or expand your search. Also see; Clusty, Kartoo, Mnemomap, Mooter, Webbrain, and Wisenut.

Social/Personalized Search - Findory, Jookster , Swicki , Collarity, and Rollyo do personalized or social search that present results based on your personal preferences or circle of friends. There are also a bunch of companies doing "tag" or "voting" based search...companies like Technorati, Digg, TailRank, and others.

Mobile search engines include; AskMobile, Boing, Google Mobile, Windows Live Mobile, Yahoo Mobile

Shopping Search - Like, Slifter, TheFind

Visual or Video Search - Blinkx, Clipblast, Ditto, Exalead, Girafa, Pagebull, Retrievr, Riya 

Continuous search engines store your search terms and update you whenever something new fits your search. Examples are; Allth.at, Swamii and Searchbots.

Meta search engines submit your query to multiple search engines and present all the results on one screen. This has got to be the most over done, and marginal category in search. Examples include; Dogpile, CrossEngine, Gnosh, GoshMe, GoYams, Grokker, Ixquick, Mamma, Mrquery, PlanetSearch, PolyMeta, Pronto, Srchr, TurboScout, Whonu, and ZapMeta. 

Vertical market segment search has lots of players in each category;

Jobs: SimplyHired.com Indeed.com, Bixee.com (India), Eluta.ca (Canada), Recruit.net (Hong Kong)

Travel: Sidestep.com, Kayak.com, Mobissimo.com

Health: Amniota.com, CloserLookSearch.com, GenieKnows.com, Healia.com, Healthline.com, Kosmix.com, MammaHealth.com, Google Health

Classifieds: Edgeio.com, Oodle.com

Blogs: IceRocket, Technorati, Bloglines, Blogger Search, Sphere, Feedster, Rollyo

Source Code: Koders.com, Krugle, Google Code

Venture Capitalists, over the past 5 years,  have poured billions of dollars into search engine startups hoping to hatch the next Google. There are probably more than 200 search engines today, trying all sorts of different approaches to search. Still, nothing beats the traditional big three of Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft Live.

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Ning versus Live Spaces and Yahoo Groups

Ning, a social networking platform,  has relaunched today with new features. Ning was founded by Marc Andreessen and Gina Bianchini. Marc was the founder of Netscape and LoudCloud so Ning warrants special attention. Mike Arrington at TechCrunch has come around to liking Ning after first panning it as a dead application. Robert Scoble has a video interview with Marc and Gina.  Om Malik says "

Ning 2.0 is also a challenge to current crop of blogging tools that are still not waking to the new reality, and continue to live like content management systems. The big challenge for Ning will be to get mass adoption, for upon that “adoption” hinges its business model.

The company plans to charge $19.95 a month if you want to run your own ads (or no ads at all). Your own domain will cost $4.95 a month, and a package of 5 GB storage/100 GB of bandwidth is going to cost $9.95 a month. At these prices, Ning will need thousands of social networks before it can join an elite network of start-ups of recent vintage that are profitable.

Haven't we seen this before? After reading some of the reviews and visiting the Ning site I stopped to think for a minute. Hmmm...haven't we seen this before? Yahoo Groups and Live Spaces, formerly MSN Spaces, have been around for a long time. Then I made a list of the Ning features and compared them to Yahoo and Live Spaces. They are virtually the same. Here is my incomplete list;

• Discussion forums
• Blogs
• Photos
• Video
• Polls
• Advertising
• Members
• Member pages
• Privacy settings
• Customization
• Management dashboard

Ning, like Yahoo Groups and Live Spaces is free. Ning will make its money by selling advertising, up-selling additional features like extra bandwidth, and using your own domain name.

The promise of Ning is customization. Ning is building out a platform that will support a variety of social applications that can be customized with your own code and scripts. The current version has feature parity with most of the big payers. I expect Ning will raise the bar with more sample applications and more customization options in the future.

There are lots of choices. Blogging platforms like TypePad, Blogtronix, and Community Server, are great platforms today, but will need to continue innovating to remain viable competitors. Yahoo Groups and Live Spaces have millions of users today, but will likewise need to stay current. Jeremiah Owyang has compiled a list of over 40 social networking application platforms, including the six listed above.

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Who wrote Linux 2.6.20? How large is the community?

I found an interesting post on LWN.net that analyzed the Linux 2.6.20 source code to discover who contributed the most code and what company they work for. It struck me that the Linux development hierarchy is a lot like traditional software development.

The top 20 people contribute about 50% of the code. I think most large software projects are like that. The "code gods" pump out the core code while hundreds, sometimes thousands, of detail coders and testers work out the rest.

LWN.net took several approaches to looking at the contributors such as; lines of code changed, changesets, lines removed, and signoffs. Lines of code changed seems to be the most reasonable measure of contribution, although each measure is open to interpretation. A little over 48% of the code lines changed were contributed by 20 individuals.

Developers with the most changed lines
Jeff Garzik	20712	6.0%
Patrick McHardy	15024	4.3%
Jiri Slaby	13917	4.0%
Avi Kivity	11726	3.4%
Andrew Victor	9710	2.8%
Amit S. Kale	9537	2.7%
Stephen Hemminger	9120	2.6%
Geoff Levand	8396	2.4%
Michael Chan	8307	2.4%
Chris Zankel	8099	2.3%
Mauro Carvalho Chehab	7390	2.1%
Adrian Bunk	6138	1.8%
Yoshinori Sato	5232	1.5%
Al Viro	4981	1.4%
Benjamin Herrenschmidt	4588	1.3%
Thierry MERLE	4549	1.3%
Dan Williams	4516	1.3%
Jonathan Corbet	3924	1.1%
Gerrit Renker	3857	1.1%
Jiri Kosina	3805	1.1%

LWN.net next looked at who was paying these contributors. Meaning, the domain name of the company they worked for. It was not possible to get a domain name in all cases. But, here are the results from LWN.net.

Top lines changed by employer
(Unknown)	66154	19.0%
Red Hat	44527	12.8%
(None)	38099	11.0%
IBM	25244	7.3%
Astaro	15306	4.4%
Linux Foundation	13638	3.9%
Qumranet	12108	3.5%
Novell	11930	3.4%
Intel	11652	3.4%
SANPeople	9888	2.8%
NetXen	9607	2.8%
Sony	8497	2.4%
Broadcom	8349	2.4%
Tensilica	8195	2.4%
Nokia	5581	1.6%
MontaVista	4394	1.3%
University of Aberdeen	4324	1.2%
LWN.net	3975	1.1%
Secretlab	3370	1.0%
HP	3211	0.9%

While "unknown" and "none" accounted for 30% of the changes, the remaining 18 companies accounted for almost 60% of the code lines contributed. It is possible that some significant percentage of the "unknown" and "none" actually worked for some of these companies, but made their contributions from home.

Where is Google? Not surprisingly, Red Hat, IBM, and Novell were big contributors. But where is Google? They certainly use Linux and lots of Open Source software, but why don't they show up as even 1% contributors?

The Long Tail of software development - It would be interesting to see the distribution of contributors for the remaining 50% of the code. My guess is that there is a very long tail of small contributors. Again, not unlike lots of big traditional software development projects.

How many Open Source users actually make changes to the source code? I recently spoke at a Fortune 500 CIO conference. During my speech I did a real time poll of the audience of CIOs. The results confirmed my gut feel for how the market really works. Here are the questions and the results.

How many use Windows Server? 100%

How many use Linux? 45%

How many use both? 45%.

How many of you have made changes to the source code? 8%

Very few Open Source users ever touch the source code. So is it really about the source code?

A small number of  companies contribute most of the code to Open Source development, so is it really about the community?

There are lots of free open source distributions of Linux, various databases, application servers, etc. Yet, Microsoft, Oracle, and BEA do pretty well in each market. Is it really about the price?

Everyone has an opinion, but I haven't seen any real survey data that covers these questions. Have any of you seen studies on this?

My real time survey of the CIO audience confirmed my belief that Open Source users are not zealots. They have pragmatic reasons for choosing Linux for some jobs and Windows for others. Understanding all those reasons will take more study.

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Are Google Apps a productivity killer?

Ed Sim, a venture capitalist, and big investor in SaaS software companies, says "G Office - What's the big deal?"  Phil Windley at ZDnet says "Google Apps doesn't compete".

Ed Sim is a big proponent of Software as a Service, but he is also a constant user of office productivity applications to get his work done. Ed recently sent his laptop in for service and had to live totally on the web for a few weeks. His experience convinced him that client based applications are absolutely vital, and that he lost about 40% of his productivity using just on-line apps. Listen to what Ed says;

While I am huge fan of web-based software and data in the cloud, there is one big problem - you always need to be connected.  For the last two weeks I have been living in a web-based world as I had to send my laptop back for service.  While I could do everything I needed to do, I must admit I was about 60% as productive as usual.  This lack of productivity partly came from clicking and waiting in my web-based Exchange offering and partly due to lots of travel which meant I could do absolutely nothing on the airplane.

In my web-based world, disconnected applications with an on-line component will rule.

At Microsoft we call this the Client /Server / Services continuum. It means having substantially the same experience on-line and offline, and the same features across all devices. Sounds easy, but its not. Keeping data synchronized is difficult, but Microsoft knows how to do it.

Microsoft Outlook Web Access did this about 10 years ago.It has steadily improved, and the same model will be extended to other Microsoft products.

Office Live is available now, but there is a lot more coming. Microsoft is building two $500 million data centers to host the on-line apps. Billions of dollars are already committed to realizing this vision.

How will Google respond? Can they solve the offline problem? Client based applications are far more powerful and responsive even when you do have on-line access. How will Google respond to that?

Google has all the press buzz now, and consumers love them. But business customers are much more demanding, and less susceptible to hype.

This will be a battle of the titans. I wouldn't bet against Microsoft. And yes, I work for Microsoft, so you know where my bet is.

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Why Microsoft will not fall into the Innovators Dilemma

Henry Blodget, the former Wall Street analyst says "Google paints bulls eye on Microsoft" While Larry Dignan at ZDnet says "Will you trust Google with your data?" Everyone is talking about Google Apps and how they are taking on Microsoft Outlook and Office. I think Google Apps really compete with OpenOffice, Zoho, and WikiCalc.

Is this another example of The Innovators Dilemma? Clayton Christensen of the Harvard Business School wrote the book. Christensen explores why successful market leading companies fail when faced with simpler, cheaper, less functional products that disrupt the market. See this post for an in depth review of the book and this one for real life examples from my past.

Google can do no wrong. The press heaps praise on anything they do. If Google Apps were released by any other company they would be panned as immature and irrelevant. OpenOffice is far better and it is free. Zoho has a better, more complete suite. WikiCalc is a far better spreadsheet written by Dan Bricklin, the original inventor of VisiCalc. All of these products are better than Google Apps...and none of them compare to Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Office. Even Microsoft Works is far better, and more complete, than Google Apps.

But this is exactly the kind of thinking that leads to The Innovators Dilemma trap. Maybe at other companies, but not at Microsoft. Microsoft takes this threat very seriously. Ray Ozzie has a grand vision for the Client/Server/Services continuum, and is already building out the infrastructure and products to make it happen.

Office Live and Windows Live is available now, but there is a LOT more coming. Remember those $500 million data centers that Microsoft is building? They are part of the strategy too.

Henry Blodget has a clear view of where things are today, but doesn't see what Microsoft is doing to build a seamless transition from Microsoft Office to Office Live. This quote from Henry sums it up best;

The current status is that Google's offerings are fine for low-end use but won't start meaningfully cannibalizing Microsoft's sales for years.  No self-respecting IT manager at a Fortune 500 company is suddenly going to throw out the global standard and bet his or her job on the sideline business of an Internet media company.  Over the years, a parade of web and technology titans--AOL, Oracle, Sun, Yahoo--have tried to upend parts of the Redmond monopoly, and all have found the crossover from their core business to PC software far harder than it looked.  And if Google is serious about stealing some of Microsoft's sales and support customers, it will undoubtedly find this transition hard, too.

At the same time, by targeting Microsoft's crown jewels, Google is risking not only failure but its own monopolistic dominance of its core business--search.  Selling and servicing technology solutions is a fundamentally different business than selling and providing advertising solutions, and will eventually require the creation of an entirely new sales and service organization.  No company in history has dominated the hearts and minds of both marketers and IT buyers, although several have tried.  Even with Google's awesome talents and power, therefore, success is far from guaranteed. 

Microsoft Office is a huge and profitable business, over $12 billion in sales and over 60% operating margins. Office is one of the three crown jewels at Microsoft. The other two $10 Billion plus jewels are Windows and Servers & Tools.

Microsoft will do everything possible to preserve these businesses while transitioning to the new Live strategy. The technical vision is to give users the best of both worlds. That is the business strategy too. No Innovators Dilemma here.

This is more than a technology battle, it is a battle of perceptions. And right now Google has the perception of being the innovator, even though there is nothing new in Google Apps. Not to worry, remember when Nintendo dominated the game console business? Xbox came out of no where and is now the percieved innovation leader. Never count Microsoft out.

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News Readers for New York Times, Forbes, and Seattle P-I

Microsoft has announced NewsReaders for Forbes magazine, Hearst Corp's Seattle Post Intelligencer, Associated Newspapers, in addition to the previously available New York Times reader.

The Hearst Corporation's Seattle Post Intelligencer has a reader available for download today. They said

"The P-I Reader allows users, such as business travelers or commuters, to synchronize their laptops before getting on an airplane or train and have available the latest content to read when it is most convenient. Up to six days of content can also be archived and read. The text and photos in the P-I Reader are displayed in a format to fit the size and layout of any computer screen and readers can customize the display according to personal preferences, such as font and window size, and move quickly through the pages, without scrolling. A user can navigate through the entire paper using just two arrow keys on the keyboard.

Robert Scoble asks "Why do a reader only for one publication?"  And, Mathew Ingram asks "Why on earth would anyone download multiple pieces of software — all of which are based on the same rendering engine from Microsoft — to read different newspapers? It makes no sense."

It's about business, not technology

Newspapers and magazines have very powerful brands. Part of that brand is the look and feel or presentation of the information. The layout, the font, the headlines, and the advertising are all part of the reading experience. The newspapers and magazines want to replicate the news reading experience on line. Sorry Robert, but you can't do that with an RSS reader.

These News Readers will download the whole newspaper or magazine to your laptop or PDA within a couple minutes. Then you can read it at your leisure on the plane, bus, taxi, or where ever you are. No need for an Internet connection, and no need to scroll through hundreds of individual RSS feeds.

Most people don't subscribe to multiple newspapers, so having a specific reader for your newspaper is not a problem. It is a feature. They want that familiar look and feel.

I will continue to use the RSS reader built into Microsoft Outlook for my news feeds because I like lots of very focused news items from many sources.

But, I completely understand why newspaper readers would like a news reader that downloads the whole newspaper and presents it with the same look and feel. And, it certainly makes business sense to the newspapers and magazines. It extends their brand, and advertising, to the on-line world in a unique way.

Another reminder that the business of software is about business...not technology.

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Google Apps takes on Microsoft Outlook and Office

Google today announced Google Apps which includes Gmail, Calendar, IM, and Google Docs and Spreadsheets. The pakage includes 10GB of storage and telephone support, all for $50 per user per year. Google Apps Standard Edition remains free. Here is a comparison of the features. All the usual suspects have stories including TechCrunch, Cnet, InformationWeek, and The New York Times.

The New York Times says "

While most analysts say that businesses will increasingly use software delivered over the Internet and supported by advertising — a formula that Google has mastered — they are split over the threat that Google’s offering represents to Microsoft in the near term.

“I think Microsoft should be very concerned about this,” said Rebecca Wettemann, vice president of Nucleus Research.

Ms. Wettemann noted that a business may spend about $80,000 on a systems administrator to manage e-mail and desktop office software. For the same amount of money, Google Apps allows a business to support 1,600 users, she noted. Simply in terms of staffing, “this may be a better proposition even if Microsoft were free,” Ms. Wettemann said.

Mark R. Anderson, an analyst at Strategic News Service, a technology consulting firm, said Microsoft should worry about Google’s inroads into one of its core businesses but would not see an immediate impact.

“These things take years to happen,” Mr. Anderson said. “Google will have to prove itself in terms of security and in terms of quality.”

Fortune Magazine has an interesting take;

The days are gone when Google announces a product and the competition trembles. Google's enterprise ambitions are modest. It's unlikely to dislodge more than a fraction of the 450 million users of Office. Even a rousing success would barely move the needle for Google. If all 100,000 of its current users signed up, for example, it'd mean an additional $5 million in annual revenue. That won't even help defray food costs at Google's cafeterias.

Google Apps is missing some fundamental features. First, there is no Powerpoint presentation equivalent. Second, there is no answer for offline usage. Third, privacy and security are still significant issues for web based apps. Google has done nothing to address those concerns. Fourth, and most importantly, there are just a lot of missing features in Docs and Spreadsheets. This is understandable given how new they are, but users are very demanding and have become accustomed to powerful, intuitive features in Microsoft Office.

Email is easy. Gmail is a reasonable alternative to Hotmail or Yahoo Mail, but it doesn't compare to Microsoft Outlook. Even Microsoft's online version of Outlook called Outlook Web Access is far better than Gmail. Another issue is keeping your email contacts and directory information synchronized with your corporate directory. Outlook and Exchange do this seamlessly. Ask yourself how would Gmail handle new employees joining the company or leaving the company? How does the Gmail contact list get updated?

Office Excel, Word, and Powerpoint are world class. I have tried using Google Docs and Spreadsheets and it is a frustrating experience. Obvious features that you have come to expect just aren't there. Some of them are simple, some are very subtle, and some are for power users, but all of them are not available in Google Docs and Spreadsheets. They are too numerous to list here but they are simple things like formatting cells, editing formulas, and quick features and icons we have come to expect in Office. I encourage you to try out Google Docs and Spreadsheets to see for yourself.

Software plus Services is Microsoft's strategy going forward. There are already some shipping products that illustrate what can be done, but Ray Ozzie's team is working on ne Office Live products that will change the game. The key is to have a seamless user experience across client/server and web services. The user interface must be intuitive and similar across the continuum, and your "user state" must be synchronized across all the usage scenarios. This means that when you move from the Outlook email client to the Outlook Web Access service it recognizes what you have already read, your calendar is up to the minute, it recognizes what alerts you have already responded to, and any last minute changes. The same synchronization must happen across Microsoft Excel, Word, and Powerpoint. It shold be seamless to transition back and forth between your data on your laptop and data on your online hosted version.

Microsoft Office has 450 million users worldwide. Microsoft takes the Google challenge very seriously and has already released Office Live. There is a lot more innovation coming soon. Google Apps will be attractive to some segments of the market where price is the number one factor, or where privacy and security are not an issue. But for most businesses Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Office will remain a very important foundation for running their business.

Fire bad students and bad teachers - Give incentives to both

I had no idea that tech blog readers had such an interest in public school education, although it makes sense that we all should. We have all been through the school system ourselves, and probably have children in it now. Alfred Thompson was a teacher and has some thoughts. Robert Scoble keeps his readers focused on the issue. Dan Farber has an audience too. Comments and links to my previous post were awesome. Techmeme keeps track of all the the most popular conversations. Shelly Powers  suggests how high school might look if Steve Jobs was in charge.

The main premise of my last post was that there need to be incentives and rewards for great teachers, and the ability to fire bad teachers. Let me add to that. There need to be incentives for good students and the ability to (fire) divert bad students to more appropriate programs.

If we are going to hold teachers accountable for performance we need to hold students and parents accountable too. We also need to offer alternative programs for students with different learning styles and different interests. The "one size fits all" public school education program doesn't work well for teachers or students.

Students should have incentives, recognition, and rewards for achievement, just like teachers should. Recognition is the best reward in most cases, and it doesn't cost much to do it. Rewards can be simple things like time off, first pick of some programs, special parking spots, free passes to school events, free lunches, whatever... it doesn't need to be expensive. Ask the teachers...they have hundreds of ideas...but no power to implement them.

Students should also have consequences and alternatives. Lets face it, not all students are in the classroom to learn. Some don't want to be there, don't care about learning, and are very disruptive. Get them out. It is a privilege to be in the classroom...make them earn it. If the student can't perform at that high level, then offer a lower level course. If they aren't interested in a college prep course then offer them other vocational programs, or just life skills classes. Some kids learn more about life playing sports than any experience in the classroom. There are lots of ways to learn and lots of different things to learn about. Why tie all students down to one education path?

Parents share an equal part of the responsibility. Every teacher will tell you that most learning happens in the home, especially the life skills and character lessons. If parents aren't involved and working in cooperation with the teachers...they have no right to complain.

Schools are all about local control. Your local school board really controls the school administration, who gets hired, how much they get paid, what curriculum gets taught, how big the class size is, and what programs are offered. How many parents have ever been to a school board meeting? That is where all the important decisions are made.

Presidential candidates, senators, and congressmen have almost nothing to do with public education. They talk a lot, but they really have zero impact on the education process. Governors and state reps have a little more impact because they make the decisions on how much state funding will be allocated to public schools. But, in most states, more than half of public school funding comes from local property taxes. And, the total amount that will be spent is proposed by the local school board and approved by local voters.

It all comes down to incentives and consequences for teachers and students. Unions have taken away incentives and prevented consequences for teachers. The union wants everyone treated and paid equally regardless of ability. All rewards are based on seniority. What a stupid way to run things.

The school boards have not put adequate rewards, consequences, or alternatives in place for students. They need to get creative and get out of the "one size fits all" education program.

Parents are in control. Parents are voters and taxpayers. Parents vote for the school board members and they vote to approve the budgets. Parents pay the taxes that support the schools. Parents teach and motivate their own children. If parents aren't doing their job and making the right decisions...the teachers don't have a chance.

I promise I will get back to my regular topics after this post. :-)

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Steve Jobs says teachers unions protect bad teachers - can't reward the good ones

Steve Jobs is speaking out. A few weeks ago he said the music labels should eliminate DRM protection. This week he said "I believe that what is wrong with our schools in this nation is that they have become unionized in the worst possible way".

April Castro of the Associated Press wrote a story "Apple CEO lambasts teachers unions", where Jobs said, "What kind of person could you get to run a small business if you told them that when they came in they couldn't get rid of people that they thought weren't any good?" he asked to loud applause during an education reform conference."

My take? Steve got it half right. I agree that You can't fire the bad ones. The other half of the problem is that you can't reward the good ones. That is what all unions do...protect the incompetent ones. Unions eliminate "pay for performance" and instead "pay by seniority". How do they get this seniority? Just breathe...because they can't be fired. About the only way a teacher can be fired is for sexual misconduct, some other crime, or obvious malfeasance. Perhaps worse, unions don't allow rewards for excellent individual performance. Where is the incentive for teachers, or any union member, to work harder, take risks, and excel?

UPDATE: I wrote another post that explores the other side of the problem Fire the bad students, and give rewards to both good teachers and students.

Robert Scoble agrees with me, while Dan Farber says the problem starts with teacher salaries.

Most of us work for businesses without unions, and most of us do just fine without the "protection" of a union. In fact, we enjoy "pay for performance" and work hard to earn promotions and bonuses. Yes, there are some large businesses that protect incompetent workers and refuse to fire them. But at least they don't hold back the star performers and do reward them for their efforts.

Pay teachers more money? Politicians always shout we need to pay teachers more money. Have you ever researched how much the average teacher gets paid? Not the starting salary of a 23 year old first year teacher...the average teacher. The politicians always point out the starting salary, but the truth is that almost no one gets paid that amount.

The Hoover Institute published a paper on teachers salaries, citing the American Federation of Teachers effort to compare teachers wages to other professions. The Hoover report responded;

"Where, one wonders, are the comparisons with journalists, registered nurses, assistant district attorneys, FBI agents, military officers, and other not-so-highly compensated professionals and public-sector employees? Shouldn’t the average pay of a high-school English teacher be compared with that of writers and editors? One could make a case that the salaries of high-school physics or calculus teachers should bear some resemblance to those of computer system analysts, but does the AFT believe that the appropriate compensation benchmarks for 3rd-grade teachers are the salaries of engineers or attorneys?"

Teachers only work about 180 days per year, so on an hourly basis they are making a very good wage. The rest of us work about 240 days per year, or about 33% more. Doesn't it make sense that teachers should be paid 33% less than the average worker with similar responsibility? Take a look at this chart from the Hoover Institute that compares average hourly wages of many different professions. Teachers make a higher average hourly wage than accountants, computer programmers, auditors, and even more than architects and engineers who work in State and Local governments.

Steve Jobs said that putting more technology into schools will not significantly improve the results. This is a bold statement for the Apple CEO to make after decades of subsidizing the purchase of Apple computers for use in public schools. But once again, I think Steve Jobs is right. Until we solve the problem of how to reward great teachers and remove poor teachers we will not see significantly better results.

The problem is not money. Schools already get more than 50% of the local budgets in most cities and towns. Health care is the same deal. We spend more per capita on health care than any country in the world. The problems with education and health care are not lack of funding. The problem is lack of incentive.

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Blog metrics - subscribers, readers, page views, and the Conversational Index

My friend Stowe Boyd posted that his Feedburner subscription numbers jumped 34% in one day to 2,858 subscribers.  Curious, I went to check Feedburner subscriber counts for Don Dodge on The Next Big Thing. Sure enough, my subscriptions jumped 29% to 3,792. Wow! what is going on?

Danny Sullivan at SearchEngineLand has the answer, Google Reader subscription data is now available as a feed.  Here is the announcement from Feedburner. The subscribers were always there...they were just not being counted.

Subscribers vs. Readers vs. Page Views - Intuitively I knew there were more "readers" than subscribers, and more page views than readers. Magazines and newspapers have a stable number of subscribers but many more people buy single issues off the news-stand. Blogs are the same. However, blogs are different in that once a reader finds your blog they may read additional posts resulting in more page views. I didn't have any good metrics or comparison data to validate my intuition.

My blog metrics - There are 3,792 subscribers as of 2/17/2007. I use two blog statistics packages that track unique visits and total page views. There are  8,275 unique "readers" on an average week who generate 17,377 page views. These are averages over the past month. There are spikes in readers and traffic, sometimes double these numbers, depending on how popular or controversial a blog topic is on a given day.

So, for every one subscriber there are 2.2 readers. Each reader generates 2.1 page views.

Stowe Boyd is always finding interesting ways to look at user behavior. Stowe coined the term "Conversational Index".

The Conversational Index measures how much conversation is happening on a blog by comparing the number of Comments and Trackbacks versus the number of Posts. Meaning, there should be more comments and trackbacks than posts to show that it is a conversation, not a one way broadcast. A year ago when I first calculated my Conversational Index it was 3.08, meaning there were 3.08 comments and trackbacks for every one post. Today my CI has improved to 4.73. Thanks! Keep those comments coming!

Links are another measure of blog effectiveness. Technorati is somewhat erratic in its measurement of links but they seem to be the accepted benchmark. To date, The Next Big Thing has 2,256 links, but Technorati only uses links from the past 6 months to calculate its blog rankings. Over the past 6 months there are 1,023 links from 494 different blogs, yielding a Technorati rank of 5,226. Being one of the top 5,000 blogs doesn't sound very good until you consider there are over 50 million blogs. So that puts it in the top 99.99% of all blogs.

Sports, politics, and Hollywood entertainment blogs appeal to vast audiences. I don't write this blog in order to appeal to the broad audience anyway. I don't pander to Digg or Slashdot either. I write about entrepreneurs, startups, VCs and technology. Admittedly a small audience, but it is what we care about. Metrics be dammed!

What is your Conversational Index? What are you finding in your subscriber/reader/page view trends? While I don't care about broad metrics that much, I do care about trends and metrics within the tech community. What are you seeing?

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