You know the world has gotten a little nutty when a Microsoft guy complains about a patent, but when Matt May last night at the Podcast Hotel told me a company is trying to patent AJAX, among other things, I was amazed when Matt said this patent looks like it tried to patent AJAX. I haven’t looked at the patent (the patent lawyers ask employees to refrain from looking at patents) Then he passed me a Slashdot article on them today.

We call some of this kind of behavior “patent trolling.” (I haven’t looked at the patent in question, so don’t know if it’s legitimate or not, I’m not a lawyer and all that). What’s a patent troll? A company gets a patent that it itself isn’t willing to commercialize in a product, but goes around to every company threatening that it’ll take everyone to court. Demands a licensing fee. Usually something like $20,000 to $150,000. And repeats, often stopping short of the big guys with the deep pockets (although in this case it looks like they are pitching it to the big guys).

Why does this work? Well, I interviewed one of our lawyers recently and he said that a patent case, if it goes to trial, will cost millions of dollars to defend. So, of course everyone settles out of court if the fees are far less than a potential loss in court.

The commenters over on Slashdot are unusually lucid on this topic. Makes for fun reading.

As usual, my disclaimer particularly applies here. This is my personal opinion and may or may not agree with anyone else’s opinions, in particular my employer’s. I haven’t checked with anyone else at Microsoft before writing this post.

What do you think? What should the responsibility of big companies be here?

Here’s an article in InformationWeek about this patent and the breadth of what it covers.

Guy Kawasaki gives some great advice to those of us who work in companies “how to prevent a bozo explosion.”

#9 got a little close to home. *

Anyway, one thing that I will always appreciate about Bill Gates is that he lets me walk around Microsoft with a camcorder so I get to study one of the world’s best businesses from inside (how many business school graduates get to do that?).

And, even better, I get to meet a LOT of people from a lot of different businesses, so have collected a few of my own rules about bozo explosions.

There are a few other things I’d add to Guy’s list after studying the problem in detail:

#15: If you are a software developer and if you spend more time in meetings than writing code you might be in a bozo explosion.
#16: If the first question out of your manager’s mouth is “can this be monetized?” you might be in a bozo explosion.
#17: If the name for your product is something like “Contosa Bozo Exploder 2006” you might be in a bozo explosion.
#17B: If your product’s box has 45% more text on it than an iPod box, you might be in a bozo explosion.
#18: If, when an employee comes up with a new idea the answer back is an email with the words “business value” repeated 13 times you might be in a bozo explosion.
#19: If, when you ask a business leader “what’s your philosophy?” and they answer “huh?” well, then, you might be in a bozo explosion.
#20: If more than three people have to be consulted to spend less than $100 million to acquire a company, or build something new, then you might be in a bozo explosion. (Committeeism guarantees slowness, lack of philosophy, and lack of creativity).
#21: If your marketing team can change the spec after the development team has started development, you might be in a bozo explosion. (Or, if your development team doesn’t communicate well, or listen to, the marketing team you might be in a bozo explosion).
#22: If your company forces you to work computers built in 1999, you might be in a bozo explosion (you do realize that having two monitors has been shown by several studies to make people up to 15% more productive, right? Are you working on two or more monitors yet? I keep visiting lots of companies and am suprised to see how many companies force their workers to use small, low-resolution, single monitor setups. They are literally throwing 5% productivity down the drain. For what? A $1,000 per worker savings? It gets worse when we’re talking about software developers who have to wait minutes for their companies’ code to compile (I’ve seen so many horror stories here it isn’t funny).
#23: If your best employees leave you might be in a bozo explosion.
#24: If you’re not allowed to write on your blog that you are in the middle of a bozo explosion you might be in the middle of a bozo explosion (hint: we don’t have such a rule at Microsoft).
But, back to #9. You knew I couldn’t resist, couldn’t you? Well, I personally think that a major company (IE, one with more than 1,000 employees) that only has ONE paid blogger IS potentially a bozo factory. I personally believe every employee should blog. But, then, I’m an edge case.

The asterisk is because my employee review goals show that I’m not paid to “only blog.” I’m facing 197 emails tonight (many of which don’t have anything to do with blogging). Tomorrow I’m going to Danny Sullivan’s Search Engine Strategies conference in New York to speak. And, really, my “day job” is to do videos for Channel 9 anyway. I don’t look at that as blogging. Most of my blogging is done at nights and on weekends, so Microsoft gets blogging mostly for free. Who’s the bozo here?

How can you get out of being in a bozo factory? I’m seeing some best practices:

1) Stop having meetings. Put a 23-year-old in charge and let her ship and get out of her way. At Microsoft that’s Sanaz Ahari (and Scott Isaacs and a few others who are just kicking butt). Or, have a “meeting dictator.” At Amazon Jeff Bezos is famous for coming into meetings and challenging the team who organized the meeting “give me the three reasons why we’re having a meeting.” If they can’t answer, he leaves. Hint: it isn’t good when Jeff Bezos leaves your meeting like that.
2) Have your development team over for Xbox and pizza instead of keeping them locked in their offices during ship nights. I watched Jeff Sandquist do this and his team has done magical stuff in just a few weeks. (You’ll see their work real soon now, it blew me away when I saw it last week. It’s amazing what three developers can do in less than a month).
3) Tell your development team to do something better than the competition. Anything. And then fund it. Expect it. I’ve been watching the Virtual Earth team under Steve Lombardi and have been impressed.
4) Listen to your blog’s commenters, even if it hurts. The IE team hasn’t had the public corner turn yet, but those guys respond to every customer’s request I’ve been getting. Often within minutes (you should see the email I get and pass along). At some point that’s gonna mean they get a killer new feature that you weren’t expecting. I remember one post they had had about 1,000 comments. Or visit the IE wiki. That was started by customers. Not done by a Microsoft employee and it’s watched often by the team.
5) If your team blogs, even when it has no customers, or worse, is derided by the community, you’re on your way off of the bozo explosion. Something interesting happens when you have a conversation with people about what they want. It focuses meetings and gets things going.
6) Get great competitors. Seriously. Stuck in a bozo explosion? Watch what happens when your competitors get rid of their bozos. Everyone notices and that pushes management into action. If they don’t, then you really know you’re on a bozo explosion and that’s a good opportunity to leave.
7) Keep people from changing the spec. A few teams at Microsoft are developing by using scrum (an agile development process where you lock down the requirements for a month and keep people from changing them while you “sprint” to complete that work) and are seeing great results. One manager told me this transformed how they worked and got stuff done.
Reward good work. Publicly. With cash. Nothing will get more good people to want to join your team. Nothing.

How do you know you’re in a Bozo explosion? Have you been in a company that successfully has gotten out of it?

I can’t visit a memetracker like Memeorandum or TailRank without seeing something about the Origami project. There’s pictures, on Engadget, and there are videos and other speculations elsewhere.

My own Origamisms started back last Spring when I visited Otto Berkes in his office and saw that he was tinkering with dozens of portable devices. Otto was one of the four guys, I hear, who started the Xbox team, but now was working in building 32, which is where the Tablet PC team was hanging out. He showed me some wood prototypes that excited me. They were small, would open up new usage models (I want to buy one for my son, for instance, to take to school to take notes on) and were fairly low cost.

Anyway, I’m going to keep my mouth shut about the rest of the deal, cause Otto and his team deserves their day in the sun. Let’s get back together on March 2 after the announcement and see what you think.

Hey, we’re in the top 10 of America’s most admired companies, named by Fortune Magazine. Here’s how they picked those.

Not the only honor we’ve picked up lately: Edelman says that Microsoft is the most trusted global company. Thank you very much, but as anyone who reads Mini-Microsoft knows, we have even more to do to make sure our customers and employees are the best treated in the world.

You know, we’ve gotten tons of reviews for our book. I don’t link to many of them cause, personally, it just gets a little boring after a while. But the Church of the Customer authors just recommended it and I gotta celebrate a bit cause Ben and Jackie are two people I look up to and I remember thinking how cool they were to write a great book and do a good job consulting (I saw them speak at Microsoft a few years back).

Sorry for the celebration. Oh, and nice Photoshop work on our cover, too! Heheh.

The site is registered to Microsoft. It’s a good tease. But what is it? And why do my readers know about this before I do? (JP of DesignTastesGood sent me this question).

I do know that Origami is the code-name for a new kind of device. Oh, heck, here come the NDA police, gotta go! …

For the past couple of months Blog Herald has been subtly attacking me. I thought it was just one of those suckups trying to bait me to link to them but today I saw the real reason for Duncan’s tone: he thinks I don’t want him or anyone else to make money off of content (that link takes you to his post titled: Steve Rubel doesn’t get it: RSS advertising sucks).

He’s wrong about my views, but he’s not the only one (I was forwarded some email from a private mailing list where some of the participants skewered me in the same way that Blog Herald just did but in a more personal way — all because I want full-text feeds).

Ahh, I see Kent Newsome sees through Duncan’s post.

So, let’s get to it: what are my views?

1) That I won’t subscribe to any feed that isn’t full text. Well, except for my brother’s blog.
2) That treating RSS readers well will get you more Web browser readers.
3) That full-text sites will be more profitable because of this than partial-text sites.

So, let’s look at the world of RSS. First, you MUST separate the world into two buckets:

1) The way they are today.
2) The way we want them to be tomorrow.

Personally I want a world where everyone uses a feed reader and subscribes to their favorite blogs, news sites, etc. But let’s be honest. Such a world is a LONG way from being here. We could go into the reasons, but that’s for another post at another time. Let’s not rathole on this.

Instead, let’s look at how things are TODAY. Today only a very small percentage of people use RSS and RSS News Aggregators. Even if you include the people who don’t have any clue that they are using RSS (like those people who use live.com or MyYahoo to subscribe).

The reason RSS advertising doesn’t work today is:

1) The audiences are too small.
2) The audiences are too geeky and too full of smart people. Hint, those people don’t click on advertisements unless they are very targetted!

Now when I talk with audiences I see two trends: 1) Blog-heavy audiences, like the Northern Voice conference, have about 80% usage of RSS News Aggregators (these audiences do NOT represent the mainstream user). 2) Blog-lite audiences, like Ireland’s IT@Cork conference, only see about 2% RSS usage (these are far more mainstream — in fact, I’d argue that the mainstream user is far less likely to use RSS than that. Heck, if you really want to get mainstream, only about 1/6th of the world’s population even uses a computer).

But, now, how do you get traffic to visit your content? Well, I’ve been studying that too. There are a few ways:

1) Get your content listed on a news site with a lot of flow. Something like Yahoo or Google or MSN’s news page. Not many of us have access to that. With one exception that I’ll note below.
2) Get a journalist with a lot of flow to link to you. When the New York Times links to you you’ll get lots of flow.
3) Get lots of bloggers to link to you. I do get lots of flow when lots of bloggers link to me.
4) Get the memetrackers like Digg, Memeorandum, TailRank, Slashdot etc to link to you.

Yeah, there are probably others, but in terms of buckets of how you get traffic, these are the major ones.

OK, you might be reading my words in an RSS aggregator, right? What happens when you click on a link? It takes you to a Web browser, right?

Ahhh! That’s how you can make money!

Aside, there are at least three ways content owners today make money off of advertising:

1) Show a banner ad when you visit the page (the content owner gets paid everytime you visit that page. For instance, I just went to cnn.com and there’s a banner ad there and they probably got a few cents from my visit.
2) Click-to-pay advertising. You see all those Google ads all over the place? Chris Pirillo’s blog, for instance, has Google ads (so does Blog Herald). These sites only get paid if you actually click on the advertising. For instance, some of the words you click on can be worth up to $60 PER CLICK to Google and other advertising companies (like Mortgages).
3) Interruptive advertising. News.com uses a lot of these kinds of ads. They are Flash movies that fly over the page, or pop up, or run across the page until you click their close or “skip” buttons. These are also paid by impression, or everytime you load the browser up.

Anyway, back to traffic. To get it, first you should appease the connectors. Er, the bloggers, the journalists, and the geeks.

You see, when I get together with journalists their RSS usage is WAY WAY WAY higher than the rest of the population. Journalists are like me. They sift through lots of information looking for the gems for their readers. That’s how they build audiences. RSS lets people read about 10 times the amount of content than if you just use a Web browser. That’s why journalists, connectors, bloggers, geeks who care about productivity, etc use RSS. It’s also why advertising in RSS isn’t yet working. These people aren’t good targets for loosely-targetted advertising.

Here’s a question: if you were an advertising company, what advertisement would you put into this post? One for diapers? Digital cameras? RSS aggregators?

Most of the algorithms for advertising would just look at the words I typed. So, now you’ll get ads for all the above. Loosely-targetted. This isn’t like going to a search engine and actively searching for, say, digital camera info, and getting a Nikon advertisement. Geeks, connectors, journalists LIKE that kind of advertising. But we don’t like interruptive styles of advertising. Which is what we get in RSS feeds today.

So, how does anyone make any money?

Well, let’s stay in TODAY’S world. In today’s world you get journalists, geeks, bloggers, connectors, to read your content and link to it. That’ll bring a larger audience to visit your Web page. How do you do that? Serve out full-text RSS. Why? Cause by doing that you treat the connector with the most possible respect and give him/her the easiest way to consume your content and link to it.

Then you put advertising on your page. That could be a banner ad. That could be a Google AdSense block (or Yahoo or MSN’s equivilent). Or you could even be really rude and put a Flash ad interstitial (I’ve seen more and more of this kind of “interruptive” advertising). Or, you could get really creative like Honda did and create advertising people will link to as content itself.

Since only a small percentage of your audience will be using RSS (even if you’re a tech blogger, less than half of your audience will be using RSS on the average day) you’ll make money.

Now, the fear is that the model will go away tomorrow thanks to RSS being built into IE 7, Safari, Firefox, Opera and other browsers. Whoa! Alert, alert, if that happens that means the unwashed masses won’t be seeing your interstitial Flash advertisements anymore, or refreshing your banner ads, or seeing your Google AdSense blocks.

OK, in such a world advertising will have to change. But, let’s be honest, what percentage of people will use RSS in such a world? I’d argue that it’ll be a small percentage for a very long time. My mom just doesn’t read enough sites to care about RSS. I doubt she will until she gets into blogging (which is possible, but I don’t expect it anytime soon).

Plus, what makes the usage model of reading a Web page in an aggregator so different from reading it in a browser window? Why couldn’t Google put the same AdSense block into RSS that it puts next to Chris Pirillo’s content, for instance? Oh, wait, Google is already doing that.

But, that’s also ratholing in an argument that really deserves its own post.

What people who say that full-text RSS hurts their advertising possibilities don’t get is that if you treat connectors, bloggers, journalists better, you’ll get MORE audience to your Web pages, which will get you more advertising hits.

Or am I missing something here? Either way, you can call me all the names you want, but I won’t subscribe to partial text feeds. Yes, I’m more likely to link to Web pages that also serve full-text feeds out. But don’t mistake my demand that my content providers treat me better with some theory that I don’t want them to make money. That simply isn’t true and represents the worst of “stick-your-head-in-the-sand” kind of anti-change thinking. If you want to make money in this new world you are far more likely to do so by working with your best customers to find new ways to build audiences and serve better advertising toward them.

The one exception above? The folks who run Yahoo, MSN, and Microsoft’s main pages are heavy users of RSS. Why? Cause they are paid to find the best content. If they aren’t using RSS aggregators today I’d argue they should be fired. Why? Cause they aren’t being as productive as someone else (I can prove that an editor who reads content in an RSS aggregator is far more productive than someone who only uses a Web browser).

But, what do you think? Are content providers going to gain anything to tell connectors, journalists, bloggers to screw off?

PS: Dave Winer has an interesting post this morning on why formats like RSS 2.0 work.

I love this license plate, seen today in front of building 26 on Microsoft’s campus:

You know, most of my life I’ve looked forward to the traveling lifestyle. It’s always fun to go and see new things. But it’s exhausting. It’s so nice to be back in my office.

Not so nice is my email. Whew. And my tasks. Double whew.

But, I shouldn’t complain. While I was off skiing last week my coworkers were working nearly around the clock finishing off something cool that you’ll see soon.

I’m not allowed to tell you what is up, but let’s just say that it’s the offspring of what happened here when Amanda Congdon of Rocketboom kissed the Nine Guy.

I do work with some people who just impress the hell out of me. Jeff Sandquist didn’t get the credit he was due for Channel 9 (at least not in our book) but he’s one of those people at Microsoft I’d go to if I wanted to get something done. And, I’m not just kissing up cause he’s my boss. You’ll all see again soon.

Anyway, there’s a lot of things going on. Tons of conferences and geek events are coming through my inbox.

Like what?

Well, Gaurav Bhatnagar reports that there’ll be a Barcamp in New Delhi, India. That should be well attended! I found a few new Indian tech bloggers linked off of that.

The Podcast Hotel is this week in Seattle. Maryam and I are gonna try to get there.

The Blogger Cruise, in October, going from Florida to Cozumel is gonna be one of the experiences of the year. They can’t take that many people, so don’t miss that!

Microsoft is hosting a Small Business Summit on March 14-17 in Bellevue (it’ll be Webcast too).

Next week I’ll be speaking at the New Communications Forum in Palo Alto. Lots of interesting speakers in the PR, marketing, blog worlds. I’ll also be speaking in New York at the Search Engine Strategies Conference and Expo. Whew.

The Blog Business Summit is going to Los Angeles on March 16 for a seminar on the essentials of business blogging.

And of course in March there’s SXSW, Emerging Tech, and Mix06.

Lest we forget that Mashup Camp is going on right now (Memeorandum has a bunch of reports). I was supposed to go to that but begged out cause my schedule is just too nutty.

Can we pack anymore events into a month? Got any other events coming up that we should be aware of?

Is Microsoft coming into the mobile space fast and furious? Yes and Om Malik noticed.

It’s real interesting that I’m getting a good look at the latest cell phones. I have a Nokia N90, and a new HTC phone (with Wifi built in!), and a new Sprint phone (I don’t have that one with me, so forgot the number).

I’m jealous of Nokia’s blog program. First they send phones out to bloggers to try out for a while. Second they have better photo and blog applications included on the phone.

Don’t count Nokia out. Their phone has a better camera on it (but is much more expensive than the Cingular 2125 phone that I am now using as my main phone. Funny enough that’s the only phone in my possession that I actually spent my own money on. It’s a great phone. How good is this phone? It’s the first one, out of dozens that Shel Israel has tried, that works in his house.

Yesterday, on our snowmobiling trip, we compared phones with several other guests (including an anesthesiologist from Florida) and mine always had the best reception.