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| BRAINSTORM |
Red Herring founder unveils 'super-blog' for business geeks
By David Kirkpatrick
FORTUNE.COM
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(FORTUNE.COM) -- Tony Perkins gets points for prescience. He invented the technology business magazine when he founded Upside in 1988. He refined the model further in launching Red Herring in 1993. A boatload of imitators followed. Then in November 1999 he, along with his brother Michael, published the book on the last great technology wave—The Internet Bubble: Inside the Overvalued World of High-Tech Stocks—And What You Need to Know to Avoid the Coming Shakeout. How's that for timing?
So Perkins is something of a bellwether for technology journalism. Now, with his two-week-old AlwaysOn Network, he's trying to take it to the next generation. AlwaysOn aims to completely rethink technology and business publishing. (Here a necessary disclosure: Tony's a good friend of mine. But in this case our friendship just gives me a good view of the significance of his project.)
"The impact of the Internet on the media business will be in forcing it to become more participatory," says Perkins. So this time he has completely foregone print—the company is only online. And he sees in the burgeoning blogging movement, in which everyone has a voice, the seeds of the next media revolution: "The bloggers have shown us the value of truly participatory media sites, so we're just going to bundle it up and polish it and commercialize it."
AlwaysOn is almost entirely the creation of its members, who express their opinions in a variety of pre-defined topic areas, including "The Wireless Device Boom," "Security in a Hacker's World," "The Real-Time Economy," and "Entertainment Goes Online." There are three categories of bloggers on the site: ordinary members, who after two weeks already number 5,500; about 100 volunteer "correspondents;" and industry celebrities, who Perkins will interview periodically. He merely asks these people to talk about their strongest opinions of the moment. He's already posted comments from Michael Dell, John Doerr, and venture capitalist Tim Draper. (Doerr's screed against expensing stock options elicited 15 posts, mostly disagreeing with him.)
"This is the eBay-ization of media," says Perkins. "We've created the arena, like eBay did. We organize the world, then invite members to come in and play." He calls the site a "super-blog," comparing it to Slashdot.org, a phenomenally successful site for serious technophiles that now claims over two million members. "While Slashdot is for techie geeks, AlwaysOn is for business geeks," he says. He will impose editorial order by continuing to fine-tune topic areas, recruiting appropriate bloggers, and contributing heavily himself.
Perkins has also shown prescience in his choice of an overarching concept for his site. "We're betting that 'always-on' is the catch phrase that comes to symbolize the next round of explosive growth in the IT and communications industry," he says. "Consumers and businesses will need to be always on in order to survive, compete, and participate." He's right—as more and more connected consumer devices emerge at lower and lower cost, this always-on connectedness will increasingly define our lives, in both good ways and bad. Perkins is no Pollyanna on this subject. Among his topic areas: "Turning Off; Will It be Possible?" and "New Communities, New Isolation." This latter thread addresses what happens when some are wired and some are not—the so-called Digital Divide.
But AlwaysOn's business model is even more significant than its approach to technology and business content. Perkins started the site with nothing more than a $150 blogging software package called pMachine, and put only about $50,000 into the site's development, he says. He has a tiny staff—only three full-time and three part-time employees. But from day one, he claims, his costs have been more than covered by his four paying sponsors—Accenture, KPMG, technology-oriented law firm Gray Cary, and the Silicon Valley Bank.
And here's the most revolutionary thing about AlwaysOn: Perkins has put his entire member database into the customer management service of Salesforce.com. When somebody signs up, their info—including, at a minimum, name, title, company, zip code, and favorite URL—goes directly into Salesforce. Most people voluntarily include significantly more. Then Perkins gives his advertisers and sponsors real-time (perhaps we should call it "always-on") access to his membership database by giving them Salesforce.com accounts. That allows them not only to see who's getting their marketing messages but also gives them the ability to e-mail people in carefully sliced and diced segments—for example, all members who went to Stanford who live in Manhattan. One obvious risk: unwelcome spam could turn off members and sully the site's reputation. Perkins says he will work to insure sponsors don't abuse the privilege. Only time will tell if this works, but he has innovatively attempted to solve one of the most vexing problems faced by media companies up to now—they don't really know who is looking at their stuff. That makes the task of selling advertising infinitely harder.
So far AlwaysOn remains thinly populated with information and ideas. And it's confusing to navigate. But it's been launching slowly, with no media coverage and no promotion thus far except a few e-mails sent by Perkins to friends and contacts. Who knows if it will succeed? But I can tell you one thing—this site will define an entire new approach to technologized media.
