TechFlash published a Redfin essay today asking folks in Seattle’s startup community to go ahead and disagree — yes by all means — but to stop being so nasty about it. Which of course has only incited more nastiness: 58 comments and counting. Why do you think Seattle has gotten into such a funk lately?
I wrote the post in an hour or two and then spent the weekend trying to decide whether to let it see the light of day. John Cook was supposed to publish a picture of Khan from “Star Trek: Wrath of Khan” as my picture but instead just inserted Ricardo Montalban below the standard headshot, with no explanation. While searching for the photo, I learned that Montalban’s ridiculous rubber pectorals were in fact real.
And to express how I felt about the need to disagree, to have it out, to get somehow to that lost little shivering creature of truth, there was a link in there to the opening monologue in “Michael Clayton” that spoke to me like nothing else in film in the past five years. Here’s the full clip:
And while we’re on the subject of stuff that didn’t make the cut… For the closing sentence, about how we are all “more delicate than we pretend to be,” there was a Flickr photo we never got permission to use, so you’ll just have to look at it on Flickr itself. If humanity had to send one picture into outer space to convince hostile aliens that our planet was worth saving, this one would be it.
Following Andreas Kluth’s essay in The Economist, Nicholas Carr, author of Does IT Matter? and the recent Atlantic essay “Is Google Making Us Stupid,” said on Friday that the blogosphere is dead:
While there continue to be many blogs, including a lot of very good ones, it seems to me that one would be hard pressed to make the case that there’s still a “blogosphere.” That vast, free-wheeling, and surprisingly intimate forum where individual writers shared their observations, thoughts, and arguments outside the bounds of the traditional media is gone. Almost all of the popular blogs today are commercial ventures with teams of writers, aggressive ad-sales operations, bloated sites, and strategies of self-linking. Some are good, some are boring, but to argue that they’re part of a “blogosphere” that is distinguishable from the “mainstream media” seems more and more like an act of nostalgia, if not self-delusion.
Noting that 94% of blogs have been abandoned, Mr. Carr compares the initial proliferation of amateur bloggers to radio’s earliest days when, as one contemporary account observed, thousands of amateur broadcasters turned the entire country into “a vast whispering gallery.”
It’s an amazing essay, exactly the kind that argues for professional writers to blog. And of course he’s right: when Tina Brown edits Vanity Fair, The New Yorker and then a blog, you can’t really deny that blogs have become a major commercial enterprise.
It’s about time. The commercialization of online journalism isn’t a tragedy; it’s the de-commercialization of journalism that has been the tragedy. For years now, the suppliers of information — the writers who actually gather news — have done all the work and the Internet aggregators such as Google and Yahoo have mostly profited from it.
Karl Marx would have called this a contradiction of capitalism, with technology taking the place of capital as the way to create surplus value. It’s good to see online journalists take charge of the machinery and turn their blogs into businesses. As for the rest of us, Mr. Carr shouldn’t worry: trust me, there will always be a place on the Internet for amateurs.
It’s an old pleasure getting a package in the mail from a friend, especially when it contains a new book, the pages cracking and smelling of paint and wood.
Thanks Guy, for including us. It was a wonder you ever took notice of Redfin when we were only a few goofballs working in David Eraker’s apartment. And it’s exciting to appear in a book that gets manufactured by a big machine, and moved around on forklifts and in cargo ships, and read by people in subways and hammocks and breakfast counters. Almost the fulfillment of a life-long ambition.
Some day, I’m going to see a guy falling asleep on a plane with this book in his lap, and I’ll tell him Hey! pay attention! There’s some good stuff in there…
After Redfin’s layoff last week, the CEO of a startup down the street emailed to say “at least we’re not public!”
Which made me wonder how private we really are. You can hide from the Wall Street Journal but not from the hundreds of tech and real estate blogs that covered Redfin last week. One big difference between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 is that this time, the meltdown will be blogged.
That kind of attention can lead startups to dither like publicly traded companies before making hard decisions. And it has prompted some startups to turn against blogs just for covering the news.
Connections with Other Little Companies, Everywhere But Redfin has no complaints. Blogs brought us our first customers and our best ideas. Most important for the lonely types who tend to go off on their own to make software, blogs connected us to other little companies everywhere.
Sure, eWeek or CNET covered startups before, but it was blogs like TechCrunch and GigaOM – with their fits of idealism and jadedness, of accessibility and remoteness, of cleverness and heart, their sense of “we” and “they” — that first made us feel cool.
When Redfin announced our layoffs, we expected all that to turn against us. But there was only empathy for the company and, most important, for the people who had to leave the company.
To all the folks who blogged or commented on our setback, thanks for your even-handedness. Redfinners past and present have never needed your support more, or expected it less.
The End of Cool The only thing that we lost in having blogs write about our troubles is our cool: the cool of startups that never struggle, that show up on all the “hot” lists, that always seem to be having a ball, that don’t have a care in the world.
That’s ok. Startups haven’t always tried to be cool. Today, the blogosphere has created its own celebrities, mixing Michael Arrington with Ashton Kutcher, MySpace with Paris Hilton.
But my first startup job was about as far from cool as you could get, a reunion of all the people at the desolate end of the high-school cafeteria. We rented U-Hauls to drive our own pop-up booth to a trade-show. At big client meetings, we wore debate-tournament-era suits.
Even starting a company that went public was never really cool in the way it’s usually portrayed: it meant walking through rivers of my friends’ blood, and working on silly little things all night, and caring too much, and becoming a jerk and becoming humble again, and it meant joy that arrives without your noticing it, and love and above all things — not a flash of brilliance or a dramatic strategic decision — endurance.
And that is the one trait that characterizes Redfin, endurance. This was a business run out of an apartment, by people working for free. We created a real service when it was fashionable to be all virtual. We have changed the game rather than play the game. And now we offer a service so valuable to so many people – and so much better than what they have come to expect — that I believe we will always endure.
The Only True Currency It seems like the blogs — which are typically written by compulsive people late at night in their bedrooms, for reasons they can barely explain — are best equipped to understand what we are going through: setbacks and endurance, passion and hardship, being cool and not being cool, working for love and scrapping for money.
As Lester Bangs explains in “Almost Famous,” the “only true currency in this bankrupt world is what you share with someone else when you’re uncool.” This impulse is what drives blogs and startups alike. That bloggers have reached out to us now, when we have never felt less cool, is the truest currency there could be between us.
Redfin's corporate blog is the place to read what Redfin employees have to say about Redfin, the real estate industry and other topics such as life at a startup or usability and web design.
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