CNET and ZDNET – Social Media’s long-lost Godparents?

The first part of a four-part conversation with JSM editor Peter Friedman about the secret history of Social Media.

By Stephen Fitzpatrick

Preamble

Interviewing Peter about his past work is always a mixture of pain and pleasure.

On the one hand it is a nightmare, because the sheer quantity of material he comes out with leaves me with a massive transcription job (and also a horrendous editing job, because his timeline is ridiculously convoluted: he is always working on more than one thing at a time) on the other hand it is great because so many new ideas emerge but which then need serious unpacking and structuring.

This is Part One of an interview that proved to be quite long so I’ve unpacked it into four coherent parts so that you, dear reader, don’t have to go through what I went through.

Part one covers the early research which fed into the Social Media Lab and the Journal of Social Media.

Part two covers the bubble-years and some interesting observations on stockbroking and social media from that feverish period

In part three Peter talks about a very early link-blogging and community project and part four covers is more speculative – a discussion about some of Peter’s fears about how social media could take a wrong turn and create an anti-social media backlash.

SF: How far back do we have to go?

PF: The ideas which went into HereComesEveryone’s project first came into existence when I was working as IT Director for a company in the city by the name of Perfect Information (PI).

This was the time when what we now call the tech bubble was in the middle of its explosive growth period and the tech-stock meltdown was a long way into the future.

PI was in the financial information services business, so it was hardly surprising that the PI office was buzzing with interest in the stock market and a great deal of that interest was focussed upon news about new technology companies.

The technology news publications, like Wired, Fast Company and Red Herring suddenly became an indispensable source of news about new potential investment opportunities (although rarely any warnings of potential perils, mainly because, at the time it seemed to many as if there was no such thing as anything but a sure-fire winner).

However, unlike my senior PI colleagues, I had come from the personal computing side of IT (rather than the stock market world which they inhabited) and so the publications that I gravitated towards for news about technology came from the leading PC IT publisher, Ziff Davis.

Ziff Davis seemed to have a massive head-start on the other players, because, as an organisation, they seemed to be taking the insights that they were gaining from their own technology well-informed news journalists (such as the now-vanished one-man proto-blogosphere Jesse Berst) about the future of technology and implementing it in their own publishing infrastructure.

PF. What’s the link between Journal of Social Media and this historical stuff about ZD?

PF: Well, looking back from where we are today you can see that what they – CNET and ZDNET - had was Web 2.0 before even Web 1.0 had really taken off!

These CMSs were immensely responsive and sophisticated and placed huge amounts of power in the hand of the editors of the CMS.

They could be configured to facilitate all kinds of participative functions that could be used to help integrate marketing, publishing and selling and I could see that what they had was critical – that they could have ‘taken over’ then if they’d been of a mind.

It seemed pretty obvious to me then that if you were serious about web-marketing then linking together the publishing process with news and community and integrating this into your business processes was the way to go – it wasn’t an advertising model – it meant becoming a media company yourself and of course that meant rethinking and retooling the business; at the time this seemed a crazy thing to suggest to anyone so I kept quiet about it..

I didn’t get a chance to put this model into operation until later……

Part two: The social media side of stockbroking?

Peter Friedman on putting theory into practise and working with internet legend
Alpesh Patel

Part three: Link-blogging before the blogosphere?:

Peter Friedman tells me how he persuaded a training services company to embrace the blogosphere, before it existed! Shurely shome mishtake?

Part four: Social media and its discontents:

A conversation with Peter Friedman about his fears about what happens after what happens next.