Opinionated

Ok, I became a US citizen last week and there is a danger, amidst all of the patriotic outpouring that is the citizenship ceremony, and the frenzy of Phelps generated nationalism, that in response I am over-compensating. In other words I may be seeing devils where there are none.

However, what I am about to show you seems, on the face of it, a cheap attempt to make the US Olympic effort seem better than that of the host country, China.

Here is the official medal table from the Olympic Committee’s official web site:

Now, look at the NBC version of the table:

Wow - the US is first

To be sure I checked out the BBC’s site. Here is its version:

So…. why do all US based Olympic medal tables deviate from the official version, whilst the rest of the world does not? Could it be that the only way to get the US in first position is to add Gold, Silver and Bronze into a total and then order the results by total medals won, implying that all medals are equal?

Or to put it another way - let’s assume you applied this methodology to a single event, oh I don’t know, let’s say… swimming (ludicrous I know, but it makes the point) - that would mean that the silver and bronze medal winners in Phelps events are counted equally to him, and so a person who won 1 gold, 3 silvers and 7 bronzes (11 medals in total) would be a bigger winner than Phelps.

Makes no sense does it

Update 2:Rafat has a comment to this post pointing out that by just looking at paidcontent.org I am doing the valuation of ContentNext a disservice. Of course he is quite right. ContentNext has other sites and also events. It is also true to say - although Rafat doesn’t - that valuation has many variables, including the quality of the people etc. Rafat is very good at what he does and he has a great team. So … fair point Rafat.

In my own defense, this post is not intended to be a scientific analysis of valuation. I did a “back of the envelope” comparison. I didn’t take into account any of the other sites that GigaOm has, or TechCrunch, or ReadWriteWeb. I also didn’t take into account TechCrunch events. All I was saying is, there are probably (by relative comparison of the web sites) some pretty valuable businesses out there right now. Hope you agree with that Rafat.

Update: Kara Swisher is speculating who’s next. Jeff Jarvis is hoping she’s wrong. Now there’s a Techmeme discussion.

The news that Rafat Ali’s ContentNext, owner of PaidContent.org, has been acquired by the UK’s Guardian Media Group got me to thinking. What does this mean for the valuations of other Tech blogs?

I did a quick back of the envelope calculation based on the numbers published and the Compete.com stats for June 2008.

By this math PaidContent.org got something like $139 per unique reader or $56 per visit as an acquisition price. Of course the Compete stats will not be wholly accurate (although Quantcast has Paidcontent.org at only 40,000 unique visitors, so Compete could be high)

Using Compete.com for 4 other significant technology Blog services we get some interesting numbers. TechCrunch should be valued at between $200 and $450m; GigaOm at between $46 and $55m; ReadWriteWeb at between $63 and $65m and Venturebeat between $50 and $53m. I’d say a merger between these 4 would bring them collectively up to about $350-500m even without the synergies and growth prospects of being one. I also looked at the search analytics data from Compete.com. 4,563 keywords for TechCrunch, 585 for GigaOm, 913 for ReadWriteWeb, 581 for Venturebeat and 363 for PaidContent.org Interesting indeed.

I am adding some graphics from Compete.com (all from this URL).

Disclosure: I am a shareholder in TechCrunch - along with Mike Arrington.

Nicolas Popp - a leading advocate of Open Identity and data solutions - posted on his VeriSign blog today following the rather heated discussions that have ensued since Google announced its Friend Connect product recently.

Nico’s employer - VeriSign - along with Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, AOL and others, is a member of the board of the OpenID foundation.Nico’s primary argument (emphasis mine) is that:

Undoubtedly, data portability is the natural child of federated identity (more on that in a future post). Personal and social data are an important part of any consumer identity’. Like identifiers, credentials and profile attributes, social graphs, activity streams belong to the end user who created them in the first place. In the long run, consumers will require full control, privacy, security and portability over such personal information. Therefore, the identity technical community must engineer a new and comprehensive identity portability layer. The new layer needs to broaden the tradition notion of identity federation beyond names, passwords and profile to encompass the full gamet of personal and social data. Furthermore, this new layer must support a plurality of identity service providers who can compete and distinguish themselves by the quality of their service and the user experience that they provide. Freeing our data off Web portals and social networks by creating a new service layer dominated by one single service provider is hardly trading one master for another.

I am in full agreement with this approach. And .. as coincidence would have it, last week I registered the domain name - itsmygraph.com - with a view to beginning to participate in this discussion. I have an early draft of my thoughts. They are at sites.itsmygraph.com. But as a teaser - here is my high level view of the evolution of Internet Users:

I would love to get feedback on your thoughts about the future of data portability and its relationship to OpenID and OAuth.

My personal view is that Michael Arrington had it right when he said recently:

I’ll say what the OpenID Foundation cannot, for political reasons - It’s time for these companies to do what’s right for the users and fully adopt OpenID as relying parties. That doesn’t fit in with their strategy of owning the identity of as many Internet users as possible, but it certainly fits in with the Internet’s very serious need for an open, distributed and secure single log in system (OpenID is all three).

If and when the Big Four become relying parties, the floodgates will truly open and there will be no looking back. And until they do that, I’m not buying that they really support what OpenID is trying to accomplish.

The Conversation:

Techmeme
TechCrunch
ReadWriteWeb

I spent a great morning watching Manchester United beat Wigan 2-0 to become English Premier League champions.

After a nail-biting 90 minutes, Chelsea eventually only tied with Bolton 1-1. united were far and away the best team all season. Next up….. United v Chelsea in the European Champions League final - May 21st. Can’t wait.

As the man says - “Unbelieveable”!

Marvel lawyers have sent a cease and desist to TechCrunch on the plans to show Iron Man for $1 a seat - tomorrow in San Francisco.

What - gives? Play the video and see. You can leave video comments here (click on the Seesmic link in the comments)