We’re pleased to have been accepted by the NYU/Poly Incubator, sponsored by the NYC Economic Development Corporation.

The incubator has been getting a lot of press lately, including stories in the New York Times and BBC.

A few hundred applied and about 30 were accepted.

Aside from a fairly swank office in downtown NYC, we’re happy to be surrounded by a couple of dozen other entrepreneurs — from one person start ups to 10-person early stage companies.

We’ve also got small digs over at Rose Tech Ventures, where another group of remarkable entrepreneurs work. Lots of VC-backed companies at Rose’s operation — called “Spark Space.” And free lunch on Fridays!

Lots of space now. Time to grow!

Interviewed (via e-mail) last week by Dee Ann LeBlanc of CMS Wire. Story came out today — http://bit.ly/LdDcF

Nice to see a journalist covering the inside pool of Drupal with real understanding.

Highlights:

“Staying with Drupal 6 lets the Buzzr team wait until they feel all of the necessary Drupal 7 modules are ready and stable before migrating the platform to the new version. Unlike many Drupal 6 users, however, Buzzr users may barely notice the change. No doubt they’ll get new functionality along with the update, but Buzzr is a usability layer on top of Drupal.”

and:

“Sussman hints that in addition to the main Buzzr release, they’re also working on “providing white label multi-site solutions for enterprises interested in rolling out social-media friendly sites quickly and efficiently — reducing their reliance on large teams of highly skilled developers.”

Buzzr, our platform for simplifying the creation of sophisticated websites, has been in development for more than a year now. Yet even though we aren’t public yet, tens of thousands of sites have already adopted software from the project. More than 100,000 sites, we estimate. How? Open Source.

For this of you not too familiar with open source technology projects, a word of explanation is necessary. Strange as it may seem, we’ve released, free of charge, interesting parts of our work (“modules”) well before we were ready to release it on our own site. We’ve also contributed extensive work we’ve done on existing modules to make them much better.

The work ranges from making it easier for website visitors to vote on content they like, to making it easier to create a custom form, to making it easier to configure a website to begin with.

The open source deal is this: you can use the module for free, but once you come to depend on it, you’re probably going to want to see it working well. So you help by reporting bugs, submitting patches and making suggestions.  And we end up getting free help supporting our work. Below, I’ve listed some of the modules we’ve created or done a great deal of work on, along with some usage statistics.

We’re building Buzzr leveraging the Drupal project. A big part of what we’re doing is creating a usability on top of Drupal, as well as integrating a bundle of Drupal modules that work as a simplified solution for creating, hosting and running websites.  You can see a preview of the work here. http://buzzr.com/buzzr-demo-video-making-drupal-usable

We have lots more good stuff coming.  And if there’s a particularly important feature you hope becomes part of Buzzr or one of the modules we release on Drupal, please let us know!

Thanks to the entire Lullabot team, including Karen Stevenson, Nate Haug, Jeff Eaton, Angie Byron, James Walker, Jeff Robbins, Addison Berry and Matt Westgate for their work on these and many other Buzzr tools.

New Modules:

jQuery UI ; SimpleViews ;  Views Attach; Views Gallery ; Form Builder;

And here are some of the modules we’ve made significant contributions to:

Embed Filter ; Fivestar; jQuery Update ; Multiblock:  Voting API

Sample Usage Charts:

Today, my company, Buzzr.com,  announced that we’re acquiring e-commerce platform, Tipzu.com.

Nice piece by Rafat Ali on PaidContent.org about the acqusition.

Also, a pithy analysis on CMS Wire.

Here’s our press release about the acquisition.

Iran changes everything.

Lots of professional journalists are pretty mad at the web. They blame it for sucking away ad dollars that pay their salaries. They view blogs and social media as low quality, unoriginal, and owing their existence to the work produced by real journalists. The wonderful writer Buzzr Bissinger, author of Friday Night Lights, spoke for many reporters last year when as a guest on Bob Costas’ HBO show he denounced blogs as being “dedicated to journalistic dishonesty” and responsible for “the complete dumbing down of our society.”

In February of 2008, I wrote an essay for FastCompany.com, a website I ran, called The Media is Social arguing that journalism and community-generated content should become a tightly-integrated hybrid. The digerati approved; lots of professional journalists made it clear to me they did not.

But anyone who still believes that social media is anything other than a powerful force for good and must be part of the new digital journalism (which before too long, will be almost all journalism), isn’t getting the profound media lessons from the 2009 revolution in Iran: Twitter is writing the first draft of history.

We used to say that about journalism. A few reporters in Tehran, though, simply can’t compare to the thousands of Iranians capturing the street revolution on cell phone and digital camera videos, as well as blogs and tweets, and distributing their observations with the help of Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and all sorts of other people-powered channels that didn’t exist five years ago. (Yes, it’s not just Twitter, although Twitter has become emblematic of all social media these days.  It’s just more fun to say than “social media.”)

As the Economist pointed out, CNN was running a Larry King repeat on June 13, just as Twitter lit up with news of the street protests. If you were in the U.S. and wanted to see the protests almost in real time, your only choice was links from Twitter to videos uploaded by Iranian citizens. CNN was wall-to-wall with coverage by June 16th – but what were they showing? A selection of those very same videos from street protesters.

A few journalists were braving the streets (at risk of death) but they couldn’t be everywhere at once.  And the important images – of men and women being shot and beaten by Iranian authorities, and huge crowds assembling – were captured by “citizen journalists,” not pros.

I got tired of watching the same few dramatic videos rerun over and over by CNN. So I went to YouTube and found a channel called “CitizenTube” with dozens of videos from Iran.   Amazing images – large crowds repelling cadres of police by tossing back tear gas canisters thrown at them, bloodied men being hurriedly carried off the streets, calm corners suddenly erupting with storms of people.

How extraordinary if this technology had been available just a few decades ago. The Warsaw ghettos as Jews were murdered in the streets and rounded up on cattle cars. Turkey as its native Armenians were slaughtered during and after WWI.  Cambodia in the time of Pol Pot.

Many of these stories took years or decades to emerge.  How would history have changed in these places with he same flood of citizen media now focused on Iran? Even a great work of investigative journalism, no matter how brilliant and well-documented, does not have anywhere near the impact of thousands of almost real-time videos, photos and accounts by tens of thousands of people.

I’m not arguing that what ills the world will be solved by social media. Only that at least it will be better documented. As the Iran story continues to unfold, if I had to choose between countless citizens with cell phones or, a dozen western journalists in Teheran, I’d choose the former without hesitation.  Journalists are more easily intimidated, more easily followed and often don’t know where and when the action is happening until after the fact.

Yet, I don’t want to sort through all those thousands of videos and tweets and blogs myself.  Nor do I think social media sites have yet created tools to adequately filter out what’s most relevant, though Twitter is coming closest.

Twitter has tools for real people to recommend stuff they like best on the service: “RT”, or retweet, is one; another is the follower/following system – everyone on the service gets to choose whose posts to follow. Doesn’t take too long, usually, to decide if someone is worth your time. People also can set up their own “hash tags” to create a stream of tweets on the same subject. Google has its analytics engine and YouTube its star ratings and recommendation engine to help filter the wheat from the chafe. But Twitter is mostly human powered, and that seems to work best for following real-time news.

Journalists everywhere need to jump in to the fray. I think one of the most critical functions of news organization expecting to survive and thrive over the next few years will be to curate and analyze social media content, whether collected from external sources, (the New York Times blog, The Lede, is headed in this direction) or from their own readers (CNN’s iReport is a great early example.)

News organizations should spend time developing their own networks of reliable sources from among the social media masses; and they need to give context as to whether particular content being disseminated online is trustworthy.  And even with professional analysis, readers still want to see the original material – and I think, a lot of it.  Summarizing is not enough – readers want video embeds, real-time tweet round ups, and links out to the best material. Major media websites have been way too parsimonious to date with engaging their readers with the rest of the web.

Curating and analyzing social media can be an important and honorable journalistic endeavor – the digital equivalent of working an old-fashioned beat, ferreting out good sources, not being misled by others.

Right now, trusted media brands are in a good place to serve this role. And trumpet what they’re doing prominently on their homepages, instead of relegating it to a side blog. As with everything on the web, if the mainstream companies don’t get it fast enough, start-ups will.

Is journalism really in danger?

Newspapers and magazines are shutting down, long-time reporter friends of mine are going back to school to become teachers and public policy experts, and a colleague of mine who teaches journalism confided that to justify his school’s value to students, he thought it had to be looked at as a general training ground for the liberal arts.

Not too long ago, at a closed-door gathering that brought together a bunch of well-known journalists to discuss the future of their profession, the specter of a journalistic apocalypse was raised. Government officials and corporate chieftans would go unchecked by investigative reporters, all laid off as a result of advertising dollars being siphoned by the internet. Incompetent or fool-hardy “citizen journalists” would have no idea how to get a story, and if they ended up in the wrong place a the wrong time, especially overseas, they’d be tossed in jail without the protection of a high-profile media brand. This final point drew much head nodding and discussion.

I originally intended for this article to sort through the shifting economics of the media industry. I was spurred on by an observation of a colleague of mine at an important, large news organization. He told me that his company’s web revenue was coming close to equaling the total staff budget for every journalist and editorial type at the place. Many hundreds of journalists.  And 10 times as many people were getting their news via the website than the print publication.  Yet, the print publication was still bringing in about eight or nine times as much money as the website, a strange by-product of many years of severe underpricing of web advertising by powerful media brands. Web advertising was a “bonus” or “value ad,” discounted or given away to support the sale of print or broadcast advertising, which was losing its value as the public migrated to the web. Now it’s too late to jack up the online prices.

From a pure economic standpoint, if this particular company shut down their print edition, enough ad dollars would flow from print to online that every journalist at the place could keep their job. But no way is that going to happen anytime soon. Too many people have their livelihood tied to dead trees. Truckers and printers and print ad sales people and those executives whose compensation is justified by big revenue numbers and selling advertisers on the experience of holding paper in their hands. The cost of maintaining real estate is another big problem for traditional publishers: internal politics nearly always make it difficult to shut down or reduce the space of large offices made much less necessary in the age of work-anywhere-with-your-laptop and online collaboration tools. The legacy issues standing in the way of restructuring are probably every bit as tough as those faced by the U.S. auto industry.

So, even with the recessions speeding the transition, the transformation process is likely going to be drawn out. To staunch the bleeding, cuts are being made across the board– give backs negotiated with the trade unions, departments combined, and journalists laid off. For most papers and magazines, what’s happening is a slow, painful path to exclusively publishing online that could be greatly accelerated, with fewer journalist jobs lost, if  media companies were more willing to quickly restructure themselves.

Not everyone can do it. Their content just isn’t going to be perceived as valuable enough by readers and advertisers and/or the publications won’t understand the importance of community and reader involvement on their sites– a story for another time. And a few don’t need to do it unless they want to — their content is so valuable that readers and advertisers will continue to pay enough to cover the deep expenses of printing and distribution. e.g.The Harvard Business Review or The National Journal.

Some media types are hoping if they hold out long enough, the Kindle and its ilk will more or less save their world via a printless print facsimile. Kindle fans working in journalism love it because the page format looks like print newspapers and magazines. As I see it,  Kindles are nice, especially for reading books, but they aren’t going to take the place of websites for newspapers and magazines: the flood of information and community on the internet needs to become part of the DNA of media companies. A reproduction of existing print pages just isn’t going to cut it and those who make too big a bet on it will easily be outmaneuvered.

Eventually, most big media brands are going to have to voluntarily get a lot smaller (although the good ones will be able to maintain the size of their edit staffs), or involuntarily be forced into bankruptcy. Newer media brands, without legacy restructuring issues, will become more competitive if established brands take too long to dig themselves out of their structural problems.  Models for low-cost digital publishing are quickly emerging. My new company, Buzzr.com, might eventually help here on the technology front with advanced and inexpensive publishing tools tightly integrated with social media. Generating sufficient revenue for these new, small online publishers to stay afloat, though, is currently an unsolved problem. That won’t last. I know of two start ups, currently in stealth mode, with great potential solutions for helping local publishers increase their revenue. I’m sure there are dozens of others in the works.

But will upstart websites, or revamped and much smaller existing news organizations, be up to the task of  creating great journalism? You’ll recall I said that at that closed door meeting of big-wig journalists there was much discussion about the importance of big media brands protecting properly credentialed journalists from the imperiousness of foreign governments. A blogger pursuing a story could be tossed into jail and no one would notice. Major media-brand reporters feel more protected, so they presumably, are more probing, more daring, more likely to get the story.

The world now know this assessment is false. What’s going on in Iran with Twitter and cellphones and YouTube is far beyond the capacity any mainstream news organization to collect and disseminate information. It appears some people are perfectly willing to risk dying to stand in the street and take cell phone videos. Meanwhile, most foreign reporters are confined to their hotels or being thrown out of the country.

And so where does that leave journalism?  The classic role of the investigative journalist, of Seymour Hersh uncovering the My Lai massacre, of Sydney Schanberg and Dith Pran bringing the Killing Fields to the world’s attention, is permanently undermined. And not for the worse. There are about 4 billion mobile phones in the world. About 65% of cell phones are in the developing world, and about half of the world’s residents will have mobile phones by 2012, according to the U.N. Whether it’s famine or war crimes, it’s increasingly unlikely that major events will go unnoticed and undocumented. And this is a great social good.

And this is where the original intent for this article shifted: too many journalists are hostile to the emerging models of new media, even if the net social benefit is significant. It makes it more difficult to rally to the defense of journalists if they refuse to participate in what’s happening. “Journalism is just for journalists” is no longer a defensible position. So, yes, there may very well be a catastrophe for some journalists — but it’s a self-inflicted wound.

The value a journalist still brings to the party in a situation like Iran is sorting through all the information and making sense of it for readers. Perhaps that seems a lot less special to some than breaking exclusives based on first-hand reporting. In fact, it’s not all that different from being a blogger, policy expert, or historian, and I expect we’ll see great contributions to journalism from all of these quarters. Welcome to the party.

I think people will very much value good analysis.  They can’t easily make sense of the flood of unfiltered information coming their way.  Great journalism can emerge when the record created by ordinary people is interpreted by professsionals. It’s largely because of the potential of this combination that I’m not all that worried that journalism is going to suffer in the long term. Painful restructuring ahead?  Yes. Lower pay for journalists?  Yes.  Less paper? Yes.  Greater competition? Yes. Worse journalism? I don’t think so. I think it’s going to become clear post-Iran 2009 that the information gained by the emergence of new media is outweighing the losses we’re suffering with print media.

by Ed Sussman

Everybody.

On April 13, a little over two weeks ago, we released a demo video and blog post about our new business, Buzzr.com. The demo, which is kind of wonky, is aimed at the crowd of developers who live and breathe Drupal, the publishing platform underlying the new business I co-founded with Lullabot and Bond Art & Science.  About 10,000 geeks have come to check out the blog so far.  Our ultimate audience will be more ordinary people who run businesses, write blogs, publish online newspapers and magazines, operate non-profits and just want to create cool, great websites. We should have something ready for them to play with before too long.

For now, though, it was pretty amazing to hear from the developers who are immersed in website creation. Along with the comments from the blog post, we set off a twitter storm. I thought I’d select a bunch of the comments and tweets, edit them down a bit, and give those who didn’t follow the chatter a feel for the overwhelming excitement. “Jaw droppingly awesome” from @torgospizza is probably my favorite.

• 
  pilpi: Something beautiful to start my day: The Buzzr Demo Video – Making Drupal Usable http://ping.fm/l8ru9
  11 days ago from Ping.fm · Reply · View Tweet
• 
  yelvington: Watching Lullabot’s video demo of Buzzr.com: http://tinyurl.com/cfnfnd (expand) Tres cool.
  14 days ago from TwitterFox · Reply · View Tweet
• 
  DamienMcKenna: Awesomeness + awesomeness = awesomeness^2: http://d7ux.org/buzzr/
  14 days ago from MoodBlast · Reply · View Tweet

• 
  KatherineD: @jjeff finally made time to watch the Buzzr video It’s awesome! boo-tee-full! the unix thing was pretty funny too http://is.gd/sNzH (expand)
  15 days ago from twhirl · Reply · View Tweet
• AmyStephen: I’m loving the excitement around #Buzzr – good job @lullabot http://tr.im/iVdr It’s the ease of use we are working towards w @Tamka
  16 days ago from TweetDeck · Reply · View Tweet
• 
  Sooz: @lizak Buzzr looks like great service for “the rest of us” who want to use Drupal. Curious to learn more as it percolates http://is.gd/sfxu (expand)
  16 days ago from TweetDeck · Reply · View Tweet
• 
  openbookuk: watching the buzzr video, pretty darn impressive http://bit.ly/RW7SF (expand)
  16 days ago from TweetDeck · Reply · View Tweet
• jdschroeder: Just finally watching the @Lullabot Buzzr video. Very impressive. http://tinyurl.com/cfnfnd (expand)
  16 days ago from twitterrific · Reply · View Tweet
• 
  rjdempsey: Buzzr? This is would bring Drupal to the masses for sure. No more joomla vs drupal debates. Drupal ftw. http://bit.ly/RW7SF (expand) #drupal #buzzr
  16 days ago from TweetDeck · Reply · View Tweet

• xcv: Is buzzr.com a game show? no… It’s @lullabot ’s attempt at taking over the world without a star destroyer… Drupal + ui awesomeness
  17 days ago from web · Reply · View Tweet
• 
  anemani10: @appratt have you heard of choice architecture? the buzzr guys seem to be “nudging” web design. awesome.
  17 days ago from web · Reply · View Tweet
• 
  timmillwood: @jjeff Buzzr is pretty impressive http://digg.com/d1oeN7, well done to @lullabot.
  17 days ago from Seesmic Desktop · Reply · View Tweet
• 
  torgospizza: @jjeff Simply put: jaw-droppingly awesome. Buzzr should be part of core NOW.
  17 days ago from web · Reply · View Tweet

• supaben34: RT @DamienMcKenna: Buzzr just made my year – http://tinyurl.com/cfnfnd (expand)
  18 days ago from TwitterFon · Reply · View Tweet
• 
  timeril: Lullabot’s Buzzr aims to make Drupal setup as easy as Ning & Squarespace: http://tr.im/iLcI
  18 days ago from Nambu · Reply · View Tweet

• skangus: If/when Buzzr gets released it will change the Drupal world.
  18 days ago from web · Reply · View Tweet
• 
  a_c_m: WOW JUST WOW : RT @jjeff: Announcing Lullabot’s *real* #Drupal usability project: The Buzzr Demo Video- http://bit.ly/bhGD8 (expand) (via @lullabot)
  18 days ago from web · Reply · View Tweet
• 
  DamienMcKenna: Buzzr just made my year – http://tinyurl.com/cfnfnd (expand)
  18 days ago from MoodBlast · Reply · View Tweet
• 
  davereid: @jjeff @lullabot Holy crap! Neat stuff! http://tinyurl.com/czkemf (expand) #drupal #buzzr #yourgonnaloveit
  18 days ago from TwitterFox · Reply · View Tweet
• 
  juliakm: @jjeff Buzzr looks awesome! It’s like Typepad and Drupal had a baby.
• 
  darrenmak: @lullabot I think I have almost seen more tweets about Buzzr than I did about the @Macheist bundle Enjoyed the video, looks good!
  18 days ago from twhirl · Reply · View Tweet

  

  appratt: this is really, really slick: RT: @kthread: pretty jazzed about the new @lullabot buzzr usability demo: http://bit.ly/bhGD8 (expand)

Comments from the blog:

terrific

On April 20th, 2009 Moshe Weitzman (not verified) said:

Well, this is a masterpiece, that won’t easily be topped. Just like Drupal builds upon Apache/PHP, Buzzr builds upon Drupal. It takes unusual vision and talent to execute a leap like this. And buckets of hard work. Thanks for taking drupal and content management to the next level.

Now I can see how Drupal will take over the world

On April 13th, 2009 Evan (not verified) said:

It’s always been powerful – but now I can see how it will be easy to use too!

Thats hot.

On April 13th, 2009 Steve Grimm (not verified) said:

And its real. Nice!

o_O

On April 13th, 2009 JohnAlbin (not verified) said:

This is a very impressive demo! Holy cow! You took every recent Lullabot-related module and put them altogether!

Nice

On April 13th, 2009 Ben Finklea (not verified) said:

This will be fantastic when it’s available. It’s an “everything not Drupal” killer.
Favorite line: “Mildly OK-looking stuff…” LOL.

It looks amazing

On April 13th, 2009 Damien McKenna (not verified) said:

But you knew that already.

WOW!

On April 13th, 2009 NonProfit (not verified) said:

All I can say is “wow!” Drupal is now a product.

This is #!@&$ awesome

On April 13th, 2009 Shawn (not verified) said:

This is #!@&$ awesome, it’s something that I have thought about but didn’t have enough Drupal mojo to actually do. I guess if anyone can get it done it’s you guys.

Smooth…….

On April 14th, 2009 Kevin (not verified) said:

gr8 work guys cant wait for Buzzr to be realized & get my hands on it…

Holy Crap!

On April 14th, 2009 Waldo (not verified) said:

LOVE THIS!Believe it or not I think the “features instead of modules” UI enhancement is the best thing… and you saved it for last!

Just a thought. VERY VERY nice work. This is the future.

Kudos!

On April 14th, 2009 John Lewis (not verified) said:

This is a very good example of the type of thinking that developers have avoided and that designers and administrators need. Drupal is very back-end oriented and that is it’s greatest strength. While not losing any of that layer, you’ve captured many of the issues that the end user has to struggle with after the development is done.Keep up the good work and for the bravery to unveil something at the right time even if it’s still a work in progress and even if you were looking for VC for it. L

holy crap!

On April 14th, 2009 danneskjold (not verified) said:

Finish and sell this! Right now, I’ll buy it and finally leave ning.com!

Very exciting

On April 14th, 2009 Tao Starbow (not verified) said:

Ah this demo makes me happy in so many ways.I hope this demo give the money tree a solid shake for you.

excellent

On April 16th, 2009 sobi3ch (not verified) said:

That’s what I’m calling pushing forward functionality

It’s very original

On April 17th, 2009 Golchi (not verified) said:

The concepts are very original and the result is very cool. The UI is really more friendly (you have a feeling of less settings to ‘touch’ to customize drupal and it definitely don’t look like drupal ).Keep on guys, you are doing great as usual

damn … this is so cool. i

On April 18th, 2009 jonathan wagener (not verified) said:

damn … this is so cool. i was mentioning some of the issues i was busy trying to address in the blog post http://espresso-online.info/site/node/114. you seem to have covered the issues and then some. this is really exciting, drupal is beginning to become appealing to normal people and is not just something used by programmers surrounded by pizza boxes and empty beer bottles.

Awesome. Photoshop for web

On April 30th, 2009 Anonymous (not verified) said:

Awesome. Photoshop for web sites.

by Ed Sussman

On Monday we released the first public demo of a product I’ve been working on for almost a year.  It’s great to be able to show people that you’re not just imagining the company you started.

The release create a mini-twitter storm because of it could lead to a dramatic improvements to the open source platform Drupal.  It’s also the foundation of my business – a hosted platform that makes it easy for ordinary people to create dynamic, cutting edge websites. Good stuff.

Even more fun for me, though, was the unveiling of our name: Buzzr.

Since October, I’ve been the CEO of a company called Codename Enterprises, Inc. At first, we called it Codename because we kept it hush hush for several months and Codename seemed to be a pretty good codename for the project.  Easy to remember and say. Kind of a meta joke.

The name quickly became second nature for those of us inside the project – not a joke at all. “Did you see the new Codename form builder Nate built!” or “Codename is driving me crazy” or “Will Codename make us very rich or very poor?”

Many, many hours went into brainstorming a suitable “real” name. I am the wistful non-owner of the parked “SiteMama.com” (is every aspect of one’s naming imagination already in existence on GoDaddy.com?) and proud owner of the rejected gem “BuzzGod”  (yours for a song!) If memory serves me correctly, several very off-color names were concocted and snapped up promptly by the creator after rejection by the team.  I am afraid to check if any came to fruition as websites.

Nothing we thought of seemed just right, though. And so, Codename remained Codename month after month.

After a while, the name stuck, to the point that it now feels odd to call the company by its new name. Buzzr. Buzz – R. Buzzr.com. It’s going to take awhile for me to get used to it.

Here’s an initial list of the characteristics we came up with for the ideal name:

Cool, new, elegant, dynamic, open, robust, endless functionality, understandable, inspiring, not intimidating, warm, inviting, supportive, huggable, profitable, empowering, works seamlessly, tweakable, customizable, fun, flexible, social

All that, in 5 or 6 characters. Plus we wanted a name that would look good on T-shirts. And possibly spawn an adorable icon. And please, not for more than $3,000 bucks.

The naming exercise was led by Evan Orensten of Bond Art + Science, our usability and design partner. Liza Kindred, Jeff Robbins, Karen McGrane and I were probably the most active name brainstormers, but a lot of the Lullabots pitched in: Kent Bye and Jeff Eaton come to mind. We even sent Kent on an undercover mission to suss out background on the owner of a domain.

At first, an orderly process was followed: a formal name and branding strategy workshop was convened. A seven-page brand characteristics survey was completed in several multi-hour meetings. A wall-sized whiteboard was organized around themes and the names springing from these themes. Lots of springtime themes kept popping up. Flowers, bugs, trees, birds, bees and fecund rabbits.

We actually settled on one, then another, only to discover their owners were recalcitrant to part with non-earning domains that had been parked for years. I’m not exactly sure why, although I can speculate: either it’s the fantasy that if they hold out a bit longer, that $2,000 offer is going to turn into $1 million. Or, perhaps they harbor a dream of a building a website they just haven’t got around to yet. (Buzzr.com will help with that.)

I ended up pre-occupied with possible names for months. I’d post long lists on our team blog (always to tepid responses.) I became a fanatical user of www.makewords.com Throw in a few letters or word, enter a category (e.g. business, medicine or music), a base language (Finnish is a good one), and MakeWords spits out a long list of possible domain names, along with whether the names are taken or available for registration. (The site could use a makeover, but the technology works just fine.)

I think it was MakeWords that led me to BuzzGod. We were doing various takes on “Buzz” and I was immediately drawn to BuzzGod. My narcissism unveiled in the name of branding.

I wasn’t the only one making lists. By the end, we had considered several hundred names and were only been pleased with a handful.

Jeff Robbins came up with Buzzr. He and his wife are good namers. As a musician/lyriscist and artist, respectively, they have the proper credentials to create silly icons and names.

The bee, most lately shanghaid for mass-market commercial purposes by Jerry Seinfeld’s Bee movie, is our intended symbolic stand-in for our website. Bees get around, they make a lot of love, they fertilize a lot of flowers. And when they get together, there’s an audible buzz. Good subliminals, no? Plus anytime you put together two “z”s and roll them off your tongue, it tingles a smidgen in your mouth. Jazz. Fuzz. Buzz.

Ok, if you piss off a bee, it’ll sting you and possibly send you into shock. That’s a negative. So the Buzzr bee has to be very friendly. We’re still playing around with a few different bees. Some seem more fertile, some more frenetic, some more fuzzy. You can see the current contender here.

All in all, I’m pretty pleased.  At the very least, my tongue gets to tingle night and day.

The following is reprinted from my announcement of the creation of Codename Enterprises. It orginally appeared on the Lullabot  website: http://www.lullabot.com/blog/edward-sussman-why-start-now

by Ed Sussman

Amid the gyrations of the stock market, and predictions of a severe economic downturn, I have found myself in the interesting position of launching a start up with my friends at Lullabot and Bond Art + Science. Over the past six years, I’ve worked within the comfortable fold of two well known brands in the media world: Inc. and Fast Company, the last four years as president of a digital division with six websites, 40 employees and more than $10 million in revenue. Now I’ve left to be the CEO of a self-funded company formed by Lullabot and Bond Art + Science that doesn’t even have a name for its product yet (even the name of the company is just Codename Enterprises.)

Some people think we’re crazy to do this now. Jason Calcanis wrote a couple of weeks ago that he expects 80% of the start ups already funded would collapse because of the down, part of a “start up depression.” And legendary VC Fred Wilson said companies without angel or VC funding in place would probably have to try to make it without VC funding.

There’s an old axiom, “There’s no bad time for a good company” but that’s a bit flip for the times. After all, some companies with good products are going to fail this year because of the downturn – they won’t be able to cut their expenses deeply enough to make up for lost revenue, and VCs will cut the cord before second or third round financing becomes available. That’s why there’s some panic in the start-up world right now, tempered by lots of practical advice from VCs about tucking in for the long winter of recession ahead. Sequoia Capital’s long slideshow shared with their portfolio companies recently is the best I’ve seen on the subject.

With our fledgling company, we only need to move around headcount numbers on a spreadsheet to make phantom staff we never hired go away. We’re working lean from day one. If this were a funded start up, about three million dollars of other people’s money would have been burned up so far. Instead, we just burned a few more pounds off of Lullabot Jeff Eaton. (That’s an inside “skinny” joke.) By the way, Eaton talks about the technical work done by Codename so far, and the excellent contributions that will ensue for the Drupal project, in this blog post.

That’s been the story for almost a year, now, actually. Day one for Codename was about ten months ago, when Lullabot managing partner Liza Kindred and I started talking about how damn hard the Drupal open source social publishing platform was for the likes of her and me (non-developers), and seemingly, even for the many developers who were working on a large project for me. I was in the midst of launching two of the most complex Drupal-powered sites to date – FastCompany.com and IncBizNet.com – and the separation between the promise of Drupal and the practical restraints were fairly maddening. I advised the Lullabots (the world’s leading Drupal consultants) to start working with Bond Art + Science, one of the best user experience firms in the nation. I also read an amazing post called “How Drupal Will Save the World” by Lullabot CEO Jeff Robbins, that pretty much laid out all the guiding principals that came to be the Codename company.

Some 4,000 hours of development and design by Lullabot and Bond Art + Science ensued. The object was and is to build a hosted platform, powered by Drupal, that gives ordinary people, businesses and organizations simple tools (like drag and drop or point and click) to custom-craft websites with features such as multi-user blogs, social networks, wikis, member reviews and ratings, photo sharing, and custom form fields. With these tools, even newcomers should be able to build feature-rich multi-user websites that go well beyond the boundaries of blog sites, or more rigid products such as WordPress.com and Ning.

“Working lean” is an understatement of what happened. Working for nothing is what happened. Lullabot juggled consulting and Codename to make it happen so far. The excellent user interface experts at Bond similarly kicked in their valuable partner time. An amazing advisory board has similarly been offering up valuable advice: Jeff Dachis, former CEO of Razorfish and senior partner at Bond Art + Science; David Bradley, owner of Atlantic Media; Jeff Veen, founding partner of Adaptive Path and former design manager for Google; and Lane Becker, co-founder of GetSatisfaction.com and a founding partner at Adaptive Path.

The Product

But “Why Start Now” isn’t answered just by saying, ‘we know how to do it if we want to, even if it means working lean and in a tight economy.’ “Why Now” requires a deeper examination of the importance of this product, especially in tough economic times.

The short answer is that websites that are social and dynamic are dramatically more useful than websites that are static, and that has a powerful social implication. In his post, Jeff Robbins tells the story of a village in Nigeria that allowed an oil company to use its land in exchange for clean water and schools. Because they had a website with some flexibility, they were able to post the contract with the oil company and bring attention to the oil company not living up to its obligations.

It’s incredible how many organizations and businesses in the United States, let alone the world, still have static websites where they can\’t even change their business hours without going back to the developer who built the site for them. The simplest CMS back-end remains unavailable to them, unless perhaps they keep a blog (which in all likelihood is hosted elsewhere.)

I switched FastCompany.com over to Drupal in February, making it a dynamic site for the first time. Within three months, repeat visits had increased 1000%. The site went from a straightforward publisher to a platform for conversation. But it took us almost a year to build and the work of half a dozen full time developers – not something ordinary people or businesses can do.

Yet, think of the practical implications if we could create a widely accessible web publishing tool with great social tools and format flexibility:

• Small businesses in search of leads for scarce business online could do a significantly better job attracting and creating a conversation with clients. More efficiency means more business and more jobs. Really.
• Small organizations could tap into the knowledge and needs of their members, and help them better engage with one another. Stronger organizations mean more powerful grass roots social movements. (Or at least better organized bowling leagues.)
• Bloggers could expand their work into real websites, with highly flexible formatting of pages and forms, rich tools to interact with their readers, and a back-end CMS akin for group blogging to what a major publisher pays thousands of dollars for. Better blogging platforms mean better information to readers at a time when newspapers are disappearing.

Earlier this year I was a judge at a startup competition put together by Jeff Jarvis, one of the great voices of \”citizen journalism.\” We were charged with judging the business plans of a group of grad students who thought running their own websites might be a better alternative to getting a job. A couple of the plans were, in effect, community newspapers, and a big chunk of the money they were after would have gone to pay for development of their sites. A few others involved more sophisticated dynamic tools: bookmarking, ranking and rating, user profiles, and the like.

When our platform reaches its potential, the startup costs for making these business plans real will drop dramatically. Companies will launch that would otherwise have never had a shot. And more start ups equals a better economy — it’s large enterprises that shed jobs during a recession. Job growth comes from small business.

Drupal is a magnificent modular platform that lets you build most any website you can imagine. If only you have the special know-how. It\’s hard even for developers to master, though. And that\’s not good enough to reach the mass audience that needs a social platform to build their websites.

That\’s why we\’re building a layer between Drupal and the end-user — a layer that simplifies choices, but leaves Drupal core intact. And it\’s free.

Can we make money with a free product?

Yes.

Some websites will want help with advertising. That something I\’m good at, having grown ad revenue almost 600% during my time at Inc.com and FastCompany.com. Some will want premium services, like extra storage space, beyond what we\’ll provide for free. And some websites will want to tap into our expertise in how to maximize a social website with great copywriting, custom branding, SEO, SEM, and community building.

The business model for freemium remains viable even in a weak economy. Fred Wilson wrote a good post about this. The services surrounding a free product can be very valuable, and even in the worst economy, people will pay to get help succeeding in whatever is most important to them.

We\’re well aware that plenty of others have their own visions of expanding social media platforms to more people: Ning with better social networks, WordPress.com with better blogs; Acquia with better, supported distributions of Drupal itself.

What we will offer as an alternative is a more flexible format that\’s still straightforward for average users. And we\’ll be improving Drupal all along the way by giving back to the open source project. Jeff Eaton discusses a number of important breakthroughs we\’ve already contributed in his blog post.

We\’ll see over the coming months whether this approach interests outside investors — outside investment money would certainly speed things along. But we\’re going to keep going in any case.

So why start up now?

Because innovation is always important.

Because getting in at the bottom is how you make the most money in the long term.

Because aggressive companies pick up market share more easily during bad economic times.

Because efficient ad-supported media, like radio during the great depression, can and do catch hold even when times are rough.

Because, as investor Mike Moritz put it, the best time to invest is when people are cowering under their desks.

Because people need this product.

Comments

It’s the “Perfect” Time to Launch!

The following is a February, 2008 reprint from my blog at FastCompany.com. http://www.fastcompany.com/article/media-social At the time, I ran FastCompany.com as president of Mansueto Digital.