PodLeaders - Thought Leaders podcast

Episode 37 of the PodLeaders show - 18 mins 15 secs

First of all - apologies for the lack of a podcast last week but other events had me distracted!

My guest on the show this week is Pierre Chappaz. Pierre founded Kelkoo (a price comparison engine bought by Yahoo! in 2004 for €475m). He is also the former head of Yahoo! Europe, the former head of marketing for IBM Europe and currently the founder of new start-up Wikio.

With such a strong background Wikio has to be interesting so I invited him on the show to discuss Wikio as well as some of his other interests.

Here are all the questions I asked Pierre along with their times during the interview:

Pierre welcome and can you give us some background on yourself first, who is Pierre Chappaz? - 0:41

You founded Kelkoo back in 1999, can you talk a bit about how that came about? - 1:45

What is Kelkoo’s business model, does it make a commission on sales generated or is it by traffic? How does it work? - 4:08

You sold Kelkoo to Yahoo! last year. Can you talk a little about that process? - 5:56

Do you still have an involvement with Kelkoo? - 8:02

You are involved in another startup now called Wikio. Can you tell us what Wikio is? - 8:15

So Wikio is like a cross between Digg and Technorati with News sites thrown in as well? - 10:36

The interface is in French right now, are the sites that you are indexing also in French only or are you also indexing sites in English, Spanish, German, etc.? - 11:44

You mentioned that you have interests in other businesses as well. NetVibes is one of them, is that right? - 12:46

What are the business models of Wikio and Netvibes? How do you intend to monetise them? - 14:45

And finally, you are a serial entrepreneur, what is next for you? - 16:25

Download the entire interview here
(8.4mb mp3).

Episode 36 of the PodLeaders show - 41 mins 29 secs

My guest on Podleaders today is Loic Le Meur. Loic Le Meur is Executive Vice President & General Manager Europe of the blog platform company Six Apart. Six Apart are the developers of TypePad, Movable Type and Live Journal and Loic is the organiser of the blogging conference Les Blogs. I learned a lot in this interview about Six Apart, their products and the French!

Here are all the questions I asked Loic along with their times during the interview:

Loic, can you start off by telling us who is Loic Le Meur? What is your background? - 0:42

As a matter of interest, where does the name Six Apart come from? - 2:00

Six Apart is a blog platform company, as we mentioned, and you have several offerings in this arena - TypePad, Movable Type and Live Journal. That’s it, isn’t it? There aren’t any others apart from those three? - 2:32

Let’s talk about the three that people know right now, TypePad, Movable Type and Live Journal. What are the differences between them? Why would I use one as opposed to another? - 3:02

How do you maintain the privacy aspect of it? How do you restrict the number of people accessing it? - 9:25

I have heard quite a bit of criticism of Movable Type recently. People seem to be becoming frustrated with the lack of innovation with it and the lack of support; especially when compared to the likes of WordPress. I was talking to Todd Cochrane last night and his quote was “Some of us are getting sick of waiting for a new revision”. How do you respond to that criticism? - 9:55

Just looking at the pricing of TypePad and MovableType, I think you can start off with Movable Type for around €40 per annum, and TypePad for around €50 per annum… - 12:03

Under what circumstances can you use MovableType for free? - 13:18

There’s an increasing problem with comment spam and trackback spam on blogs - what kinds of steps are Six Apart taking to minimise that for people? - 14:42

I was listening to TalkCrunch yesterday and Tony Conrad from Sphere and AutoMattic was on it. He said that in excess of 80% of comments these days is spam… - 18:06

Audience Questions -

Dennis Howlett
Is there something about French culture that has contributed to the spectacular growth of blogs in France? - 19:16
Is there any clear evidence of business blogging taking off in France or is it still a few examples like LeClerc and LaFraise? - 24:44

Todd Cochrane:
What is SixApart going to do to revitalize the third party developers that you lost when MT went to a pay model? - 27:18
Also finding plugins is not easy, do you think you should have someone dedicated to talking about the new plugins? - 28:13

Back to my own questions.

What do you see as the advantages to businesses of blogging? Why should businesses be blogging? - 29:27

Talk to me about the new French competitor to Google - Jacques Chirac’s pet project Quaero… - 33:08

Finally, when is the next Les Blogs? - 36:46

Download the entire interview here
(19mb mp3).

Episode 35 of the PodLeaders show - 25 mins 05 secs

My guest on Podleaders today is John Battelle. John is the founder of Federated Media Publishing (FMP) but is probably better known as the author of the book on search called, appropriately enough, The Search: How Google and its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed our Culture. John is also one of the original founders of Wired magazine, the founder of Industry Standard magazine and website, and band manager of the collaborative weblog Boing Boing.

Here are all the questions I asked John along with their times during the interview:

John, first of all can you give the listeners a bit of background. Who is John Battelle? 0:36

FMP is only for bloggers at the moment. Do you have plans to expand that to Podcasters or other media? - 1:33

You were the co-founding editor of Wired and the founder of The Industry Standard. What lessons have you learned from your involvement with them? - 2:44

John can you see any new and upcoming companies give Google, MSN and Yahoo a run for their money? - 3:48

You wrote the book on search - your book is called The Search - why did you feel people needed to know about search? - 5:22

Privacy now is a myth, isn’t it? The era of privacy is gone… - 8:15

How do you see Technorati and the blog search engines affecting the likes of Google? - 8:44

I was talking to Alex Laats of PodZinger today. PodZinger’s search is another vertical. Do you think this is something Google is taking an interest in? - 11:00

Audience Questions:

Damien

Can you name one thing MSN, Yahoo and Google could be doing much better and then one thing that they have nailed? - 12:57

Is Google turning into MSN? Their rate of turning out innovative and funky products seems to be slowing. Google Talk wasn’t very exciting, Google Base seems like a mess at the moment and Google Pages is very hit and miss. Do you think they’re losing focus? - 15:05

Can the search engines cope with the new wave of home produced “content” and I use the term loosely because a lot of it is going to be bebo/mySpace type junk. Do you think the big boys will get their head or their crawlers about Microformats and microcontent which is evangelised by the likes of Marc Canter - 16:17

John, you’ve interviewed a lot of people through the years. Who was the most interesting? Also, who would you like to interview that you haven’t and what would you ask? - 18:01

How did you hook up with the BoingBoing folks and become their “band manager”? - 20:46

Finally John, can you tell us about the current book you are working on? - 22:40

Download the entire interview here
(11.49mb mp3).