Emily Chang - eHub Interviews

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Visit Hackoff.com, originally added to eHub on Oct 12, 05.

eHub Interviews Tom Evslin

Thanks to Tom Evslin, author of Hackoff.com for this email interview posted October 17, 2005.

eHub: What is your blook about?

Tom Evslin: hackoff.com is an historic murder mystery set in the Internet bubble and rubble. It is serialized on a blog platform so that daily episodes can be read online, received by RSS fed or by email subscription. Complete chapter PDFs are also available. The blook (book on a blog platform) also includes a faux company web site for the fictional company in the book, a user forum, and a wiki. Access to all including subscription services is free under a creative commons license. A traditional hard cover of the novel will be available early in 2006.

eHub: Why did you start this project?

Tom Evslin: As the CEO of a company which went public during the Internet bubble, I had a boardroom seat for those strange times. I wanted to write about the people who lived inside the bubble; the pressures on them; the elation; the despair; the humor. While I was thinking about publishing, I got good advice that a first time writer will get no help in marketing or publicity from a traditional publisher so I decided to self-publish.

Then I realized that publicity and distribution for this book should start on the Internet. It is about the Internet. It is by an author (me) whose career has been entwined with the growth of the Internet. I already have an audience for my blog Fractals of Change (blog.tomevslin.com). Blogs are where readership is growing. Most important traditional gatekeepers (publishers, “name” agents, reviewers) can be bypassed if a web site, a service, or a story can capture the imagination of enough of the blogosphere.

The technology growing up around blogs and podcasts is also important. RSS or email subscription is a very good way to read a serial. “email this” is a good way to get one reader to tell another about a story they like. Tagging is a way for people with similar tastes to make recommendations to eachother.

So the book became a blook. The initial results have been great in terms of inbound links, readers, and subscribers.

eHub: How much time do you devote to its growth? Do you have a day job?

Tom Evslin: About eight hours/day. Half as much time as I spent working before I “retired”. Day job is some consulting, more writing, some charitable work.

eHub: How large is your team and what are your backgrounds?

Tom Evslin: Team bios below starting with mine:

Like Larry Lazard, the fictional CEO of hackoff.com, I founded a company during the dotcom era, took it public, saw the company’s stock soar and plunge, and fought a hostile takeover. Unlike Lazard, who is discovered in his office dead of a gunshot wound, I lived to tell the story.

Besides being a serial CEO, I am an inventor with five granted patents, a licensed pilot, a failed candidate for the US Senate, the former Transportation Secretary of the State of Vermont, and a nerd.

Super-blogger Jeff Jarvis wrote: “Tom did, indeed, have that [ringside] seat. Put him on the short list of the people who made the internet the internet. When he headed up AT&T’s internet services, he introduced flat-rate pricing and brought on the masses. He went on to see the power of VOIP before the industry did. And as you’d expect, he’s not publishing the old-fashioned way...”

The company my wife Mary and I founded was ITXC, which grew to be the world’s largest wholesaler of VoIP and went public in the fall of 1999. Besides AT&T I also worked at Microsoft but have spent most of my time at startups including software developer Solutions, Inc. which Mary and I ran before selling most of its assets to Microsoft in 1991.

The rest of the team:

Pat Bertha is our graphic artist and created hackoff’s logo and other key graphic pieces. She learned Macintosh graphics in 1983 before the machine shipped and has a great story to tell about adapting Dow Jones fonts to the Mac. Pat also did all Solutions packaging and other graphics including the famous glue bottle in a cape.

Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff is our editor (but I, Tom, am responsible for mistakes). Her short fiction has been published in Analog, Amazing Stories, Century, Realms of Fantasy, and Interzone, and she is the author of THE MERI (a Locus Magazine 1992 Best First Novel) and four subsequent fantasy / speculative fiction novels. In 1999, her short story The White Dog (Interzone #142) made the short list for the British Science Fiction Award. Maya also writes and performs music with her husband Jeff, with whom she produces original and parody music CDs. Her website is at www.mysticfig.com.

Kelly Evans is the publisher (project manager) of this blook and web master for hackoff.com. Previously, Kelly was Directory of Operations and Technology (2001-2005) at Creative Time, a nonprofit public arts organization whose credits include the blue lights at the WTC site. She was beaming art and exhibit guides into PalmPilots before most of us knew what the infrared stuff was for. Kelly was one of ITXC’s first employees and helped get that off the ground and out of our house. She had a crucial job in production at Solutions.

Mary Evslin is only part time on this venture. Too many charities need too much of her time. She’ll do special assignments like getting through to people who don’t want to be gotten through to and getting them to do things they really have no intention of doing. She’s currently working on possible magazine placement of some chapters. We’ll get lots of good ideas from Mary and, as often as we can, con her into implementing them. Mary and my collaborations started with Worcester vs. Kreps et al and have continued through children, houses, political campaigns, several varieties of Solutions, ITXC, charities, and figuring out how to retire.

David Zahn’s Signal Advertising has been Mary and my web developer of choice since there’s been a web. Since the 80s we have been turning to David and his team for graphic design whenever we decided to start a company or a venture. Signal is the graphic design and web development company that built www.hackoff.com and helped us think through some of the ‘novel’ issues that surround online publishing. It was David who wrested the URL away from the porno site that owned it. For this project web graphic design was provided by Dave’s partner Anci Slovak; and programming and project management was the work of Jason Northrup at Signal. Signal specializes in enterprises that are disruptive to traditional markets, so this ‘blook’ is a perfect fit.
I’ve been lucky to have a great informal brain trust helping me to figure this out (mistakes are my own, though). The team includes Dick Costolo, Matt Blumberg, Brad Feld, J.B. Holston, and Fred Wilson.

eHub: What is your design philosophy?

Tom Evslin:
1. Give the reader as many choices of format as possible. Different people want to read in different ways. We already have blog format, RSS and email feeds, PDFs. A hard cover is scheduled for the beginning of the year.

2. Take advantage of being online. It’s not convenient to take an online edition of the book to the beach. But links in it can be live. The company website and even company store are further examples of making the most out of being online.

3. Keep learning from user feedback and make small changes rapidly.

eHub: What technologies are you currently using?

Tom Evslin: [Tom Evslin] Hosted Movable Type as a base platform. I write in Word and paste MT which is NOT completely satisfactory.

FeedBlitz emails episodes to those who subscribe by email and also is handling registration for our contest.
FeedBurner handles RSS feed conversion for the blook and we’re working with them on some other projects and co-promotions. They are an important part of automatically creating blogrolls of not only blogs which mention hackoff.com but also blogs about blooks and other blooksites.
We and others tag with del.icio.us to create automatic blogrolls.
NewsGator has created a “blook” category so readers will have an easy way to find new blooks to read and blook-writers will have a way to publicize.
Word of Blog provides other bloggers with graphic links to hackoff.
ReturnPath has given us invaluable advice on how to use (and not use) email feeds.
We use SiteMeter for some monitoring.
Our wiki software is from MediaWiki.
Our forum software is from phpBB.
Together with our friends at Signal Advertising, we’ve created small bits of technology like “blookmarks” to make a blook easier to read.

eHub: If your project is live, what are the most requested features from your users/community?

Tom Evslin: Podcasts of episodes. Feeds made from comments.

eHub: Does your user base reside in a primary geographic location or is it distributed?

Tom Evslin: See traffic pie chart. Data reflects online visits only, not subscriptions.

eHub: Where do you see the project heading in the next 6 months? The next 2 years?

Tom Evslin: The serialization of the blook will end with the end of the novel. New formats will become available including the hardcover edition. We are sponsoring a “blook tour” to allow other authors of books to get publicity through the blogosphere. What we’d like to see is the technologies and techniques we’re building and cobbling together become a way for authors -particularly new authors - to bypass traditional gatekeepers and find an audience. None of this will make a “bad” book “good” but good and bad are often in the eyes of the beholder. Blooks create more choices of both content and format.

eHub: What is the greatest challenge to your success?

Tom Evslin: Right now things are going very well. Readership is growing rapidly. We get lots of attention from bloggers with lots of readers. We now have to reach the “long tail” - the bloggers who individually each have few readers compared to the superblogs but, in the aggregate, reach the people we’d like to have reading hackoff.

eHub: What is the one thing you need to get to the next phase of the project?

Tom Evslin: See above. We need to turn the attention we’ve gotten from well-read blogs into attention from the less well-read but much more numerous blogs which are the long tail of the blogosphere.

eHub: Do you have a business model? If so, what is it?

Tom Evslin: We don’t plan on any income until the hardcover book is available for sale. Indications are that we will have good initial sales because more people will know about it than if we hadn’t given it away and promoted it as a blook. It is possible that blooks will carry advertising (we don’t now) but serializations.

eHub: If you’re able to disclose this information, how much traffic or usage do you see on an average day?

Tom Evslin: We are still trying to correlate the data we get on visits, page views, PDF downloads, RSS syndication and email subscriptions so not sure except that the numbers are going up rapidly and hackoff readership is growing much faster than traffic to my other blog, Fractals of Change did.

eHub: What is the one thing you’re most proud of about the project?

Tom Evslin: The number of other online books now identifying themselves as blooks and apparently benefiting from that.

eHub: How would you describe the shift that’s occurring with the web right now to future generations?

Tom Evslin: Hard enough to describe the shift in any one year :-} let alone future generations. We’re now seeing the web loosen the grip of traditional gatekeepers of content whether that content be music, writing, video whatever. At the same time we’re seeing various folksonomies growing to help people make sections from a sea of content in a much more democratic way than ever before. Artists have more chance to find audience. Audience has more choice. The Internet has always been disintermediating and this trend continues.

eHub: What site(s) do you visit everyday other than your own?

Tom Evslin: I use a feedreader so partly depends on what sites have new content on a given day. The blogroll on Fractals of change includes:
‘Net Insider
*michael parekh on IT*
800-CEO-READ Blog
A VC
AlwaysOn Home
Andy Kessler
BuzzMachine
Clay Shirky’s Internet Writings
Feld Thoughts
Guy Kawasaki
Junto Boyz
Om Malik on Broadband
Seth’s Blog
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to 650
The Jeff Pulver Blog
VoIP Watch
isen.blog
I also read NYTimes and WSJ online and look at lots of other blogs.

eHub: How many hours of sleep do you get a night?

Tom Evslin: Six.

Thanks to Tom Evslin, author of Hackoff.com for this email interview posted October 17, 2005.

Visit Hackoff.com
Originally added to eHub on Oct 12, 05

» More eHub Interviews

eHub Interviews is a series with the creators of Web 2.0 applications and services by Emily Chang, author of eHub, designer, and co-founder and principal of Ideacodes, a strategic web consultancy in San Francisco that she co-founded with Max Kiesler.

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