Questions for Mike Davidson
I asked my good friend Mike Davidson a couple weeks ago if he would be willing to do an interview with me about his company Newsvine. This will be my first interview and I can already tell you the questions I have are loaded and should definitely entertain. Let BusinessWeek ask the boring shit.
In any case, I thought it would be a good idea to stick in some questions from the audience, so leave a question in the comments and I will make sure to ask the five I pick and he will have no choice but to answer.
Besides that I have been knee deep in a Myspace case study. I’m a very social person who goes out a lot and never understood the Myspace phenomenon until I really got to use it and from a business perspective it’s brilliant. So many great lessons that can be learned from it when looked at it from the right approach it is amazing to me how everyone who talks about why it’s a success is completely missing the point (including myself and my previous entries about it). Hopefully I can get my first bit of insight in later today or tomorrow so then I can come back a couple months from now and realize I was still wrong about Myspace.
*/
Paul, these both sound quite interesting. Looking forward to them.
By Jeff Croft on April 12, 2006 4:20 pm
No questions for Klondike Mike Croftie? You going soft all of a sudden?
By Scrivs on April 12, 2006 4:24 pm
Hey Mike,
Do you see a trend in the comments at Newsvine looking a lot like those of Digg.com? Does that bother you? Or do you even really care? Oh. And if you had to be a fruit, which one would you be?
By Dustin Diaz on April 12, 2006 5:17 pm
1 “Has Newsvine become what you expected it to be?” or something along those lines..
2 “Who are your favourite Newsvine writers?”
3 “How did you came up with the name ‘Newsvine’ ?
By Marc Köhlbrugge on April 12, 2006 5:19 pm
1. “What can you tell us about the back-end of Newsvine?”
2. “How many people currently work at Newsvine?”
3. “What’s the traffic like now that you’re public?”
By Jeff Wheeler on April 12, 2006 7:00 pm
Hmm.. I’d love to hear more about the backend, which after seeing some error messages pop up in the early beta, it seems to be built with PHP.
- External libraries etc, which ones and why?
- Did you build on a framework, or build a Newsvine specific framework?
- What programming lessons were learned along the way by the team?
- How quickly can you roll in a new feature? In the beta, many features were rolled in in stages, what were some of the dev times?
And most importantly:
- What the heck happened to my request for an interview? I am so going to kick yer ass in IKNFL next year (you too scrivs. And croftie)
By Mike Papageorge on April 13, 2006 8:21 am
Dustin beat me to it – Scrivs, definitely ask Mike D. how he feels about the “Digg-esque” commenting going on at Newsvine; that’s something I’ve been wondering about also…
By Vince on April 13, 2006 10:03 am
I’ve asked him this before, but he has dodged me. I want the newsvine header to shrink in height when I browse it on my 12″ ibook. Since MD uses a 12″ Powerbook, he should sympathize.
By Colin D. Devroe on April 13, 2006 10:16 am
For Klondike Mike:
Was there ever a point between now and when you guys started out with Newsvine (i.e. left Disney) where you went “Geeze, this is so much more fun, how come we didn’t do this years earlier?” — despite the obvious trick being that you might simply not have had the idea for it that long before?
By Faruk AteÅŸ on April 14, 2006 9:30 am
I really want to like Newsvine but I fear that story quality will lessen as the population grows. There are only a few large communities on the Internet that have maintained their respectability through devices like strong moderation and/or member fees. How will you enforce good community standards to avoid trivial news stories and unintelligent discussions?
By Dat Nguyen on April 17, 2006 5:45 pm
“What is the strength of your organization?”
“Has Newsvine reached that much height where u wanted it to be?”
“To u prefer any one Newsvine writer?”
By william on May 3, 2006 5:32 am