Where's Wil?

Valleywag, my favourite tech gossip rag, covers the action on the latest TWiT, including this wonderful comment on yours truly:

"Will Harris informs us that HP stock is taking a hit, not because of the pretexting scandal, but because of how the scandal is being covered. Isn't that just a convoluted way of sounding business savvy by reiterating the same sentiment? Or in plain-speak, isn't he just saying the same thing, but sounding smarter because of his British accent?"

Yes, that is quite right.

For anybody interested, I'm going to be on John C. Dvorak's Cranky Geeks tomorrow being suitably British and cynical.

And, finally, I just hooked up with the guys at Engadget and will be writing a twice-monthly column on legal affairs in the tech world, harnessing the otherwise wasted Law degree I gained. Look out for the first one of those to hit the site soon.

So I got a decent scoop at the Rev3 party last night. Many of you will be familiar with Federated Media, the ad sales company founded by John Battelle. FM is contracted to sell advertising space for some of Web 2's top sites, including Boing Boing and Digg.

FM has come in for some stick for not necessarily getting the job done. Others have pointed out the slight non-sense of an advertising company taking venture funding to grow - surely revenue from ad sales should do that?

Well, it seems that FM is going to take some more help to grow its business. Sources confirmed to me last night, ahead of an official announcement, that Batelle is contracting out sales of UK and European traffic across its network to a company based out of London called Net Communities. NetCom used to sell traffic for popular Brit news rag The Inquirer before that venerable publication was bought by VNU Publishing, and the company now also dabbles in Podcast creation.

NetCom, ironically, has also come under fire in the past for its lack of advertising sales at the Inq, so cynics might suggest that the company may be a good match for FM. Can traffic at the 'author-driven' business be successfully monetised? That's the question on the lips of everybody, it seems - except for Digg's staff, who have repeatedly stated their desire to build traffic, not revenue.

Questions will also continue to be asked about whether the FM model really works - if FM has contract out ad sales, its core competency, is it really pointing in the right direction? In a world-wide web, should Digg be cutting up its ad sales by geographic location? And is the agency model the right one? Those questions are beyond the scope of this post, but FM's latest move should spark renewed debate.

So it's been a while since I've posted anything - sorting out life has been slightly complicated recently. I just moved back to Oxford to live with Alex, my girlfriend, and so sorting that out has occupied a fair amount of time.

However, now I'm out in San Francisco this week for the Intel Developer Forum, the chip giant's bi-annual shindig for the industry. So far news is a little lacking, but I'm hoping that it will pick up.

More interesting was the Revision 3 party last night. I went out to Mighty to party with Kevin, Alex et al and had a great night. Bumped into some awesome people - Bram Cohen, for one, LaLa from TikiBarTV, for two - and generally had an awesome time.

The guys at Rev3 have got it spot on. They know exactly what they're doing, exactly what their audience is and how to go about monetising that.

Happily, a couple of people even knew who I was, which was quite something. There are a lot of people that listen to TWiT, and I guess I'm fairly distinctive. Good stuff.