Wikipedia is the Next Google

Fear. You can just feel it in the air, can't you? There is fear everywhere that Google has become too powerful. As John Battelle notes, the tide of public opinion is starting to turn from loving Google to fearing them. Perhaps. But I have news for you. Google's not the only monarch to watch - or fear - anymore. Despite the media's fascination with all things search, Wikipedia is waiting in the wings as the next Google. They (or maybe that's “we”) are the emerging king disruptor; the one entity that we will soon fear most, if not already.

Let's take a walk through history. King Disruptor I was Microsoft. For years this king attracted legions of fans for providing access to information; for making getting on the Internet easy. However, soon the once-loved king saw its popularity erode once Microsoft invaded one too many industries.

At its peak, Microsoft ruled the technology kingdom like a tyrant, leaving fear everywhere in its wake. This reached a climax when it slayed the emerging prince with so much promise, Netscape. Later, as Microsoft invaded the nations of telecommunications, cable, gaming and media, it began to attract more ire. Eventually, the fear rose to a fever pitch and it was determined that Microsoft crossed the line. It went too far.The people - the people's government that is - rose up to dethrone the king, or at least slow it.

In Microsoft's wake a new ruler emerged - King Disruptor II, commonly known as Google. With its lightning quick search technology, friendly face and “do no evil” motto, Google won fans around the world. But eventually they too, like Microsoft, began to face enemies when they went too far. Now, for all of Google's contributions to society, King Disruptor II is viewed as a scary king. This will surely continue as Google grows, moving its tentacles in to areas like books, classifieds, email, news, shopping, advertising, entertainment and more. It will only become a bigger target.

History is about to repeat itself. A successor to Google's throne is waiting in the wings - it's Wikipedia, King Disruptor III. Like its predecessors, Wikipedia is powerful because it provides access to largely accurate information that can be hard to find. This king, however, is unlike any other because it operates in a completely democratic way. It's run by the people, without any grand financial ambitions. This doesn't mean its rule will be perceived solely as a benevolent one, however.

Already, Wikipedia instills a deeper fear than either Google or Microsoft did when they were at such a young age. It's the emerging king. Will it face the same scrutiny and fate as its predecessors as it expands? Certainly. But this time it will be far more difficult to slow. Yes, King Disruptor III - Wikipedia - might rule for years. And perhaps this may just be the way it was meant to be.

Technorati Tags: Google, microsoft, Wikipedia

Pesco's Salon article on big ideas in technology

1. Robugs: Swarms of tiny robotic insects.

2. Hacking DNA: Creating life one BioBrick at a time

3. Location, location, location: The GeoWeb

4. Maker mindset: DIY technology

5. Biology as art: Genetic creativity

6. Desktop manufacturing: 3D printing and inkjet electronics

Welcome to the hobby economy

Economists don't know what to do about it.

It's hard to measure, hard to quantify and a little odd to explain.

More and more people are spending more and more time (and money) on pursuits that have no pay off other than satisfaction.

"Why should you have a blog?" they ask. "How are you going to make any money?"

"Why post your photos on flickr?" they wonder. "You don't get compensated by people who see them." Or your garage band's songs on an MP3 site. Or spending time and money on projects like: The Basket Book: Over 30 Magnificent Baskets To Make and Enjoy.

Of course, economists don't really worry about this. They understand perfectly well that economics is able to easily explain that human beings pursue things that satsify them.

What the web is doing, though, is exposing lots of avenues for people to use to find satisfaction (but not necessarily cash). Make magazine is page after page of geek projects that are fun, but not profitable. Other sites make it easy for you to build a tube amplifier or splice your own DNA.

Now that white-collar workers regularly spend 75 hours a week at work (did you know the CEO of GE has been spending more than 100 hours a week--for twenty years?!) there's plenty of time to surf the web and get paid for it.

Advice for freelancers

Web design freelancer Cameron Moll has posted some great tips and lessons learned about freelancing. A few of the tips are industry specific, but most will apply to almost any freelance gig.

If you're a freelancer now, or are considering making the leap, it's well worth checking out.

Michael Robertson launches Oboe "music locker" service

You can store all of your own music, making your entire music collection playable from any browser in the world. Plus you can also sync that entire music collection and playlists to multiple computers with a single mouse click. Oboe is the jukebox in the sky that can store all library for safety, playback and move your music to any location for offline playback as well.

Here's some things which I think make Oboe interesting.

- Oboe is the only online music locker. There are photo lockers, email lockers, general purpose storage, even video lockers but no music lockers and music is ideal for lockers because it's used repeatedly from multiple locations.
- $39.95 per year for unlimited storage and unlimited bandwidth. No per gb billing for either storage or bandwidth.
- Works on Mac/Win/Lin with MP3, AAC, WMA and Ogg files.
- First of its kind iTunes plug-in so iTunes users will be able to sync their entire music collection from within iTunes with one mouse click. This makes it ideal if the user just wants a simple backup of their music. When they realize they can now access their music from any website or zap it to other computers they will be amazed.
- Last time I launched a locker system called my.mp3 it triggered a hailstorm of lawsuits. Hopefully we can avoid them this time, but you just can never tell with the music industry.
- I'm personally a big advocate of open formats and open APIs which Oboe has. So today we're announcing syncing to PCs of all flavors, but tomorrow those same APIs will let you sync your music collection to any phone, PDA, car, tablet, etc.

HP Marketing Re-org Pits Omnicom against Publicis

From the mail bag

• 3 ad units
  
• 2 AdSense for search boxes
  
• 1 link unit
  
• 1 referral button per product (i.e., 1 AdSense referral button and 1 Firefox plus Google Toolbar referral button).
  

It's All About The Music: Part 2

Marketing Services Blowing Up

According to Lewis Lazare, Draft/Chicago is looking to add 50 new jobs across all disciplines, including creative, account services, interactive, multicultural and health care.

The hiring spurt comes in the wake of several new business wins in 2005, including the Los Angeles Times, Johnson & Johnson, the American Marketing Association and S.C. Johnson.

"With clients shifting their advertising budgets from traditional media to more measurable marketing services, we've experienced incredible opportunity and growth," said Yvonne Furth, president and COO of Draft/Chicago.

Microsoft testing classfieds service

Filed under: Online

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Mags Behaving Badly? B2.0 & Wired

Six Flags’ Mr. Six to get deep-sixed

Download of the Day, part II: foXpose for Firefox 1.5

Firefox 1.5 extension foXpose tiles web page tabs much like Mac OS X's fancy Expose feature.

After installing foXpose, hit Control-Shift-X to view a tiled preview of all your open Firefox tabs and easily switch from one to another. This extension only works with Firefox version 1.5, so it's a great consolation prize after losing half your extensions which don't yet work with the upgrade. foXpose is a free download, works everywhere Firefox does.

Storyboarding Rich Internet Applications with Visio

Better visual working memory stems from ignoring stuff

Most of what I do from day to day is ignore stuff -- quickly deleting emails that I won't be able to answer or don't need to read, skipping through RSS to get at the good stuff, separating small quanta of wheat from mountains of chaff. I can totally believe that the key to survival in the information age is not paying attention to unimportant stuff.

The findings turn upside down the popular concept that a person's memory capacity, which is strongly related to intelligence, is solely dependent upon the amount of information you can cram into your head at one time. These results have broad implications and may lead to developing more effective ways to optimize memory as well as improved diagnosis and treatment of cognitive deficits associated with attention deficit disorder and schizophrenia...

"People differed systematically, and dramatically, in their ability to keep irrelevant items out of awareness," Vogel said. "This doesn't mean people with low capacity are cognitively impaired. There may be advantages to having a lot of seemingly irrelevant information coming to mind. Being a bit scattered tends to be a trait of highly imaginative people."

Earnings: TiVo Passes 4 Million Subs In 3Q05 But Reports Net Loss Of $14.2 million

Personal Google Agent, Job of the Future?

The Digital Living Room, Apple Style

My Jupiter colleague Michael Gartenberg is providing some great thinking about a rumor that Apple is going to spin its Mac Mini into a media-hub. I definitely agree with him when he says this could be a really significant, big deal. Interestingly, I was just considering buying a Mac Mini for the SteinHaus for just this purpose.

I think this vision has a lot of traction, simply because it seems to bring together elements of interactive and broadcast content very seamlessly, which ultimately can spark a number of interesting advertising innovations.

Many of which will probably be more interesting than allowing TiVo owners the ability to search for commercials to skip.

Celebrity endorsers no longer a sure thing

Filed under: Gripes, Television

It should come as no surprise - at least no one who's been reading PR/advertising blogs for the last six months - that celebrity endorsers and spokespeople no longer are as effective as they once were. That's the lesson that The Gap learned. A long string of celebrities appearing in their commercials and ads has gone hand in hand with a slipping in same-store sales. There are, to me, three factors at play here:

1. Celebrities are under more scrutiny now than ever before. A wide variety of sensationalistic magazines and TV shows mean that the private lives of stars are aired for all to see constantly. It's very hard to assign credibility to someone you know has cheated on their wife/husband, whether it's a celebrity or your neighbor. They chose to focus on celebrity endorsers because it worked in the past. So did aquaducts but then someone discovered you could put the pipes below ground. Adapt.
2. Blogs and other social media have built a network of trust and reliability for their unfiltered and unadulturated opinions. Why should someone believe Sarah Jessica Parker - when she was paid to endorse a product - when an ordinary citizen and consumer gives you a more open and honest opinion.
3. As the article states, Gap's brand name doesn't stand for anything anymore. There are too many other stores in the mall, all angling for the same group of 13-25 year olds. The Gap may have been where your older sister shopped but she's, like, totally out of college already.

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Grand Central, Swivels

PaidContent says Halsey Minor, founder of C/Net has literally swiveled and turned his struggling web-services start-up Grand Central into Swivel, a company that in the hottest Web space: online advertising and e-commerce.

Blog Advice from the Masters

Harvard Business school chimes in with their obligatory article about the power of corporate blogging for public relations. What's notable about this piece, however, is the advice offered by experts on how to have a distinct focus, feature distinctive voices while remaining open to comments.

Create your own 404 page

Writer and web designer Ian LLoyd offers tips on creating a user friendly Error 404 page for your website.

You’ve requested a page — either by typing a URL directly into the address bar or clicking on an out-of-date link and you’ve found yourself in the middle of cyberspace nowhere. A user-friendly website will give you a helping hand while many others will simply do nothing, relying on the browser’s built-in ability to explain what the problem is. We can do better than that, can’t we?

With a friendly Error 404 page, readers won't feel quite so alienated if they reach a dead link. Instead, you can point them to the resources they need to find what they were looking for to begin with.

Loads O New Features

Google is accelerating the pace of change in both its results and its home page. Many readers have emailed me recently with tips, here are a few:

First, "Personalized Home" is now standard on the home page, up on the top right. This is an attempt to push more of us toward using its portal Fusion.

Also, many have noticed the new way Google is clustering results based on similar phrases. Try searches for President's Day Weekend, for example. And lastly, as I've noted before, Google continues to push adoption of its Toolbar, now with banner ads for it at the bottom of results (thanks Peter).

Jack Kornfield on mindfulness

FINDING MY RELIGION / Buddhist teacher and author Jack Kornfield on mindfulness, happiness and his own spiritual journey

SF Gate interviews Bay Area meditation teacher Jack Kornfield:

What is mindfulness and why is it important?

Mindfulness is an innate human capacity to deliberately pay full attention to where we are, to our actual experience, and to learn from it.

Much of our day we spend on automatic pilot. People know the experience of driving somewhere, pulling up to the curb and all of a sudden realizing, “Wow, I was hardly aware I was even driving. How did I get here?” When we pay attention, it is gracious, which means that there is space for our joys and sorrows, our pain and losses, all to be held in a peaceful way…

For many people, happiness is about chasing after something — a new car, a promotion, a trip to Bermuda. But when they get it they aren’t satisfied. They want more. Why do you think that happens?

I’ll tell you a story. A reporter was asking the Dalai Lama on his recent visit to Washington, “You have written this book, ‘The Art of Happiness,’ which was on the best-seller list for two years — could you please tell me and my readers about the happiest moment of your life?” And the Dalai Lama smiled and said, “I think now!”

Happiness isn’t about getting something in the future. Happiness is the capacity to open the heart and eyes and spirit and be where we are and find happiness in the midst of it. Even in the place of difficulty, there is a kind of happiness that comes if we’ve been compassionate, that can help us through it. So it’s different than pleasure, and it’s different than chasing after something.

Kornfield co-founded Spirit Rock and is the author of many books, including A Path with Heart — I haven’t read it yet, but it’s been recommended to me by several people as a sensible introduction to meditation and a spiritual path.

[ via Ms. Stiness ]

Tags: meditation, mindfulness, buddhism,

Akamai: Cyber Monday Traffic Spikes 35 Percent

Google Video Dead

Fairway Blog...so Close

CH Holiday 2005 Gift Guide

Last year we launched our first holiday gift guide. Those of you who have been with us for a while will remember that we asked you to pay for it. That was an interesting experiment, but we like free content so this year we decided not to charge you to get the guide. And this year it's even better!

We've got a few great exclusives. We've searched for the new and noteworthy. Added a few classics. And revisited some of our favorite gift ideas from the site. Almost everything is available online to make your holiday shopping as painless as possible. Check it out now and check back often as the guide will be updated daily.

So many blogs, so little time

Microsoft Moves Beyond the PC

The Economist writes:

Microsoft has been trying for years to move beyond the PC, and into other devices such as mobile phones, television set-top boxes and games consoles. “The big über-strategy that this falls under relates to what's happening in the home,” says Robbie Bach, Microsoft's “chief Xbox officer” and head of a newly formed business unit that brings together Microsoft's gaming, mobile and TV divisions. “We identified many years ago that the digital revolution was going to have a big impact, and we see a big opportunity there,” he says. As all these other electronic devices increasingly resemble computers, they offer Microsoft new opportunities to sell software. Just as importantly, they offer new avenues for growth: sales of non-PC devices are growing much faster than sales of PCs. “Microsoft wants the next 30 years to be as successful as the last 30 years, so we have to continually find new market opportunities,” says Christine Heckart of Microsoft's TV division.

Search Engine Brands: Google is The Guide

There's been a bunch of buzz the last few days about the Search Engine Experiment. The live test lets you put in a search term: the results from MSN, Yahoo and Google are returned and you're asked to determine which set you think is the most relevant (and therefore best). Google wins, but not by a huge margin. And if you add up Yahoo and MSN, you can very reasonably say that more than half of all people (or, test-takers, if you want to be specific) say that they can find better results at "other than Google".

The question on everyone's mind (notably Seth and Guillaume) is "why?!". If you were to ask people (as Jupiter has) which search engine is best, you get around 70% saying Google. Clearly there is a delta of at least 20% of the audience between actual quality and perceived quality.

So, is the challenge figuring out a better search mousetrap? Nope. There are plenty of interesting experiments out there, and Google's reliance on links represents a significant challenge to keeping their index free and clean.

Comparisons to Coke vs. Pepsi or any other product fall flat as well, and don't really dive into the nature of the brand. The fact is, the Internet represents a great big mystery to nearly everyone. Some have basic needs, some more complex. But everyone needs a guide.

Various brands have taken this guide position over the last decade. Wired Magazine held it for a while. Apple was there (briefly, with the introduction of the iMac), as was Yahoo!

In some sense, the fight for this position is a zero-sum game: only one brand can occupy the guide position. Search engines need to not only look at their functionality, but rather whether or not this functionality gets them closer to the prized position of Guide. Google will continue to maintain this valuable position in the consumer's mind so long as their competitors focus on features, and not benefits.

Improve iTunes with iTunesKeys and idleTunes

The Download Squad offers a few tips for improving iTunes for Windows using free programs iTunesKeys and idleTunes.

I was a long, long, long time WinAmp user, and until... I could find a way to control iTunes with keyboard shortcuts, I wasn’t interested. Well, the first problem was dealt with a while ago, and for my second problem I found iTunesKeys, a program dedicated to solving iTunes’ woefully missing keyboard shortcut access.

The post also discusses idleTunes, which handles dead track removal and (very cool) makes iTunes compatible with other digital audio players.

Ten Rules for Web Startups

Worst Job Ever

Filed under: Funny, Viral

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Jonathan Ive

The Social Media League Scorecard

Here's a look at where the major US sports leagues stand in their adoption of social media. I've added a plugged-in symbol to the proper box if the league has adopted either blogs, podcasts or RSS. (Note: the NFL's blogs are not on NFL.com but on the player association site. Only the blogs have feeds so I didn't give the league a plug there.)

Technorati Tags: Baseball, Basketball, Football, Hockey, MLB, NASCAR, NBA, NFL, NHL, NHL, Sports

Google Video Redesign

Google Dials-In The AdWords

Google is finally testing out its Click-to-Call system. (Greg Yardley first reported this news, but I have been slow in getting around to it.) It has been a long time coming. I have been waiting for this since I wrote this piece in September. I believe this is the right strategy for the company to extend its core competence: attaching ads to anything that can be served up as a web-page.

The text ad model had been getting a long in the tooth, and perhaps voice is the application that will help them attract local advertisers. It will also put them on equal footing with Microsoft, which recently showed off their click-to-call offering. Mind you, it lacks the ability to display locations on the maps with click-to-call features built in, at lease for now. (If anyone has seen map-based ads with click to call, do let me know!) The new ad-system also allows them to compete with eBay-Skype.

It seems to be a limited beta, and not working on a Mac. I am going to try it out on a PC and report back the results. Incase you folks were wondering who that third party supplying technology for this service, I will get that information to you tomorrow after I confirm the name of the company. I know which one it is, but still want to make sure before I get the word out!

Yes, Virginia, there is a secretsanta.com

Zomblog

Mashup Culture Goes Mainstream

Many MSM properties are stumbling their way towards Web 2.0. The Washington Post is not one of them. The Post is laying it down.

Welcome to washingtonpost.com's Post Remix site, affectionately known as mashingtonpost.com.

This site has two goals:

To spotlight the work of outside Web developers who've made cool and interesting projects ("mashups") using Post content.

To provide information about washingtonpost.com's various data offerings (APIs and RSS feeds).

Why are we doing this? Because we want to foster innovation, and because we want to see your ideas about new ways of displaying news and information on the Web. Here are a few examples of what people have made with washingtonpost.com content:

-Frank Wiles made News Cloud, which is a tag cloud of Post stories that lets you browse stories by keyword.

-Jacob Kaplan-Moss made Ripped from the Headlines!, a daily news quiz that's created automatically from our headline feeds.

-Adam DuVander made a world map interface to Post stories, plus a thumbnail quiz of Arts & Entertainment stories.

-Bryan Fordham made washingtonpost.com search results via RSS, which provides RSS feeds for search terms on our site.

These are the kinds of projects we'll be spotlighting on Post Remix.

If you've created something using washingtonpost.com content, or if you have an idea for somebody else to implement, let us know, and we'll include your project or idea here. Contact us by e-mailing Adrian Holovaty at adrian.holovaty (at) wpni.com.

Reporting from Deep Inside the Bubble: Geek Entertainment TV Cracks Me Up

I'm not sure if it's the amusing text overlays in the video, the fact that it's my friend Irina, or that the folks being interviewed know not to take it 100% seriously. But Geek Entertainment TV (GETV) really amuses me.

Geek Entertainment TV is an emerging global media empire, reporting from deep inside the bubble as it re-inflates. GETV covers buzzword compliant topics such as web 2.0, tagging, AJAX, social software and the bubble juice known as VCs. We like robots, so you'll hear about that too.

Irina takes her microphone and puts some of the folks "deep inside the bubble" on camera to find out what's going on. The results are both funny and informative. She once commented that it's a like a Silicon Valley version of The Colbert Report.

The best part is that Geek Entertainment TV is the result of just two people: Irina and Eddie (he handles the video and post-processing work, etc).

Give it a watch.

She's threatened to interview me in December. I can't wait. :-)

Million Dollar Homepage Snags $623,000 in Ads

DMC ditches the Adidas

Run DMC was more or less the unofficial sponsor for Adidas for most of their career. At least, DMC (Darryl McDaniels) was. He was the one with the penchant for that particular brand, but he's kicked them to the curb to sponsor (for real this time) the Le Coq Sportif brand of shoes. Le Coq Sportif, like Adidas, was a popular shoe in the hip hop community in the 1980s. DMC will help choose colors for the product's US line. That's nice and all, but I would think that "Le Coq Sportif" doesn't lend itself as well to rap lyrics.

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Choosing ladies or chips

Filed under: Outdoor

There's an old saying, "I wouldn't kick her out of bed for eating crackers" which is usually spoken by men who would never have said lady in their bed in the first place. Adrants points to this street ad, found on Flickr, which asks kind of the same thing, which of the three lovely ladies would you boot for eating Hunky Dory chips? Apparently pedestrians can text their answers. It's a cool idea, but one Flickr user suggests the women look too manly, and that perhaps there's a subtle joke there against the men who are ogling the advertisement. I don't believe it, but it's an entertaining thought.

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Denton puts Oddjack to sleep

Oddjack is dead. Denton says, "A.J. Daulerio, the editor, is a trooper, and an amusing writer, but the audience was never there." The blog will be pulled down by the month's end.

As of publication, Oddjack posts no acknowledgement of kaputment. But the death is public. A.J. tells Aileen Gallagher, FishBowlNY contributor and (she forgot to mention) A.J.'s roommate:

I was told about a month ago that November was the month that would ultimately determine my fate. As much as I tried to spike traffic with random posts--most of which had a tenuous gambling angle at best--it was painfully obvious that flukey traffic surges I'd get every now and again were not going to make this blog successful. The site had a very small readership that was pretty much maxed-out for whatever reason. Then yesterday Lockhart asked if we could meet to discuss this. I told him it wasn't necessary to meet face-to-face because I had a feeling this would be the end. He IM-ed me the dire circumstances about 5 p.m. yesterday and that was that. That is how things are done in blog world, apparently. It's very comforting.

Roll a die, flip a coin in the memory of the first Gawker Media blog to die. Then stay up all night refreshing the comment threads, waiting for A.J. to move in with Jessica and raise the kids.

Download of the Day: TheOpenCD 3.1

Previously-mentioned TheOpenCD has released the newest version.

Core applications including OpenOffice, Firefox and Gaim have been upgraded to major new versions. The popular game Battle for Wesnoth has reached 1.0 and a range familiar programs appear in minor version updates.

If you're tired of paying for software, check out TheOpenCD. The software included on TheOpenCD covers almost anything you can do on your computer, from office work (OpenOffice) to photo editing (GIMP), and of course the obvious Mozilla suite of programs.

If you haven't checked it out yet, consider giving the new version a try.

Del.icio.us redesigns

Preloaded Video iPod

Don't feel like loading your own content on your Video iPod? Check out a company called TVMyPod, which will gladly sell you a brand new Video iPod with the DVD movies of your choice already preloaded. Not a bad deal if you don't have the movies, or the time to deal with ripping, converting and loading all that content. To those who've already purchased their hardware, the company also plans to let you send your iPod in for preloading, and is thinking about adding a subscription service to give you new video content as well.

Buy your video iPod... preloaded [Lost Remote]

Of Course GoogleBase is about Classifieds

If you have any doubts about Google's intention with Googlebase, you can either read today's NY Times article.

Or, you can browse the list of attributes you can use to structure your data-feed. Here's a sample:

- Number of bathrooms
- Actor featured in the video
- Imigration status required for the job
- Ethnicity for your personal
- Vehicle Identification Number (VIN)

I know there are recipes for Chicken Tikka Masala in there. But...I don't think that's the point of this application.

The hate/love of product placement

Filed under: Gripes, Product Placement

The BBC has a somewhat lengthy piece about advertisers and why they've been getting such a bad rap lately. It references the recent efforts of the Writers Guild of America to curb product placement, something Adbusters founder Kalle Lasn poetically describes as "a fart in the ocean." The article suggests that product placement doesn't have to be an absolute evil, that if done right it can ingrain itself in the story and not come across as intrusive or unnecessary. It's also not a new practice, as even vaudeville actors would sometimes wear items which they also wore in advertisements, at least according to one media PR person.

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Style Over Substance Pays Off Huge For Sidney Frank

Room 116 points to a great article in New York Magazine about Sidney Frank, CEO of the Sidney Frank Importing Co. The piece describes Frank's Gatsbyesque rise, and how he created Grey Goose vodka from thin air.

In this story, the name came first—as it so often does when image is the paramount concern. Frank recalled he’d once sold a Liebfraumilch named Grey Goose back in the seventies. These were German white wines that were briefly hip but faded into oblivion. “I remember there was always something in the name that had magic with the consumer,” says Frank. (It may also be that Frank liked the name because he already owned the worldwide rights to it.) Frank gathered his lieutenants at the company’s New Rochelle headquarters. “Go to France and come back with a vodka,” he said. So they met with cognac distillers, whose business had slowed. The stills were switched to vodka, and at last there was an actual product.

But why France? Doesn’t vodka come from Russia, or perhaps, in a pinch, Scandinavia? “People are always looking for something new,” says Frank. It’s all about brand differentiation. If you’re going to charge twice as much for a vodka, you need to give people a reason.

Frank could see that there was a product missing from the shelves. Here were all these vodkas, in the $15-to-$17 range, vying to be the premium brand (with Absolut mostly winning). Frank just sidestepped the fray altogether and charged an unheard-of $30 a bottle. The markup amount was pure profit. “He was the first person to see,” says an executive at rival Bacardi, “that there was a superpremium category above Absolut, if you had a good product story.”

Uh hum...I think I'll have a Smirnoff and Cran.

Mo Rocca sings for Best Buy

Filed under: Funny, Online, Television

Comedian Mo Rocca, former Daily Show correspondent and occasional host of shows about animals can be found here singing about all the great things you can purchase at Best Buy. The song is sung to the tune of "Angels We Have Heard on High" which, like most Christmas carols, is often sung loudly by people who can't sing. Rocca does okay, though, and even throws down some different rockin' versions of the song. It's actually quite funny.

[via Adrants]

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FeedBurner Reports: Feed for Thought

FeedBurner is kicking-off a series of Technorati-like special reports this week called “Feed for Thought” that will cover the state of the “feedosphere”:

With so much going on in the world of syndication, we thought it high time we stop bantering amongst ourselves, and start sharing some of the keen insight and commentary brewing inside FeedBurner headquarters. From where we sit atop more than a hundred thousand feeds, the air is thin but the view outstanding. We can’t help but see what’s on the horizon and identify ways in which we can continue to help publishers maximize the delivery channel.  With that, we offer Feed for Thought, an ongoing series of reports that cover the state of the feedosphere, emerging trends, our take on where subscription delivery is headed and the challenges and opportunities it will face.

The new series is aiming to cover a variety of topics with the first report focused on “RSS & Blogs.”  Now, fair warning, this first report is a lengthy read, but a good one nonetheless.  One of many nuggets of info that's worth pulling out from this report is how RSS adoption is quickly evolving from a stand-alone syndication method for blogs (circa 2003) to a broader publishing standard for all sorts of content, today (e.g., search results, commercial publishing, podcasts, etc.)  This graph nicely illustrates RSS adoption trends.

A full version of this report can be download here (PDF).  Additional reports are on the horizon, watch the FeedBurner Blog for details.

Technorati Tags: Research, RSS, Stats

J&J turns to media companies for help

Filed under: Print, Television

Johnson & Johnson took an interesting approach to their latest "Having a baby changes everything" campaign and Web site, Baby.com. They staged a "bake-off" in which three media companies were asked to create television spots. Time Warner won, beating out Viacom and NBC Universal. In the new spots, celebrities talk about how having a baby changed there lives. While this is a unique approach to creating ads, Johnson & Johnson assures that this is just another way of working with the changing "media landscape." The company's agency, Lowe Worldwide, was involved with the process of asking the media companies for their ideas.

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Technorati's catching up to Google's speed

Feedster Top 500 Update

Feedster has updated their Top 500 List of Blogs. Scott Johnson, Feedster’s CTO, writes about it here.

The first list was published in August. The new list incorporates recent links and has changed substantially from the previous version. In particular, they’ve added user tagging and a tag cloud to assist in search/find. The tagging interface is in Ajax (with captcha to reduce spam).

I spoke with Scott Johnson last night about the new list. They’ve taken big steps to remove spam blogs and links, and will soon be tying authority to links to further refine the list.

The Feedster list is very focused on recent links in, looking back only two years and giving additional weight to more recent links.

The tagging feature is an interesting way to find blogs in the list. They’ve added a tag cloud on the right sidebar for easy navigation to specific types of blogs. For instance, click on “celebrity” and get that type of blog. Great way to drill down.

And finally, Feedster will be adding “Import into Excel for Analysis” and an OPML export of the feeds.

Tags: feedster, feedstertop500, search, blogs, blogging, techcrunch, web2.0, web+2.0, ajax, tags, tagging

Companies I’d like to Profile (but don’t exist)

There are companies I review every day that I don’t write about. Reasons vary - it’s been done already and the product isn’t even as good as what’s been done, its a highly or totally one-way application, or it isn’t consumer focused (or have implications for consumer focused applications). Even with this filtering, I get flame comments on some of the stuff I do choose to write about as “not worthy”.

But there are a number of companies and/or products that I would like to write about but don’t exist. I’ve been keeping a list over the last few months and I am posting the list now.

Some of these are big ideas, some small. Some could potentially receive venture backing, most wouldn’t. But I believe that a viable business could be built by an entrepreneur around any of these, and I will be happy to profile them if and when someone builds them. In a way, this is number 11 in my previously post “Top Ten Things You Can Do To Get Blogged“.

And let me know if and where these should fall in Nivi’s matrix.

1. Better and Cheaper Online File Storage

Photos, movies, music and important files take up a ton of hard drive space. I recently purchased a new desktop computer with a 250 GB hard drive, and the hard drive is full from recorded television shows that I haven’t watched yet. Yeah, I can buy a network drive for my house, but they are expensive and if the house burns down I’ve still lost everything.

It’s amazing to me that all of us aren’t backing up our important files online regularly. As far as I’m concerned, the only reason is because no product has emerged to fill this tremendous demand, with the right features and at the right price.

We need a good product. Something as easy to use as the Flickr uploader on the client side, and easy web access. These tools need to go a generation or two beyond what xdrive is offering.

Features I’d like to see: drag and drop file adding and removing, an rss feed for my files, tagging of every file for easy search later, easy sharing, and the ability to publish files to the web with permanent URLs. And off location backups in case your building burns down.

Pricing needs to be dramatically lower too. Find a way to make this cheap. Include ads or whatever, but this needs to be very low cost (remember that Google offers over 2 gb of mail storage for free). Xdrive is currently $10/month for 5 gigs. Even Godaddy, at $10/year for 1 gb, is way too costly.

I have no idea what the cost economics for a business like this are, but plan for scale and give some amount, at least a gig or two, permanently free. No 15 day free trials - we see right through that. Give me a lot for free and let me scale up to, say 500 GB for $20 per year.

2. Blog/website Email Lists

People can visit my site, and get the content via RSS, but I know of no quality service to allow people to subscribe to my site via email.

I hate to rip on Feedblitz, which is really the only choice right now, but it sucks. It’s orange. Really ORANGE. I want the look and feel to be TechCrunch, not theirs. I want people to have the option of getting an email every post, every day, or every week.

I also want to know that I and I alone control these email addresses so that they will not under any circumstances be misused. If I change services, I want to have an easy export feature to take these with me (OPML would be nice).

I also want access to real time stats. The number of emails, type of subscription, how often they are opened and what things are being clicked on.

And users need a very easy way to stop the emails.

I’m willing to pay for this. Probably as much as $20 per month. A free version should be offered too that’s add supported and maybe doesn’t have the analytics.

I’m frankly amazed that Feedburner chose to partner with Feedblitz to do this instead of building it themselves. It wouldn’t be that hard to build. And the Feedblitz interface disaster wouldn’t be detracting from the Feedburner brand.

3. Portable Reputations

eBay’s Feedback system is arguably their biggest asset. Even with its flaws, it is one the biggest drivers of trust between two people buying and selling who’ve never met and never will. But it’s a closed system, usable only within eBay and only for eBay transactions. We need an internet-wide identity and feedback system that any reputable application can tap into, both pulling and pushing data.

A couple of companies have taken tentative steps in this direction, but they have until now kept the data in their own silo, demanding people come to their site to provide feedback. I reviewed iKarma, one of these, in October and practically begged them to change their business model. So far they haven’t. Opinity is much the same, although they offer partners the opportunity to tap into the data. These centralized data plays have no chance on today’s internet. Why even bother.

Here’s what we need - a referee and a scorekeeper. Open (I didn’t say free, mind you) APIs in and out, not just links to feedback scores. Figure out the rules (keep it flexible) and let other applications feed the database. Somebody please build this. Or eBay, open up your Feedback API.

I’m not alone in pleading for this. See what Rob Hof and others have to say as well.

4. Tailored Local Offers (via RSS)

Build a website. Let users give as much or as little demographic and personal information as they wish. Partner with a big sales force that already has access to local businesses (citisearch, yellow pages, whoever). Offer me (via email, website and RSS) special offers from local merchants. $5 off a pizza. Free first time dry cleaning. A cup of coffee. Whatever. I’ll eat it up (and so will everyone else).

5. Facebook, in other countries

Somebody’s gonna do it. Why not you?

6. Free Music

Music will someday be legally free. There is just no other way. Artists, label and promoters will need to make money in other ways.

Limited edition cds and dvds. Concerts. Tshirts. Whatever. Face reality and do it sooner rather than later.

7. Open Source Yellow Pages

YellowWikis is sort of on the right path, but drop the wiki aspect (as I’ve said before, wiki’s are hammers, but not everything is a nail), add tagging and make it open source. Or at least open APIs in and out. Make money from local ads and premium listings.

8. Podcast Transcriptions

Podcasters need transciptions. Many people don’t have the time or inclination to listen to every podcast they want to. Search engines can’t index the content. Transctiptions fix both problems.

Hire transcribers in a low cost country. Offer podcasters reasonably priced transcriptions (bonus: in multiple languages). I’m thinking $10 per half hour. Partner with the podcast directories, search engines and tool providers. Mint money.

9. Decentralized Review Aggregation

There are millions of passionate reviews of every product and thing you can think of sitting out there in the blogosphere. Don’t try to get people to re-write all this stuff. Leverage tagging, RSS and, eventually, microformats to aggregate it and make it searchable/findable. Wonderfully, chaotically decentralized. Ad supported.

10. Build Something Cool with SSE

Figure out how to leverage this before everyone else does and build something beautiful and amazing.

Tags: techcrunch, web2.0, web+2.0

Portal 2.0

Michael Parekh writes:

there is a real problem as the big portal companies go into the Web 2.0 world, and it's a possibly intractable one.

icrosoft MSN/Live, AOL, (along with Amazon, eBay and Apple for a sub-set of the portal services) need to come to terms with the reality that most of their users WILL ALWAYS NEED TO have accounts at their competitors because they'll NEED TO CONNECT WITH PEOPLE AT ALL of those services.

In a Web 2.0 world, where by definition these services are about connecting with people across these services, these services are still competing on the traditional model of winner takes all.

The underlying assumption by each player is that if one service can offer the latest and best X.0 version of each of the services in question that they'll have that customer's TOTAL online business for the indefinite feature.

The reality is that as a user, I'm forced to have accounts at ALL of the services because in an oligopolistic world of online services, most of the people I need to connect with could be using any of the services on any of the portals.

Import your Blog into Google Base

Geek blogger Niall Kennedy has posted some instructions on adding your blog to Google Base.

Google Base launched last Tuesday as a new repository of information for distribution across Google's network of sites including Google search, Froogle, and Google Local. You can add your existing content to the Google Base for broad distribution with only a few easy steps. I'll show you how.

"Add to Google" Button

Find your XBOX 360

The XBOX 360 could likely be this year's Cabbage Patch Doll (remember those?) and your chances of getting one are getting slimmer by the second.

Thank goodness for the XBox360 Inventory Locator! It an application that will tell you how many XBOX360s you're local Best Buy has. It even uses a neat Google Map to graphically show you the location of the stores!

Strange Google Ad

Texas sues Sony over rootkits -- YEE-HAW!

"Sony has engaged in a technological version of cloak and dagger deceit against consumers by hiding secret files on their computers," said Attorney General Abbott. "Consumers who purchased a Sony CD thought they were buying music. Instead, they received spyware that can damage a computer, subject it to viruses and expose the consumer to possible identity crime..."

Because of alleged violations of the Consumer Protection Against Computer Spyware Act of 2005, the Attorney General is seeking civil penalties of $100,000 for each violation of the law, attorneys' fees and investigative costs.

Breakthrough Budgets

GM FastLane Blog begins to reflect the troubles of the corporation?

Courtship of Stewie's Father Podcast

"These podcasts would work a lot better if we drank beforehand."

For your listening pleasure. Will soon be available on iTunes and on the site.

Love
The Webmaster

G.M.’s Future Shock

All the major papers are leading today with GM’s stunning announcement that it will cut 30,000 jobs and close 12 factories.

Surely, news as devastating as this also warrants some honest company comment on it own Fastlane blog.

I’m not being glib here - the blog offers GM a direct voice to its customers and its employees without having to navigate mainstream media. It’s an opportunity for the company to talk honestly and frankly - exactly the sort of transparency that has won GM and its exec Bob Lutz much kudos in recent months.

Lutz has been candid before about GM’s business decisions. Now is the time for the company to have a conversation with the employees it is letting go, with the shareholders who are scared of seeing the company file bankruptcy and the customers who seen GM as a damaged brand.

GM has a voice through its blog - it should use it.

Cingular and AT&T: A lesson in brand confusion (and wasted money)

Cingular to be rebranded as AT&T? And this is after Cingular has spent tens of millions trying to erase the AT&T wireless brand from consumer’s memories. Very odd indeed. Get even more confused over at Engadget:

Anyway, we can get why they’re doing it — SBC, which was one of the Baby Bells spun off from AT&T during the big break up of 1984, is officially changing its name to AT&T and they want to unify all the branding — but man, are things getting confusing. As you’ll recall, last year Cingular snapped up AT&T Wireless, which had been spun off from AT&T in 2001 for the princely sum of $41 billion. They then spent the better part of the past year spending tons of time and money trying to eliminate the AT&T Wireless brand and integrate its network, subscribers, and services into Cingular. The integration is pretty much done (or close to it), but now they’re going to go through all that again, except in reverse, which means that some of you out there will go from being AT&T Wireless subcribers, to Cingular subscribers, only to become AT&T Wireless subscribers all over again.

And this is good for whom?

Put an “Add to Google Button” on Your Blog

Google has posted instructions on how to to promote your RSS feed by placing an “Add to Google” button to your RSS-enabled website or blog. This will make it easy for people to quickly add your feed right to their Google homepage or Google Reader. Here's what the landing page looks like for my feed. (Via Search Engine Watch)

Technorati Tags: Google

AtomShockwave Launches Game Ad Network

Chrysler 'Person of the Year' Campaign Uses Web, Podcasts, Wireless

Cream - get on top........

Yahoo Will Provide Content For Clear Channel Digital Video Ad Kiosks In Malls

Did Google save web advertising?

Filed under: Online

As much reporting on Google as we might do here at AdJab, the New York Times is doing just as much. The most recent of their full-length profiles of the internet giant plays on the idea that Google has revolutionized internet advertising not only through the ease of and communal nature of AdWords/AdSense but also by providing an alternative to the flashing pop-ups that announce we're a winner or ask us to harpoon a penguin for a free iPod. By saying to all advertisers - regardless of size or budget - that ads could only be text based and would appear in a box either on a website or alongside search results they made ads something that would be easily digestable. Viewers would no longer feel like putting their fists through their monitors to make the flashing signs stop and publishers did not have to completely disrupt their page layouts or get involved with pop-ups.

In terms of the future of online ads, there is talk of Google adding images to the search results. All that talk, though, is speculation from outside the company. Some believe that the data transfer involved in processing images based on the number of ads Google serves would, in the words of one person in the story, "break the internet." Google maintains that text allows for the best and fastest comprehension and has no plans to switch to image ads.

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D’Amp’D

For past few days I have been trying to nail down the details of the comings and goings at the much hyped, Amp’d MVNO. My sources last week had informed me that one of their most senior executives, Don McGuire, senior vice president of marketing had quit the company along with another senior executive. After some nagging, company’s PR folks said that, “Don McGuire has left Amp’d for personal reasons and is pursuing other endeavors.” This comes closely on the heels of a controversial ad campaign which well… in in poor taste.

These departures were only two of the “revolving door” of executives at the company that recently raised about $67 million. MocoNews says that a lot of resumes are flying out to executive recruiters. Amongst others who have departed include Stefanie Henning, former head of the Music and Entertainment Group who is now at Fox. Steve Stanford was one of the first to leave and is now the CEO of ultra-deluxe MVNO, Voce Wireless.

And if that was not enough, as per MoCoNews, Sue Swenson, who was the former COO at T-Mobile USA will have trouble joining the company, thanks to an injunction granted to T-Mobile by a Seattle judge. This cannot be good news for investors like Redpoint Ventures, Highland Capital Partners and Columbia Capital who pumped in the dollars into this company.

The trials and tribulations of Amp’d are symptomatic of the whole MVNO business. Some venture capitalists in private have been fretting about the rising number of MVNO business plans. It is hard to imagine how three MVNOs - Amp’d, Helio and ESPN - will actively (and profitably) compete for essentially the same demographic - the hip and rich young people. In a column earlier this year, Matt Maier of Business 2.0 wrote:

All successful MVNOs require one of two things: They need to serve a well-defined, unserved market — the youth demographic, in Virgin’s case — or they need to target riskier customers whom the national carriers refuse to serve because of poor credit or no credit history. When a carrier like Verizon Wireless or Sprint decides to lease its network to a third party to set up an MVNO, it’s doing so because it wants to reach markets it could not otherwise touch.

Many look at the success of Virgin Mobile (never mind the fact that they had to give up a stake in the company to Best Buy to get shelf space and Sprint to play nice) and Boost Mobile, and believe that lightening will strike, not twice but many times. Not quite possible, but then…I am just wondering how will the the MVNO market reach $10.7 billion by 2010 as predicted by The Yankee Group.

I also wonder if MVNOs take such a big portion of the pie out of the revenues of cellphone carriers, who are totally beholden to Wall Street, how long before the axe falls. A very smart man, whose infinite wisdom I tap when flummoxed, tells me that already, “margin (and hence price) pressures are continuing to increase exactly in line with the ‘madness’ to which you refer.”

Sky Dayton, the chief executive of Helio, which has substantially deep pockets told me that in the MVNO game, the table stakes are at least half a billion dollars. Much of the money will go to the handset makers, the parent carriers, and well the advertising agencies and other businesses that feed off consumer-centric services. The bills will go to the private equity investors, venture capitalists, and well in the end the citizens who fund pension funds. You know how the milk is churned.

Iain Gilliot, a smart man who runs his own research firm, in a recent report to his clients wrote: MVNO: CLEC of the New Millennium? D’Amp’d might just be the first one of them!

Technorati posts major server upgrade

Yahoo Castrates Cheney's Dick

PR = MR + BR

I asked Steve Rubel to give his PR professional’s view of the Audible podcasting kerfluffle. Here it is, Steve’s analysis of the company’s MR (media relations) and BR (blog relations). Thanks, Steve. But never satisfied, I’m also curious what he thinks of a consultant going on the attack on behalf of Audible.

And while we’re at it, Steve, what would you do with OSM?

Blogger burnout

Matt, last week everybody was talking about blog sellouts. This week, the big news will no doubt be… blog burnouts. Tech pundit and Microsoft insider Robert Scoble is pulling the plug on his Scobleizer blog. He wants his personal life back.

Here’s why:

It’s becoming more and more clear that something in my life has gotta give. I’ve got about 1,100 emails waiting. Maryam would like to have me say more than hello and goodbye to her. My son is now showing me how to play bass guitar via IM and that sounds fun. I haven’t seen a movie in months. My friends are getting ignored. The Channel 9′ers need their videos (and their foam nine guys, I have a bunch to send out). I have a book that needs writing. And then there’s the link blog.

That’s quite a commitment for no pay. It will be tough on his loyal readers, but, as he points out, there are plenty of fine tech blogs out there to fill the void.

You know what is coming next, don’t ya? Media pundits of all stripes will take Scoble’s departure as an occasion to question yet again the sustainability of blogs. Can bloggers hack the commitment? Can they be trusted to draw in readers six months from now? Six years from now? Will AOL, Yahoo and Time Inc.’s recent investments pay off or blow up in their faces?

Burnout is bound to happen. Every writer/reporter/editor/media pundit has flirted with handing in the badge and retreating for a desert island. But we like the attention, the readers, the forum to communicate with the world too. Bloggers aren’t going anywhere. But I think a few of them should take the occasional holiday to recharge the old creative juices. Speaking of which, I could use a few days off … erm, we’ll resume this offline.

Mr Clean is Mr. Proper

I like to learn something new every day. If that's not possible, then I like to forget something. This keeps my brain from becoming too overloaded with information. Here's what I learned today: in Europe, Mr. Clean is known as Mr. Proper. I imagine he does it as some kind of tax shelter, but I'm not entirely sure. I picked up on this when I spotted these fun print ads over at Advertising/Design Goodness. According to Wikipedia, Mr. Clean/Proper is supposed to be a sailor and not, as I always imagined, a wandering vagabond who uses his cleaning power and rugged good looks to seduce lonely housewives.

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Scott Gatz

Matt MacAllister pointed to a new blog last month and I took notice. It was from a guy named Scott Gatz of Yahoo.

I has met Scott on various occasions during my travels and I was recently told that he wa sthe ‘blogging guy’ at Yahoo. So I planted a bookmark - thinking - “OK I gotta get this guy in stage for our ‘StructuredBlogging.org’ launch.”

So let’s see how good this blog is “Hey Scott - wanna come hang with us and support whatever format it is you’re supporting already - and call that ‘Structured Blogging ?’

Cause we don’t really care what you call it:

- microformats

- Structured Blogging

- OPML

- Comet

- Y! 360

- Google Base

…whatever.

We just wanna make sure we get interop.

And to get interop we need Scott. And Anil (or Barak), and Jason - both Jasons (@ Google) and Sifry and Wyman and Reinacker and Gillmor and Hodder and Searls and everyone else - too.

Salim Ismail and myself will run the party and get everyone to sing Kum-bah-yah (on Dec. 13th) - but the real heart and soul of this will be the day an end-user doesn’t notice the difference between a format and a protocol. When we can achieve transparency on this new technology and have one way of describing it to humans.

You know - sort of like ‘Structured Blogging.

Grokking Google Base? Read Burnham and Pincus

Worth the time:

I suspect that Google will soon announce a program whereby people can register their "Base compliant" RSS feeds with Google base. Google will then poll these feeds regularly just like any other RSS reader. Publishers can either create brand new Base-compliant feeds or with a bit of XSLT/XML Schema of their own they can just transpose their own content into a Base compliant feed. Indeed I wouldn't be surprised if there are several software programs available for download in a couple months that do just that. Soon, every publisher on the planet will be able to have a highly automated, highly structured feed directly into Google base.

feed gets inside Google the fun is just beginning. Most commentators have been underwhelmed by Google Base because they don't see the big deal of Google Base entires showing up as part of free text search. What these commentators miss, is that Google isn't gathering all this structured data just so they can regurgitate it piece-meal via unstructured queries, they are gathering all this data so that they can build the world's largest XML database.

And Mark Pincus:

google started with an amazing premise of doing no evil. i truly believe its founders want to help the world. my guess is that like many companies google will be a victim of its own success. like msft it will go hire the smartest people in the world. unfortunately, those people are often sharks and have less lofty goals, especially when they have yet to make their billions.

ase is a very msft mba approach to the world. while it makes business sense, it lacks soul. it does as little to help the community as bringing in a walmart. in fact, google feels a like walmart today.

Lots Going On

JD Lasica reports…..

At Web 2.0 last week, I cornered the high-energy, super-sharp Valerie Cunningham about AlwaysOn’s just-announced OnHollywood summit — a gathering of the best and brightest in the movie and tech industries, coming to Hollywood on April 25-27, 2006.

Here’s Valerie’s 2 1/2-minute description of the conference (in MPEG-4). (Ourmedia page | watch video)

From the AlwaysOn announcement:

ONHOLLYWOOD is where cutting edge technology from the backstreets of Silicon Valley meets Hollywood’s digital media revolution. This two and a half day industry insider event borrows on the “film market” tradition by providing an open environment where 80 top digital entertainment and media entrepreneurs meet the big time studio, telco and consumer electronics executives. …

Among those invited are the top dogs from Yahoo, Disney, Sprint and other bigger players to mix it up with the entrepreneurs, VCs and talent agents that will be wandering the halls of the Roosevelt and hanging out at the pool party on opening night.

Count me in.

DISCLOSURE: I am working on a project with Val named GoingOn. So I dearly love her. This new show Tony Perkin’s is putting on will be at the Paramount in Hollywood. Cause Tony would only be caught dead in ONLY the swankiest, coolest new scenes.

Pitch Or Perish

Hugh MacLeod has produced some doodles for his friends at Cravens Advertising in Newcastle, England. While snooping around their site, these etymological gems surfaced.

I've been reading "Which Lie Did I Tell" by William Goldman (the guy who wrote Butch Cassidy & Sundance Kid). A fantastic book about his experiences as a screenwriter in Hollywood.

He also gives some tips and observations about the screenwriter's art. (Essential reading for all copywriters).

One thing he talks about is pitching movie ideas. The stress and heartache of selling an idea you care passionately about.

Goldman says that to understand the pain of the pitch you have to consider its origin.

Back to a time of medieval religious persecution and the actions of one of its chief inquisitors.

Pitch: This originated during the Spanish Inquisition. Torquemada, one of its leaders would tell imprisoned playwrights that if they could interest him in an idea, he would let them live long enough to write it. If not, they were dropped into a large vat (or pitch) of boiling tar, hence the term 'pitch'

This also got me thinking about the origin of 'deadline', another everyday agency word

Deadline: Originating during the American Civil War: prisoners in that war were seldom held in purpose-built jails. More often, they were herded at gunpoint inside a makeshift boundary. The boundary had two lines, and a prisoner who stepped outside the inner boundary was ordered back, but one who over-stepped the outer boundary was shot. Thus it was called the deadline.

Tough job this agency gig.

Google-Mart

Google Analytics Is Now Full

Google redressed Urchin web analytics software and released it as Google Analytics. It seems to be quite a hit, that the company had to close the applications for the service. I tried signing up for it this morning and found that I was too late to the party. I wonder why does Google release products out in the wild and not be prepared for the worst case scenario. (Like the service could actually become a hit?)

Of course there is the more darker explanation - Urchin even when used for a single website was such a beast and siphoned off so many resources, that most of the users (like myself) simply relegated it to once a day update in the early hours of the morning. Is Google suddenly finding out that Urchin doesn’t scale when being used by thousands of users. Frankly, I think Adaptive Path’s Measure Map is a far superior analytical tool, even in its current alpha form. Despite its niggly bits, Measure Map is a tool designed from the ground-up for bloggers and allows them a chance to look at comments, incoming links, users and page views etc in a way that it is actually “human” understandable.

Others like MINT, on which I spent $30 was such a piece of sh*t that it just did not work. Support… what is that. Buyer Beware on that one. Anyway… enough of early morning, pre-coffee rantings! (Check out Mark Boulton’s comparison of the three services, and he likes Mint.)

Google Analytics Tips

Anonymity, Inc.

Steve Baker says anonymity is the next big industry. I don’t know whether it’s an industry, but there is value to add there. What do newspaper job classifieds and headhunters really provide but anonymizing? In the new world of jobs and resumes where buyer and seller can come together frictionlessly, there is some need for a trusted agent to act as the anonymizer (which may be newspapers’ last hope to keep a foot in that marketplace, if they figure it out and act quickly). Ditto personals, until you’re ready to meet and mate. Ditto some other commercial and informational transactions. It’s harder to provide anonymity in a distributed world but it still had value.

: LATER: Michael Zimmer says in the comments: “ ‘Pseudonymity’ is probably a more attainable goal.” Right, he is. And now let’s butcher that into a verb: pseudonymizing?

Google Base v. microformats

I’ve read the little background material on Google’s Base and still can’t see whether the material you put there can be found by other search engines. I also cannot find evidence of an API that shares any standards for tags and structure. Is Base open or closed? So far, closed.

What we need instead is a means of letting you tag and structure your data so it can be found reliably by any search engine no matter where it is on the internet. That would stay true to the distributed internet Google has so masterfully exploited.

I wish I were hearing more noise from the microformats guys to act as competitors — or at least as pressure on Google for openness and standards.

Imagine if you could go to a page that lets you put in your resume or house ad or job ad and it spits out tagged XML you could put on the web anywhere to be found by anyone.

Or imagine putting tags on restaurant reviews you post on your blog so anyone could aggregate or search for, say, all the cuisine=mexican restaurants in location=chicago. Well, you don’t really have to imagine that. If you aggreed on the tags, you could start doing that today via Del.icio.us and Technorati.

And imagine if you could go to Google or other services — e.g., Indeed and SimplyHired for jobs or Baristanet for three Jersey towns — and see the tags they use so you can swarm around those tags and find and be found. That’s the openness we need. If Google spearheads that with a truly open API that can be adapted by the community, then great. That is our distributed marketplace. But if not, then Google is only trying to recreate the centralized marketplaces of old — otherwise known as newspapers. That worked for newspapers when they had monopolies. They don’t anymore. Does Google think it has a monopoly?

: Mark Pincus hopes Google is not trying to recreate Walmart. It’s a heartfelt, practically tear-wrenching ode to what Google coulda shoulda been:

my other big question is whether google is opening this service to the same crawling it has benefitted from to the tune of $108 billion? …

has chosen between two paths. one which i thought they were on was to be a platform to enable great things on the web. google could have powered everything with its search engine, ad infrastructure, massive crawling and computing power. it could have been a democratizing force, enabling small services to flourish in being found and in serving them a platform on which to innovate.

instead google has chosen to be merely another big corporate titan. like microsoft, it’s choosing to go for the gold, enriching their shareholders rather than enabling industries….

like msft, google is now going after every other oppty around it, taking advantage of its trojan horse position. suddenly every company is at risk. companies as far away as walmart have to have a ‘google strategy’. today, vc’s ask every new startup how they will compete with google. (at least we dont have to answer the msft question any more.) …

in fact, google feels a like walmart today. once the excitement over trying out their latest release wears off we are left with the realization that they are going to ultimately put the corner grocer (being craigslist) out of business, and suck value out of an economy not add back. …

one last thought to all those ‘web 2.0′ers’ listening. WHEN ARE WE ALL GOING TO WAKE UP AND REALIZE THAT NONE OF US COMPETE WITH EACH OTHER? WE ALL COMPETE WITH GOOGLE, MSFT AND YAHOO. the only chance we have of enabling an independent industry is to come together, leverage s resources, create and protect a level playing field. otherwise, we are all in the business of creating great products in the hope we can sell to them before they build it. how fucking boring is that?

Right. That is precisely why some of us are working on figuring out open ad marketplaces and why I wish the microformats guys were getting more ink pixels.

The answer to any monopoly — water to wicked witches everywhere — is openness.

: I’ve been meaning to link to this PC4Media post on microformats for months; now I have the excuse and the memory to do it:

MicroFormats Enable Distributed Applications!

mats could be as big an innovation as databases were.

If databases let us store information. Microformats let us access the world’s databases. Potentially!

Yes, APIs do this too. But, microformats make the database (or data store) distributed. Not controlled by one entity.

This could be as big as “http”.

If you don’t get how microformats can change your business, prepare to be outdone.

: See also Fred Wilson on base.

: And see Umair Haque:

There’s only one question that matters, strategically: is Base the AOL-style walled garden of the 00s?

rns to info owned by Google going to be lower than decentralized info? …

What that means is that Google keeps indexing the world’s information, albeit at increasingly costly factor prices; while superior returns begin flowing to reconstructors and smart aggregators. This scenario devalues centralized mechanisms/walled gardens, like Base - because they’re not part of the attention ecosystem; they’re part of GoogleWorld (we really do need a name for all the info Google owns)….

But I think what it does do is begin to point to a growing vital point competitors can strike….

Then there’s Amazon, eBay, VCs, and media - all attention economy players, who seem totally intent on missing the tectonic shifts right under their feet, which are eroding all their returns.

The key question for any company today is: How do you play in the distributed world? How do you stop the 1.0 insistence of having to control and own and how do you instead make money by enabling others? That was where Google’s own gigantic growth was. But sometimes it’s hardest to learn the lessons you yourself teach.

Umair adds:

Another, marginally related point - it also points to the uncooling of Google. I mean, Base? Can you get more Orwellian, lame, sinister, connected to all the wrong stuff?

s “the Base”.

See also: base instincts.

: SEE ALSO: The comments. Good notes there from ROR and SimpyHired.

Revealing hidden assumptions in estimation

It is trivial to estimate a new feature as trivial. All too often, programmers and users both fall into this trap. A programmer says, “let’s just make it do X.” A user says on a forum, “its only Y, how hard can it be?”

Just and only are two of the most insidious words in the English language. They hide mountains of assumptions behind them, and blind the speaker to the realities of the situation. Even worse, the speaker is implicitly agreeing to be blindfolded, making it even more difficult for them to see the assumptions their words are masking.

/feeds.feedburner.com/37signals/beMH?g=722"/>

Watch Jack Ma

The CEO of Alibaba, a central figure in China and the nascent search/ecommerce wars there, is one fun fellow to watch. His recent deal with Yahoo has redoubled Ma's presence in China. Read this Forbes piece for more. From it:

Ma isn't content to dominate China's auctions and e-mail. He wants the third point of the Internet triumvirate, too: search. The CEO depicted an almost disarmingly simple strategy: "We win eBay, buy Yahoo! and stop Google. That is for fun. Competition is for fun."

y and/or geopolitics apparently loom large in Ma's worldview. He told reporters that while Google (nasdaq: GOOG - news - people ) and Yahoo! dominate Europe and the U.S., neither is in a position to rule Asia.

"I call them sharks in the ocean. We are crocodiles in the Yangtze River. If we fight in the Yangtze River, we have more chances than they have."

SOLD OUT: Come back in 18 month's time

This morning's Wall Street Journal wrote up (subscription required) on the burgeoning Web platform and the conundrum facing pretty much any mainstream marketer with money to spare and the premium web publishers (portals) with limited inventory.

My thoughts are two-fold:

1. According to the article, MSN is charging up to $1,000,000 for a 24 hour home page placement. $365,000,000 for the year all things being equal (which they aren't)

By comparison, ABC has roughly 60 slots to sell for next year's SuperBowl at roughly $2,500,000 a pop. That works out to $150,000,000. I'm rounding off pretty liberally and certainly not factoring in value-add deals, volume discount, sponsorships (on both the up and down-sides), but I think you get the point: 1 network 1 day a year = 1/2 a major portal's annual premium inventory on their homepage. (feel free to tear apart my logic, math, assumptions etc)

For instance, only 1.5% of the population is in the market for a new car or truck each month, says Betsy Lazar, general director for media and advertising operations for General Motors Corp. But, she says, "about 70% of people in the market for a car go online, so it's logical that we need to go there."

Good point Betsy...but surely you'll need to be there 365 days a year as it is a moving target...and if so, why are you not roadblocking one or more of the portals as close to 24x7x365. You've got the money. Oh that's right...because you can't; it's not available.

Takeaway 1) There has to be more than just homepage placements in order to scale this opportunity. Besides going deeper into the portals themselves (mail, finance, autos, sports), there also has to be an evolution of how premium homepage placements are bought and sold...put differently, the days of 24 hour placement is a non-scaleable luxury.

Takeaway 2) This problem underscores the very fibre and foundation of where advertising is going...on all fronts (except probably Cosmo or Vogue) - clutter is becoming a thing of the past. One ad (pre-roll) before a video clip is the online norm. Just this week we saw the AOL/WB announcement, on top of the CBS/NBC onces and it seems as if our best shot is 4 x 15-second spots per showing. That's a far cry from the existing model of 18 minutes of commerials per hour of programming. Prices can increase up the old wazoo...no way the revenue can be made up.

2. There has to be more...and there is: it is and will take the form of a combination of a network model overlayed against the oodles of consumer generated content. Adam Curry is doing it with his Podcast Network; Weblogs fetched a handsome price on the market. Gawker media has signed a deal with Yahoo.

So in short...let's dig a little deeper until the hood of homepage placements, roll up our sleeves, get our hands dirty and grease the wheels of consumer generated content and re-open the doors of the Web: it's very much open for business to anyone who's prepared to stop looking at it like a freakin' traditional media buy.

13 good reasons to switch to firefox

Kill Bill’s Browser offers 13 good reasons to switch to Firefox

Napster Viral Ad

Riffs Web 2.0 Consumer Review Site Debuts

Riffs is a newcomer to the world of consumer review sites. This category to date has been dominated by epinions and Planet Feedback. Riffs - which was developed by a startup called attap - is trying to break in with some neat Web 2.0 features.

For example, Riffs has Blikis - a combination of blogs and wikis. Using Riffs the community can decide on the content for any given item being reviewed, how riffs should be organized and more. Each user also gets their own page, where he/she can organize their riffs and record your commentary about anything. They also offer RiffRolls that bloggers can incorporate into their own blogs as well as a nice set of mobile features.

Take a look at this in action. It's pretty cool. Here's a review of the iPod nano. It includes the usual thumbs up/thumbs down reviews plus user comments. But look closer and you will notice that this product has its own wiki history, user tags and an RSS changes feed. Outstanding!  Great work gang. (Hat tip: 37 Signals)

Technorati Tags: Riffs, Tagging, Tags

It's Official: SBC Buys AT&T; Becomes "New" AT&T

Google Base as Directory

Michael Parekh writes:

With Google Base, the company now POTENTIALLY has a human-powered directory of it's own, that can supplement results to it's core search engine. It's Yahoo!'s early approach in reverse.

und, it's not just dozens or hundreds of humans powering the directory, it's potentially millions.

To put it in fashionable Web 2.0 terms, it's a microchunked directory powered by peer production.

To put in mainstream terms, Google Base is a Lego set for users to submit and categorize any kind of content that's important to them.

The new font of the moment

Have a look at Rollyo, Wayfaring, and Riffs. Something look familiar? Maybe something close to this or this?

'Sporting News' Gets 'Maxim' Cover Treatment

Maybe Pajamas Media wasn’t such a bad name afterall

If I were at OSM, nee Open Source Media, nee Pajamas Media, I’d be looking to change my name… and quickly…. and I’d be sending a fruit basket and an apology to the folks at Open Source Media, the radio show… and I’d be hoping I weren’t heading to the lawyer’s office to start settlement negotiations with part of that $3.5 million I just got….

Brendan at Open Source Media, the radio show, has a devastating account of the name. He’s polite and gracious but underlying it is a muffled scream: “Stop! Thief!”

Open Source Media, the whatever-it-is, has a disingenous and recently revised explanation that Brendan deftly slices apart here.

At the bottom of the Open Source Media, the radio show, page is this: “Open Source (sm) is a production of Open Source Media, Inc. Contents (c) 2005 Open Source Media, Inc.” At the top of the Open Source Media, the whatever-it-is, it says Open Source Media. Now just note that I have to keep saying Open Source Media, the radio show, or Open Source Media, the whatever-it-is. That’s what I’d call brand confusion.

What’s doubly bad about this is that the folks at Open Source Media, the radio show, who used the name first are highly respected in this medium of blogs and that the folks at Open Source Media, the whatever-it-is, apparently are not enough in touch with this world that they knew that. It’s a bad stumble. Admit it. Apologize. Pick yourself up. And move on.

Yet Open Source Media, the whatever-it-is, promises this — with more haughtiness than I’d ever heard from Dan Rather — on its prevaricating post about the name:

The goal of our enterprise is to bring gravitas and legitimacy to the blogosphere…

I don’t think that blogs need to have legitimacy laid upon them … and who died and made you the legitimizer?

And gravitas? Good God, big, old media has an oversupply of that. That’s what got them in such trouble. And that’s what we’re running away from.

Previously, I was merely amused and confused by whatever-we-should-call whatever-it-is. Now I’m cringing as I await the sound of trains crashing.

Yahoo, Google Are Competing With VCs As Start-Up Funders

Users sue Match.com for date fraud

Match.com, a unit of IAC/Interactive Corp. (IACI.O: Quote, Profile, Research), is accused in a federal lawsuit of goading members into renewing their subscriptions through bogus romantic e-mails sent out by company employees. In some instances, the suit contends, people on the Match payroll even went on sham dates with subscribers as a marketing ploy.

"This is a grossly fraudulent practice that Match.com is engaged in," said H. Scott Leviant, a lawyer at Los Angeles law firm Arias, Ozzello & Gignac LLP, which brought the suit.

Beck and the dancing robots

It's all about the bacon

Sure, podcasting and videocasting may be all the rage--but look out world, because the newest Web 2.0/blogosphere trend is already upon us--baconcasting.

In a blogosphere that leaves no niche unturned, there are already a heaping helping of blogs dedicated to all things bacon--from recipes and restaurant reviews to bacon-related stories and experiences (not to mention Kevin Bacon/Bacon Brothers sightings), everybody's favorite pork-based breakfast meat is one of the web's hottest tags.

To help you make sense of this grease-soaked world of online food coverage, we've prepared this Friday tour of the bacon blogs.

Bacon Unwrapped

We kick off our tour with Bacon Unwrapped, a site whose bacon love is evident from the second its header loads. The site's been around since June 2005 (as you'll see, Summer 2005 was when the bacon blogs really blew up) covering a variety of topics, but always coming back to focus on the goodness of bacon.

Some of the recent best from the Bacon Unwrapped vault includes a mediation on the joys of Idaho "Street Bacon", a historical look at the Swedes and their love of bacon, and a review of the new Sonic breakfast sandwich (with bacon, naturally).

I ♥ Bacon

Of all the sites mentioned here, I ♥ Bacon is easily the least focused on bacon. Which is probably a good thing, health and longevity-wise. But that doesn't mean this site doesn't (wait for it) bring home the bacon. With a section dedicated to "the Bacon lifestyle", there's discussion of chocolate-covered bacon (aka Homer's Fudge Bacon), bacon spray, and the must-have item for every guy this Christmas--bacon robots.

The Bacon Show

While it has the misfortune of sharing its name with a failed Kevin Bacon late night TV show project, The Bacon Show is unquestionably a force in the baconblogosphere. While it's only been live since May 2005 (hey--same as us), the site is already packed with bacon recipes and a large directory of bacon-related links as it builds towards its objective--cataloging every bacon recipe known to man.

To reach this goal, The Bacon Show follows a simple format--one recipe involving bacon, everyday. Sources for these recipes include old cookbooks, Bon Apetit's and other bacon-loving websites. Some recent mouthwatering favorites include Bacon-wrapped Dates with Almonds and Goat Cheese, Spanish Bean Soup with Beef, Bacon and Kale, and Jalapeno Cheeseburgers with Bacon and Grilled Onions that sound so good, I might just make one for breakfast.

Bacontarian

The Bacontarian has been around since early 2005, which makes him somewhat of a veteran in bacon blogging circles. While he doesn't hold to the hard "Bacon Only" editorial rules of The Bacon Show, the Bacontarian does serve up large sides of pork-related news, links and recipes/cooking experiences. The artery-hardening treats you can read about include Bacon Tempura, Bacon Mushroom Bleu Cheese pasta sauce, and bacon ice cream (which I insist was invented at my fraternity house, but that's another story for another time).

In case you were wondering--the site defines Bacontarian as "a person who supplements an otherwise normal diet with large amounts of pork!" Which, incidentally, is what a cardiologist calls "his money customer."

--

This concludes our tour of the bacosphere for the day. If for some reason we missed your bacon blog, send an email to tips@blogebrity.com and we'll check it out.

Texas town changes name, gets free satellite service

Back in August EchoStar's Dish Network offered free satellite service for ten years to any town that would change its name to Dish. Absolutely no one took Dish Network up on the offer, and the company was shamed for even suggesting that a town would actually change its namesake for something as trivial as free satellite service. At least, that's how it happened in the dream world in which I live. In reality, the small town of Clark, Texas recently changed its name to Dish, and yes, all 125 of its citizens now have free service from Dish Network. I'll bet Bob Clark is extremely angry. That is, of course, if the town was originally named after Bob Clark, the director of Porky's. I haven't actually researched that.

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CSS Tip: Create a default with special cases

When you have one element with multiple states, you can use an ID to define the default appearance and classes for the individual cases. This makes your CSS easier to read and reduces code duplication (stay DRY).

In Basecamp, a bar appears below the navigation to display green confirmation messages and red failure messages. The only difference between the two messages is the color and icon.

The basic appearance of the bar is the same in both cases, and there is only one bar, so we can start with an ID. “Flash” is Rails parlance for this sort of message, so we called it #Flash.

<div id="Flash">This is the Flash bar.</div>

#Flash {
  text-align: left;
  border: 1px solid #ccc;
  font-size: 14px;
  margin: 0 7px 12px 0;
  padding: 5px 5px 5px 30px;
}

Now its Cisco versus Motorola, Microsoft

Cisco had data, Cisco had voice, and what it needed was video to complete the triple play. So they bought Scientific Atlanta for $6.9 billion.

Cisco will pay $43 per share in cash in exchange for each share of Scientific-Atlanta, and assume outstanding options, for an aggregate purchase price of approximately $6.9 billion, or approximately $5.3 billion net of Scientific-Atlanta’s existing cash balance.

The reasons for the deal are many, the most important being that the company the size of Cisco might have a tough time growing revenues ($27 billion - fiscal 2006) in line with Wall Street’s double digit expectations without acquisitions. Scientific Atlanta will have sales of around $2.1 billion in fiscal 2006) This is the kind of deal that gives shares a bit of lift. As you might have noticed Cisco has been range bound for years now.

From a strategic point of view, Cisco needed to fill out its cable portfolio with customer premise gear. Scientific Atlanta with its set-top boxes is a good way to get deeper into cable networks. The company has supplied head-end gear and routers to companies like Comcast for a while now. The set-top box is turning out to be the trojan into digital homes. Combine this with Linksys, and things can certainly get interesting!

Motorola, while well known as a wireless company, is a massive player in the cable business, largely due to its General Instrument acquisition. It had the most complete offering so far, but now will have to contend with Cisco on a more serious level. Same goes for Microsoft which has been trying to make a place for itself in the IPTV networks. Thanks to Scientific Atlanta, Cisco can now start calling on Telecoms building out their Telco TV networks as well. SBC was supposedly working with Scientific Atlanta anyway. BellSouth is another Cisco partner that could now take SA more seriously.

What Cisco Gets from Scientific Atlanta: End-to-End Subscriber Systems, DVR & Non-DVR Set tops, HD & standard definition Set tops, System & Client Software, Cable HSD/Voice Modems, Home Networks, HFC Networks, Satellite Systems, Head-ends, and Network Manage

Lightningcast Debuts Web Video Ad Network

Shel Sez: Google has NOT bought Riya

Conflicting reports are coming in over Google's rumored acquisition of Riya. Now Shel Israel, a consultant to Riya is saying, Google has NOT bought Riya. Who wants to play To Tell the Truth?

Yahoo Syndicates Kevin Sites' Hot Zone To Scripps Howard

The BS Brotherhood of the Networks

Today's LA Times ran the following piece: Networks say TV ads still matter

Subhead: Executives seek to use their own research and findings from Nielsen to show that DVRs such as TiVo don't pose as big a threat as once fear. Translation: Self-serving and flawed research respectively. Let's continue...

Findings from Nielsen Media Research this fall in seven markets — including Denver, Houston and Orlando, Fla. — showed that viewers in homes with digital video recorders spent 12% more time watching television, for a total of 5.7 hours a day on average. When factoring in DVR usage, prime-time programs saw a 4% boost in their viewership.

I have seen other research which concurs that DVR consumers watch more TV than non-DVR consumers. That's because it's quality TV...it's quality content. The problem is of course, that they're not watching commercials (BIG DIFFERENCE; BIG DISTINCTION) I can buy the increase of 4% in viewership (nothing earth shattering...given the current run rate of fleeting viewers to cable, Web, DVD, Gaming etc), but I do find the 5.7 hours/day to be a little out of whack...clearly we're talking about an entire household from an aggregated standpoint, however this kind of lumped in data only goes to the problem at hand...one size fits all; mass media approach which does not segment and target accordingly.

The networks said their own research showed that more than half of DVR users paid attention to commercials and that they recalled spots they saw. The network studies also indicated something surprising: that 53% of DVR users have gone back to watch commercials they initially fast-forwarded through.

OK...this is where the bullshit meter goes wild. For starters, we have the networks conceding that about half of DVR users don't pay attention to commercials and/or recall the spots they say. Then we have a factoid which has no context, foundation, frame of reference or direction stating that 53% of DVR users may have replayed a commercial they initially fast forwarded. Come on....what's the incidence of this occurrence? Does "once ever" count as "always"? Best case scenario, we're talking about iconic, memorable and easily recognizable creative (for example, early stage iPod or Nike commercials), but until you demonstrate this being anything other than an atypical exception to the norm, stop wasting our time.

Nielsen research also showed that about 90% of the DVR users watched the shows at their designated broadcast time.

Another piece of misleading information. Does "at their designated broadcast time" mean watching CSI at 9pm or 9.20pm - in other words with just the right amount of time-shifting to eradicate commercials?

Alan Wurtzel, president of research and media development for NBC...wanted to highlight the data to debunk what he called the "urban legend" that "DVRs were going to kill the business." Wurtzel's theory is that because the earliest users of DVRs were mostly tech lovers and industry insiders, their habits were not representative of the entire population. If all Americans behaved like those who first embraced DVRs, "we'd all be wearing black, driving Jags and Mercedes and trying to get a good table at the Palm."

Huh? Since when are early adopter tech lovers (read: geek) Jag drivers? Wurtzel contradicts himself...he's saying that today's DVR user is mainstream/representative of the entire population, and yet we're still talking about 8% of the US population, which puts the diffusion/adoption of DVR's in the early adopter category. It is incongruous that a consumer purchasing a DVR would be akin to a VCR consumer with the 12:00 flashing on its LCD screen. The DVR alone may not kill the business, but it is critical to note that it is the DVR, along with the Web, DVD, VCR, PSP and good old remote control are all working together - exponentially - to give consumers unprecedented choice and viable alternatives, and in this reality TV scenario, commercials are not welcome.

Marketers and agencies - you need to ignore this self-serving, borderline egregious information and look beyond the Kumbaya brotherhood of the networks.

Networks - you need to grow up quickly and start taking responsibility for the mess - clutter, inability to target more accurately (and in your defence, along with the drivel you've had to accept in the form of "creative" advertising)

Are you part of the problem or part of the solution? Let me ask you again...are you part of the problem or part of the solution?

This press conference is a painful whinge that refuses to acknowlege a sea-change and fundamental shift in the landscape.

There are plenty of viable possibilities out there and potential solutions. Some even will lie within or through the DVR (in the book I call them, "commercials frozen in time") But in order to fully explore them, you're going to need to get off your butts and do some real work for a change, instead of fudging one-dimensional data.

These ads will make you party like it's 1982

Filed under: Flickr Fiend, Online, Print

Ah, the Atari 2600. It brings back some fond memories for me. The first time playing Space Invaders at home, the feeling of having such a sophisticated gaming system of my own, getting seriously drunk with a friend and playing Yar's Revenge until 1am. Now you can flashback yourself with this Flickr gallery of videogame ads from 1982.

The Astrocade system? I don't even remember that.

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Democratizing Broadband Access New Marketing Style

The Democrats recent $128bn innovation plan to wire American with affordable broadband Internet Access is a piece of new that got me excited on many levels.

In my book, I talk about the ultimate cause new marketing plan: wiring America and now it looks like the idea might come true.

It's exciting on so many levels: societal, economic, media and political. For one thing, Universal Broadband will truly level the playing field from the ability to grant all Americans the same quality of ubiquotous access to the promise of perfect information. The socioeconomic benefits from VoIP thru access to the world's largest marketplace and bookstore are equally self evident. The spike in penetration/broadband adoption will probably drive in a final nail into the work-in-progress of the old media and marketing models.

From a political standpoint, could this be the differentiated position that people have been crying out for the Democrats to own? Will we see their advertising reflect the promise of Universal Broadband? Is this the kind of real promise that can and will be kept?

On the other side of the coin, Republicans countered with criticism that this plan would lead to more taxes and regulation, but it should also be noted that President Bush too called for universal broadband access by 2007. Perhaps the Republican plan would have aimed for a solution which would not have included taxes or regulations...but it will be interesting to see the progress/report card in 2007. It does come up pretty conveniently on an election year...

Deliciously Blogging

Our client, The Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, this week took the wraps off their new resource site for high-growth entrepreneurs. It's called eVenturing. Our team counseled them in setting up their blog and are also are supporting them with an integrated public relations and blogger relations program.

One of the Foundation's concerns at the outset was making sure that the blog was pumped with a blood supply of fresh content. One way they got around this was with one of the ten hacks I talked about earlier this week. Their blog team is using del.icio.us to populate a bundle of daily links. So far, it's working nicely and I highly recommend this strategy to others. Matt McAllister outlines this approach here. You can also see it in action on this site created by Rex Hammock.

Technorati Tags: Entrepreneur, eventuring, Kauffman

Arrested Development: Who Needs a Network?

I promised that I was going to write about video online, prompted by the cancellation of Arrested Development, a show I've seen a few times. Luckily, Lost Remote did it for me. From the post:

No longer shackled by the whim of a fickle network, “AD” can take advantage of all the technologies now available for video delivery and make more money. The model is just waiting to happen: AD, a pioneer in its style of comedy, should pioneer this, too.

Quirky and compelling, with a loyal niche audience, Arrested Development seems like a good candidate to continue creating content, but delivering it elsewhere. The problem, though, I think may be economics. I don't know how much the show costs, but it may be too much for anyone to take the gamble. But its an interesting idea.

Google Print Rebrands As Google Book Search

RSS Feeds and Podcasting from Pubcon X

Google Base Raises Features Bar Well Above Craigslist

What's a Blog?

The Online Ad Scarcity Issue

To begin with: the online inventory shortage is for real.

Second of all: it's not a crisis of not-enough-inventory. It's a crisis of not-enough-inventory-management.

I say its for real because the advertiser/agency experience makes it so. There's a finite amount of inventory on portal home pages and other premium spots. Jeff Jarvis and others say that the rush for this space is all about media buyer laziness, but its not that simple. Large brands seeking to make a significant impact will always seek high-profile placement.

Is that laziness? Not really. It is ego. Even if no one ever bought a Coke because they saw the neon sign in Times Square, it is still important enough to Coke's brand and culture to demonstrate that they are big enough and strong enough to put that message in that spot. So, as long as there are new-model-car releases, brand-launches and opening-weekends, there will be a reason to pay tons of cash for the home page of Yahoo! Scarcity will exist for that, and it will keep prices high.

But the problem comes in if you say "well, Yahoo's home page is gone, so there goes the campaign". Online advertising is all about technology innovation and the twin turbines of targeting and optimization are will both increase the revenues for publishers as well as the effectiveness for advertisers.

The shortage? It's just gonna lead to more technology innovation. Any network/serving technology/targeting system who can (really) do optimization is in a good place right now. They're the ones who will benefit the most from a shortage.

Blogvertising On The Rise

Steve Rubel suggests that marketers may begin chasing the long tail and begin placing ads on more and more blogs, given that inventory at the big portals is presently booked out months in advance.

I agree that it's a logical step, but it seems to me brands and their media buying partners will need help navigating the bloatosphere. Hence, for those actively creating the blogvertising business model, media buying could become a larger slice of the income pie than creative development.

Certainly, blog networks are well positioned to capitalize. But there are plenty of places to advertise outside these networks, as well.

$100 Laptop a Reality

Though they've been bouncing the idea of a $100 laptop around for a while ($100 Laptop - No Child Left Behind), it looks like it's finally becoming a reality. The lime green laptop is about the size of a text book and with a hand crank to allow it to operate without electricity. Designed at the MIT Media Lab, the project mainly aimed at developing countries where a calculator and Internet access can mean the difference between starvation and a good year. The goal is to allow these kids and even adults to actually own the laptops, though governments or charities will pay for them.

Looks like Brazil, Thailand, Egypt and Nigeria are the choices for the first wave of laptops early next year and each is slated to buy at least a million of them. Though not in production yet, one unnamed company has offered to build them fro $110 each and four others are considering joining the effort. They operate at about half the speed of store-bought laptops and will run on an open-source OS. The screen is actually from a portable DVD player and can be viewed in either color or black and white.

Researchers unveil $100 laptop for schoolkids [Reuters]

Live Simple ebook

Self-published author John December makes his book Live Simple: Radical Tactics to Reduce the Complexity, Costs, and Clutter of your Life freely available on the web or as a $4 PDF download. December says this book "is for anyone who wants a simpler life:"

I want to help you see that you don't have to live without breathing room for yourself. You don't have to continue to accumulate things as a mark of progress. You don't have to live in a way that places stress on yourself or the environment. Most importantly, you don't have to get lost in the trivia of life at the expense of what matters to you.

The book includes sections on taking control of your stuff, honing your routine, optimizing your location and achieving your goals.

Snoop dogg's doggs

Snoop Dogg wants you to enjoy his delicious foot-long meat snack. Also, he's launching his own brand of hot dogs. While other rap artists are dabbling in energy drinks and other such things, Snoop is straying from the pack. Actually, I'd say he's straying pretty far; hot dogs aren't exactly "hip" are they? You should form a club at your local community center and discuss that. Anyway, Snoop is teaming up with Massachusetts hot dog makers Franco Petrucci and Jeff Earp for his "Snoop Doggs." The product will launch in January.

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Bloggers Cause Sony to Rethink Their Strategy

I have to admit that - for no particular reason - I wasn't paying a lot of attention to the whole Sony rootkit blogstorm, though I certainly was aware of it. InformationWeek does a nice job here of summarizing how bloggers amplified what would have been a PR crisis for Sony - with or without them.

Several journalists have emailed me asking how I would have advised Sony. It's tough when you get into this situation to get out of it without actually altering the cause of the crisis. The real challenge for companies is to prepare for situations like these in advance, which I have explained how to do earlier.

CNet: Taking Back the Web

Day three of CNet's five-day special report on the social web (Taking Back the Web) focuses on tagging:

“The idea behind tagging may be irresistibly simple, but its ramifications are enormous and complex. For more than a decade, the primary way to categorize and find information on the Internet was through the automated algorithms of search engines, a process at once laborious and highly imprecise. Tagging has quickly gained popularity because it allows human beings to bring intuitive organization to what otherwise would be largely anonymous entries in an endless sea of data.”

Fair warning, it's a rather chunky story, but a good one nonetheless, touching on some of the bigger trends (and profiling some of the bigger personalities) behind tagging today.

Also, it's worth pointing out that the previous two reports have been really well done too (Entertainment: Underground Taste Makers and Wikis: News, History by Committee).  I think the wiki report in particular is interesting, especially when you put it in context with an associated wiki-based editorial experiment CNet's undertaking with its “Reader WIki” (a subject for a follow-up post).

Finally, what's a special report in a Media 2.0 world if it doesn't come with the accompanying (cough, obligatory) blog posts, reader comments and podcasts!  CNet's even taken it a step further and offering a full PDF of the special report right now, including tomorrow (update: see Maps) and Friday's stories), if you simply register.  Not a bad deal, here's the link (PDF).

Technorati Tags: Blogging, Media, Podcasting, Tags, Web 2.0, Wiki

RSS Needs to Come With the Cup

That’s how I see this RSS thing.

I still have to bring my own cup in order to get it filled with website/blog updates. I don’t mind bringing my own cup. But for RSS to go beyond reaching the few and into the many, we cannot others will be cool with bringing their own cup. RSS needs to come with the cup. Dig?

Google’s Riya Designs?

Exclusive: To paraphrase a popular Bollywood ditty, Is Google singing O Riya! O Riya!

Since this past Thursday, I have heard whispers that Riya, a Redwood City, California-based photo service is being courted by Google. Now this rumor has been repeated by multiple sources, though not one of them is directly involved with the two companies. One of them indicated that this is still at due diligence stage. I am putting this in highly rumored and unconfirmed category. “Your inquiry is about rumor and speculation and we’re not able to respond to questions of this type,” Google spokesperson Barry Schnitt told me. I have left message for Riya founder Munjal Shah and also emailed him, but thus far no response.

Riya, as a company hasn’t even launched, and is supposed to have a coming out event at Tech Crunch’s BBQ this friday! Riya’s technology could be used to extend Google’s reach in the picture domain, where they are completely overshadowed by Yahoo. If this company ends up in the hands of Yahoo, well as far as photos go, its end game! I wonder if Microsoft made a play for the company? Of course, Riya is just the kind of technology that could help tag the photos of the big GigaPixel project.

If and that is a massive if, the deal happens, it could be part of the continuing trend of Google acquiring innovative start-ups and talented teams, in early stages. I have a story in the next issue of Business 2.0 (same as the one which has Erick’s Flickrization of Yahoo story) that analyzes Google’s buyout strategy. This one might diverge from that strategy slightly, because (as per Silicon Beat) Riya’s backers are Leapfrog Ventures and Bluerun Ventures and have invested close to $4 million in the company.

UpdateL Niall thinks the price is going to be $40 million

PS: I guess I am officially off the GYM diet.

Starz, Variety Ink Content Deal

Get RSS IM Pings with immedi.at

I haven't tested this yet but immedi.at says it will help you to keep track of RSS feeds via instant message. It pings you whenever any RSS or Atom feed you want to monitor changes. immedi.at works with all major IM carriers including MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, Google Talk, Jabber, and AIM/ICQ. Here's the best part. All you need to do is save this bookmarklet and use it on any site that has a discoverable feed. (via The Ajax Blog)

Technorati Tags: AIM, ICQ, IM

Microsoft Considers Ad-Supported Consumer Software

AOL inserts some new uninvited bots into buddy lists

AIM just automatically added a couple of bots to everybodys buddy list. I had a weird conversation with the MovieFone bot.

(11:51:07) me: i will crush you
(11:51:07) MovieFone: Excellent.

Lack of Google Results Quality?

Ray Ozzie's blog

As Portal Inventory Dwindles, Will Ads on Blogs Rise?

TechWeb reports that advertising executives surveyed by the American Advertising Federation see blogs as a medium worth watching, yet said they haven't proven their worth. On a scale of 1 to 5, respondents to the AAF survey rated these channels in the middle of the media pack, considerably lower in priority than traditional media and other forms of online advertising.

Meanwhile today's Wall Street Journal noted that the front pages of some of the Internet’s most popular destinations, including Yahoo, AOL and MSN, are sold out on big display advertisements for months in advance.

So, with no room at the inn and ad spending booming, it's my bet that advertisers will start to gravitate down the Long Tail. This includes buying space on popular blogs beyond the Engadgets and Gizmodos of the world. This could be a big test for the emerging world of blog advertising.

Technorati Tags: Advertising

Two Yahoos In A Day

Yahoo Stock Rises 6% on Announcement of Gawker Content Deal

Daddy, Where's your Google?

Support the EFF

I've been proud to be a member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation for a few years, because I think they do important work that helps benefit all of us who value free expression online. There's a self-serving motivation, of course, because I think part of the reason blogs have succeeded is because, in many countries, they're a very free form of expression. But it's also important that we support people who do the difficult, unsexy work of defending our freedoms.

From legal defense to smart guidelines for expressing yourself to helping protect bloggers from being liable for comments posted on their site, the EFF lets us keep from having to worry about the big things so we can focus on posting about the topics we're passionate about.

So I'm glad to help promote the EFF Bloggers' Rights campaign, which is aimed at helping bloggers realize the benefits that the EFF provides us all with, in order to encourage donations from and awareness in the blogosphere.

Go take a look at what they have to say, and if you can, make a donation.

Upyourbudget blogad clickthru metrics!

Geek to Live: Turn Firefox into a web writer

by Gina Trapani

The explosion of the read/write web has made the term web browser a misnomer. If you use web-based e-mail like Gmail, or if you post to forums or write a blog, you're using a "browser" to write web documents as well as browse them. The problem is that a plain, tiny web page textarea is not very conducive to writing. If you spend a lot of time writing the web with Firefox, soup up your "browser" with a few extensions that will turn it into a more powerful text editor.

Give yourself room to write with Resizeable Textarea.

That tiny box you're typing in make you claustrophobic? Got more words than can fit in a 20 by 5 textarea? The Resizeable Textarea extension lets you click and grab a corner of a text area in your blog tool or web e-mail and make it as big as you need it. Ah, that's better.

Download Resizeable TextArea or see a Lifehacker screencast of Resizeable TextArea in action.

Check your spelling with Spellbound.

Spell check without leaving the browser. The Spellbound extension takes a little more work than most to get installed, but it's so worth it. Right-click in a textarea and choose "Check spelling" to make sure you avoid embarrassing typos in whatever text you're publishing.

Download Spellbound or see the original Lifehacker Spellbound post.

Save your work with Scribe.

If you've got the Control-S twitch from writing in Word or other text editors, then Scribe's for you. Save the text you're typing into a web page by hitting Control-S, and the web form plus all its contents will be saved to your hard drive. Restore that masterpiece you started before your computer crashed or just keep a backup of drafted blog posts on your hard drive with Scribe. Just last week, Scribe saved us from many hours of lost work because of eaten posts at Lifehacker HQ.

Download Scribe or see the original Lifehacker Scribe post.

Insert frequently-used text with Signature.

You've got certain snippets of text or HTML you use all the time to format your blog posts or send to people who e-mail you. Stop all the repetitive typing with Signature. Signature saves snippets of text you reuse all the time, and adds them to your right-click context menu. Drop text into a web form with two clicks using Signature.

Download Signature or see the original Lifehacker post on Signature.

Look up words from the address bar with Quick Lookups.

Get the definition of a slang term, or a vocabulary word you haven't seen before. Double-check the meaning of a word you think you know but don't want to misuse. Quickly find an image to insert into your blog post. Find a synonym for a word you don't want to use again - all from the Firefox address bar. Using Firefox Quick Searches, Alt-L to the address bar and type "dict vocabulary-word" or "slang slang-term" or "image thing-you-need-photo-of" or "thes get-synonym-for-me."

Download 15 Firefox Quick Searches.

Highlight adverbs and passive constructions with the Passivator bookmarklet.

Any good writing guide will tell you to avoid adverbs and passive verb constructions. The Passivator bookmarklet shows you when you haven't. Highlight passive verbs and adverbs in your web prose with a click of a button with the Passivator. (Note: The Passivator isn't perfect - and as author Paul Ford notes, for entertainment purposes only - but it is a fun way to root out two common bad writing habits.)

Get the Passivator bookmarklet at Ftrain.com.

Note: if you've never installed a Firefox extension before, see this short guide to doing so. (Thanks, Eszter!)

Got any Firefox extensions, bookmarklets, mods or tweaks that make web writing easier? Let us know in the comments or in an e-mail to tips at lifehacker.com.

Gina Trapani is the editor of Lifehacker. Her special feature Geek to Live appears every Wednesday and Friday on Lifehacker.

Facebook's level headed founder

Chalk up another victory for the college drop out entrepreneur. Zuckerberg knows his company could sell for hundreds of millions today, yet…

“I know that Facebook’s valuation is higher now than it will be a year from now,” he says, suggesting that mammoth buyouts of companies like MySpace and Skype have blown air into a new Internet bubble. “But I don’t care. I suspect it won’t be this high for four years. I’m in this to build something cool, not to get bought.”

Good for him. He’ll get paid one day one way or another. Now’s the time to enjoy building. Being able to build something from scratch and see it thrive is one of the most satisfying things any entrepreneur can experience. Selling is short-term satisfaction. Building is long term enjoyment.

Deal averts Internet showdown

Web Sites Build Up Ad Backlog

How a corporate blog should be done

Niall Kennedy builds a blog for Scooba Clean, as a way to teach people how corporate blogs are done.

Apple May Raise iTunes Song Prices In a Year: EMI CEO

Dell DJ Satellite Radio/MP3 Player

If you've been waiting for a combo MP3/satellite radio portable player, Dell and XM Satellite have finally come up with something. It basically looks like most of Dell's MP3 players, can soak up XM satellite radio content while it's on its cradle, and can hold up to 15,000 of your fave tunes. So, yeah, you can record the satellite radio content, but its still not live. Sort of like the Sirius S50 but with an MP3 player. We'll get you more info on this baby as it comes, but for now, that's all folks. Will also set you back $300.

Pricing and specs for current Dell DJ MP3 players [Dell.com]

Yahoo! adds RSS ads to Publisher Network

Filed under: Online

In yet another counter-move to Google's AdSense program, Yahoo! has introduced RSS advertising for publishers taking part in their Yahoo! Publisher Network.  The application of the ads seems a bit clunky since it involves copying and pasting code into the RSS template and the SearchEngineJournal article rightly states that it might not be possible for those people using FeedBurner or another third party RSS creation service.

Still, with more and more people reading the web via RSS and not actually visiting sites - especially if the RSS feed contains the full story - the additional option of putting ads into RSS feeds through YPN is a good tool for publishers to have.

Ads by Google

Salon's now a 10-year-old

Demand For Ad Inventory Outstrips Supply At Major Portals (sub. req.)

Mitsubishi DLP Projector

Texas Instruments will be working with Mitsubishi to make the world's most beautiful plasma-screen graphing calculator, the TI2010. Just joshing. They are actually working together to make possibly the world's most beautifulest DLP projector in the land. The Mitsubishi HC3000U projector will use a color processing technology that was developed by TI to make colors pop and sparkle. The projector will support resolutions up to 720p, have a low noise level of 25dBA and an estimated lamp life of 3000 hours. This projector is available now for $3,000.

New Mitsubishi Projector Uses New TI Tech [DesignTechnica]

Prices and reviews for available Mitsubishi DLP projectors [CNET]

Jaffe's challenge to the blogosphere

Filed under: Online

Ads by Google

Google Base Launched. Yuck.

Google Blog officially announces the launch of Google Base. We previously anticipated the launch of Google Base (along with everyone else) in late October.

Bottom Line: This is not a very interesting application in its current form. It’s like a 1985 dbase file with less functionality. It’s ugly. It’s centralized content with less functionality than ebay or craigslist. The content is not integrated directly into Google search results, but “relevance” can bump it up into main and local search (and froogle)..

Additional information and FAQs on Google Base in the About section.

Features:

• Cost: Free
• Item types accepted: All types of online and offline information and images
• Languages: You can submit your information in many languages; the Google Base interface, however, including the Help Content, is currently available only in English, English UK and German.
• Reach: Items you submit to Google Base can be found on Google Base and, depending on their relevance, may also appear on Google properties like Google, Froogle and Google Local.
• How it’s different: Google Base enables you to add attributes that better describe your content so that users can easily find it. The more popular specific attributes become, the more often we’ll suggest them when others post the same items. Similarly, items that become more popular will show up as suggested item types in the Choose an existing item type drop down menu.

There are two ways to upload data - a web interface for one item at a time and a bulk uploading option to send content in XML.

I’ve tested Google Base out. The general idea is that you pick a category for your post. There are suggested categories - course calendars, events and activities, jobs, reviews, wanted ads, etc. You can also create your own category.

Each category has its own fields to ease data input. For instance, the “vehicles” category includes fields for vehicle type, year, make, etc. You fill out any or all of these fields, add additional fields (called “attributes”) if you choose, and add a title, description and keywords (tags). You can also upload a picture or point to a picture on the web.

I found a few bugs in this form. For instance, adding “techcrunch” as a tag failed because it was “misspelled” and it simply wouldn’t include it.

Once I removed the techcrunch tag I was able to add an expiration date and post my test content, which is published after a short delay, along with a permanent URL (this is just a quick test).

Once content is published, it can be edited from a dashboard.

Content can also be searched at Google Base. The above screen shot is a search for “recipes”. Clicking on a particular item pulls up its permanent URL (example), where full details can be viewed and the posted contacted via email.

Brian Benzinger has a more positive review here.

Tags: google, googlebase, classifieds, techcrunch, web2.0, web+2.0

Google Base: Whatever You Want It To Be But Is It An Advance?

Yahoo, Gakwer Join Forces In Licensing, Distribution Deal

Mobile ESPN Could Launch With $2-Plus Million In Sponsorships

Public Service Announcement

The GYM free diet is worse than nicotine free life. Having said that, I check with Robert Scoble… he is feeling the pressure but is hanging tough because folks love it. Okay, that’s good. He is upto #29. I am at day five. Not sure how long I can hang on. In case you were wondering, spent the entire day reporting and will have two good posts for tomorrow morning. I did enjoy meeting all the wonderful people today including Pip Coburn who is in town. He is deep…. also excuse the short posts today… now I have to turn my attention to 100 odd unread emails.

Have we jumped the shark?

Let’s get it out in the open. Have we jumped the shark? If so, when? If not, how could we and when will we? What’s your prediction?

John Kricfalusi on the art of Milt Gross

John K: "The greatest guy even in that style is Milt Gross -- the greatest comic strip artist of all time and he does a style that's very similar to Gerald McBoingBoing except it's funny. It's funny and it's human. He'd draw a crowd scene and every character looks completely different, and you can tell instantly by looking at the character what kind of a person it is. He is amazing. And he has great drawing principles behind his work. A lot of people will look at his work, a lot of accomplished artists today and they would say he draws primitively. He doesn't at all. He has fantastic composition; the best composition of any cartoonist I've ever seen in my life."

Here's an article about Gross from Indy magazine. Bud Plant has a short Gross bio here. There are some nice images in Shane Glines' Cartoon Retro (A terrific website for anyone interested in cartoons and illustrations. It costs $5 a month for a subscription using Paypal. I subscribe and consider it a bargain).

Reader comment: Coop says: "You should also mention that Fantagraphics is reprinting Gross' dialog-free classic He Done Her Wrong."

Unpacking The Xbox 360

Okay, I realize that Kotaku got theirs first. But it was only by a few hours. And I have a better human model posing with my new toy — don't you think?

The first thing you need to know is that the power cord does indeed have a huge brick attached to it that is an astonishing 3 inches wide, 2 inches thick and 8.25 inches long. Other than that, both the consumer console and the developer's kit are luscious. Photo swirl after the jump...

This is the basic package being sent to reviewers. The white box is the Xbox 360 system that comes with the hard drive, wireless controller, headset, ethernet cable and component HD AV cable. The combination code for the metal briefcase? 360, duh!

Will consumers get to buy a bundle of accessories in a hardshell metallic briefcase? Doubt it. But all of the things inside are available. That's another wireless controller, the Universal Media remote (the regular remote control is included in the other box), a couple of rechargeable battery packs (the quick charge kit is "coming soon"), and a wireless networking adapter. They also stuffed a couple preview games in the file pocket of the case. Strange thing, though — the interior of the briefcase smells like it might have been used by South American, uh, "hemp exporters" in a previous lifetime.

So long old pal, it's been good to know ya.
Hmm... what am I going to do with that old hard drive?

Old dev kit, new dev kit.
Oprah, Uma. Uma, Oprah.

The family portrait (awwww).
Also the consumer electronics version of a Weight Watchers commercial.

Hey, who let these guys into the party?
Geez, that slimline PS2 is such a show off.

Play nice kids.

That's all for now.

Google Analytics DOA?

Dwight Silverman and others are asking: “Hey, where's my analysis?” I agree. I installed the Google Analytics code nearly 48 hours ago and there's still no data. How come Google isn't addressing this issue on their blog? I guess that's the price for freeware. Pay and you get good service. Go with a free service and often all you get is deafening silence.

On a related note, someone told me that simply adding the Google Analytics code to my blog sidebar like I do with StatCounter won't work. Is this correct?

Technorati Tags: Analytics, Google

Taking the Conversation Gap a Step Further

Gary Stein and Mike Manuel take my recent blog post on the conversation gap a step further with some sound insights.

Mike says there's a difference between mining the conversation gap and monitoring it. Mining is more in lines with what Intelliseek does. Monitoring, in my view, is every PR person's job - as hard as it is.

Gary suggests we look at something called the “Equity Share”- e.g. what topics are being mentioned most frequently by people posting about a particular brand. Gary, this is good if we know what we're looking for. What if we don't?

Why Blog Search Sucks

Randy Charles Morin at The RSS Blog explains the State of Blogosphere Search or put another way, Why Blog Search Sucks:

“It's been awhile since I reported on blogosophere search. This is mostly because it's not getting any better, with a few exceptions. The problems mainly arise from the broken blogosphere ping infrastructure and the unyielding supply of splogs.”

Like a lot of folks I have a chip in the game, both personally through this blog but also professionally through my day job consulting clients on their online programs.  The current state of blogosphere search is *painful* to say the least.  We need better tools and services to find and track online conversations.  Enough said.

Technorati Tags: Blogging, Measurement, PR, Search

Is Podcasting a passing fad?

That's what CNBC is asking its viewers on today's "Closing Bell".

Current voting is 68% in favor of "fad" and 32% in favor of "important new business tool"

Perhaps I should create a new section on Jaffe Juice titled, "MSM's disparaging poll of the week." Nah, I'll just leave you with a quote:

"Television won't be able to hold on to any market it captures in the first six months. People will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night" Daryl F Zanuck, Head of 20th Century Fox, 1946

Talking About Amazon Tags

TechCrunch and others have been talking about Amazon's new tagging features. A key concern, and rightly so, is spamming.

Amazon tags will make it easier for you and others to find relevant content. I wonder how they are going to handle spam tagging and other bad content, though?. Another, possibly more interesting feature would be to allow publisher tagging. The tags would likely be more relevant (and spam easier to track).

Amazon's use of tagging could be very useful to shoppers. There are some risks, like spam, but this could open many new ways to browse their products.

Primedia Guys Majority Stake in Automotive.com For $72.5 Million

Google Base To Go Live Tomorrow? (Rumor)

Open Source Media Takes Off Its Pajamas

Sony infects more than 500k networks, including military and govt

Sony has recalled some of the CDs in shops, but still has not offered an effective uninstaller for infected users. In fact, the installer they've shipped has been shown to create massive, dangerous security vulnerabilities in the PCs of users who run it.

More than half a million networks, including military and government sites, were likely infected by copy restriction software distributed by Sony on a handful of its CDs, according to a statistical analysis of domain servers conducted by a well-respected security researcher and confirmed by independent experts on Tuesday...

Kaminsky asked over 3 million DNS servers across the net whether or not they knew the addresses associated with the Sony rootkit -- connected.sonymusic.com, updates.xcp-aurora.com, and license.suncom2.com. He uses a "non-recursive DNS query" which allows him to just peek into the cache of that server, and find out if anyone else has asked that particular machine for those addresses recently.

If the DNS server said yes, it had a cached copy of the address, which means that at least one of its client computers had used it to look up Sony's DRM site. If the DNS server said no, then Kaminsky knew for sure that no Sony-compromised machines existed behind it.

The results have surprised Kaminsky himself: 568,200 DNS servers knew about the Sony addresses. With no other reason for people to visit them, that points to one or more computers behind those DNS servers that are Sony-compromised. That's one in six DNS servers, across a statistical sampling of one third of the 9 million DNS servers Kaminsky estimates are on the net.

Update: Dan's posted his research too:

It now appears that at least 568,200 nameservers have witnessed DNS queries related to the rootkit. How many hosts does this correspond to? Only Sony (and First4Internet) knows...unsurprisingly, they are not particularly communicative. But at that scale, it doesn't take much to make this a multi-million host, worm-scale Incident. The process of discovering this has led to some significant advances in the art of cache snooping.

Brand Therapy

All of our clients go through a Charrette™, our unique planning process that brings all disciplines of the client to the table to help determine brand direction. My partner, Steve McKee jokes with clients that it is their “Brand Therapy.” There is a bit of truth in his joke in that most of our clients actually benefit in ways in addition to the marketing plan. Working together allows people from very different disciplines combine their individual perspectives into a much more synergistic effort. It’s no surprise this process tends to bring synergy to the company’s other operations as a side effect.

Another interesting thing about our planning process is how much clients enjoy it. This fun factor is a huge part of effectively uncovering the little gems we need find to do effective branding. It is very enjoyable to watch a group of diverse personalities with different agendas let their hair (and their guards) down and be honest about what they think and ultimately get on the same page.

Being in agreement is very important to my partners and me. We believe open communication is critical to keeping us moving forward. It is pretty common to see small agencies with owners who are islands. Perhaps they co-exist because they need one another’s expertise. Sometimes they barely communicate with one another because philosophically they are not in agreement. By avoiding communication they avoid (they think) conflict. They may not even want to work together, but they must for survival. This avoidance doesn’t diminish conflict; it just displaces it in the form of internal chaos.

When an agency’s partners share a common vision they think as a unit. Each looks out for one another even at the expense of their own personal goals. In fact, true partners share one another’s goals because, like in marriage, you are “one.” The result is good for clients, employees and ultimately, success.

If partners have a common goal they choose clients that fit that goal. I know of many agencies that struggle with this because one partner desires a certain type of account and another feels the opposite. When partners share a common goal, employees know what to do in every situation. The agency’s behavior with all clients is very consistent. The work of the agency becomes very consistent also. If your goal is to do good creative all of your clients will be ones that appreciate it.

Having fun is so important to doing well in this industry. It only happens when you really know who and what your agency is trying to be. That focus permits more creative thinking. Everyone expands his or her thinking. Risk is not as scary when they are not punished for taking a risk to achieve greatness. They’ll continually do flips and twists because they know the trampoline is firmly planted below you.

LinkedIn paid job listings

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Cingular Pulls Out Mobile Radio Service

Instead of going with the ole' downloading music thing, Cingular decided to go another route, introducing a mobile radio service that includes about 40 channels of commercial-free music running over data connections. The content is coming from Music Choice and MobiTV Inc's streaming media service (which also delivers video clips to Cingular and Sprint multimedia phones). And all this for an extra $6.99 a month. Of course, we've heard this tune before when Sprint Nextel introduced streaming radio from Sirius back in September for an extra $7 a month. And that will include Stern, so many may find it a lot more worth their cash. Right now, Cingular's radio service will work on one Nokia phone and two from Sony Ericsson.

Cingular unveils mobile radio service [Reuters]

Pricing for Cingular Plans and Handsets [Amazon]

The perfect fit, great design

I just got a new desk at home and was very pleased to see someone thought about what happens on and around a desk. Most notably, people keep papers. The side of this desk has an opening/ledge to keep loose paper (or whatever else you want, I suppose). And the ledge is exactly 8.5” wide — exactly the size of a standard piece of paper. So when you stack your papers on the ledge, and against the drawer to the left, it’s a perfect fit. Nothing hangs off the edge or the front. These things make me smile.

Andrew Sullivan moves to Time Magazine

Andrew Sullivan moves his blog to Time Magazine's homepage. He says his writing won't change, and no one will edit his posts before publication.

Jeff Jarvis says Time got it backwards: they should have bought ads and left Sullivan on his own site. He pulls ou old way / new way opposition.

Jason Calacanis says that's charming of Jeff, but Time got it right. "The old way works," he says in a post longer than Sullivan's or Jarvis's. In Calacanis's experience, it's tough to sell an individual blogger, so Sullivan will benefit from joining a group of voices (he can't help but be influenced by his neighboring writers, can he?).

TypePad gets it write

Elevator Summary: Typepad (this and many other blog's publishing platform/application) has been going through some pains. So much so that several bloggers have been not-coincidentally blogging against Typepad (would that be considered typing the hand that feeds it?)

You might have noticed multiple duplicative posts and comments which were the product of having to re-submit several times due to non-response.

So long story short...Barak Berkowitz sends out a mail to all TypePad customes and not only explains the situation and how it has been (or is being) rectified, but goes one step further:

At times last month, we did not provide that type of experience to all our customers and apologies are not good enough.

That said, we recognize that customers have had different experiences with the service, so we want to give you the opportunity to choose more, or even less compensation. If you click the link below, you'll get a screen that offers you the following choices:

• While the performance issues caused me some inconvenience I mainly found the service acceptable last month. Give me 15 free days of TypePad.

• The performance issues made it very difficult for me to use the service on multiple occasions during the month. Give me 30 free days of TypePad.

• The performance issues affected me greatly, making my experience unacceptable for most of the month. Give me 45 free days of TypePad.

• I really wasn't affected and feel I got the great service I paid for last month.
  Thank you for the offer, but please don't credit my account.

How's that for respecting the intelligence and honesty of your consumers? How's that for recognizing the diversity of different customers and their varying needs and internalization of the same problem? This is pretty sublime...taking trust to the next level. No way everyone will be satisfied and debtable as to how scaleable this will be as Six Apart continues to grow, but it's a great start and step in the right direction.

CEO's could learn a lot from this action. Oh that's right, they don't pay attention to blogs.

Listen Large launch

Filed under: Online, Outdoor, Television

XM Satellite Radio has launched a new campaign titled "Listen Large." The first 30-second spot seems to take a page directly from ESPN's popular series of spots for SportsCenter. It features celebrities such as Ellen Degeneres, Snoop Dogg and David Bowie (that combination sounds like the setup for a joke, doesn't it?) walking around the XM offices. The spot is just one aspect of the "Listen Large" campaign, which also includes outdoor and online components.  

More and more mainstream ads will likely appear for both XM and Sirius, the other major player, as the idea of satellite radio becomes more and more common. One thing that "Listen Large" does is play into the idea of variety. Indeed that's one of the main selling points for XM, Sirius and increasingly over-the-air radio stations as well. Many Chicago radio stations advertise themselves as being the place to go for a wide variety of music, with one even using the term "shuffle" as part of its copy point. It's all to attract listeners by billing themselves as an alternative to their iPods or other MP3 players.

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Coors stops policing own ads

If you enjoy complaining about beer advertisements, Coors just made it easier for you. At the end of the year Coors Brewing Company will no longer police its own advertisements, instead turning them over to the Beer Institute. The institute sets guidelines for beer advertisements as a means of promoting responsible drinking and broadcasting advertisements when children are less likely to see/hear them. The Beer Institute gives consumers a single place where they can address concerns. The institute has several members, including Anheuser-Busch and Miller Brewing. It was founded in 1986 as a means of publicly representing the beer industry.

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Lugz Beats Crap Out of Eminem

Snoop Dogg to Launch Snoop Doggs

Vonage's legendary boo-boo

Filed under: Gripes, Online

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TiVo losing its catchet?

TiVoted not fawning anymore, according to this study which finds that the iconic company is losing ground among DVR users

Visa's new ad agency

Filed under: Agencies

Visa is dumping the ad agency that came up with the card's famous slogan "It's Everywhere You Want To Be." BBDO has been Visa's ad agency since 1985, but the company is switching to TBWA/Chiat/Day in the hopes of moving beyond mere television advertising and taking advantage of different types of media, especially online. Goodby Silverstein and Partners, which split from Discover in order to pursue Visa, was also considered.

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Yahoo! Shoposphere social shopping

Just in time for the holidays, Yahoo! Shopping launches the Shoposphere beta:

The Shoposphere is a place to discover interesting and cool products thematically arranged into Pick Lists by other shoppers. It’s always changing. It includes new lists in a “product stream” and highest rated lists which are a fun way to explore new products and trends.

Picklists consist of items from Yahoo! Shopping and can be rated by other users. The highest rated Pick Lists like the Jean Guide for Men and I Want to be Napolean Dynamite (Tater Tots and moon boots!) are neat places to start browsing other people's lists for ideas.

CBS to Debut Bonus 'CSI Miami' Scene Online, Hummer to Sponsor

Flickrization Of Yahoo Well Underway

Business 2.0: “I look at Flickr with envy,” Jerry Yang, co-founder and chief of Yahoo says. “It feels like where the Web is going.”

What Yang envies is the community of 1.5 million rabidly loyal users Flickr has cultivated and the vast amount of content they’ve created. Of the 60 million photos uploaded to the site so far, more than 80 percent are public, meaning that anyone can look at them. More than half have been “tagged” with user-created labels, making them searchable. To use Flickr is to belong to the culture of participation sweeping the Web -- where you write your own blog, produce your own podcast, and post your personal photos for all to see. If this is where the Web is going, Yang wants to make sure Yahoo gets there first.

Indeed, the Flickr purchase helped ignite a larger strategy. Thanks to a new generation of managers like Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake, Yahoo is starting to see how user-generated content, or “social media,” is a key weapon in its war against Google. That upstart in neighboring Mountain View may have a better reputation for search, it may dominate online advertising, and it may always win when it comes to machines and math. But Yahoo has 191 million registered users. What would happen if it could form deep, lasting, Flickr-like bonds with them -- and get them to apply tags not just to photos, but to the entire Web?

Many of the champions of social media inside Yahoo -- including Flickr’s Butterfield and Fake, senior technologist Bradley Horowitz, and the head of Yahoo’s developer network, Toni Schneider -- are former startup founders recently acquired or hired. These entrepreneurs are sprinkling their social-media DNA all over the company, in a process some insiders are calling the “Flickrization” of Yahoo.

Sony's spyware "remover" creates huge security hole

The new vulnerability is as grave as a security vulnerability can be. If you run the uninstaller, your computer can be utterly compromised by an attacker who can reach it via the Web. Your computer can be made to run any code and surrender your data. It can be enlisted to act as a "zombie" for sending spam or attacking sites that are being shaken down in protection rackets.

Ed and Alex have written a demo to show that this danger is real. They've also supplied instructions for removing this dangerous software from your PC.

The music industry often warns against the use of P2P systems because they claim that P2P software can contain sneaky, malicious software that compromises your PC. Well, it appears that legitimately purchased CDs are deliberately corrupted with the same dangerous software.

If you buy CDs, you risk your PC, you risk having your personal information stolen by crooks, and you risk having your equipment used to break the law.

The consequences of the flaw are severe. It allows any web page you visit to download, install, and run any code it likes on your computer. Any web page can seize control of your computer; then it can do anything it likes. That's about as serious as a security flaw can get.

The root of the problem is a serious design flaw in Sony's web-based uninstaller. When you first fill out Sony's form to request a copy of the uninstaller, the request form downloads and installs a program - an ActiveX control created by the DRM vendor, First4Internet - called CodeSupport. CodeSupport remains on your system after you leave Sony's site, and it is marked as safe for scripting, so any web page can ask CodeSupport to do things. One thing CodeSupport can be told to do is download and install code from an Internet site. Unfortunately, CodeSupport doesn't verify that the downloaded code actually came from Sony or First4Internet. This means any web page can make CodeSupport download and install code from any URL without asking the user's permission.

BMW Chooses Texas-based GSD&M As Its New Ad Agency

More Database of Intent and the Law

The content of a suspect's Google searches were used in a murder trial. Story here, Slashdot ponders here. From that post:

Will police in the future simply serve a subpoena to Google to find out what you've been thinking about? While this use of that information makes sense, at what point does your privacy give way to public concerns? Should police be able to search through your search history for "questionable" searches before you've been arrested for a crime, and what effect would this have on the health of society?"

m the story:

etrick searched for the words "neck," "snap," "break" and "hold" on an Internet search engine before his wife died, according to prosecutors Wednesday.

The Nike build-a-shoe sign on the Reuters building in Times Square

EFF to Sony: you broke it, you oughta fix it

But if you truly intend to undo the harm you have caused, your company should immediately and publicly commit to the following additional measures:

* Recall all CDs that contain the XCP and SunnComm MediaMax technology. The recall must include removing all infected CDs from store shelves as well as halting all online sales of the affected merchandise. We understand from a recent New York Times article that well over 2 million infected CDs with the XCP technology are in the marketplace and have yet to be sold.

* Remove from all current and future marketing materials statements like that on http://cp.sonybmg.com/xcp/english/updates.html that say the cloaking software "is not malicious and does not compromise security."

* Widely publicize the potential security and other risks associated with the XCP and SunnComm MediaMax technology to allow the 2.1 million consumers who have already purchased the CDs to make informed decisions regarding their use of those CDs. The publicity campaign should include, at a minimum, issuing a public statement describing the risks and listing every Sony CD, DVD or other product that contains XCP or SunnComm MediaMax. The publicity campaign should be advertised in a manner reasonably calculated to reach all consumers who have purchased the products, in all markets where the CDs have been sold.

* Cooperate fully with any interested manufacturer of anti-virus, anti-spyware, or similar computer security tools to facilitate the identification and complete removal of XCP and SunnComm MediaMax from the computers of those infected. In particular, Sony should publicly waive any claims it may have for investigation or removal of these tools under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and any similar laws.

* Offer to refund the purchase price of infected CDs or, at the consumer’s election, provide a replacement CD that does not contain the XCP or SunnComm technology. For those consumers who choose to retain infected CDs, develop and make widely available a software update that will allow consumers to easily uninstall the technology without losing the ability to play the CD on their computers. In addition, consumers should not be required to reveal any personally identifying information to Sony in order to access the update, as Sony is currently requiring.

* Compensate consumers for any damage to their computers caused by the infected products, including the time, effort, and expenditure required to remedy the damage or verify that their computer systems or networks were or were not altered or damaged by XCP or SunnComm MediaMax products.

* Prior to releasing any future product containing DRM technology, thoroughly test the software to determine the existence of any security risks or other possible damages the technology might cause to any user's computer.

* Certify in a statement included in the packaging of every CD containing DRM technology that the product does not contain any concealed software such as the XCP rootkit, does not electronically communicate with Sony-BMG or any other party, does not initiate the download of any software update or other data without informed consent of the consumer immediately prior to each communication, can be uninstalled without any need to contact Sony or disclose personally identifying information to anyone, does not present any security risks to any consumer's computer, and will not damage or reduce the performance of the consumer's computer or data in any way.

David Carr on bad bloggers who blog on blogs about bad things--they're not nice!

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Peter F. Drucker, Management Guru, Dies at 95

11 NOV 2005 from The Los Angeles | Read the full story»

Peter F. Drucker, considered by many the "father of modern management" for his innovative approaches to leadership in the workplace, died today [11 Nov]. He was 95. (Free subscription required!)

Man throws football, wins money

Filed under: Outdoor

This is a nice story. A South Carolina Army veteran who enlisted after 9/11 recently won one million dollars in a promotional event created by Healthy Choice and Bi-Lo (a supermarket chain). Chris Bostic was chosen randomly for the Bi-Lo Healthy Choice Pigskin Challenge after buying a Healthy Choice product. The challenge was to throw a football 25 yards into a 20 inch hole during the Florida State-Clemson game, which is exactly what he did. Bostic served one year in Afghanistan.

[via Ad Pulp]

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Yahoo Plans Podcast Creation Tool

TechWeb News reports that Yahoo is working on a tool to make it easier for people to produce and publish podcasts. Joe Hayashi, senior director of product management, told TechWeb that the the challenges podcast publishers face are based on not understanding the technology behind the publishing tools - particularly RSS.

He's absolutely correct. Creating podcasts has to become as easy as blogging for it to take off beyond the geeks. People won't want to invest the time, PR professionals included. This is welcome.

Technorati Tags: Yahoo

Senior bloggers defy stereotypes

News of the Day

Good Morning....Today:

- Google announced it is making its web analytics (Urchin, which it purchased some time ago) free to all. My big beef with Urchin is how much disk space it uses (it keeps everything so it quickly eats up your storage). So I hope this hosted solution will solve that.

- AOL announced a big video deal (not surprisingly, with Warner). Clearly it intends to compete here.

Video: David Cross on Fox's mishandling of Arrested Development

JC Penney buys out Slate.com

Filed under: Online

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Make extensions work in Firefox 1.5

Firefox 1.5 release candidate 2 is now available for download, and early adopter testers may find that their current extensions don't yet work with the new version. Blogger Liew Cheon Fong offers a temporary solution:

1. At the location bar, enter: about:config. This will show you a list of Firefox internal preferences.
2. Right-click on the list, select New > String
3. Enter "app.extensions.version" (without quotes) for the preference name.
4. Then, enter "1.0" (without quotes) as the value for app.extensions.version.
5. Restart Firefox 1.5, then enable those disabled Firefox extensions.
6. Restart Firefox 1.5 again to active the extensions. Done.

Firefox 1.5 RC2 isn't the stable final release - which will become available later this year - so proceed with installation (and this configuration change) with caution.

They got it backwards

Time Inc. announced that Andrew Sullivan is moving his blog to Time.com. Good for Andrew. But they got it backwards. They should have left Sullivan right where we was and sold advertising there. That would have extended their reach to a new audience. They’re thinking the old way: trying to draw people to their site and brand and buying content to do it. The new way would be to build your audience and brand and ad revenue all over the web, at all the best places, piggybacking on the audience and reputation that is already there. They’re thinking like a marketplace in a distributed world. [hat tip: Jay Rosen]

: Here’s Andrew on the move.

Esquire's Manhattan apartment

Filed under: Indoor

Esquire has taken over an apartment in Manhattan with a market value of $12.5 million. The magazine is turning different rooms over to different designers who can do whatever they wish with the room using furniture and other items from the magazine's advertisers. The apartment is then opened for charity events where rich folks fork out large amounts of cash. All of this amounts to return business from advertisers. This is the third time Esquire has done such a thing. Over the last couple years they've had apartments in Los Angeles, and another one in New York.

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'SI on Campus' Nixes Print Pub, Stays Online

Jaffe is looking for some love

Ads for financial services increase

Filed under: Television

If you're noticing a lot more commercials for financial services lately, blame the aging baby boomers. Besides the baby boomers reaching 60, ads for financial services have also been increasing over the past few years as more and more companies consolidate and more money is spent to keep up with the overall increase in television advertising. Unfortunately what this amounts to is commercials like the one from Chase featuring a man at his daughter's wedding as he thinks back on her life and "Wind Beneath My Wings" plays. Apparently the idea is to attract baby boomers while making everyone else throw up.

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Track web site stats with Google Analytics

Google's launched a free web site analyzer that reports how visitors interact with your web site and how your site's ad campaigns are performing:

Google Analytics tells you everything you want to know about how your visitors found you and how they interact with your site. You'll be able to focus your marketing resources on campaigns and initiatives that deliver ROI, and improve your site to convert more visitors.

To enable Google Analytics, create a free account (they ask for your phone number) and enter your site information. Then, add a snippet of Javascript to all your site's pages. One of the neater reports is this site overlay, graphics superimposed on your site's pages which give information about clicks.

Note: we tried creating an account this morning but were unable to finish the process - got the message "Currently Undergoing Maintenance." Chances are Analytics are buckling under the launch rush.

Weak Taglines Rule The Day

According to Adweek, Grey Worldwide is responsible for the city of Atlanta's shoddy new logo and tagline.

The new branding effort began earlier this year when Mayor Shirley Franklin formed Brand Atlanta, a partnership between public and private interests to develop an advertising campaign for the city. Franklin wants to attract more tourists and businesses to the city.

The new work replaces the former slogan, "The city too busy to hate," which was popular for decades as Atlanta tried to distance itself from other areas of the South that favored segregation. The Ray Charles song, "Georgia on My Mind," had been the city's anthem for decades and was included on the state's vehicular license plates until last year.

Blue Man Las Vegas ad

Filed under: Television

The Blue Man Group started off in New York City but later moved their show out to Las Vegas. You can see a spot they made for their "bluephoria" shows here. The spot opens with a room filled with people, everyone with a TV set for a head. The Blue Men come in and turn the people on, so to speak. It's quite kinetic and entertaining, as all of their spots tend to be. The campaign was develpoed by the Hill Holliday Connors Cosmopulos ad firm along with the Blue Man Group. 

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Adrants Named 'Almost Sorta Hip'

How to Run a Useless Conference

I go to more conferences than you do.

I’m frequently amazed, but not particularly surprised, at what a bad job conferences do at their stated objective. What’s the problem? After all, these are expensive, professionally-run events that work hard to satisfy the typical attendee.

And that, of course, is the problem.

Facts don’t change people’s behavior.

Emotion changes people’s behavior.

Stories and irrational impulses are what change behavior. Not facts or bullet points.

If all we need is facts, then books alone would be sufficient.

When the Surgeon General announced that smoking was fatal, how many smokers quit right away?

Human beings are irrational. Change agents (like you) can fight that and obsess about presenting more and more facts, or we can embrace it and make change happen.

Conferences are designed to get average people to change their behavior. By “average”, I mean typical—the masses, the center of the bell curve. That’s a sensible objective. By definition, most people (in any given population) are in the middle of that bell curve. Change them and you’re golden.

If this group would learn, take action and make things happen with just a memo, you wouldn’t need to have a conference. But we end up being flown on average planes to average hotels to sit in average conference rooms and hear average speakers doing presentations filled with bullet points. And it’s all beyond reproach.

But it doesn’t work.

It doesn’t work when you’re on a sales call either. Your facts and your service and your prices can be the best, but that doesn’t mean you’ll get the sale. And it breaks down at an annual review and it even happens in a one-on-one encounter with a policeman or a teacher or a clerk.

People are irrational and they usually make decisions that have nothing to do with facts. And yet we spend most of our time improving our facts and very little concerned with the rest.

Think about the most powerful learning moments you’ve ever had. My guess is that they didn’t take place in a darkened meeting room.

Conference organizers (and more important, their clients) spend virtually all of their time and money doing one of two things:
1.    Satisfying the center of the bell curve.
2.    Avoiding failure

That’s why the typical conference is... typical.

That’s why the food and the setting and the venue and the location and the chairs and the layout and the schedule and the refreshment breaks are... typical.

If you want to run a meeting (a brainstorming meeting, a board meeting, a zoning commission meeting) that is likely to perform as well as your past meetings, then the best thing to do is to run it the way you’ve always been running it, right?

Here’s the challenge, then: figure out how to do the atypical. How to change the interactions that people have with each other. How to change what they talk about in the elevator. How to create an environment where people walk in ready to learn and change and challenge, as opposed to getting that, “hey we’re in the Bahamas let’s get drunk and then sit through a session with the CEO” glazed look.

Sure, it won't work on everyone. But that's better than working on no one.

Terrific RSS Tutorial Posted

Nineteen year-old college student Paul Stamatiou is on a blogging roll. He's been posting some great tutorials and now he's back with one on getting started with RSS. He's right. By the end of this article, you will know what RSS is and how to use it to make your online life easier. This is a must read for those who are new to RSS and/or people trying to teach others about its power.

Red or Blue

Jeff Risley blogs about his agency launching The Red Blue Project. Looking at the state of politics in the US, the project is trying to get past polarisation. The agency says, "The project is politically neutral. The goal is not to move anyone to one side or the other, but just to encourage more thoughtful, open-minded discussion rather than just throwing rocks at the other side"

I like this idea. And I marvel at the thought of an ad agency championing the avoidance of logical fallacies. Rock on, as Hugh would say.

Antidote

My pal Alan Moore (such a talented family, don't you think?) has a good post about Levi's Antidote programme. This is a rare effort by a big brand to genuinely collaborate with its audience and a step away from top down marketing.

Alan sets the context for this initiative with his customary passion. I liked this bit especially.

..brands in the 21st Century have to give up control to gain control. They have to become facilitators, enablers, life-simplifiers, co-creators, they have to inspire greater C2C interaction and in that way they will get the most precious thing from their customers - personal advocacy.

City branding

Katherine Stone is underwhelmed by Atlanta's new tagline (Atlanta: Every day is opening day). Christina Maynard at Ricksticks feels the same about the new logos for Toronto and Atlanta.

I'm yawning too.

My two (maybe five) cents: when people talk about advertising and branding, they often focus on a few examples of stuff that seems to work. Katherine likes Las Vegas' "What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas", which has a lot more impact than the Atlanta offering. Most of us can reel off a few TV ads we really love. But let's not forget that most of what we see is achingly mediocre.

So if I were advising a city, I'd ask: what makes us think we're so talented that we're going to be the one in ten thousand cities that comes up with a snappy tagline or clever logo that actually achieves something? And who exactly are we to think we have the ability to summarise the complex virtues of where we live in a few short words?

I can't help thinking this is another manifestation of the tyranny of the explicit: if we don't make explicit, however trivially and boringly, some USP for a location, we're somehow missing a trick. God forbid that we let the people who live here, and those who visit, tell the story in a million more modest, less consistent but much more credible ways? Ah, but that would put a few branding experts out of a job I guess.

The Flickrization of Yahoo

The Photography of Rodney Smith

I went to the BYU Museum of Art with my family this evening, and was delighted to discover a gallery of photographs by Rodney Smith. I’d never seen anything by him before, and in only a few short minutes I had completely fallen in love with his style. His photographs are (largely) black-and-white, with a subject matter ranging from thought-provoking to humorous in a very spontaneous way. The pamphlet accompanying the gallery describes his work thus:

Appearing as a tangible artifact, his images nevertheless convey a dream-like, otherworldly sensibility. They are elegant and spare, enticing and harmonious.

Some of my favorites from the portfolio page are: 1 2 3 4 5 6 and 7.

Fire up the PowerPoint

Robin Good puts together a few PowerPointable lines on the future of media:

Consumers become producers of content, and niche content surpasses by orders of magnitude the value of traditionally labelled commercial television and film.

anymore in the best seller or in the blockbuster.

The value is in infinite choice of content and in the opportunity for the consumer to see content when she wants it: prime time is anytime, and anytime is prime time.

Viagra has grandma exhausted

Filed under: Funny, Print

Check out this print ad campaign for Viagra. It's funny, get it? All those old hausfraus are exhausted from the barrage of loving coming from their pill-popping husbands. I suppose it's kind of disturbing, but Viagra is marketed toward older men, so it makes sense. I just wonder if the women in the pictures were actually told what they were supposed to convey, or if they were simply asked to "act tired." I think it's more entertaining to imagine the former:

Photographer: Okay, now pretend you're all tired from too much sex.

Old lady: Really? You mean like that time at the 1939 World's Fair in New York City when Billy took me behind the corn dog cart and we did it for three hours? I nearly sprained my ankle because he kept--

Photographer: Okay, let's just shoot this.

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Clemson Fan's Pass Is On The Money

ABC News: Before Saturday, Chris Bostic was a $10-an-hour landscaper whose favorite football memories were running for touchdowns in Pee Wee football.

But after his perfect 25-yard spiral made it though the tiny hole in a promotional contest, the Army veteran has a new favorite memory and is South Carolina's newest millionaire.

Bostic's pass at the end of the first quarter of the Florida State-Clemson game won him the $1 million in the Bi-Lo Healthy Choice Pigskin Challenge.

The football clipped the bottom of the 20-inch hole, bouncing through as the crowd at Memorial Stadium went wild.

Bostic jumped up and hugged some of the contest sponsors, eventually taking his oversized million-dollar check and pumping it over his head as he ran to the sidelines.

Bosstic, who played linebacker at Myrtle Beach High, was selected randomly from people who bought a Healthy Choice product at Bi-Lo during the contest period.

Blogs with taste

Terry Teachout has been arguing for sometime that blogs are the salvation of arts journalism in America and now he brings his argument forcefully to his Wall Street Journal column. Among his interesting points is the rise of the practitioner-blogger:

The emergence of the practitioner-blogger has the highest potential significance for arts journalism. Many, perhaps most, of the greatest critics in history — George Bernard Shaw, Virgil Thomson, Edwin Denby and Fairfield Porter come immediately to mind — were also practicing artists. But with the growing tendency of mainstream-media journalists to think of themselves as members of an academically credentialed profession, the practitioner-critic has lately become a comparative rarity in the American print media. Not so on the Web, which is one of the reasons why readers in search of stimulating commentary on the arts are going online to find it.

They’re meltinggggg

Chris Anderson chronicles and calculates the meltdown of big media a few days ago:

Down:

down by 7% this year (tickets per capita have fallen every year since 2001).
* Newspapers: circulation, which peaked in 1987, is declining faster than ever and is down another 2.6% so far this year.
* Music: Sales are down another 5.7% this year; although digital downloads (still just 6% of the business) are climbing nicely.
* Radio: down 4% this year alone, continuing a multi-decade decline.
* Books: down by 7% in 2004 (but see comments below for discussion)

Mixed:

* DVDs: sales growth is slowing dramatically, from 29% last year to single digits this year.
* TV: Total viewership is still rising, but as channels proliferate and the audience fragments the rating of the average show continues to decline.
* Magazines: Ad revenues are up a bit although the number of ad pages is flat (they’re charging more per page). Circulation is also flat, while newsstand sales are at an all-time low.
* Videogames: it’s the final few months of the current generation of consoles, which tends to the trough of the buying cycle. Sales were down 20% in Sept, but will probably pick up by Christmas with the launch of the Xbox 360.

Up:

* Internet advertising:
–Banners: Up 10% this year
–Keywords: Google revenues up 96%

From Service to Application

Late last week - and it was certainly an odd week for all sorts of reasons - I had the honor of appearing before the SDForum's Search SIG in Mountain View, on the Microsoft Valley campus. First I was interviewed by Dan Farber about the book (here's Dan's write up), then I got to interview four entrepreneurs in the search business - folks from Trulia (real estate search), Truveo (video search), Healthline (medical) and Simply Hired (jobs). Om has more on that here (though I have a rant in me about the "exit" - more later).

As usual, Dan focused his write up on what proved to be, for me anyway, the most interesting comment of the night. It came from Simply Hired CEO, Gauta Godhwani, when I asked him if he feared Google. "Google does search very well, but we have yet to see Google do applications well," was his reply.

Interesting. As I thought about that, it struck me that what we are seeing right now is indeed the evolution of search companies from their roots providing a single service - one thing, done well - to a application suite that does many things. What does that mean, exactly?

Well, in Google's case anyway, let's give credit where credit is due. Google does do a few applications pretty well. Gmail, for example, is still considered by most to be a very good mail application. Blogger, while not for pros, is also a pretty successful application ("AOL for blogs" is how one pundit put it at Web 2.0).

But neither of those are really executions of search as an application - even though Gmail has really good search. Huhm. What Godhwani was saying is that in the search field, applications are the next thing, and Google is just as new at this game as his company - if not more so in certain vertical fields.

Dan further quotes him: "Finding a job takes a few weeks or months, doing research and using the power of referrals. You can’t do it on a basic search engine, so we are complementary to search." As Godhwani said this, I was thinking to myself - "Well, as soon as there is an economic reason to do it, Google will do it, and then what?"

By then, I sense, Simply Hired (and all the other vertical search engines on the panel) hope to be so far along that the only logical move would be an acquisition, or direct competition in which the upstart actually has a chance of winning. It's how it's been for ages in this industry.

But back to this larger idea of search becoming an application. It's probably obvious to you, but for some reason this idea provides me with a way of grokking a much larger trend - why is it that Google is so focused on Toolbar, Desktop Search, Accelerator, Local, and Ajax-y things like Maps, etc.? It's because to create a decent search application, you need to have a far more robust interface, and you need to know far more about the intent of the person that is using your application. A web-based service, on the other hand, does one thing well, and does it the same for everyone. Search is becoming an application, indeed, and that more than anything else explains very well Google's recent moves.

DDB wins Lencrafters account

Filed under: Agencies

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Life in the public domain

Inducing people to give up Explorer: Kill Bill's Browser

1. You'll only see porn when you want to.
Sick of seeing pornographic pop-ups all over your computer while you're helping your daughter with a research project? Since Firefox blocks pop-ups, you won't get tons of porn in your face when you're least expecting it. On the flip side, since Firefox stops spyware from taking over your computer, there will be nothing to slow you down when you go and look for porn.

2. Your kids will only see porn when they want to.
Sorry, buddy... the apple doesn't fall far from the tree.

3. Your computer won't spend its free time telling the world about Viagra soft tabs.
Experts say 80% of spam comes from hacked PCs. Firefox has much better security, so your computer will get hacked less. Do it for the children, the children! (caveat: reducing Viagra spam may also reduce total number of children.)

4. Mozilla doesn't inflate prices and use the money to vaccinate children in Africa.
Uhh... wait a second. Maybe Microsoft's monopoly hasn't been all bad. Better donate to Oxfam. Seriously, you should.

Buffett Talk

[via Yuvaraj] Warren Buffett met with students from Dartmouth. Nice reading.

Scoble sees the light

Scoble has finally figured out that user generated content is another way of saying (digital) slave generated content.

magnificent bastards

A story in Adweek suggests that wieden + kennedy has won the Coca Cola business in North America. 'Welcome to Optimism' is unable to confirm this but, thanks to Rob Mortimer, we've been alerted to some amusing online gossip occasioned by this story.

American Copywriter blog tells the tale of an alleged meeting in the US between Coke and W+K.

'The WK account person deftly presented the work. The Coke people smiled, nodded and then suggested some revisions. The WK account human sat there a little bewildered and then said, "Well...you can't honestly expect me to go back and tell the creatives that."

All of us at American Copywriter raise a Diet Coke with lime to our friends at WK who, it would seem, enjoy life on an entirely different plane of existence. Congrats on your new biz you magnificent bastards.'

Well, cheers, American Copywriter. Though I'm not entirely sure if it feels like we inhabit such a different plane.

There's a follow-up post by David Burn that is too flattering to W+K for me to reproduce it in full but if you're interested you can read it here:

http://americancopywriter.typepad.com/blog/2005/10/a_god_dont_you_.html

Why Yahoo Bowed Out Of AOL Talks; Why Google Is Best Bet

iPod Nano cases with horns and devil-faces

TiVo Box Only $16.95

I say it's damn good to see TiVo finally changing its business model. Right now, you'll actually get a free 40 hour TiVo box when you pay the $16.95 per month service fee. Of course, this is only a year agreement, so we can't be sure what the company has up its sleeve. But huzzah for progress.

Stop Watching the Old Fashioned Way [TiVo]
Get TiVo for only 16.95* including the box! [PVRblog]

NBA Goes to the Net, Launches Broadband Network

Yahoo said to say 'No, thanks' to AOL

ibm develops blog search tool

Malone On Murdoch, IPTV, Portability

Get sportured

Filed under: Online

Are you ready for the Sporture Chamber? That's the new Web site from ESPN to promote their Mobile ESPN service. I'm assuming the implied torture comes from having to give all your personal information before they allow you to take place in the sports quiz hosted by Trey Wingo. Of course, you can always lie, which is what I did. Since I'm not a sports fan I didn't so especially well on the quiz, but I did get the bonus question about ESPN's new mobile service correct, which put me in the sweepstakes drawing. The site will run to the end of the year and will be followed by a TV campaign.

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Kodak pushes wifi cameras

Filed under: Indoor

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Jack Covert Selects: Grapevine

Google is Building Yahoo 2.0

In his posting titled Reading the Google Tea Leaves, Tristan compares various product offerings from Google against those of the "big three" (AOL, Microsoft, and Yahoo!) and concludes:

Google does innovate in some spaces but has largely innovated in order to gain entry in markets that already existed. As a rule of thumb, they've been very smart at breathing new innovations in those markets. However, their competitors are generally quick to notice and are catching up.

I've been giving a much shorter verbal version of his post for many months now. Typically when I'm interviewing someone or talking to random folks who are trying to figure out this industry we're in. They'll ask a question like "what do you think Google is doing?" or "where is Google really headed?"

My answer is this: Google is trying to build Yahoo 2.0.

It's really that simple.

If they press me for details on this theory (that only happens about half the time) I say that it's as if someone decided to re-invent more and more of Yahoo's popular services in random order, giving them a fresh user interface, less historical baggage, and usually one feature that really stands out (such as Gmail's storage limit or Google Talk's use of Jabber).

When Google Calendar and Google Finance (more in a future post) finally show their faces, I suspect they'll follow the same pattern. They'll look like someone sat down and thought "I'm starting with a clean slate, so how would I build a modern version of Yahoo! Calendar, with a newer and more interactive UI, one killer feature, and fixing the various things we've learned since Yahoo! Calendar launched many years ago?"

A few people have recently told me that I'm not "stirring the pot" enough on my blog anymore. I assume that by "stirring the pot" they mean "talking trash about Google", so maybe this counts? Or maybe it's not trashy enough?

Anyway, what's your theory? Is Tristan right? Am I right?

Will Microsoft try to build Yahoo 3.0 in 24-36 moths when their newfound "services" vision finally trickles down through the ranks?

New plugins for Movable Type

Doom for the iPod Nano

Blog consulting--free!

• We talked about if they should pay for these Intelliseek/Technorati blog monitoring software offerings ($100k for wha-wha-what!?!?!?!?!?!).
• We talked about how they could credible insert themselves into the conversations about the blogosphere.
• We talked about what blogs they should create.
• We talked about who in their organizations should blog.
• We talked about the best examples of company blogs.
• We talked about the best examples of advertising on blogs.
• We talked about the biggest PR disasters in blog history (kryptonite...hello?!?!?!).
• We talked about selling blog internally. You know, to the PR department, the CEO, and to the product managers.
• We talked about the impact of podcasting and vlogs.
• We talked about how to manage trolls, playa haters, and irate customers.
• We taked about how to turn fans of your company/product into superfans.
  
• We talked about how to track your company in the blogosphere (for free).
  

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Replica of Charlie Brown's Xmas tree

The tree is an exact replica of the tree from the famous cartoon, made of wire branches and plastic needles with a criss cross wooden base. The bendable branches allow you to make it look just how you want, super pathetic or just kind of pathetic. The tree comes with one red Christmas ball ornament.

Katamari sushi

Marble-Mouth Managers

"Waste" Is The Wrong Verb

Not to be left in the dust by Forbes, Ad Age published it's own anti-blog piece a few weeks ago, that I initially scoffed at, then ignored. Here's the lead:

Blog this: U.S. workers in 2005 will waste the equivalent of 551,000 years reading blogs.

I'd ignore this asinine story now, if it wasn't for Dean Gemmell's wicked response to it.

Do you think a lumbering trade journal like Advertising Age, covering a stumbling industry like advertising, just might have a vested interest in smearing blogs as time-wasters? I happen to think 90% of the printed publication is a waste of time, especially the page that features photos of Grey Goose-swilling ad executives getting loaded at another industry cocktail hour.

Interestingly, just days after the article first appeared, Ad Age saw fit to launch their own blog, Small Agency Diary, which is not a blog from Ad Age journalists. It's written by Bart Cleveland, Partner and Creative Director at McKee Wallwork Cleveland in Albuquerque, NM. I have nothing against Mr. Cleveland, but Adweek's Adfreak is a much better waste of my time.

Audi Leads The Way

LA Times: Last week, Audi launched its own television channel in Britain, which, if successful, could be rolled out in other countries too.

The Audi Channel will run 24 hours, seven days a week and is aimed at a mass-market audience: British car owners and car enthusiasts. The launch schedule is split between product-related "infotainment" during the day and more general entertainment-driven material in the evenings and on weekends.

The channel is being broadcast to 7.6 million British homes over the Sky Digital satellite television platform. More viewers will get the service in coming months when Audi UK completes negotiations on terrestrial digital platforms operated by Freeview and cable television operators. The channel also is being made available for broadband Internet users via Audi UK's website.

The channel has cost 2 million pounds (about $3.5 million) to set up, and Audi is committing 1 million to 2 million pounds more a year to cover running costs — equivalent to annual expenditure on the Audi UK website.

The decision to extend from advertiser to broadcaster was born of growing frustration with a fragmenting media marketplace and concern that British viewers were spending less time engaging with the brand's TV advertising, said Gary Savage, Audi UK's marketing director.

[via PSFK]

Search engine cooking and the "third page" of search

I wanted to pass along this article from the Washington Post, "My Dinner With Google" by Andrea Sachs, where she searches for recipes that use a set of ingredients -- such as tofu, oranges, and cauliflower on Google. As an avid cook, I've had my share of adventures with search engine cooking", usually as I try out new ingredients that I pick up at Bay Area farmer's markets. Most recently, I've had some cooking adventures with with corn smut (or cuitlacoche) and romanesque.

But what I find so interesting about this is that when I do "search engine cooking" (usually at the end of the week when I have odds and ends left in the fridge), recipes from my favorite site recipe site, AllRecipes.com, frequently turn up. I took a closer look at this, and found that AllRecipes.com uses  static index pages around different topics versus Epicurious' dynamically generated pages. No doubt, this helps popular recipes show up well in the results.

The reason I bring this up is that I've been noodling around the idea of the "Third Page" of search (credit goes to Perry Evans from LocalMatters for prompting this train of thought). The first page of search is the query page (like www.google.com), the second page is the search results, and the third is a destination page on yet another search engine or aggregator that's been optimized for that query.

Here are some examples: seafood recipe, chinese restaurants in dallas, where the top results are a list from another site or search engine with better functionality to help with a structured search. And this makes sense -- my hypothesis is that while a particular Chinese restaurant will try to climb to the top of the search results for such a query, it's actually better for the user experience to see a list/aggregation of the restaurants.

Carrying that thought further, as vertical search engines develop, they will actively try to source much of their traffic from the general search engines, training consumers to actually seek out these brand names in the general interface and then drilling down into parametric, structured search on the vertical search site that's better suited for their original intention.

Hence the evolution of the "third page" of search, which extends the search experience outside of the original general search engine. I think we're seeing a subtle but fundamental shift in consumer search usage away from trying to find perfect destination page and instead, turning instead to aggregators and vertical search engines that understand (and can optimize for) the query better than the destination pages.

This has significant implications for the search marketer and site optimization firms -- it's one thing to try to improve your search engine rankings vis a vis your competition, but it's another when you're trying to beat out aggregated pages optimized for these more general queries. It points to the need for a multi-level SEO strategy -- focusing not only on optimizing pages on Google, Yahoo, and MSN, but also looking at your placement on sites like Citysearch and SuperPages.com.

Jolly Green Giant is back

Filed under: Print, Television

In case you haven't caught the commercials yet, the Jolly Green Giant is back. The famous spokesgiant whose original voice passed away last month is back in a General Mills print and TV campaign called "For the Love of Vegetables" which promotes veggies as not only healthy, but just good food. Apparently they're not counting the Giant's appearance in a recent MasterCard ad with several other mascots as a comeback. I guess that was more of a cameo.

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Online Sports Trading And Info Firm ProTrade Sports Gets $10.13 Million Funding

Google ads in newspapers?

Filed under: Print

There's a rumor going round about Google ads appearing in a Chicago newspaper. No word on which one but to my mind there are three that have the circulation to warrant getting into bed with Google. The Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun-Times are the major daily players in town but there's also the Daily Herald, with its multitude of Chicagoland regional editions that seem like potential players. Consider this speculation at best for now but stay tuned for more.

[Via SearchEngineWatch]

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Do the Tobaccowala

It's the latest dance craze sweeping the marketing communications world by storm. There's also The Verklin which is as popular.

What the hell is jaffe talking about? Very simple. Publicis has Rishad. Aegis has David. WPP, Omnicom, IPG have ????? (MDC has the entire CP+B)

From a strategic (not to mention New Biz) standpoint, it's pure genius to have a strong, visionary thought-leader front and center. Sure, Publicis has Jack Klues, who is a strong and forward-thinking leader, but Rishad is the bomb when it comes to planning for, predicting and imagining the possibilities and opportunities associated with the future. Verklin is a visionary extraordinaire. I recently listened to him on a Big Sessions interview (podcast) and can honestly say that every time I hear him speak, he gives me a new idea, suggestion or insight.

So what the hell is wrong with the traditional Big 3. I know I'm kind of setting the cat amongst the pigeons by delivering this on a silver platter, but I had to say it. Who is out there on an ongoing basis - clearly, compellingly and comprehensively - communicating the guiding vision, the central theme, the competitive differentiation that makes one holding company or shop different from another? There is only 1 Sir Martin, 1 John Wren...are they visionaries? In part...but this role is not theirs to play.

I write this for a few reasons:

1. Rishad and David have done such an outstanding job that they really have created a void/vacuum in their wake

2. I expect a whole lot more thought leadership from the 800 pounders (with cheese)

3. This is a strategy not limited to the Goliaths. It can and should be embraced and emulated by any agency or boutique - small, medium or large. Steve Rubel is your role model btw...

Boneless Pigs for McDonald's McRib Farewell Tour

NPR Doubles Its Podcast Content, Launches alt.NPR

Thinking outside the silo

I just put up Microsoft in Reality — a look at the latest memos from Gates and Ozzie.

Thanks to Dave for providing the original texts of the memos, and to Craig Burton for outlining — in February 2001 — the playing field Microsoft (and everybody, actually) finds themselves in today .

Is Google down?

First my RSS reader didn't work...now I can't access google.com. Could it be? Is Google down?

Update: It's now 11am and I still can't access any Google services. I'm going out of my mind...Google withdrawal is not pretty. There have been plenty of Internet deprivation studies...but how about one for Google?

It's started to make me think:

1. What would life be like without Google? Think about it. It's interesting...makes you really scrutinize the competitive landscape and also evaluate Google's inroads/role it has played in our lives.

2. I'm wondering if I've been Google-blacklisted. Did I say something wrong about them? Tom assures me it's working for him, so I'm starting to get a little paranoid. Perhaps if I don sackcloth, sit in a pile of ashes, fast and repent, I will have atoned for my sins and Google will welcome me back into the fold.

Google May Help Itself to Slice of Classifieds Biz with 'Automat'

Shockwave uses in-game ads

Filed under: Product Placement, Online

Shockwave announced recently that they'll be integrating advertisements into their online games. It sounds as if the integration will work pretty much the same way it does for in-game ads in regular games, using the actual landscape of the game to insert ads. The first game to incorporate these ads is Switch Wakeboarding, where players can see ads on billboards and ramps.

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AP To Launch Online Video Service With MSN, Thru Member Sites

Understanding Local Max

My guess is that you've been wrestling with your Local Max.

If your organization or even your career is stuck, it may just be because of this chart.

Everyone starts at that dot at the bottom left corner. You're not succeeding because you haven't started yet.

Then you try something. If it works, you end up at point A.

A is where you see results as the direct output of a strategy and hard work. A is the job you got after investing in an MBA. A is the sales you got after running an ad.

Of course, being a success-oriented capitalist, that's not enough. So you do more. You push and hone and optimize until you end up at the Local Max. The Local Max is where your efforts really pay off.

So you try harder. And you end up at point B. Point B is a bummer. Point B is backwards. Point B is where the outcome of more effort against your strategy doesn't return better results. So you retreat. You go back to your Local Max.

And that is where most people stay. Most people get stuck at the Local Max because changing strategy in any direction (this is really a 3D chart, but I've smushed it to make it easier) leads to poorer results.

You've got a very good job as an art director. To do better, you'd either have to move to another firm, move to another town, switch careers or go back to school. And all of them have costs and very uncertain returns, so you stay.

You have 100 competitors in an industry that is self-described as a commodity. You use the same tactics your competition does, because if you change your pricing or fundamentally alter your marketing outreach, you get punished in terms of sales or profits.

You've got summer camp with 80 kids in it. If you want to grow, you've learned the hard way that hiring one or two more senior staff people won't work, because you can't afford them. So you stick with what you've got.

The lie of Local Max is this: the chart is incomplete. It really looks like this:

Local Max isn't actually that great when you realize that Big Max is not particularly far away.

The problem is that to get to Big Max, you need to go through step C, which is a horrible and scary place to be.

There were 10,000 single-location hamburger restaurants in the world when Ray Kroc decided to build a giant chain of franchised McDonald's. Anyone could have done it. No one did. Because everyone who tried had to go through point C to get there. It took Colonel Sanders more than a decade of pain to get through point C.

Of course, it's not just about growing sales or revenues. The Big Max/Local Max paradox affects everything from education to non-profits to politicians. If you have a "Max", whatever you're measuring, the odds are you're actually dealing with a Local Max, not the Big one.

If your market is changing, this idea is even more important to understand. That's because changing markets are always surfacing new Big Max points, and the only way to get to them is to go through the pain (yes, it's painful) of point C.

You can't reinvent yourself and your organization until you deal with the fear of point C, and that's hard to do without talking about it. I think the benefit of the Local Max curve is that it makes it easy for you and your team to have the conversation.

King Kong on your iPod

Introducing, Newsvine

Chris Anderson, editor of Wired Magazine, on his blog had some stark statistics about the declining fortunes of the old media, especially the newspapers. Will the old media will whither away or not, I can’t say. What I can add though, is theat the current state of flux has opened up opportunities for many to try new models, including many different models of citizen journalism. OhMyNews, Digg.com, Pajamas Media and Dan Gillmor’s efforts are good examples. Well, folks lets add another company to the mix - NewsVine, a Seattle-based company started by some of the former members of the Starwave crew. (Okay, I cringed at the name as well!)

In case you are not familiar with the Web 1.0 history, Starwave was this tiny yet innovative start-up that was acquired by Disney, and helped craft ESPN and Disney websites. I remember them as pioneers in creating multimedia experiences via the web browser. A former Starwaver Mike Davidson decided to opt out out of the big company life and jump right into the rough-and-tumble world of start-ups.

Davidson is the CEO of this five person company that has raised seed capital from Second Avenue Partners, a local Seattle venture capital firm created by Mike Slade, Nick Hanauer, Pete Higgins, and Keith Grinstein. Slade incidentally was the original CEO of ESPN.com (and the rest of Starwave) and led the company from a grassroots startup to a sale to Disney for several hundred million dollars. And Keith Grinstein was the former CEO of McCaw International and Nextel Communications. Newsvine has quietly built a site that uses the elements of Web 2.0 such as tagging, user submitted content and all sorts of things. But just don’t call them a Web 2.0 company.

Their model is pretty simple. Marry the content from generic news sources like Associated Press or Reuters, with citizen journalism. Newsvine will feature AP news feeds, which will account for about 80% of the content on the site. Rest of it will be made up of contributions from citizen journalists, who will sign-up and submit content to the site. So if you are a LA Lakers fan, then your columns could be featured right next to AP copy on a URL that will essentially look like Newsvine.com/Lakers. Given that I have been rallying against the whole concept of gross exploitation of “user generated content” you might be wondering why is it any different? Well, because you get a piece of the advertising that is sold against content you generated. Those of you who don’t want to write long articles, simply save the link to Newsvine with your comments.

So what these guys have done is basically mashed-up traditional online news site with About.com, Del.icio.us and OhMyNews and created a rather interesting blend of citizen journalism. From the screen shots I have seen so far, you could not tell the difference between them and say any other mainstream media news site. However, I have not seen the live product, and still remain fairly cautious about how the user contributions will pan out. They seem to be capitalistically-correct and hopefully they will prove my inner skeptic wrong.

PS: Being a media type myself, and a firm believer in the online media (read my resume) I digressed from regular broadband programming and delved into the whole news space. Now back to regular stuff …

People Tagging with Tagalag

Tagalag is a service that lets you tag people, via their email address. It’s not a “tribute” site like 43 people, because only people who know a person’s email address can add tags for that person.

If you create a profile you can add personal and geographical information about yourself.

I don’t know if Tagalag is onto a viable business model, but I like the idea of tagging people. This could become interesting as it evolves.

Tags: tagalag, tagging, tags, techcrunch, web2.0, web+2.0

Digg.com set to overtake Slashdot in Alexa traffic rankings

Worst software bugs in history

1982 -- Soviet gas pipeline. Operatives working for the Central Intelligence Agency allegedly (.pdf) plant a bug in a Canadian computer system purchased to control the trans-Siberian gas pipeline. The Soviets had obtained the system as part of a wide-ranging effort to covertly purchase or steal sensitive U.S. technology. The CIA reportedly found out about the program and decided to make it backfire with equipment that would pass Soviet inspection and then fail once in operation. The resulting event is reportedly the largest non-nuclear explosion in the planet's history.

Microsoft Revamp For Online Push Gains Urgency

Too Much Stuff

Apologies, Searchbloggers, for my absence. Travel plus some Real Life stuff have intervened on my abilities to properly post.

Meantime, much afoot. Here are some highlights.

Looksmart is branching into vertical search in a big way. Reactions are varied.

Searchblogger Chris Zaharias has started a site on SEM. Find it here.

Google launched Google Local for Mobile. Reactions here. Yahoo also launched mobile apps, integrating with SBC. More (on both) here (reg required).

Meanwhile, Yahoo hooks up with Tivo (SER).

Vint Cerf, now at Google, writes at length on the issue of net neutrality, which is heating up due to hearings on the issue, and I'm guessing that there is a serious chance the Bells and their ilk may well win this.

Just so you guys know, I did read the NYT on Yahoo and Google this weekend. Honestly, fine pieces. I just was traveling Sunday....

Murdoch sees opp in distribution business in US. Target: Comcast.

Topix stripes its service via 15,000 weblogs. Details here.

Wired sponsoring a debate on Google Print. This should be good.

MSN AdCenter is improving (SEW). Met the fellow behind this at Adtech, looking forward to learning more.

San Francisco To Request RFP Soon

Breaking News: San Francisco city’s TechConnect Project is all set to move from the RFI process to a more formal request for proposal stage according to sources familiar with the project. Many companies who have participated in the RFI process have been told that the city has disbanded the board that had been studying the RFI process, and the city will issue a formal RFP in next 30 days. The San Francisco Techconnect has drawn interest from Google, Earthlink, Anchor Free and a whole score of companies. More details later… 0Related, Politics of San Francisco WiFi Project, The San Francisco WiFi Bidders and the GoogleNet!)

Briefly

Whirlpool Gets Into Podcasting

Gary Stein: Is "Juiciness" a New WOM Metric?

WOMMA Member Discounts
* AD:TECH New York, Nov. 7-9, Save 20%
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On Business Blogging and Character: Panasonic Redux

OPML Manager: One of My Wishes Comes True

Gatorade's "How'd they do that?" spot

Filed under: Television

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Saturday Night Live commercials

Filed under: Funny

OH MY GOD!  How did I not know there was a Wikipedia entry (thanks to Network Landscape) for the commercial parodies done on Saturday Night Live over the years? This is huge? If you surf there you'll be reminded of some great skits that show that even some of the weaker casts on the show were better when they were being filmed as opposed to performing live.

Here's my list of my top favorite commercials. Leave yours in the comments.

• Colon Blow - Phil Hartman at his absolute best
• Schmitt's Gay - It's all in how Chris Farley sells it.
• Schimmer - "It's a floor wax! "It's a dessert topping! It's both!"
• Bass-o-Matic - Funny because it's that close to being true.
• Happy Fun Ball - My friends and I pull this one out all the time.

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Audi Launches TV Channel

Play Risk With Google Maps

A developer called "TehDiplomat" has created a risk game out of the Google Maps API.

For some reason I decided a bit after the API for Google Maps came out that it would be awesome to be able to play Risk on it. About a month later it became apparent that everyone using the API was doing it for more useful things, such as gas price tracking and ::cough:: hotornot placement. I've always been a gamer and thought this was the perfect step.

It's a bit clunky right now, but it works and is another interesting use of the Google Maps API.

Vint Cerf speaks out on net neutrality

Google Automat: Free To List, Pay For Upsell

New beta of Mac DTV -- open source video podcasts!

Magna gets tough with networks

Filed under: Television

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More ad dollars for podcasts

Filed under: Online

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The Big Picture Is There Is No Big Picture

Lincoln Journal Star: The mass audience in the United States is splintering and dividing into ever more specialized and personalized niches.

In the 1940s, more than half of all Americans went to the movies at least once week. In the ’50s and ’60s, the most popular television shows were seen in more than half the households in the country.

Today, despite unceasing hype and advertising, an average week sees around 10 percent of us going to the movie theaters.

In 1947, the peak of the studio system, 90 million Americans out of a population of 151 million went to the movies each week, according to “The Big Picture,” a book on the changing economics of Hollywood by Edward Jay Epstein. That figure represented 60 percent of the population, who bought a total of 4.7 billion tickets that year.

In an average week in 2003, less than 12 percent of Americans bought movie tickets. The total number of tickets sold in the U.S. in 2003: 1.57 billion.

That downward spiral has become the subject of much media attention. Summer 2005 was a huge box office disappointment. According to box office tracker Exhibitor Relations, this summer’s $3.6 billion total is down 9 percent from 2004. Even worse, attendance slumped by 12 percent.

Home video and other auxiliary sales (per-per-view, pay cable, network TV and basic cable TV) have become the profit center for movie studios.

According to Epstein’s figures, in 2003, the six major studios spent $11.5 billion to produce, publicize and distribute 80 films under their names and spent another $6.7 billion on 105 films from their “independent” subsidiaries, such as Miramax and New Line.

The studios recovered just $6.4 billion from their share of world box office, leaving them $11 billion in the red after their movies had completed their theatrical runs. But they more than made up that $11 billion gap on DVD sales, which totalled $33 billion worldwide in 2003.

Starbucks Holiday Red Cup

Paul Williams, Brand Autopsy alum and current Idea-Sandbox guy, is sharing some behind-the-scenes stories on what it’s like to manage a Holiday retail promotion at Starbucks. (Paul should know … he managed three of them during his time at Starbucks.)

In Paul’s first entry, he points us to the online campaign Starbucks is running this year – www.theredcup.com. Enjoy.

Jagger Update Latest

Phase 3 of the Google ‘Jagger’ update is still underway. We are waiting patiently for the dust to settle before we analyze what has happened. However, before you make any adjustments to your site, we strongly recommend that you bear in mind that it’s still too early to completely gauge the update's full effect.

he moment the best strategy is – ‘Don't try to analyze too hard now. Wait for the dust to settle.’

We are hoping that Jagger 3 will be completed around November 15^th or so.

n the Jagger update it has been observed that:

• There is an improved spam filter to catch spam sites
• Older established sites fare better than new ones
• Authority sites (relevant content) do well
• Incoming links are needed from a variety of sources
• Sites with deep links to internal pages are benefiting

Bear in mind that these are just the initial observations and we will not be able to do a full analysis until after the update is completed. Google is working with billion of sites and it appears to be a complicated and chaotic process. It is also possible that any lost rankings will return after completion of the update.

throughout the search marketing community is that it is in your best interest to simply be patient for the time being.

In-Game Ad Company Gets $10 Million

Content Commerce Firm Navio Close $24.5 Million Funding

Blogspot Spam Gone?

Blogging's Impact on Search Position Quantified

Search Engine Watch has an article about search's impact on PR and reputation management. Blogs are featured at the end of the piece. However, one statistic really jumped out at me.

According to Converseon's study of the top 20 search engine listings for the BusinessWeek 100 brands in July 2005, 39% of the top search listings were derived from consumer-generated media such as blogs. Based on this study, Converseon estimated there are 16,000 flame sites web-wide and growing.

Wake me up when NBC and CBS do something really interesting

Complain and you're fired

Starbucks Bets On a Chinese Expansion