April 2006
Hey Grandma, what big ears you have.
Newsome.org on what newspapers need to do to survive:
Remember- you don’t have to outrun the bear. You just have to outrun the other guy.
Unfortunately, it may be a pack of wolves coming, dressed as Grandma.
Organized Reading Lists for River Of News fans
Scott Johnson has some sensible advice for River of News fans.
Does anyone actually organize their readers with numerous groupings and then actually use them?
The idea seems so foreign to me, but I’m not really an organized person.
I tried to organized into groups but just slipped into River of News style of reading unintentionally.
MC Hammer, Steve Rubel, and James Corbett just flow in together.
My GestureBank donor card
GestureBank, as many of you have probably heard is an interesting new project being evangelized by Steve Gillmor.
I’m contributing my clickstream as of moments ago. Still not sure how the recorder can contribute to Root.net as well. I’ll have to take a second look at that.
Where all of this will take us, we shall see.
My guess: The way GTalk’s jabber based open architecture will slowly melt down the IM silos, projects like GestureBank will melt down the silos of marketing data.
I don’t even think Steve fully realizes what potential that holds for individuals of the world.
This will spawn unforseen applications and networks,. I even have a few in mind already. ; )
The consumer always wins (almost)
I thought the recent IT Conversations with Jonathan Schwartz and Doc Searls was interesting. One thing Jonathan said, that “the consumer always wins” made me think, especially since I don’t always feel, as a consumer that I always win, and certainly not in the short run.
For example, I hate my mobile provider and even my ISP, and for now I don’t think I can do much better.
What I think is true about is statement is the flip side.
“The company that does not cater to the consumer always loses.”
If a feature, price, or product is available and desired, you will lose customers if you don’t provide it.
Sounds simple enough, yet the recording industry and the old media companies have proven it’s not necessarily a “no brainer”.
Success isn’t easy
Seth Godin latest post states,
The challenge is NOT to empty your inbox. The challenge is not to get your boss to tell you what to do.
The challenge is to ask a two part question:
What next? What now?
Asking is the hard part.
I agree, except I think he underestimates the challenge that takes place after the asking.
Success isn’t easy, even if asking the question comes naturally.
Boned by the web 2.0 Borg
Sounds like the Borg to me, but I agree with Alex, who agrees with Tim, that Ajit has it figured out.
Buona. . .
. . .Pasqua
Attention data is revealing
For the last few weeks I’ve had an exchange set up on Root.net with Seth Goldstein.
It’s really interesting, if nothing else, to compare online behavior.
I won’t reveal any of his attention data here, except one fact.
He hasn’t visited this blog.
I hadn’t visited his either until I linked to it in this post. But that doesn’t necessarily mean we didn’t read each other’s because consumption through a newsreader is not recorded.
I wonder what he finds interesting in my attention data.
1 mail.google.com 528 visits 25.1%
2 everybuddy.org 387 visits 18.4%
3 www.register.com 85 visits 4.0%
4 www.google.com 82 visits 3.9%
5 192.168.2.20 80 visits 3.8%
I use Gmail. I blog through the Wordpress web interface. I use register.com as my domain registrar and I have development server on my local network.
Pretty boring stuff.
What he (or a marketer) would find interesting is the visit to the Food Network.
Considering my Italian roots, it’s a decent bet I’m celebrating Easter this weekend. Those, plus the fact that a recipe I looked at several times on different days includes Amaretto liqueur, a marketer might think I’d be in the market for a new bottle.
The bottle I have right now is just about kicked, but in fact I won’t be buying another. A dinner guest will be bringing one, along with some fresh italian pastries.
But you get the idea. GestureBank on the way via Steve Gillmor. Lotsa fun ahead.
Open Source News
One of the most important items on the world’s agenda right now is finding ways to filter out the noise from an immense and growing pool of media.
I can only continue to stress that these algorithms must necessarily be open source, or else we are only trading one closed distribution monopoly, the press, for another, the algorithm.
Update: Jeff Jarvis is thinking along the same lines today, but for an advertising platform.
The decline of the TV commercial
Mike Arrington says TV should drop the ads.
Not yet, but very soon.
Let’s face it, they were somewhat doomed around the time that cable proliferated. They are an artifact of a time when everyone was getting the heavyweight title fight for free.
Now, nothing is really free.
So, you have the Masters and the Superbowl, but can anyone say that commercial TV is a better model than HBO?