Saturday, April 08, 2006

Essay: The Internet as "idea processor". 

Signed up for Seattle Mind Camp 2.0. I've been looking for an excuse to make a trip up north, and now have one.  

Must-read piece by Robert X Cringely about Windows on the Mac, and OS X on Dell, HP, et al.  

Dr Dobbs podcast interview with Amazon's Adam Selipsky explains S3. One new piece of data here, S3 is the same storage system that Amazon uses for its service.  

Kevin Werbach, Danah Boyd & John Perry Barlow.  

Mike loves blogging because "we fact check your ass." 

Day 3 with Amazon S3. If the net stays up, I'll begin working on the internal API. (PS: It crapped out again. Arrrgh.) 

Curry & Bloom v2.0 

I listened to a podcast interview with Ron Bloom, CEO of Podshow. The interview was done by Steve Gillmor. Also on the show was Bill Rinehart, the CEO of Limelight Networks.

A bunch of people sent me links to the interview wanting me to comment on this or that. But I'm going to comment on something else.

I've heard Bloom talk about "Advertising 2.0" before, but it isn't until now that I heard something like a definition. Bloom fights his way through sentences the same way Bush tortures his words, so if you took a literal transcript of what he said it would be nonsense, but he managed to communicate the idea anyway. It's something I've said many times, probably to him, certainly to Adam Curry, and also here on Scripting News. Advertising is changing, advertisers have to learn to communicate to people who aren't captive couch potatoes. They have to say things people want to hear, in the way they want to hear them, otherwise they won't listen. All the new electronic modes give the user the power to skip ads they aren't interested in. Advertisers must take this into account.

Luckily people want commercial information, they seek it out. So there is a role for marketing in the future, but advertisers are slow to adapt. Bloom is saying, rightly, that they must adapt. He says it in a more fear-inspiring way, but fear or no fear, they should listen to what he says.

I spent a bit of time with Bloom early in 2005 talking about businesses that might be possible around podcasting. He's found one of them. But he doesn't need and can't use the amateur podcasters in the new business he seems to be building. Why he continues to promote his company to user-content-creators is a mystery. His business is that of an Internet advertising agency, which is exactly what the last company he and Curry started was, in the dot-com boom.

The more things change, the more they stay the same. Big Wheel Keep on Turing Etc.