Discovering Raditaz
Read here about Raditaz, which I hadn’t heard about before. It’s a competitor to Pandora. Some differences: unlmited skips, no ads, geo-location. I started out by setting up three “stations,” based on three artists: Lowell George, Seldom Scene and Mike Auldridge. I’m on the Mike Auldridge station now, and guess what comes up? Dig: Not...
What I’d like to say on the subway
When I was young, New York subways were dirty, noisy and with little risk of improvement. But, even if the maps weren’t readable (as with this 1972 example), there were lots of them. Now the subways are much nicer, on the whole, and being improved. But there is now a paucity of maps. In fact,...
No 2 SOPA
Today I’m in solidarity with Web publishers everywhere joining the fight against new laws that are bad for business — and everything else — on the Internet. I made my case in If you hate big government, fight SOPA. A vigorous dialog followed in the comments under that. Here’s the opening paragraph: Nobody who opposes...
Remembering Judith
I got to know Judith Burton when she was still Judith Clarke and Senior VP Corporate Marketing for Novell, in 1987. Novell had just bought a company called CXI, which had been a client of Hodskins Simone & Searls, the Palo Alto advertising agency in which I was a partner. By that time HS&S had...
What could be more social than a real marketplace?
When we say “social” these days, we mostly mean the sites and services of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Foursquare and other commercial entities. Not talking on the phone or in person. Not meeting at a café. Not blogging, or emailing or even texting. Those things are all retro and passé. Worse, they’re not what marketers get...
Tools for Independence
So I signed up for Google+. I added some friends from the roster already there (my Gmail contacts, I guess). Created a small circle to discuss VRM. Nothing happened there that I know of right now, but I haven’t checked yet. I’m about to (see below), but first I’ll go through my other impressions. First,...
The Long Tale
I wrote A World of Producers in December 2008. At the time I was talking about camcorders and increased bandwidth demand in both directions: And as camcorder quality goes up, more of us will be producing rather than consuming our video. More importantly, we will be co-producing that video with other people. We will be...
hNews vs. rNews?
It’s been almost two years since the Associated Press issued a press release that began this way: 07/23/2009 AP Press Release Associated Press to build news registry to protect content Registry will provide tools to monitor use of AP and member content online while also enabling new business opportunities NEW YORK – The Associated Press...
IIW: Investors Invitational Workshop
We’re doing something different at next week’s IIW: inviting investors. So here’s a pitch that should resonate with investors — especially in Silicon Valley, where IIW happens (appropriately, at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View)… Here’s a chance to check in on development work on a huge new disruptive market play: empowering customers as...
Let’s move tweeting off Twitter
Blogging, emailing and messaging aren’t owned by anybody. Tweeting is owned by Twitter. That’s a problem. In all fairness, this probably wasn’t the plan when Twitter’s founders started the service. But that’s where they (and we) are now. Twitter has become de facto infrastructure, and that’s bad, because Twitter is failing. Getting 20,500,000 Google Image...
World Wide Catacombs
What started as plain old Web search has now been marginalized as “organic”. That’s because the plain old Web — the one Tim Berners-Lee created as a way to hyperlink documents — has become commercialized to such an extent that the about the only “organic” result reliably rising to first-page status is Wikipedia. Let’s say...
