everwas

a blog by Ian Kennedy

Year: 2005

  • Mary Meeker on Online Advertising

    Yesterday I visited the Ad-Tech show here in San Francisco to catch the last 20 minutes of Mary Meeker’s keynote and visit the exhibition hall. Let me first say that Mary’s presentation was fascinating but left me winded. We blew past 50 slides dense with stats and tidbits that raised an eyebrow when I first ran across them in my readings over the past several months but now, when gathered up and presented together, are nothing short of inspirational.

    My key takeaway was that with broadband penetration now hitting 25 – 30% in North America, we’re going to start to see even greater adoption of the internet as the alternative delivery format for rich media. As more families experience life with an always on connection (I have an iMac in my living room and the little white window has become a hub of activity throughout the day), they begin to view the internet as a viable alternative to existing delivery methods.

    Weblogs replace the letter from friends. Topix replaces your local paper. Weather.com replaces your local TV forecast. RSS feeds replace your local sports wrap-up. The list goes on. Mary’s point was that we’re only just beginning a new adoption phase as it is only when penetration of a new medium hits 25% that the volumes start to make sense for others to follow. Once all these families start hanging out on their always on broadband connections, you’ll see the advertisers follow which will enable more interesting projects which will draw more people online which will draw more advertisers, you get the idea.

    More tomorrow on the exhibit hall.

  • I am You as You are Me

    Matthew Haughey says all this fuss over the Mainstream Media is meaningless when so many bloggers are now on TV and magazine publishers are now blogging. We are all the media and the line that defines mainstream has gotten so fuzzy as to be meaningless.

    Amen to that brother.

  • She Passed!

    Izumi’s had a bit of a struggle with getting her California Driver’s License and I don’t blame her. In order to transfer her license from New Jersey, she needed to pass a written test which is hard enough in English. While multiple choice, many of the possible answers are written in a twisted grammatical form that make it challenging for a native speaker but pure hell for a non-native. The questions are also devilishly obscure and sometimes defy logic.

    Q: When on a hill, without a curb, which way do you turn your tires?
    A : To the right.

    So if you’re brake fails, now your car will swing out INTO traffic? Go figure. . .

    In order to give herself a fighting chance, Izumi chose to take the test in Japanese. Unfortunately, that didn’t make it any easier as there was no Japanese booklet to study and their translations left something to be desired. On top of this, Izumi’s got one of the worst cases of test-phobia I’ve ever seen (she actually breaks out in a cold sweat) so you can appreciate the dilemma. She had failed twice so you can imagine the tension as well as we went in on Friday morning for her third try.

    I took her to the DMV while Tyler was in school and played with Julia while mommy labored over her test. We made up little cheers and whispered them quietly in the corner (“Go! Go! Mommy!”) hoping that the positive vibes would boost her confidence. We were crestfallen when the scores came back and she had again failed by missing seven questions when you need six to pass.

    On the way home, as we reviewed which questions she had missed, Izumi noticed that one of the questions was marked incorrectly as a miss when in fact she had marked the correct answer. She had pointed this out to the woman scoring her answers but she was distracted and had somehow missed it (see picture above).

    I pulled a quick U-turn and floored it back to the DMV hoping to catch the lady that graded her test before she went out on lunch break. Luck was on our side because not only did we catch her, she remembered that Izumi had pointed out the proper answer and now the “-7” became a “-6”. When I confirmed that Izumi passed, I couldn’t contain myself and caused a minor disturbance by shooting my arms straight in the air and shouting “YESSS!”

    The Kennedy household is a couple of notches less tense now that the test is behind us and we’ve ticked off another hurdle to becoming Californians.

  • Seth Goldstein on discovering something you didn’t even know you were looking for

    In part three of his five part piece on Media Futures, Majestic Research co-founder and former Entrepreneur in Residence at Flatiron Partners, Seth Goldstein comments on the development of the Web API.

    As of 2005, the Internet has replaced the desktop PC as the primary platform for APIs. Unlike Microsoft and the desktop, however, nobody controls the web as a platform; although certain companies do oversee enormous pools of user data and have the opportunity to direct such traffic as they see fit.

    He goes on to list several examples of traditional websites (Amazon, Google, EBay, etc) publishing an open API to yield secondary applications developed by the general public. He goes on to call the web-based API, put into the hands of the developing public,

    the hinge between the algorithm that processes raw human meta data and the moment of alchemy that occurs when you discover something you didn’t even know you were looking for, courtesy of some people that you didn’t even know that you knew.

    It’s John Battelle’s Database of Intentions set free by a collection of vendors & search engines which open up their data so that it can be collated and analyzed in new and exciting ways.

  • Blogs on the cover of BusinessWeek

    It’s going to be another busy week – BusinessWeek has a lengthy cover story on why companies need to pay attention to blogs.

    Go ahead and bellyache about blogs. But you cannot afford to close your eyes to them, because they’re simply the most explosive outbreak in the information world since the Internet itself. And they’re going to shake up just about every business — including yours. It doesn’t matter whether you’re shipping paper clips, pork bellies, or videos of Britney in a bikini, blogs are a phenomenon that you cannot ignore, postpone, or delegate. Given the changes barreling down upon us, blogs are not a business elective. They’re a prerequisite.

    At the same time BusinessWeek Online launched five new blogs (powered by Movable Type) at Blogspotting.net

  • Artwork


    There is a difference in each of our kids’ artwork. Julia, the younger one, draws with determination to express an emotion. The drawing on the left is Julia’s and although she says that it’s a dragon, it bears a striking resemblence to her mother.

    Tyler is older and is much more detailed in his drawings. The picture on the right is his and you can see that he is using color and detail to explain a story. This one is of a dragon as well and takes place in the desert.

  • The King of San Francisco

    The King of San Francisco

    As we were driving through the city Tyler asked who lived in the majestic building that is known as the City Hall. I said that the Mayor of San Francisco worked there but he didn’t know that term, “Mayor.” I said that the Mayor was someone who ran the city.

    “Oh, so the king of San Francisco lives there?”

    Hmm. With all the hubub over the Bay Bridge, a King might come in handy.

  • Alameda, a boating community

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    This is the view from the High Street Bridge, about a ten minute walk from our house. I read somewhere that Alameda has something like one sailor for every three residents and I hope that we can join their ranks someday.

  • Insider Pages – open source advertising

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    Bill Gross’ Idealab launches Insider Pages which takes a shot at local listings, combines it with a recommendation engine and adds a touch of social networking. Damn, that was my idea. Where did I put that napkin anyway?

    If I were the Yellow Pages I would be worried. Very worried. They even use the Yellow Pages name (it’s not copyrighted is it?) in their tag line “Yellow Pages written by friends”