a blog by Ian Kennedy
On a lark I uploaded a recent photo of Julia I had posted to Flickr to Nationwide’s Life Comes at you Fast site. In return, I got an email with a link to their site telling me when the photo would run on the big screen outside the Reuters building.
If you’re curious, check out the site between 4:40 – 5:00 pm (NYC time) each day this week.
There’s so much activity at Yahoo that many projects or cool little features get lost in the shuffle or overlooked. A couple of engineers were lamenting the fact on an internal mailing list and wondering what could be done to get the word out about their favorite features. It didn’t take long for a couple of them to take matters into their own hands and start their own little fan site.
One of the things I really like about this site is that it’s so down to earth. People writing lovingly about products that they just want to share with the world. It’s pretty funny at times too like the most recent post about the benefits of being able to go back and edit a review.
Another great feature is the blogroll which is the most comprehensive list of Yahoo product blogs on the web today. Slurp this blogroll into your reader and you’ll know everything you need to know about Yahoo, straight from a Yodeler.
Steve Rubel points to an interesting development of Apple’s iTunes client.
The addition of PDFs to iTunes is more than just a mildly interesting occurrence. iTunes, as a ubiquitous cross-platform app, has its own embedded browser that powers the music store. It’s conceivable that Apple could turn iTunes into a dedicated RSS reader that operates like Safari and become a clearing house for all subscription-based content. In addition, wireless is on the way according to this patent filing.
Taking this a step further, it’s also highly possible that if iTunes enhances its DRM to include other enclosures it will move into e-books and or e-magazines. Oh, and where might those eBooks be consumed?
– via Micropersuation
I’d take this one step further. One of the more lucrative lines of business for the news business is the timely delivery of profiled news. Could iTunes become a platform for newspapers to delivery their premium content to subscribers? With a built-in browser and DRM, the iTunes client becomes much more attractive than email or even some of the current branded RSS readers such as the one available from USA Today.
Did you know that the FedEx logo has an arrow built into it? The Sneeze has an interview with Lindon Leader, the man behind the logo.
If you’ve been following the ABC television show Lost, you may know that they’ve been building up to a season finale that would integrate the internet and game play into the viewing experience. Tonight the game launched itself with a non-descript advertisement from "The Hanso Foundation"
Any regular viewer of Lost knows that this is the Hanso Foundation plays a key role in the show and the phone number at the end of the commercial (1-877-hansorg) is the first clue. What follows is a trail via a voice mail tree that brings you eventually a website that’s been set up for the game.
I’m a bit lazy and shortcutted my way to the site via The Lost Experience which is doing a great job documenting the twists and turns of this very immersive "alternate reality game." I’m really interested to see how this all turns out but one thing is certain, by running an ad with clues to kick this off, ABC has skewered my reflex to zip through the commercials on my Tivo.
Brilliant.
What a difference a year makes! Last year is seemed as if blogs were only given a polite nod and tolerated as something vaguely interesting but mostly for the geek fringe. The majority of the attention was given over to the SEO black arts. This year blogs are a given while the social media darlings of YouTube & MySpace are the focus of everyone’s attention.
Worth the price of admission alone was one of the panelists (I think it was Dave Evans of Digital Voodoo) who defined Social Media as, “communication and media that doesn’t require interruption.” That is so true! Successful advertising in social media is not a pop-up ad for an irrelevant product – it cannot get in the way of what I want to do or who I want to reach. Successful integration of a brand into social media is going to facilitate the conversation. It’s going to be that funny clip that I can use to reach out to someone, it’s going to be images that I want to associate with by adding them onto my blog sidebar, it’s going to be a service that allows me to connect or communicate in a way that I couldn’t before.
Other notables:
Garrick Schmitt from avenue a/razorfish said that, “the tag cloud will become the mullet of web 2.0.”
This was funny because I ran into the father of the term “folksonomy” a couple of days earlier and he was going off on how tag clouds are overrated (he’s now posted about it).
Shawn Gold from MySpace on perspective, “To us, the refrigerator is the refrigerator. To our grandparents it was technology.”
It may seem strange to call MySpace a messaging platform but that is exactly how it’s being used. I heard of one music promoter who has so many friend requests that he has hired someone to manage his profile for him. This doesn’t sound so strange if you think that people hire others to answer & screen phone calls as well. I also met someone who has a 500 friend profile and he was asked if he would sell his profile. This did seem odd to me – I never thought I’d see a social network commoditized as if it was a World of Warcraft character being sold on e-Bay.
Shocking stat of the show: World of Warcraft has 5 million users as of Sept. 2005 and currently something north of 6 million today. The typical user plays 27 hours/week and most of these users will stay on the platform for over two years.
Cool mobile app: Mobot – turn your camera phone into an image recognition device. I saw a demo where a guy took a picture of a Coke can and it recognized the logo and went to a special landing page on the phone’s browser.
While shopping for plants, Julia found this one tucked in the back. It was kind of lonely & sad and didn’t have a price so they gave it to us for free. We don’t have a dog, we have an avocado plant.
Other activities include Aikido lessons for Tyler and his weekly soccer game. We placed him in a league with kids a year older than he is to challenge him a bit and I think the extra competition is good for him. He’s a bit more focused at practice and he’s got a great coach who’s working really well with the kids. They won their game handily and Tyler really mixed it up despite being the smallest on the field.
My little experiment with internet classifieds worked like a charm and we sold off our old refridgerator Saturday morning. I listed on craigslist, edgeio, and an internal Yahoo list. A toss up between craigslist and the Yahoo list for the number of leads but in the end it was an Alameda buyer that found us on craigslist that settled with us just 48 hours after listing the fridge for sale.
Sunday was spiff up the house day. After picking up plants (above), I painted the bathroom, patched up some holes in the toy room ceiling left over from an old light fixture that I had replaced a few weeks back, and painted some exposed wood. Oh, I also got up early and went for a nice long run which may be why my legs are so sore right now!
End of an era. Scott McNealy steps aside as CEO of Sun Microsystems and hands the baton over to Jonathan Schwartz and we have another CEO blogger! Jon has a great post recounting the first time he met Scott and this:
There is no single individual who has created more jobs around the world than you. And unlike Henry Ford and some of the industrialists that preceded you, not all of those folks just work for Sun – I’m not talking hundreds or thousands of jobs, I’m talking millions. They ended up in America and India, Indonesia and Antarctica, Madagascar, Mexico, Brazil and Finland. They ended up everywhere. Everywhere the network travels.
No single individual has spawned so many startups, fueled so much venture investment, or raised so much capital without actually trying – just with a vision of the future that gets more obvious by the day.
The Network is the Computer. Scott was one of the few who saw this back in 1992 and we are only now beginning to see how prescient that vision really was.
Apple announced today that it will run graphical ads in the lower-left hand corner of the iTunes product as users listen to podcasts on their PC. Advertising Age goes on to write that this will help offset the costs of producing and hosting podcasts. Everyone will be looking at this closely.
In other news, I’ve been pointed to another version of advertising, one that comes from and is amplified by the community. Here’s the Firefox Flicks community on “other browsers” in Wheee!
