Octavianworld

Days of Wine and Anger

From my friend Bill Ives, this post on the subjectivity of wine appreciation.  Lots of wisdom here to support why disciplined development of users and use cases makes sense when assessing applications specifically and overall user experience generally.  And, what a great story to work into a talk!

See also Jeff Bonforte's excellent talk on "Anger in Innovation".  Message: market based on appealing to anger and pain, not on coolness.

Good Podcasts I Listened To Recently

Doug Weaver on expanding interactive advertising budgets into a new slice of traditional spending on TV.  Very thoughtful way to get insight into how fast the dam will burst.

Dana Todd and Bruce Clay on SEO.  Interesting to SEO nerds and newbies alike.  The comments about getting "theme" right were especially interesting.  At a deeper level, the ideas here are metaphorically extensible to marketing in general.

Guy Kawasaki on The Art of Innovation.  Very entertaining!

I'm Liveblogging ad:tech in NYC

via my Twitter feed (I'm "borealic").

Not Dead Yet

Went to the Web Innovators Group meeting last night in Cambridge.  The ballroom at the Royal Sonesta was full, with a healthy mix of entrepreneurs, engineers, students, VC's, corporate types, etc.   Rumors of Boston's demise as a tech hub are overstated.

Memorable snatches of conversations/presentations:

• "I hear there are assets in Germany available..."
• "We started with a subscription model, and morphed it from there..."

and my favorite:

• "We're a real-time mixer service, halfway between Meetup and Dodgeball.  It's 3 o'clock, you want to meet people, you sign in, and at 4 we've got you in a bar with five people you don't know... but you have something in common with!

I caught up with Paige Arnof-Fenn.  We speculated on Whether It's A Bubble.  "No, there's twenty times the money (advertising anyway) there was in 2001, and maybe 75% of the VC money invested back then," was our consensus.  What about a recession? Money flows to the most measurable media, which these days is online, so maybe this time a recession might kill off the old (golf-and-a-rate-card analog formats) instead of the new.

The River of Time(s)

The New York Times has graciously allowed Dave Winer to innovate with their content.  The result is http://nytimesriver.com, an alternative presentation which is halfway toward a branded reader.  I like the outline view especially, since it dynamically sorts out topics, in a way that subscribing to fixed tags or categories in an RSS reader wouldn't.  Judging from the traffic, it will be a bit before we see ads here, but I'm impressed it registers since it's so new!  I think the bigger point is the happy result of this open-minded partnership.