Disruptors

It was a day of MooseCamp fun but the big dividend was our table of four at Vancouver's Shiro -- which roughly translated means "great Sushi". How I ended up sitting with Buzz Bruggeman, Robert Scoble and Maryam Scoble had more to do with Buzz's leadership and the small size of the restaurant than anything I did, but sometimes you just have to show up.

So what do you want to know?

The blogging community -- those that really believe this is a discussion not an elevator pitch -- know that we're all here to engage. We talked. What else can I say. Maryam is a compelling woman; charming and delightful. Robert is pensive, which may mistakenly be taken as aloofness. Buzz is engaging, articulate, a leader and an encyclopedia of personal experience. Buzz remembers things and he pulses with the connectedness of our digital age. When you sit and eat raw fish with these folks you know why the digital web can never match the analog stimulus of eye contact and great conversation.

When it's your turn to have dinner with Buzz and the Scobles, don't think about what you need to do to get a link, be noticed or sound controversial. You made it to the table; you are part of the tribe. Be prepared to listen. Ask questions. Some of the things you are doing may or may not be relevant. That's okay, we're having a conversation here.

Thank you very much Robert, Maryam and Buzz.

PS: Robert, we will hold a night open for you in Calgary when you come through this spring for the W3C. Come on Calgary bloggers and podcasters let's treat Robert to great dinner!

NorthernVoice NorthernVoice2007 NV2007
Buzz Bruggeman Robert Scoble Maryam Scoble

Boris and the cooking crew got us going with the grub and Lee LeFever charmed with a NASCAR intro to his world wide odyssey. This could only be Northern Voice.

Hey, if you want a micro-view of the kind of stuff that goes on here then picture Keith Bao and I raving and lamenting about the wonders of drupal. Keith loves the platform for the obvious community functions and that's really important for his over 700 player Vancouver Dodgeball League. Man, if the web had existed when I was a twelve year old dodgeball savant who knows how far I could have gone.

MooseCamp tomorrow and then the "real" conference stuff on Saturday, stay tuned.

NorthernVoice NorthernVoice2007 NV2007

Have you noticed how popular all the gadget and gizmo sites are? Those sites are always full of upcoming product info; secret photos, leaks from manufacturers, rumours and hoaxes. Well -- in advance of THE most IMPORTANT product annoucement since... well... since the last one -- here is some interesting conjecture regarding product development of the Zune line.

Let's put two and too together; Zune rhymes with tune and, according to podcaster Paul Colligan and Scoble, there is no obvious podcast tie-in for Zune. You want to know why? Could it be that Microsoft will release a Zalk just for talk and that by next year we will all be Zalkcasting? There may also be a further spin-off with a Zame that will only be for gamers. The Zame unit will feature digital rights managed claymation. Sources say these units may be delayed until the plain English EULA's can be re-written so that all legitimate uses of the units can be disallowed. Test units at research locations have also been spotted -- code-named Zribble -- that shake uncontrollably within 10 feet of a person using an iPod.

The on-the-spotters and rapid reporters have already told you how great the Podcast and Portable Media Expo was this past weekend (Sept 29 & 30, 2006). Best general re-cap is available from Leesa Barnes -- who I'm making my "most important podcaster I did not meet". (Expect an email soon Leesa...)

I went with a sense of irreverence -- don't worry I still have it -- but also picked up some great vibes around podcast commercialization, specialization and pure podcast passion.

So; is podcasting disco? I was glad to see that a group at the show had picked up on a thought I had some time ago to create "podcasting sucks" t-shirts -- everybody got a laugh out of it and we need to be laughing. It was Trucker Tom Wiles though who has really articulated what we all hope is the best metaphor for podcasting. Tom says that podcasting is more like email than disco.

That's the difference between history and trivia. Listen to his chat with the inimitable Michael Zwerling on Tom's episode 382 and you'll get the whole American philosopher buzz around Tom. (Update: Tom sent me a link to the show)

Every project starts with a request. (Click here to play now)

Shout Outs:
Not a lot for this week -- just a reminder that I will be at the Podcast and Portable Media Expo with iPod and TuneTalk in hand. If you want to meet or be interviewed for The Bradcast then drop me a note: thebradcast AAATTT gmail.com

Main Line:
Riffing on a topic I broached a few weeks ago, this podcast looks at those ubiquitous PIM and email clients. I focus on Outlook, of course, because that's the one that now dominates.

Our email clients are dumb. They are not able to relate our commitments to our tasks and they have no ability to derive any context from the stuff that gets entered into them. Sure we have "rules" and routing features but we don't have the ability to provide meaning to data on-the-fly as we reply to emails.

One way we can move toward that goal is to open the proprietary nature of the data in the hope that somebody else will build a tool that does something new. As a result I looked at this blog entry on the "Holy Grail" for synchronization, the ScheduleWorld.com site and this tantalizing peak at something called Taskmaster from PARC.

This show was recorded entirely using the on-board microphones of the Belkin TuneTalk Stereo recorder for gen 5 iPods to give you an idea about the sound quality. I did get pretty aggressive with the low-pass filter and the compression. The sound is okay but it's sibilant and is prone to noise from the hard drive on the iPod. Use an external microphone if you don't want hard drive noise spoiling low volume level sounds on your TuneTalk.

Click here to stream the show through your favourite player.

Notes:
Length:00:35:33
Recorded: 2006/09/25
Bradcast_20060925 is copyright 2006 by Brad Gibson and he is solely responsible for its content. The Bradcast is not associated with any technology blogging group or association. Opinions represented in the podcast are not those of any client, customer or employer organization, past or present.

My interest in broadcast advertising effectiveness was piqued recently by this scan of a McKinsey & Co. study in Advertising Age. The "grabber" in the article is that:
"...by 2010, traditional TV advertising will be one-third as effective as it was in 1990."

Hmmm... thought I. The numbers cited seem to indicate that this has happened. I went to the source in the McKinsey Quarterly Report to verify my thesis. What I have surmised is that the study assumes what has already happened to prime-time advertising will take hold in TV as a whole.

Just look at the numbers. A 40% price hike has bought 50% less viewers in prime-time since 1990. That represents about a 65% decrease in effectiveness, or as the study words it, "35% as effective as it was in 1990"; which sure sounds a little friendlier doesn't it?

One of the curious by-products of this market's collapse are the efforts by some advertising agencies to "shock" their represented products to greater effectiveness. This has lead to the spectacle of gambling on highly questionable imagery to gain market share. The old saw may say that there "is no such thing as bad publicity" but that just is not true.

Another tactic is to carpet bomb a property with logos and "messages". There may be some significance in the psychology of this but I question how useful saturation ads are in the long run. Do "exclusive to" products really get a bump outside of the controlled environment of their "exclusive" property?

The McKinsey Study has quantified what we really already knew: the age of TV dominance is over. Advertising and sales has already adjusted to the new channels available to it -- and they are not on television. Somebody send a Telex to the TV business.

In contemplating a wired conversation, it seems that I have initiated one. That is a far more useful metaphor for the current state of connectedness that is perjoratively referred to as "blogging" than anything else I have read lately. I think the phrase "keep those cards and letters coming in" could be roughly translated to "me heart the trackbacks" in this age of the digital essay. Mind you, we are awash in a sea of prate as well but it is easily filtered. (Merely using "prate" in a sentence also helps to qualify reader participation.)

Ethan took part 1 of my "Activity or Action?" series and riffed it into something much bigger than I had envisioned in the near term. Coincidently he eschews blogging yet again in a follow-up post a few days later. While I do not agree as strongly with his aversion to being associated with blogging -- quite obviously by someone's definition he is blogging -- his repeated association to the concept of 'me, Writer' is sound.

"Activity or Action?" stems from my frustration with a lack of forward thinking and planning work in much of the current internet application space. I have much more to say about that but the issue at hand is Ethan's extension of the theme to be far more comprehensive. Take a look at his action points if you have not yet read his piece:
? "No" is not a plan
? Forward or Backward?
? Conservation as Regression
? Progress wanting, progress found
? What is dreamt of in your philosophy?

While things get a bit muddled in the middle, the thrust of the argument is that complex problems require progressive decision making. Progressiveness can borrow from the past and it will be multi-faceted. Progressiveness is not the domain of a particular political philosophy. Instead it dwells mainly in the houses that retain the best ideas for the problems at hand. Progressiveness is not a dogma, it is an ethos.

I think we are developing some themes here that quite reasonably could be expanded into a book. Once Ethan has finished his L'ingOL, I think he needs to face the AYBBAM demon. Given some of the latest business/leadership books I've been trying to read, we could not do any worse

The title ought to say it all. I don't actually know what the heck "architechting" means -- other than displaying a poor command of the English language -- but the word I dislike the most right now is "monetize". As in, the "monetization of podcasting", "to monetize your web site" or "if we get this right we should be able to monetize it".

Poof! There you go. Your web site instantly turns into dollars. Just because a few really bright teenagers can copy somebody else's good idea and find a buyer doesn't mean that a business model exists. Some people will be able to sell code, servers, web domain names, etc and make some money. If you do get something in the first tier of a new concept land-rush or, even if you don't and you find a buyer, then you are just engaging in the time honoured exchange of trade in goods and services.

No, what I'm really thinking about here are the tool makers and widget jockies of the latest vanguard. Maybe you have a good idea, maybe not. If you do then test it in the real world of the web beyond the minions of "tech". Make it useful to the AOL'ers, the Ebay'ers, grandma and the kid in Montana with dial-up. Get out of the bubble and breathe some business gas.

Give up on dreams of 'monetizing' your latest 'tool'. If you want to make money then don't be embarrassed about using words like 'plan', 'profit' and 'goal'. Dreaming is something you do when you sleep. Your waking life is for action.

Right now, right this very minute, somebody is hatching a good idea and they don't know what to do with it. Maybe the idea just cannot be conventionally commercialized. That's okay; we've got open source. There are ways to move concepts forward without capital. The key is to imagine the result you want, whether it is a commercial ambition or a noble cause. To get there, you have to have a plan. Make progress everyday and think in terms of what defines success for you.

Monetization is not an action, it's just an activity. If you can't figure out how to "monetize" your web hobby then is it something that you can turn into a money maker? Antique dealers don't wonder how to "monetize" old chairs; they sell them. Define what it is you do and establish your value in the marketplace of ideas.