Friday, October 21, 2005

Keynote: Build to flip the Flickr of evrything. 

Carmine Gallo: "If you truly want to capture the hearts and minds of your listeners, then maintain eye contact during your presentation, talk, or speech." 

Matt Mullenweg is leaving CNET and going out on his own. I hope to see him tonight at the TechCrunch BBQ, and we're having dinner one night next week. I've got a bunch of ideas for things we can do together. 

One thing I want to say in my BBQ keynote tonight is that one good thing that's happening is that people are trying out new ideas again. That should be a constant in the tech industry, in good times and in bad. There should always be money for new ideas because you never know which one will turn into the next Visicalc, Wordstar, Mac OS, Excel, Web or whatever. Too many years of drought between the years of wine and roses.  

Wired News takes a look at Memorandum. Of course I discovered the article on Memorandum, which tempts me not to point to it, unless I have something to say. Now having said it, I can stop, because no doubt Memeorandum will link to this witless and information-less post and at the same time will move the Wired News article up the ladder. Meanwhile, my ultra-witty keynote, above, which has only been linked to by TechCrunch (calling it The Flickr of Keynotes), didn't make the grade on Memeorandum at all. I could have sent out emails asking for links and it probably would have shown up, but that seems really tacky. One more thing, people complain the site is too ugly, and there should be a sports version, I have another complaint. The name has too many syllables and it's hard to remember how to spell it, and it's too long, and screws up word-wrap on my posts.  

Here's a deep probing question. Would people be happier with Flock if it were called Flockr? And am I spamming Memeorandum right now, as I type this? One more question. Is Flock the Flickr of Flocks?  

Open Media Summit: "By invitation only." Open?  

Tom Friedman has a fantastic column today in the NY Times about podcasting in China. It's not about making people rich, it's about enabling the people to create media, a very 21st century thing. I can't point to Friedman's column because it's behind a very 20th century for-pay firewall. 

BTW, congratulations to Evan Williams for finally figuring out that the main significance of podcasting is not that it gives a new channel to commercial broadcasters (which it does), but rather it allows people to create media (see above). My guess is that this epiphany was brought about by a 20-million-ton frieght train called iTunes.  

Ross Rader advises that Jon Postel died on Oct 16, not the 19th.