Monday, November 28, 2005

TiVO has just taken what I think will turn out to be a huge step in the right direction. The same technology that allows users to skip over ads they aren't interested in, can now find ads they are interested in. I predict that this is going to be as big a feature as the other one. 

Jim Moore: "Madison Avenue meets Craig's List!" 

This issue, btw, was exactly where the philosophical split was between Adam Curry and myself. I reasoned that podcasts, unlike TV or radio, were only available on devices that could easily skip over intrusive messages, and therefore commercialism would evolve in a different way, with the constraint that the commercial info had to be welcomed by the user. We wouldn't be couch potatoes or eyeballs (or earballs, I guess) -- but that didn't mean all of a sudden we weren't interested in buying things.  

Timely piece in the SJ Merc, interviews CurryCo CEO Ron Bloom. "There's a $32 billion war chest invested in radio advertising," he says. Wrong answer, Ron.  

Raymond Kristiansen has a screencast that shows Scoble how to open his Bloglines subscription list in the OPML Editor. There's another way (sorry I didn't remember this at first). It pays to review the docs every once in a while.  

Johannes Ernst summarizes a consensus that may be emerging for identity.  

LA Times: "We thought we'd better be specific, so we prayed for hot dogs, because they could be cut up to feed a lot of people," Fay Jones said. "About the time we said 'Amen,' a guy drives up with a truck filled with 2,600 hot dogs. That was the beginning of the miracles around here." 

David Mercer compares OPML to Gopher.  

Here's the part of the Darwin exhibit where they talk about the Pope.  

Lots of food for thought in my meeting on Saturday with Nick Denton. They're big users of blogging software at Gawker, and Nick has a lot to say about where it should be going. One thing he says should be easier is images. He's right, and I can see that sooo clearly, having switched platforms recently. We both realized that there's opportunities for lots of new widgets for weblog authors, but no standard easy to use platform for integrating them. I noticed that WordPress doesn't even give the user a way to edit their site template. This is a major step backward. Both Manila and Blogger gave this power to users, in 1999! Hello. Earth to developers. You're not supposed to take features out. Products are supposed to bloat, not disappear. We need to get back to work. We've been spending too much time fighting over who gets to reinvent what's already been invented. I think it's high time for some new standards. Next time someone tells you to throw out something that's working, tell them to invent something new or shut up.