November 2007 Archives

When a GNC reader recently pointed out my antipodean spelling I thought it might be past time that I actually introduced myself.  As the tags on my post say, my name is Matthew and I live with my wife and kids in Melbourne Australia.  While I studied IT in college my career has taken me more into the business side of technology and I have post graduate qualifications in marketing and economics (micro) and an MBA from Melbourne Business School.

For the last 10 years I have been working as an IT and business consultant for a couple of multinational vendors.  My work has mainly involved working with very large companies, helping them develop and implement IT strategies and change initiatives.  I am still a geek at heart and love my gadgets, but my expertise is in how big business can use technology.

While I have been consuming blogs for some time I only started blogging in earnest earlier this year.  I have thought for some time that the focus of IT commentary is squarely on the consumer space.  While this is where most of the cool stuff happens, its not where IT companies make their money, that comes from the business sales.  I thought I could contribute some of that focus to the general discussion.

I have my own site at businessgeek.org where I post some of my more business focused commentary.  These are typically longer articles that often contain a bit of financial analysis.  If I think they might be of interest to the GNC audience I sometimes post a summary here as well.

I’ve been part of the Ohana since somewhere in the 40’s.  When Todd offered me the chance to contribute to GNC I was honoured.  While family and the day job may cause variation, I am hoping to keep a good flow of articles coming into the site.  In keeping with the style Todd has created, these will offer more than just a link to information and offer some perspective, or a new take on the story.  I’m keen to get your feedback on whether you like the style of my posts and any constructive feedback is gratefully accepted.  You can email me at matthew@businessgeek.org or Todd will forward on any feedback you send to him.  I have profiles on most of the social network sites, but the only one I actively use is Facebook, you can find the link to my profile on businessgeek.

Thanks to all that have commented on my posts and checked out businessgeek so far.  I hope make a meaningful contribution.

Sure I have two Macs here at the house but we primarily use one of them for Video editing and the other is used for doing my Ustream show.  Otherwise I am pretty much on Windows PCs 95% of the time.

I did take my Mac with me to a meeting the other night and when I made a comment that this was not my main machine I got some funny looks from the Apple users there.

Several asked why, and when I told them I am more productive in Windows they about lost their minds. But hey -- to each his own. My kid uses the thing more than I do and most of the time I have to force-kill Safari or Firefox because some Javascript kills the browser. That does not happen on my Windows machine.

So when I was asked if I was going to upgrade my reply was "Why should I?" Just like I have not upgraded to Windows Vista at this point in the game there was nothing compelling enough to want to go spend the money.

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Full Show Notes Link

It disturbs me that I might say something positive about a spammer, but I must admit that I respect the ingenuity of this.  Reported by the BBC, spammers have invented a windows game that progressively displays more of an image if the player correctly decodes a distorted phrase.

The image is tuned to the male libido (of course) and the phrase to be decoded is a Captcha from a free email or comment entry window.  The Captcha is collected by an automated bot that tries to post or register at a protected site.  It sends the Captcha back to the player of the game and if the player correctly guesses it, they get to see more of the image and the bot gets past the protection.

From the report this system is not particularly prevalent at the moment, and hopefully the anti-virus vendors will treat this as a threat and block it, even though it poses no risk to the computer it is installed on.  It is yet another demonstration though that there is no protection that can stop human resourcefulness.  Shared access and protection are mutually exclusive.

The only way to stop spam is if we can find a way to stop it working.  If everyone just deleted it there would be no reason for it to exist.  It will be interesting to see if the increased IT literacy over time changes the efficacy of spam.

In a move that can only be declared self-serving, Verizon has introduced a new definition of “Unlimited” data usage in its Wireless terms of service.

They have outlawed such things as being subscribed to RSS feeds, no P2P applications, you cannot use the service as your primary Internet Service. Ohh, and if you go over 5GB of billing they reserve the right to shut you down or severely throttle your service.

Pure insanity, if you ask me. Why don’t they just call their service the 5GB and under plan and be done with it. Thank goodness I have Sprint EVDO service and they don’t play games like Verizon does. Verizon 

Over the past two days I have been trying to determine if it makes sense for RawVoice to join the OpenSocial coalition “not even sure how to at this point” but we have built our platform in a way that may make sense for us to do so.

While it is still early on I can see some definite advantages to getting on board. Data contained within our communities should be able to be ported and this may be the easiest way to allow it to happen. Google Open Social

Do you want your Podcast listed in the Zune Marketplace Directory? Well, you will want to follow the instructions as outlined on the Zune Insider Blog.

As I understand it, the listing will not be automatic and there will be some review done. Here are a few tips that will assure your podcast gets listed promptly.

Make sure that your RSS feed is valid and has no errors. Make sure all of your album art is linked in correctly. If your RSS feed does not have album art you likely will not get listed. It is my understanding that each show is going to reviewed. While I am not sure if they will be looking at your website, I would not be surprised if they do.

The Zune team has worked hard to make up for lost time. I would hope that the podcasting community will welcome them with open arms and help promote the Zune Product line. They are being very pro-active and I am excited to welcome them to the space. Zune Insider

Note: If your show covers or approaches these topics don’t plan on getting approved as shows with porn, hate talk and or illegal stuff will not get listed.

A study in Canada has been released that proves what many (myself included) have known for years, that on average people that pirate music are more likely to buy CD’s rather than less.  The study was sponsored by the Canadian government and is a bit of a slog to read, but there is already some very good analysis of it on the Web.

While I have seen (and helped conduct) a number of studies on this topic in recent years, this one is by far the most conclusive and the most reliable one I have seen.  Spanning nearly a year and with over 2000 participants this study has a very low margin for error.  From what I have seen so far, there also doesn’t seem to be any inherent bias in the conducters of this study, although this is something I will be researching further.

The study is exclusively conducted among Canadian citizens, and the cultural and environmental similarities make this almost directly applicable to the majority of the English speaking first world.  The first key finding was that the net effect of illegal downloads on CD purchases in Canada was zero.  That’s right, zero, zilch, nada, nil, the big donut.  Amongst those that did download though, there was a direct, positive correlation between the number of songs downloaded and the number of CD’s purchased.  The more people got for free, the more they paid for.

I have long known that the RIAA’s tactic of suing big downloaders meant they were also targeting their biggest customers.  Ironically the money they win from their lawsuits is money that would probably have been spent on music.  It’s not as stupid when you factor in that they are trying to change a cultural mores rather than claim damages.  In this case they are only moderately stupid, given that the group they are targeting are not likely to respond well to these tactics, rather than monumentally stupid in driving their best customers away.

This study will generate a lot of noise in the coming days/weeks.  It is unlikely that the music industry will come to its senses, but here’s hoping.

On Oct 24th I ranted pretty hard on Movable Type not only on my blog, but also in my podcast. In my opinion, it was well-deserved. Bryne Reese at Six Apart listened and did some work on his own time to put together a podcasting plugin for Movable Type.

My schedule has been pretty crazy and I have not had a chance to test it yet, but I am pretty confident that the plugin will gets us started in the right direction. I have remained loyal to Movable Type because it simply does a lot more than Wordpress does. The management of the multiple sites I run under a single installation of MovableType cannot be accomplished with any other blogging platform.

But like many other Moveable Type users I have been fairly critical of the pace of development, and their continued focus more on their pro-net developers versus listening to end users. I think they still have some work to do to get connected with their user community again.

I do appreciate Bryne and I am hopeful that he understands and the rest of the team understands that many of us remain passionate MT users and have invested heavily in development of our brand with MT, and hope that they really listen to our needs as time moves forward.

There is one more thing, though, that I completely disagree with, and this is SixApart's continued heavy investment and promotion of ATOM. They have been trying without success to get vendors aka Apple iTunes and others to support enclosures in ATOM feeds. First of all, the public is already confused enough. But give me a break. ATOM has not been widely adopted and for the time being RSS will be the way Podcasts are delivered and indexed.

I don’t publicly display my Atom feed and in fact have not looked at the template in several years simply because RSS readers and syndication sites largely do not support it.

I look forward to the core podcasting changes and also look forward to updating my MT installation so it can be upgraded to MT4. MovableType.org

IBM sold its personal computing division to Chinese manufacturer Lenovo (previously called Legend) in 2005, divesting itself of a product line they could not make a profit from.  After this weeks announcement that the IBM brand will be dropped, the brand that arguably launched the whole PC more will be consigned to history.

With the power of the Chinese economy behind it, and a cadre of ex-Dell executives at the helm, Lenovo has defied many of the early predictions and increased market share in almost all markets after the acquisition.  It has managed to retain the global PC sales third place handed over to it by IBM, even though Acer now threatens that post its Gateway acquisition.

Asia already controls the majority of the manufacture of the worlds PC’s, while Dell still manufactures PC’s in the US, it is the only manufacturer to still do so, and laptops for the US come out of their Malaysian factory.  Now Asia is staking a credible claim for the Brand control and strategy of the PC market as well.

Dell and, to a lesser extent, HP need to get their support in order to enable them to maintain any clear lead on the up and coming Lenovo and Acer.  At the moment, the biggest flaw in both Lenovo and Acer’s strategy is that they lack a complete and credible product line.  While they both have some server products, neither of them are geared to service the enterprise needs of customer yet with a comprehensive server, storage and services package.  I would bet money that they are working on it though.  Servers are not that hard to put together now, and Dell has proven that its possible to build market share quickly in this area.  As for storage, both Dell and HP partner to get their top end centralised storage and this is a highly copy-able strategy.  There will be some waves in the market in the next couple of years.

Ever since CES in January I have been anticipating what I think is going to be the product of the year. After some delays to make sure the software was ready for release, the folks at HP have released the MediaSmart Home Server for resale at most major online sites with delivery scheduled to start later this month.

The wait will be well worth it, as the 500GB model is going to retail for $599.00 and the 1TB model will retail for $749. Each model comes with 4 drive bays and dependent on how you order it will depend on how many free drive bays there will be.

HP has added some cool features to their offering that will sit on top of the Windows Home Server operating system that will make the HP offering even more compelling.

The first is called "HP Photo Webshare" with an HP specific software add-on that comes with the MediaSmart Home Server. You will be able to share your photos from your MediaSmart Home server with relatives and friends. Whoever you give access to those pictures will be able to download and or order pictures online through Snapfish. A even more cool feature is that friends will be able to add pictures to your collection as well.

This will be the first time you will not need to upload your pictures to Flickr. All of your photos are now available via your Internet connection and your family can enjoy your pictures as you update them.

When I asked how ISPs are going to cope with people running a home server on their Internet connection, the HP folks believe that because the usage will be limited to family and friends there should be no issue with ISPs.

If your ISP blocks incoming Port 80 though, this and other features may be in danger of not working. In all likelihood those on Comcast and other services that have strict policies against running servers on their Internet connections will have a issue that Microsoft and HP will have to work through with the ISPs.

The second add service is Windows Media Connect where you will be able to have one instance of your music versus on multiple machines. That media would be available to all network attached devices like an XBox.

A exceptional cool add on is Server for iTunes which will allow the Windows Media Connect to integrate with iTunes. iTunes will recognize the media as a new device and the playlist etc will be available. Thus, all of your computers with iTunes on it will be able to access through the Media Smart Home Server the Server for iTunes interface.

The small form factor and stylish design will only require a power plug and a hard-wired connection to your home network. Each PC then will need to run the client software for the automated backups and rebuild capability that the Windows Home Server brings to the table.

HP has not locked the software down, thus any third party applications that are brought to market will be able to be installed and run on the operating system.

One thing for sure based on your email your all a bunch of geeks. I guess thats why you listen to the show. I talk a little about Ohana tonight you will not want to miss.

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Link to Extensive Show Notes

MySpace has been planning to replicate Facebook’s ad strategy, allowing advertisers to specify some of the facets of their intended market.  MySpace then uses the demographic, location and interests information it has on its users to target which users would benefit from the ads

According to the LA Times, they also plan to open this up to casual users as well.  If you have a small Ebay business, or have some other goods for sale, MySpace will allow you access to their ‘hyper-targeting’ system to advertise to a selection of users specified by a group of categories.  The payment is calculated by click-throughs so this will probably not be an alternative for single item sellers.

Other methods offer either a set fee for a period of advertising, or pay on sale terms.  This style is much more attractive for the user wishing to sell his fridge or car.  For the home business runner that sells multiples of a small number of items, this may be a viable alternative.  It will probably depend on how well the selection criteria match.  I have not seen any details of the pricing yet, this will determine how successful this strategy is.

Last week I installed the Blogrush applet here on the website, and for the past week I have been monitoring how much traffic the applet is bringing to the website.

After a week of utilization and careful examination of log files and statistics I saw no inbound traffic being generated, which made me do some investigating.

What I found is that some of the sites with links on the applet don’t appear to be running the Blogrush applet on their own pages, yet somehow their articles are being listed in the Blogrush applet on my blog.

The way it is supposed to work is for each page load you have you get a reciprocal listing on another site and vice versa. I am questioning how people are getting links in my applet with no apparent blogrush applet running on their own site.

For example, this link on Mashable which showed up on my GNC applet has no Blogrush applet loading. I assumed they were getting credits from their home page or other Mashable page. When I went to the Mashable home page their was no BlogRush Applet on that page either.

In fact I looked all over the Mashable website and I did not see the applet any place. Maybe I am missing it somewhere but how is Mashable getting a link in the Blogrush Applet if they are not running the Blogrush applet on their website? I could have missed the applet but I looked at a lot of pages.

While this is just one example, there are a lot more sites like this that I came across. Are the Blogrush folks allowing people to pay to have their articles listed? Are sites abusing the system somehow and racking up credits?

I can accept no inbound traffic -- that is part of the game -- but it looks awful fishy to me when I can’t find the applet on some participating websites that are getting listings on my own blog.

I have had a few of you reach out to me on meeting up in Vegas during Blog World Expo. I will be in Vegas from Wednesday morning till very late on Friday. 

Don’t hesitate to call me and arrange a meet up time 808–741–4923

Todd

Major League Baseball has decided to change their DRM provider.  This has been a big job for them, having to build a completely new system and transfer all their content across.  There is also the problem that any company in this situation faces, how to maintain the downloads of their existing customers.  The realistic options are to issue customers with new digital certificates that support the new system, or to keep the old system running for authentication of old content.  These solutions both have their own costs and difficulties, particularly when there is no prospective end date for supporting these videos.

MLB have decided to use a third method, just turn off the old service.  Considering that for a downloaded video to play it needs to authenticate back to MLB this action has blanked any video owned by MLB customers.  When the understandably irate users have complained they have been told the videos were a “one-time sale” and if they want their videos they need to re-purchase.

The arrogance is astounding.  I blogged last week about the US needing better consumer protection, there are few developed countries in the world that would let a company get away with this sort of reprehensible behavior.  My strategy is, that I buy NOTHING that depends on DRM to control my fair use, which includes HD-DVD and BluRay.  We can complain about DRM, but the solution is in our own hands.  As soon as consumers en-mass tell companies with our wallets where they can stick their DRM, the problem goes away.  My boycott has already started, and I am sure that stories like this will ensure I am not lonely.

Live Blogging Blog World Expo

08:44
-First thing huge number of Bloggers and No Power Strips
-Keynote area is going to be standing room only

08:54
-Matt from Wordpress is is rehashing how Wordpress got started I am not sure why a bunch of bloggers need to be told about the wordpress history are we not all bloggers and supposed to know this stuff.

-18 Wordpress Staff support a 100 million impressions across there hosted solutions I wonder how many servers it takes to run that.

09:14

-BlogWorldExpo needs a back channel lots of bloggers but I am not seeing tweets or many blog post.

-Matt says get your User Model before you get your business model While I do not agree a 100% their is a need to make sure that when you are launching a web property you need to think about the users.

-Political Blogger wanted to know how to monetize, the short answer start planning two years in advance. But a side discussion has broken out on the ethics and disclosure of those political blogging and the harm it could cause to the blogging space.

10:00
Attending the Corporate & CEO Blogging session

-Corporate number 1 fear is that the corporation will criticized and that they will loose control. They also are worried about the amount of time it is going to take away from their staff to support the blog

-Kodak Rep is talking about their corporate blog and one of the things that surprised me is that they post their customers comments largely un-edited.

-HP Policy on Corporate Blogging is that the each group or person within the company can have a HP blog but their has to be a marketing or way to interact with the various groups in the specific technical industry.

-The corporate blogging session is somewhat a sleeper

-Southwest Airlines bloggers say blogging is a huge commitment, but it has been a huge media bonus for them. They are using their bloggers as conduits into the press. The goal with the blogs were the way to reach their customers and have used the blogs as a way to get focus group feedback. They talk about their handling of the Mini-Skirt issue and say that they did not do a good job. But they said they learned some lessons from that event and

-Southwest, Moderates their comments but they don't allow personal attacks and or customer service issues. Most surprising that they also moderate all topic post. Thus they completely moderate the entire site. They have PR and Senior people looking at each post. Thus they are controlling the conversation in a big way.

From a personal perspective I cannot imagine controlling the conversation this way. While it looks like they are trying to be fair, I am not so sure that I would like having to go through corporate PR for each and every post. I wonder if this is really blogging this is more like PR controlled spin masters.

Show Floor

No Lunch visited with Vendors. The show floor has a fair number of vendors lost of ad companies. Think I made the folks at Kontarea made when I told then inline advertising is evil and users hate the pop ups piss people off

Lots of vendors and had some great discussions. There are a number of Affiliate marketers here as well along with a lot of vendors that are pushing services for bloggers.

13:30
Attending the Secrets of great video production and Vlogging

-Sorry this session is for beginners a true 100 level presentation. The Presenter is using some purple background death by power point that is boring and hard to read.

-Lots of information being put out in this session and the presenter is all over the place. Death by Power Point in this one.

-Why do presenters continue to make people think that they have to have Feedburner it really drives me crazy.

2:45
Monetization of Podcast

-Well I am not sure why I am sitting through this, but it is always nice to listen to other companies ideas.

-Be a Podcast Consultant thats the first thing that has been covered

-Jason VanOrden is pimping tele-seminars and webinars. Sounds like Network Marketing and something I would buy on late night TV

-Nice Mention with of Talkshoe/Blubrry partnership and also a nice mention from the folks at Podango very gracious

-Non Tangible rewards like swag and products to review.

-Some discussion about the need for sponsorship disclosure and through product mentions. The main point is you need to be honest and disclose. Do not be afraid to tell your audience you need to get paid for the art.

-A show got a six figure grant not a sponsorship from a pharma company.

-Recommendation from the panel to join a network and let those companies running networks to find sponsors for their podcast.

-One problem I am seeing with a discussion here, is that they think ad insertion and being able to rebuild the shows on the fly is king. But the problem is 95% of shows do not have a long tail. Thus 95% of the shows out there have no reason to use technology that rebuilds the show.

-Podcaster should have a Newsletter period.

-Steve Boyett claims his podcast does 40TB a month in traffic? Interesting

-John Havens says the landscape is changing and that things that were once free will soon no longer be free. But the problem with that is most people don't want to pay for anything and a generation has grown up not having had to pay for anything.

Sorry folks the schedule here in Vegas has been beyond busy, and their will not be a podcast today. I will be back with you on Tuesday for the normal scheduled show.

I had planned on doing a show but the Weblog Awards and continued discussions with potential business partners here have simply caused me to be out of time.

If my schedule permits I may put something out Saturday or Sunday.

Todd…

Ok folks here we go for day two of the Blog World Expo. Thus far my impressions is that even though the organizers had tracks for podcasting the folks exhibiting and in the sessions appear to be bloggers looking at podcasting.

The number of podcasters here are hard to say but with Libsyn, Podango having booths and of course me here from RawVoice I think we guessed that the number of actual podcasters number under 100.

I think though this show has huge possibilities.

08:45
-Change Anil Dash is gonna go before Leo Surprise Speaker

-He is talking about open standards and about giving people being able to control who gets access to read what one post in regimes where people write in fear of being prosecuted by the government. This discussion into a pitch for OpenID and SixApart being one of the companies playing in the space.

-I really hate it when organizers drop in different speakers and eat up time of the other speaker. I came to hear Leo not Anil. Anil and MovableType has largely not been listening to the community, thus why should he be given time to talk here.

-Hopefully, Anil will hang out long enough to chat with people about MT. I wonder if MT is here today because the wordpress folks got some big press yesterday. Once again they are not here supporting the community with a booth. Very sad blogging company not supporting a blogging conference.

09:00
-Leo Laporte on Stage and he is surprised by the number of normal people in the audience and he is happy to see aka mainstream people here

-He is not going to focus on podcasting, but instead all new media. He does say everyone should be doing all three mediums Bloggers need to Podcast/Videocast and Podcasters need to be Bloggers as well. This is a point I have been harping on for the past three years sadly most podcasters ignore the important aspects of the blogging portion of building their audience and following.
Leo Laporte Keynote

-Leo is moving 40-60TB a month and did $250,000 in advertising last year. I am feeling WAY good about how my show stakes up!

-The thing that has changed in the media is we are in a two way conversation. Unlike this conference which is a traditional conference the shows like podcamp etc are two way conversations. But I must say that some of the podcamps are morphing into death by PPT which suprised me at Podcamp Boston as some sessions we were talked to and their was not always a conversation.

- The thing that is changing though about the online new media via blogging and podcasting and I agree with Leo, its about the conversation, why do you think I spend 20 minutes on listener Voice mail and Email on my show. My audience is part of my community.

-Video aka TV stimulates our Monkey Mind aka stimulates the emotions.
-Blogging reaches the Cerbal Cortex makes your think
-Podcasting is intimate and your in their ear and talking to them.

-This is why Audio Podcasting is about engagement where the audience really engages and this is why podcast ROI advertising has been so over the top.

-Leo says we have hit the wall in numbers of Podcast listeners and as listeners grow podcasting space will grow. He says his biggest show has about a 120k listeners.

-In my position I know what the numbers are for a lot of podcast and I think Leo may be on to something here as many shows peak to a certain level and barely goal.

-To grow we all have networks and the goal is to be the center of your network and to do well you participate in other hubs. AKA communities. This is why TechPodcasts.com and our communities are thriving.

10:15
-Advanced Blogging Monetization Session

-Ted Murphy from PayPerPost is here give me a break run this guy off the stage get me some some eggs to throw at this guy. Can't wait for the question and answer.

- Neil Patel is up.. Ohh boy he is selling us some snake oil, says to sell text links and put them in your content, not on the sidebar. Disclosures??? He is also saying to sell memberships because people forget to cancel. He says run a false ad campaign and then approach their competitors to get them to sign? What? I don't want anything to do with this guy and if he in fact is working with the top 100 bloggers then we are in trouble

- Next sales oil salesman is Blogitive - they pay bloggers to write about press releases they pay $5.00 per post GAG!!! I am sitting here in disbelief.

- I think i will have a statement versus a question in that I am going to say that their is no way I would do business with any of these companies.

-Next up is Kontera with in text advertising and the pop up advertising which most of us really hate. He is claiming that some of the clicks are

- PayPerPost is up, there are actually 20+ bloggers in this room that raised their hand and said they are working for them. The say they have 85,000 bloggers and 11,000 advertisers. They say that they are now requiring disclosure.

- Blogitive does not require disclosure and but encourages it. Sorry you can't have it both ways. I guess if bloggers want to sell out, and not disclose that they are getting paid to play and that is extremely unethical.

-Now several panelist are trying to JUSTIFY some of the tactics they use. I have heard the word honest at least a 100 times.

- Neil Patel is saying you don't have to follow the rules. He says he will pay triple if people do not disclose

-The Blogitive CEO says it is not his companies responsibility to essentially set a bloggers ethics policy. They do not want to dictate whether a blogger discloses or not. I will say straight up that RawVoice will always have a full disclosure statement on ANY ad deal we do where podcasters and videocasters are compensated to do so would go against every ethical fiber in my body.

15:00
-Bloggers for Hire/Hiring Bloggers

-This session has a huge number of people that are blogging for a living. I am surprised but he did not break it down into whether those that are blogging have any other supporting income.

-They have stated that Blogger Networks don't pay well

-Short Job Description of a Blogger for hire- Writer, Videocaster, Livecaster, Podcaster

-35-55k a year Bloggers making salary similar to Corporate Communication Specialist which is about 40k a year which in my opinion is crap

- A company here no name on badge says her company has hired 10-15 bloggers that blog on their own daily, but they have to post articles about said company x times monthly no-disclosure and get paid $1500.00 each. This is simply amazing!

-Companies are spending a lot of money to get their Google Ranking up

15:00
Mark Cuban Keynote

- As many know mark started blogging because of injustice in a article but the response was that the newspaper could no longer just say anything.

-The response was the motivating factor in that he got feedback.

- Blog Comments has made him realize so far as the mavericks go how the fans were and their passion. I hope i got the quote right in regards to Maveric fans "I dont own the Dallas Mavericks, Dallas and Fort Worth does, I'm just the care taker"

- Mark says you have to brutally honest in your blogs. "I Agree"

- You have to stay brutally honest and resist the temptation to pander for audience numbers.

- You have to put in the time in blogging. If your not part of aggregation network you have to work much harder and do the work to stand out! Note: This is why Podcast Networks work and sometimes people have to realize they cannot do the work all by themselves

-He says honesty is number-one and if your not honest people are going to see straight through you in your blog writing.

-Mark says Blogging is turning into a corporate network and you have to understand where you fit in

- Then a decisions has to be made whether you are full time, if you do and your working for someone else you will loose ability to be 100% honest

-You have to resist being combative with those that attack you, the Internet is forever and the wars of today will not be important later.

-He thinks his using facebook and his blog helped drive votes for dancing with the stars but has no real proof as only one person knows what the votes totals where.

-Mark Cuban Google's job applicants but it is not so much that but you have to remember the Internet will define who you are in the future.

-He writes his own blogs because it's faster he does not have anyone write for him.

-One of his Goals when he starts a business he wants to know his business and industry better than anyone else.

-Question: How far are we away from having the disparity on blogs today on High Def Today? He says never and it because of simply the lack of bandwidth. But until we get 1gb to the home we will not have the disparity of content.

-He is going after YouTube now saying Google is hiding behind the DMCA

All finished folks

I have been searching for a media extender box to stream some of my content on my PC to the TV in my lounge-room.  This has been more difficult that I thought it would.  This does not seem to be a big enough market yet that all the available systems are being imported into Australia yet, which limits my selection.  The ones that are available here all seem to be limited in some way, generally either they are not wireless (a definite preference) or they only work with certain media types, Apple TV being the biggest example.

I already own an Xbox360, and as a media extender it works really well.  I can wirelessly stream photos and music to it very easily through the media center interface.  I was even streaming live and recorded TV to it before I bought a new TV with its own digital receiver.  When it comes to pushing video down it, it too is restricted to only certain media type, that being WMV video.  Since the decoding is done on the 360, the only solution I have found is to run an active recoding on the media center box, which takes up a lot of resources and does not have a fantastic output.

Recent news though suggests that Microsoft may finally be offering DivX support on the Xbox, which would solve most of my problems.  It would still leave a few gaps, mainly in quicktime and possible h.264 mp4 encoded video, but would cover almost all of the media I would like to stream.  It also means I can xVid encode some of the kids DVD’s into the media center and stream them across through the 360.  Ever since my daughter learned how to load the DVD player I seem to spend half my life cleaning fingerprints off discs, and the occasional food contamination off the DVD laser head.

I will hold off on my searching now and see whether this is rumour or fact.  If it is true I think it will be a huge boost for the xBox in the console battle.  Neither PS3 nor Wii offer the depth of media streaming that an Xbox with DivX would.  If they make it a “Vista only” option I will be upset.

It appears there was some serious mis-communications in regards to Michael Arrington’s appearance at Blogworld. One of the reasons I attend some of these events is that I come to hear specific people speak. The mix up in Michael and several others that did not show did not concern me but I was somewhat surprised and others were disappointed.

This was not the case with BlogWorld I went to meet bloggers, potential and existing podcasters and make business relationships. Overall I am very happy with the three main reasons I went to blogworld expo.

One thing that did disappoint me was some of the sessions that I attended were made up largely of those that had booths at the event. Surprisingly company reps that had booths there were sometimes on more than one panel.

While could not attend all sessions there was a fair amount of pitching going on those I did attend. I think Roxanne Darling said it best in a Twitter of mine while I was live blogging and providing commentary on Twitter.

She said at some conferences attendees would be holding up yellow Bull Shit cards that Attendees are given, when something crops up in a session that is obviously false or when we are being pitched versus taught something valuable.

From now on I am going to walk out of any conference that has sessions in which I get pitched and not taught actually taught something in relation to the session topic that my valuable time and dollars that I invest in the event expects.

So here is how I grade the event.

• Vendor/Exhibitor Area B+ for First Year

I was flabbergasted that companies like SixApart did not have a booth and the only time we saw major blogging company reps was when Anil Dash was given some time during Leo Laporte’s keynote where he talked about Open ID. How is the blogging world going to continue to support these companies if they do not show up at events where there end users are. Really sad and SixApart was not the only blogging company that was not there.

• Sessions C-

One of the questions I was asked by people sitting around me is who is this person, and in fact even I had to Google some of the panelist that were in podcasting sessions because quite frankly I have never heard of them before, and I thought I knew everyone in the podcasting space.

There also some to be a lot of emphasis on direct marketing type activities in the sessions I went to. Their were even what I consider highly un-ethical practices being promoted by panelist. While it was good to see what the mentality of these companies were it disturbed me the length some people will sell there souls to earn money.

• After Hour Event A-

The after hours event at the Hard Rock was great, food was great, drinks were over the top, the only bad thing was the music was to loud for a social event and the biggest comment I heard is what kind of music is this. 

My advice to anyone working in the Blogging and Podcasting Space in putting on events like this. Make the break out sessions a commercial free zone, make them interactive not death by power point and moderate pimping of ones product or events.

Simply by putting a session moderator in the room that can stop a session and chastise a company for pitching will stop the activity once and for all.

If I want to be sold your services or hear your elevator pitch I will find you on the show floor. A general introduction is cool but don't continuously sell me your product during the sessions it lowers the value of the conversation.

Finally: If you are a company and you are going to quote some supposed facts in a session that go against logical thinking of other experts in the field, be prepared to defend those comments in the blogging space. As soon as the audio archives of this event is available I am going to share with you some incredible statements made by company representatives, that I am going to expect them to back those comments up. But I want the Audio clips to get their statements quoted back accurately before I proceed with the hammering away at the commentary.

I have been experimenting with a new service called DailyMe.  It is a web/email news service that operates very similar to a current newspaper.  It has syndication arrangements with news sources that supply this type of news, like Associated Press and the International Herald Tribune.  They categorise the news and supply you feeds of top news that meets your categories.  They (eventually) pay for the syndicated feeds and the cost of distribution by the ads they place on the pages.

On the surface they show the due respect to the information they syndicate.  They attribute the source, and if required credit the author.  In the few AP articles I have cross checked they do no editorial on the articles, simply repost them.  They do not give any web links back to the originator, but that is normal for print, and probably covered in the terms of their contract.  A newspaper article would be expected to do no more, even if it appeared on their webpage as well as their print version.

What concerns me about the site is that they try and increase traffic outside of their subscription service through social tagging.  The following article sourced from USA Today show what I mean.  The article is properly attributed but contains no links to the USA Today originating article.  What is on the bottom though is an all too familiar social bookmarking applet, allowing readers to post the article to sites like Stumbleupon or Digg.  This seems to me like a line crossed, even if that line is a bit fuzzy.

The syndication arrangement allows you to use the content to produce revenue.  I feel there is a difference between publishing that content to subscribers and using that content as an advertisement for your site.  This is essentially what they are doing, a Digg post that links to DailyMe is attracting new users to their site.  The user is not being attracted by a feature of DailyMe, they are being attracted by a reprinted article.  This seems to be at least misrepresentation regardless of whether the article originator is happy about this or not.

It definitely goes beyond the spirit of social bookmarking.  The ideal is that the original source of the information should get the credit, and link love.  If a page, article or blog post references another site, but adds worthwhile commentary, analysis or perspective then that is a separate matter, however I do not agree with attempting to get traffic by promoting reprinted articles.

Last week I was able to play with one of the new Zune players, What surprised me was how awesome the 8gig model was, in addition to the new menu system. The screen although tiny was a much better experience than the small iPod’s

The Zune team has worked hard on the functionality of the new players and what excited me the most was that Podcasts are available from the main menu screen.

One thing for sure: the Zune team is to be congratulated for really making the new Zunes much more functional. Wireless synchronization is not something the iPod has and I like the idea of not being bound by wires to sync my media player.

If you have an original Zune you will be able to get the new operating system flashed onto your device. If you're a podcaster you will be able to submit your show to be listed in the Zune Marketplace.

Tonight while getting ready for my Podcast I removed a RSS feed from my regular reading list because of excessive advertising in the feed. I'm serious -- the stupid ad TechCrunch has after every article in the feed measures 612 pixels in height.

Nothing like being stupid and making me see it after every article. This is abusive and I refuse to read his feed with that crap in it.

Live Interview with Rob Greenlee he is head of the ZUNE Podcast Programing and Marketing Lead. Also listen to find out how you can win a 8GB Zune. With the Interview this is a Monster Show!

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Full Show Notes Here!