new avenues in spam

well damn, this is a new approach, an invite to join a yahoo group... should i?

James Hong: Reinventing HOTorNOT, Part I

James Hong: Reinventing HOTorNOT, Part I

Technorati Profile

Big Thanks!

On behalf of the Mavens: Cara, Carley and Laryn, thanks for joining us last week to consume some of the Fantinel Prosecco and Vertigo (Duggan’s Averna creation).

And special thanks to jeff meisel of Domaine Select for providing us with the good stuff…

Reworking The Ad Mix

The average chief marketing officer has a notoriously short tenure, so the lofty reputation of Wachovia CMO Jim Garrity is perhaps best evidenced by how neatly the word "longstanding" fits in front of his title.Garrity is a prototypically steady senior-level executive, tanned and low-key. He speaks softly, in sentences studded with the jargon of both the marketing and tech worlds. (His first job was at IBM (IBM ).) Garrity, who oversees a nine-figure marketing budget, sometimes sounds like a man who never met a data point he didn't like. This is because he is trying to invent a system that quantifies return on investment to better justify and target Wachovia's ad spending. Garrity and those like him are quietly reworking the advertising mix of the American corporation.Garrity is a careful man in a job that requires a tightrope walk through a windstorm. (Most of us can afford to miss goals by a percentage point or two; if a CMO does, it can wreck a company's year.) As such, he does not go into much detail about how Wachovia rigorously tests its marketing spending. He does say his findings have led the company to blend old and new approaches. He loves Web advertising for its "demonstrable" results but says traditional plays, such as Wachovia's pro golf event and conferences, are also star performers. (Wachovia's investment banking division has significantly cut ad spending in favor of events.) He has made no secret of his feeling that broadcast TV is "becoming less valuable," saying as much at a recent panel I moderated. That he was seated next to a top NBC (GE )executive added a tinge of tension to the proceedings.MONEY IS SEXY. BANKS AREN'T. People don't buttonhole you at cocktail parties to wax poetic about their financial institution. And, as Garrity points out, consumers have a hard time differentiating one bank from another. (How many distinctive bank branch offices have you seen?) But despite the low-valence bond between customers and banks, Garrity notes, it's still hard to pry people away from established banking relationships. And bank advertising does not easily lend itself to crazed creative approaches of the sort that Burger King (BKC ) has undertaken in order to lodge a brand in consumers' craniums. Still, Wachovia has done well for itself via a years-long series of acquisitions, and its stock price is up over 20% in the past year. But that strategy has been maxed out, says Garrity. The company will now have to win new customers one at a time. This will put Garrity's marketing skills, and data, to the test. Luckily, the banking business is both personal and data-intensive: Wachovia has direct relationships with its roughly 15 million household and business customers; compare this with a beer company, which reaches customers only through distributors.Garrity isn't trashing the old playbook yet. Wachovia still spends plenty on broadcast TV--$53.8 million last year, according to TNS Media Intelligence, or just under 30% of its total spending. (Garrity's model suggests that sports and news are the best ways to reach Wachovia's audience on television.) But it has cut back: in 2004, Wachovia spent $66.8 million, or 37% of its budget, on broadcast. Garrity says that spending will drop again in 2006. His company's research, like any that churns through reams of data from various inputs, is treated as a work in progress. "If we had wholesale bet the ranch" on its findings this year, he says, "we would have allocated 40% [of the budget] significantly differently." Nevertheless, Wachovia's choices offer an early snapshot of the next-generation mass-marketing budget: less broadcast TV, with that spending tightly focused; more cable TV, which is better at targeting niche audiences; and much more online advertising. Even if a bunch of Jim Garritys were running things, changes in how Big Business spends its ad dollars wouldn't come fast. But if just a few follow Garrity's lead, change will come nonetheless.For Jon Fine's blog on media and advertising, go to www.businessweek.com/innovate/FineOnMediaBy Jon Fine

Reworking The Ad Mix

Blogged with Flock

Marissa Mayer on Googley Lessons

Marissa Mayer, at Web 2.0 today, shared insights into some lessons Google has learned in trying to serve users. The take-away is that Speed is just about the most important concern of users---more than the ability to get a longer list of results, and more valuable than highly interactive ajax features. And they didn't learn that from asking users, just the opposite. The ideal number of results on the first page was an area where self-reported user interests were at odds with their ultimate desires. Though they did want more results, they weren't willing to pay the price for the trade, the extra time in receiving and reviewing the data. In experiments, each run for about 8 weeks, results pages with 30 (rather than 10) results lowered search traffic (and proportionally ad revenues) by 20 percent.

John Battelle's Searchblog

Blogged with Flock

Untitled

Behind the random silliness of YouTube videos and the juvenile frivolity of MySpace Web sites lies a powerful idea: Everyday people are using technology to gain control of the media and change the world.At least that's what a new breed of Internet technologists and entrepreneurs want us to believe. The new Internet boom commonly referred to as Web 2.0 is really an exercise in digital democracy.Dubbed Digital Utopians by some, and Web 2.0 innovators by others, this latest wave of tech gurus champion community over commerce, sharing ideas over sharing profits. By using Web sites that stress group thinking and sharing, these Internet idealists want to topple the power silos of Hollywood, Washington, Wall Street and even Silicon Valley. And like countless populists throughout history, they hope to disperse power and control, an idea that delights many and horrifies others.Tim O'Reilly is the founder and chief executive of O'Reilly Media in Sebastopol, a tech publisher and event organizer who hung a name on the movement with his Web 2.0 Conference, which will be held this year starting Tuesday in San Francisco. In his manifesto on the movement last fall, O'Reilly wrote glowingly about "the wisdom of crowds" and the "architecture of participation."Winners on the Internet "have embraced the power of the web to harness collective intelligence," O'Reilly wrote, populating "a world in which 'the former audience,' not a few people in a back room, decides what's important."Indeed, millions of people each month visit social networking destinations like MySpace, online encyclopedias like Wikipedia and video-sharing sites like YouTube. Political groups like MoveOn.org have galvanized grassroots organizing. News aggregators like Digg.com have given editing power to readers. Combined, these Web sites have changed the landscape of countless industries and some have become worth billions.They have also tapped a nerve, resonating with people who feel powerless to affect the major power structures.The core of the Web 2.0 movement resurrects an age-old debate about governance and democracy, one that was argued by political philosophers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Alexis de Tocqueville: Are the benefits of democracy -- taking advantage of what Web 2.0 proponents call the wisdom of the crowds -- worth risking the dark side of mob rule?Chris Messina thinks so. Messina, 26, is a blogger, activist and "open-source evangelist," a charismatic geek spreading the notion of digital democracy."There is more potential today for individuals to change their destiny than there's been in ages," Messina said. "We need to get back to the idea that anyone can dream big and make it happen."Like any popular movement, it also has its critics.Andrew Keen warns against the dangers of embracing technology's level playing field. Keen, 46, a former professor and philosopher turned tech entrepreneur, published a tract this year, "Web 2.0 Is Reminiscent of Marx," and is working on a book lambasting "The Cult of the Amateur."If people are absorbed with content created by fellow amateurs, Keen argues, will they ever know greatness? If bloggers disrupt mass media, will they follow journalistic rules of fairness? Can an army of amateur journalists adequately replace corporate news-gathering? Will sophomoric YouTube videos take the place of great films?Keen dismisses what he calls the "militant and absurd" buzzwords of Web 2.0: Empowering citizen media, radically democratize, smash elitism, content redistribution, authentic community.Yet those buzzwords pop up nearly everywhere. Google's deal to buy video startup YouTube for $1.65 billion provides a glimpse at the potential future of media, one in which programs are made not by polished production companies but by anyone with a low-cost camcorder. In this world, programming decisions rest with what Web 2.0 calls the community and what critics deride as the mob instead of with cadres of networking executives.Rather than turning to the mass media, people can get their information from blogs, podcasts and even MySpace pages. Rather than dialing up a radio station churning out a corporate playlist, anyone can put his idiosyncratic broadcasts online at sites like Mercora and Lala.com."Everything is getting flatter," said Ori Brafman of San Francisco, an entrepreneur and author. "The amateurization is a wonderful thing."Brafman is co-author of "The Starfish and the Spider," a book about "the unstoppable power of leaderless organizations." Spiders, in the title metaphor, are crippled or dead when they lose a limb; starfish, on the other hand, can grow new arms. In the book, Wikipedia -- a Web site on which users, not experts, write and edit a free online encyclopedia -- is identified as a classic starfish organization."When you put people in this kind of an open system, it brings out a different side of people," Brafman says. "They know the system is based on trust and shared responsibility. People step up to the bat and perform."Not exactly, says Nicholas Carr, an author and blogger who joins Keen's contrarian view of Web 2.0.Carr calls Wikipedia "at once a major achievement and a mediocre piece of work.""Does something like Wikipedia change the economics of producing an encyclopedia (written by experts)? As soon as you have a mediocre product that's free, is that going to destroy the possibility of having a superior product that costs something?" he asks.Idealism in technologyThe notion of a Digital Utopia has been around since the early days of computing. Many of the industry's pioneers saw their machines as tools that could make life easier and unite humanity.Some of the earliest successes on the Internet have an almost direct lineage to the liberal politics of the 1960s anti-war and civil rights movements. Former Merry Prankster Stewart Brand was the brains behind the Well, an early online community that took its name in part from his Whole Earth Review. New York Times technology reporter John Markoff argues in his book, "What the Dormouse Said," that the '60s counterculture played a pivotal role in shaping the personal computing industry.Underpinning the technology movement has always been a sense of community. "Take the Summer of Love," said Brewster Kahle, 45, founder of the Internet Archive in San Francisco, a digital archiving and storage site. "A tradition was started then of recording concerts of those bands and passing the tapes around. But they had a firm rule that you couldn't make any money. If you didn't make any money at all, it was OK to share the love."That tradition has migrated to the online world, Kahle said, not just to his site but to a renewed resistance to copyright and a love of sharing information, whether it is music or knowledge.The Utopian lifeToday's Digital Utopian takes many forms, from the aging '60s hippie to the tech-savvy youthful idealist. They share little physically, but most everything mentally.The Utopians attend loosely organized gatherings, often called un-conferences, where there is no agenda other than participation. Messina and his girlfriend, Tara Hunt, have spearheaded a series of events known as BarCamp, where ad-hoc groups bring sleeping bags and food to an office that a company has donated for the occasion, and then stay up late engaging in freewheeling roundtable discussions about how to use the latest technological innovations. BarCamp events have been held around the world; when one is arranged, it's posted online at www.barcamp.org, and anyone can show up."Most of these un-conference things are a big experiment," Messina said at WineCamp, at which geeks gathered in a Calaveras County vineyard to figure out ways they could use technology to help nonprofit groups. "It's up to each one of us to make it interesting."Utopians' favored reading material includes "The Long Tail," in which Wired editor Chris Anderson contends the Internet makes it possible to no longer rely on hits (most notably movies, books and music) but to make big bucks by selling niche products along the tail of the demand curve."People are taking advantage of all of these powerful forces," he said. "The world is changing."The modern Digital Utopian uses the Internet constantly and extensively to share information and ideas at social networking sites and communities.It all adds up to a shared experience, and a generally shared philosophy centered on technology and idealism. And where there is a point of view, a counterpoint is sure to emerge.The critics and the co-optersWeb 2.0 has inspired its share of critics, social commentators who wonder if something valuable may get lost in the online hubbub.Can the community produce a collaborative decision? Not usually, Keen says, contending that often a great leader is needed to take charge, whether it's Bismarck uniting Germany or Steve Jobs developing the iPod. These things don't happen by putting every decision up for a vote, like a California ballot measure.Keen, who spurred the debate by coining the phrase Digital Utopian, runs a curmudgeonly blog, The Great Seduction, on the intersection of technology, media and culture, at andrewkeen.typepad.com.Oddly enough, the Utopians may become victims of their own success. While they advocate a world in which people can share content without concern for profit, much of what they are creating is becoming a tool of the corporate culture they decry.MySpace, the most popular social networking site, is owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. YouTube, which was built so that people could share their videos with each other, has been bought by Google. And even though Google's motto is "Don't be evil," it is a publicly traded company with a fiduciary duty to make money.O'Reilly says this is the natural order of things.He said the term came from the wreckage of the dot-coms several years ago. Even though many businesses folded, the Internet continued to grow, mature and become more indispensable.Yet while people, perhaps reacting to the greed that fueled the IPOs of the dot-com years, saw in Web 2.0 a chance to create a new collectivism, O'Reilly said, "I don't see it that way at all."Web 2.0, he says, is about business.He says many tech movements start out with similar idealism, only to give way to capitalism. For instance, O'Reilly says, Napster introduced file sharing, but now iTunes has people comfortable with paying for music online."You do a barn raising at a particular stage of society," he said, "and then the developers come in. ... It always happens that way."E-mail Dan Fost at dfost@sfchronicle.com.

DIGITAL UTOPIA / A new breed of technologists envisions a democratic world improved by the Internet

Blogged with Flock

i thought this was interesting. i've been to second life a couple times and i've been to habbo hotel too. i found both interfaces to be too clumsy to navigate effectively and ultimately wasn't interested. i'm sure we'll look back at this and stake it out as a fork in the road down which many of the online networks ultimately travel, but in as much as craigslist is still relevant, i often wonder if simplicity still has a place for a huge swath of the population...

NEW YORK (Fortune)—Second Life, the three-dimensional virtual world, has been getting tons of press lately. In the software, which anyone can download for free, you travel around as an “avatar” representing yourself (with a different name), through a huge range of spaces – beautiful natural environments, shopping malls, museums, clubs, homes, apartments and cities. So far, it’s signed up 1.3 million members.

It’s not a game, it’s just a place you go to do whatever you want to do. It has been on the cover of Business Week, on the front page of the New York Times Escapes section and in the coverage of Reuters, which has now assigned a reporter to operate full-time inside Second Life. The Reuters reporter, Adam Pasnick, told CNET that his assignment has caused so many waves he’s been getting interview requests from Poland, Colombia, Brazil and New Zealand.

W Hotels has built a prototype of its new Aloft hotel brand inside Second Life. It was featured in the Times, among many other articles. W President Ross Klein told me that while the company originally just wanted to test out concepts, the PR value from all the stories written about Aloft in Second Life has given the company a “hundred-fold” return on its investment, just in positive PR. Even IBM (Charts) CEO Sam Palmisano can now be seen lurking around Second Life.

Yet Second Life may be more important, longterm, than even this much publicity would suggest. That’s because what it really may represent is an alternative vision for how to interact with information and communicate over the Internet.

Yes it’s cartoony, but one of the great things about Second LIfe is that whenever you are doing anything, you can see the other people who are nearby as well. This brings a dimension of social life – so elemental to how we live our lives offline – to the Internet in a way that up to now the Web has not. In Second Life everything you do is done in a social space, though you can get privacy if you want.

So far Second Life is way too hard to use. The people who do best there are still techie types. It requires a fairly powerful computer. You have to download a special software application to use it. It can’t be used in many corporate offices (like mine at Time Inc., for instance).

But Second Life is important as much for what it represents as for what it concretely offers today. Looking at Second Life makes me realize just how much the Web, wonderful and useful as it is, still mimics a print model.

We are all lathered up about the success of News Corp.’s (Charts) MySpace. But the social networks of the future will probably be much more than merely a bunch of Web-site-like collections of data, as MySpace is today. MySpace beat Friendster, the previous champion social networking site, by allowing its members much more freedom in how they created their pages.

Second Life goes much further. It took a radical approach to design from the beginning. It offered itself as a mere platform for the creations of its occupants. Essentially everything seen inside the software today was created by its users.

All that the company that operates Second Life, Linden Lab, sells is server time and network capacity. The more real estate you own, the more you pay. It costs nothing to enter, so you can go in and explore all you want. It’s often worth it to own real estate, because you can make real money by renting it out or developing it to resell.

Users pay in Linden dollars, which can be converted to real dollars. Though Second Life has established codes of behavior, and does enforce them, restrictions are minimal. Second Life really is the creation of its residents.

One of the more intriguing aspects of Second Life is that it includes links to content outside. If you go, for instance, to the island owned by Sony (Charts), you can enter a Christina Aguilera room, and watch her latest video (while your avatar sits in an easy chair, of course). There’s no reason why some version of a 3D world couldn’t eventually offer as much functionality as we get today on the Web, and more. An interesting corrolary – searching with Google (Charts) might be harder. It’s completely text-based.

Every day more big companies turn their attention to this new medium, realizing that it really represents something new. I’m now convinced that one day Second Life or something related to it will become a Google/Yahoo/MySpace-scale company.

Maybe Second Life will grow organically to become that company. Or an existing giant striving to stay relevant might buy it. Or maybe somebody will build a different, even better virtual world.

But we’re seeing something new and important. If you want to stay abreast of what’s happening in tech, you need to get inside Second Life. If you run into David Liveoak, don’t hesitate to say hello.