ambient

Earlier today, I wrote about my experiences with two online life insurance brokers. I actually had Mack’s post about a woman’s experience with Panera in mind as I wrote it.

Because both of the insurance brokers don’t come off as Web 2.0 type companies, I figured that neither of them would ever see what I wrote, and that was unfortunate. I would always want to know how my customers or prospects felt after they had an encounter with a service that I was offering.

I was pleasantly surprised when Sean Cheyney responded to my comments and explained more about his business and the way it works. Because I have no reason to do otherwise, I take his comments at face value and now the company he works for (AccuQuote) have a much higher standing in my opinion.

It takes a lot of time and energy to track down people who are talking about your company and even more integrity to engage them in conversation. If more companies did this, the concept of “PR Nightmares” would largely go away.

People want to talk to other people. That’s why social media works.

Our exchange can be read here.

TechMeme, of course, is abuzz with discussion about Amazon’s new SimpleDB. Don’t know if this is a huge announcement in its own right, but it definitely demonstrates Amazon’s commitment to taking distribution, its true business objective, to the next logical, though not obvious, step.

On a side note: Business Week has a good write-up of Google 101, the company’s efforts to teach web-scale computing to the next generation of computer scientists. Makes me wish I was still a college student, in Seattle. (Go public schools!)

And finally, a gestalt moment… I’m reading a book by German Theologian Ulrich Duchrow (whom I had the pleasure to meet in San Diego) called Property for People, Not for Profit: Alternatives to the Global Tyranny of Capital. There is this line on page 36 in regards to Hobbe’s analysis of power and society:

“Then Hobbes distinguishes natural power, such as special physical and mental abilities, and instrumental power, i.e. tools such as riches, reputation and good friends, with which one can win more power. From this he concludes ‘that the capacity of every man to get what he wants is opposed by the capacity of every other man’. In the struggle that results, power means finally the ability to command the services of other people.

Thus a power market develops, in which the power of a human being is regarded as a commodity: ‘The value, or worth of a man, is as of all other things, his price: that is to say, so much as would be given for the use of his power: and therefore is not absolute; but a thing dependant on the need and judgement of another’…”

So, I read that and realized: hey, I know that. It’s called cloud computing. And even a little MapReduce is thrown in there. We just did it with humans first. We call it society.

The new Facebook Ads network presents some new opportunities for marketers. Whether those opportunities translate into any real value for consumers / Facebook users remains to be seen.

I wanted to understand how it compares to PPC ad networks from the likes of Google, Yahoo, and MSN, so I created a small text ad for Boompaste. It was denied. So I created a new one.

The first, disapproved ad said “Meta is Betta. Get all your news in one place.”

I think Facebook rejected it because you have to use the title of your company, product, or service in the ad title and body. Annoying, but whatever. I guess they are shooting for high quality ads, which is good for users.

My second ad reads “Boompaste: Meta is Betta. Get all your news in one place. Boompaste aggregates the most popular stories on the web.”

It was approved, for two reasons, I believe:

1. I targeted 16-40 year olds the first time. This triggers additional editorial review. The second time I targeted 18-40 year olds and it went live almost immediately.
2. I used the name of the offering in the title, as mentioned above.

So the ad is live, and within 10 minutes I had about 196 impressions and 1 click (CTR of 0.51%). Gotta love PPC.

I’ll post more results later. So far, however, I like the experience. It’s clean and well done, if still immature.

In order for Facebook to really compete, marketers are going to need:

• Data exports: there is currently no way to export campaign / performance data from Facebook. It would be even better if this was available via API, depending on the delivery options for reports. If you could schedule email delivery of reports, that would be fine.
• Some sort of transparency. This is a critical area where I believe Facebook is lacking, and it’s tricky because it’s related to privacy. When you buy ads on search or even content networks, you can easily see it live. For example, if you bid high enough on “laptop,” you can query Google, etc. for that keyword and see your ad running in its live environment. You can also view competitors and their ad copy. More sophisticated marketers automate this process.
• Automated ad placement - Facebook needs to understand that marketers with large budgets work hard to create consistent campaigns across a variety of networks. Nobody wants to manually create thousands of ads on Facebook when you can automate that entire process on Google. Facebook does offer a valuable enough audience to target it as a network regardless, but velocity will suffer in comparison to other networks.

I’ll add more later. You may want to read Fred Wilson’s blog - he is conducting a similar experiment.

Boompaste is live.

I’ve been inspired by quite a few different takes on RSS and the best way for people to follow the buzz on the web.

Boompaste is designed to make it easy to do so. I’ve got a lot more planned for the site, and it’s barely finished started (with bugs and all) but I wanted to at least get it out there for my friends to see and use. I’m not heavily marketing it right now, because I’d like to see how it grows on its own.

If you think there are ways to make it better / more usable, just let me know.

Blogs aren’t that interesting anymore. Actually, it’s more accurate from a marketing perspective to say that blogs have become or are quickly becoming mainstream.

I feel rather lucky to have followed the earliest bloggers. I myself am an early adopter of the medium though none of my blogs were ever “successful” as success is commonly measured. They did, however, give me a chance to practice my writing and communicate with my friends and family through important times. For those reasons, I will likely always have a blog of some sort and for now it lives here, and this one isn’t going anywhere. I just don’t write here nearly as often as I used to on Sacking Rome.

Several trends are beginning to interest me. One, with the mainstreaming of blogs we are seeing new levels of text commodification. It’s almost as if the excitement around text itself, or at least prose, has fizzled out in favor of new mediums such as on demand video, games, music, and social networks.

There does appear, however, to be one new entrant on the text frontier. It’s what I call spasmodic, terse broadcasts of useless information that somehow matters a great deal. Twitter exemplifies this service. My description of this service is not to say that the medium itself is useless or not important. On the contrary, I was absolutely blown away by what the service represented - nothing short of the closest thing to global telepathy in a network-based emulation of spritual connectivity that we have right now. It is precisely the mundane nature of the messages on Twitter that makes it such a fascinating application.

But I digress. Back to the new mediums. (I use the Anglicized plural of medium here to distinguish the word from the loaded term “media” and to demonstrate fealty to McLuhan’s assertion that the “medium is the message.”)

Marshal McLuhan was more prophetic than he would have ever realized when he made his two most interesting, in my opinion, observations.

The first is that with the commodification / mainstreaming of text has come the next evolution of the human societal mind: post-text, or post-literacy, as he calls it. He says of this evolution

“we shall at once move into a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and superimposed co-existence.”

So, he’s not entirely optimistic about this transformation but the new post-literate culture that he envisioned can be seen coming to life in our video games, social networks like Facebook with its viral fetishes and, offline, a renewed resurgence in religious fundamentalism and xenophobia.

The second is really an offshot of the first and it is that the dominant medium of society (or even any individual) shapes the cognitive channels of the mind (whether collective or individual). For the last 500 years of Western culture, text has been the dominant medium.

It is mind-boggling how quickly that dominance is being dismantled by Generation-Y and the stragglers of Generation-X. It’s very possible that Generation-X will be the last American literate generation. That is not to say that future generations won’t be able to read and write. What it means is that that ability will no longer be the defining characteristic of intelligence, education, or incentivized behavior in society. Thus, new patterns of thought will emerge in the next 20 years that are utterly alien to all previous generations still alive.

Through a friend, my wife discovered Etsy. I’m sure it’s been around for awhile, but we just found it and we think it’s fantastic.

It lets artists / craftspeople market and sell their products without having to create their own website and figure out how to handle transactions, etc. The look and feel is clean and simple, and it’s a great way to start getting immediate traffic.

The site favors new users / listings so it enourages the prolific.

My wife, Kaoru, has had her own jewerly store online for a long but Etsy makes life so much easier that she is going to switch all of her operations over to Etsy. If you’re an artist, or you know one, there is tremendous potential here.

Mike Arrington writes about the ugly place that Silicon Valley has (once again) become now that stupid loads of venture capital have been flooding in for the last two years or so.

Ugliness / greed aside, this particular bubble (if it is one) is interesting. One could look at boom / bust cycles as a matter of exuberance vs. boredom. The last time it all came crashing down, I personally believe, is that people just got bored. Sure, all of the petfood.com stories turned the entire era into a joke but there was, as we must acknowledge, an incredible amount of innovation that occurred. Then all the money went away and the engineers got back to what they do best.

In the following years, innovative services like Flickr, del.icio.us, Wikipedia and, of course, Google were developed. Much of the innovation that we hear about today happened during the downturn years between 2001-2004. If this cycle is indeed nearing an end, I wonder how long it can possibly last. We are just on the cusp of what will be an entirely new generation of technology-driven innovation and services — everything from scalable, interesting virtual reality to major, disruptive (at last) in human-computer interfaces — and it makes me seriously doubt that this next downturn will last long at all.

We are also faced with a set of serious crises - namely, the effects of global climate change and disgusting food / farming practices - in the next 10-20 years. Say what you will, and I certainly have, of that capitalist optimism (some would say delusion) in the face of adversity there is something about crisis that brings out a lot of talent and enthusiasm for making things better.

Finally, back in the internet / tech realm - a lot of the core technologies we rely on today are getting a little long in the tooth. Consider email. Does anyone think that we will be messaging one another using the same tired old protocols and client interfaces 20 years from now? It’s past time for revolutionary thinking about how we do not just email but web servers, operating systems, HCI, and data management.

Here’s to the next downturn.

Serialization of the imagination to a non-volatile archive is the human species attempting to preserve itself from an evolutionary standpoint. This was the first leap in the process of evolution from a purely physical adaptation path to one that is virtual.

To the conscious mind, void is the greatest evil. Hard drive failure is catastrophic. Religion was the first attempt at a backup & recovery mechanism (called the afterlife) for the human consciousness.

As soon as consciousness was born - represented as the result of eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, that serpentine ontology - death became intolerable because it was known.

Death, as defined as a natural process of life, put nature at odds for the first time with a species that nature herself had nurtured (perhaps ‘forged’ is a better word). Only the conscious mind can perceive death and what it means. Thus the quest for immortality was born.

Since that time, the human future has always been a post-human future. For this reason, technology and the promises it offers will become the religion of the 21st century.

I may be a little slow on the uptake, but I just got why Pandora is such a powerful ad platform for advertisers.

Pandora has done a great job in making the application interactive. If it plays a song I don’t like, I give it a thumbs down; if I like it, thumbs up. That becomes quite a powerful semaphore in determining which ads to show because songs are delivered in the context of channels.

So, on my Pandora, I have a Tristania channel and an Iron & Wine channel. Both of those specific bands become mapped to larger symbolic channels in my own mind (eg. Tristania = dark fantastic adrenaline-pumping capital ‘R’ Romantic Byronic gothic symphony vs. Iron & Wine = chill guitar-strumming melancholy pensive relaxing americana).

My interaction in each of these spaces gets pumped in the form of very sophisticated demographics data to their advertisers. When Tristania is playing, I get Absolut Vodka, shrouded in dark shadows, and when it’s Iron & Wine, I get relaxing images of people taking long baths or going on vacation.

Brilliant, if you ask me.

I was speaking with some colleagues yesterday about the differences in adoption rates of advanced mobile technology in the U.S. vs. other industrialized nations, specifically Japan.

To me, it comes down to this: it’s not about data prices, network speed, hardware, or killer apps (or the lack thereof). It’s a mindset. In the U.S., no matter how many gadgets we attach to our phones, at the end of the day, we view phones as either just phones or as smaller computers.

In Japan, it’s different. First of all, a camera on a phone is not a camera. It’s a third eye. It’s not just used to take crappy pictures. It can be used as a bar code reader, a text translation tool (really!), a scanner, and whatever else somebody comes up with as an application for the firmware in the device. GPS? Yeah, they’ve had that, oh, for about five years now. Paying for stuff with your phone? At least three years, maybe four.

But it’s not about the apps in Japan either. Mobile techonology is perceived differently. It’s part of the social fabric.

The point is not that Japan comes up with better applications. It’s that the Japanese think of mobiles differently. It’s not a phone, or even a computer. It’s an interface, a fetish in the anthropological sense, in which the web becomes an ambient, context-aware, spirit guide through the world in which the Japanese people have constructed for themselves.

Until Americans move beyond the idea of technology, and especially computers, as just machines that we to whiche we tie ourselves the kind of paradigm-busting adoption (and the apps that follow that adoption) we see in Japan and elsewhere will never happen here. What we have now is just not inspiring to enough people.