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Wednesday, December 12, 2001
Earth to Yahoo: go intrude yourself 
| | On a scale of one to ten, Coleman said he thought the ads on Yahoo are a three in terms of intrusiveness, but he thinks they should be a six to make the model work. " Are we going to step on some people's toes? Yes. The free-for-all world is over. It is going to cause some pain." |
| | Coleman's model is called television, but that's not where Yahoo lives. Out here there are about ten zillion other places where we can find what Yahoo has. So let's just leave Yahoo to suffer its own damn pain. |
| | But let's read this CNET piece carefully. It's one of the best exposures I've ever seen of the fault line that runs up the middle of broadcast enterprises who believe that their customers — advertisers — have a "need" to inflict pain on their "consumers." What these outfits overlook — because "consumers" pay nothing for the media they consume and therefore have no influence — is that advertisers are getting smart about the fact that pain only gets attention. Not sales. |
| | They're also waking up to the fact that broadcast advertising has always been woefully inefficient, on top of all its other flaws. Advertisers come to Web companies like Yahoo to find better efficiency. For their part, the Yahoos of the world have always been in a good position to help introduce pleasurable relationships between advertisers and new customers. But doing that would take original thinking. It would take listening to clues. It would take siding with both users and advertisers. For a while there Yahoo tied. But they apparently associate those now-discredited efforts with dot-com failure in general, and are turning to the tried & true methods of a medium that bears only superficial resemblence to the Web. |
| | If they keep it up, it will kill them. |
Give Paul a high five and dump your Yahoo stock
| | It's Paul Boutin's 40th, and he's happy about it. Bravo, especially since he looks a lot younger (and not just because I'm a lot older). I figgered him for mid-30s, tops. Shows what I know. |
Middle old
| | What does it say about me that I am old enough to remember when Adam jocked at MTV but too old to know who Wil Wheaton really is (or was)? |
Neoblogism
| | David Weinberger has a fine new title for his blogrolling list: blogrolodex. I'm stealing it. |
| | By the way, after going on about how he's not a natural blogger and all that, Dr. Weinberger has quickly made his daily blog a must-read. |
| | To me the most deep and moving Cluetrain chapter was The Longing, which David wrote. It goes beyond the existential question by asking a very tough prepositional one: What is the Web for? In his blog today he asks the same of... blogs. Dig it. |
Rolling Gonzo
Way to slash, Steve
| | Here's what you can get today on XM satellite radio. Notable absences: NPR & PRI. Why? Not sure. I hope it's not because they have an exclusive agreement with Sirius, the competing satellite radio service not yet on the air (and not looking too hopeful, judging from its subminimal Web site). My guess is that it's because NPR's sells its programming to local public radio stations, which in turn sell it to listeners. With this setup, satellite radio might look like channel conflict to the network's current customers. |
| | But I'm not sure about that, either, since neither NPR nor PRI appear to sell exclusively to any station. Selling All Things Considered to XM or Sirius might be no different conceptually than selling the same program to KQED or WAMU. |
| | By the way, NPR streams over the Web, but that appears to serve mostly as a sampler for local stations. |
| | If anybody knows the story here, I'd like to hear it. I'd gladly be an XM customer if they'd add NPR and/or PRI. |
Speaking of jihads
Now just Die
| | Says here in the New York Times that the feds have raided UCLA, Duke, MIT and Purdue to bust the DrinkOrDie piracy ring. The story says the ring had its own Web site. Apparently www.drinkordie.com is off the pipe, so maybe that was the one. |
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