Emre Sokullu is an entrepreneur I have had the opportunity to meet and work with over the last year or so.  He’s hard at work developing his company, Grou.ps, which I am backing.

Hakia is a search company hard at work to build the web’s "meaning based" search engine.  It’s a very ambitious goal and the impressive team at Hakia is moving boldly towards it.

I am very happy to see Emre is now a Search Evangelist working for Hakia.  I think the experience will be helpful for Grou.ps, as well.

Congratulations, Emre.

It’s very obvious to me that much of the challenges in managing one’s health have search as a solution.  Google knows this too.  Here’s a very interesting blog post about it.   They conclude:

At the end of the day, all these questions are about how you find the
information you need. They are deceptively simple. If they were about
restaurants, they would be trivial. But they are actually matters of
life and death in the extreme and quality of life in the common case.
In short, they matter profoundly.

At some point Google will unveil a health product.  If done right, it can double Google’s market cap.  I continue to watch.

Fred calls it Superdistribution, and I think it’s one of the most important points he’s ever made.

Superdistribution means turning every consumer into a distribution
partner. Every person who buys a record, a movie, reads a newspaper, a
book, every person who buys a Sonos or a Vespa becomes a retailer of
that item. It’s word of mouth marketing, referral marketing, but with
one important difference. The consumer is the retailer.
…
I want to turn everyone on to Arcade FIre. I want to them to sell 100
million Arcade Fire mp3s. And I want to get paid for doing my part.

Distributed commerce will and up being a natural result of the information revolution.  Traditional commercial models were built to overcome the limitations of time and space.  Since digital media is not really bound by these boundaries, I expect that Fred’s model of superdistribution will flourish there first.  In a way, we are getting glimpses of how this will work, with Napster, Bit Torrent, Skype and YouTube.  The behavioral requirements are being established, and legal and commercial models will follow.

And, this will be truly disruptive.

Following a fight between Turkish and Greek internet users posting insulting videos and comments, and a wave of reporting on this by the Turkish media, YouTube is now apparently blocked by Turkish ISPs through a court order.  While I find the entire back-and-forth by the nationalists in both countries in poor taste, I am shocked and disturbed by the decision of the courts.

Rumors abound in London that Viacom is looking to purchase LastFM (via Dealbreaker).  From a joy-of-use perspective, LastFM is the best thing to hit my browser since Kozmo.com, so I am happy for them, especially since the price tag is rumored to be $450m.  The latest subscriber numbers I’d read on LastFM were around 15m, and I think $30/user is nicely representative of the value LastFM delivers to its users.

Now what this means given Viacom is old media, I am not sure.  LastFM has generally played by the rules, and they have navigated the treacherous waters of digital music astutely.  So, I don’t expect Viacom to have large strategy changes in mind.

I wonder if this is primarily a grab at large new media properties following the MySpace and Facebook episodes, or Viacom has developed a strategy on how it’ll play at the edge.  As far as old media goes, Viacom’s MTV has always been closer to the edge, but outside of that, there’s really no evidence that Viacom’s moving in a progressive path.

I have been extremely busy with Mondus, so I have not been blogging much, but this post by Jon Udell is too important to pass up.  Udell’s post and the comments he receives provide a good discussion on the meme that is now very established:  the difficulty of attaining critical mass on social networks, especially in the US market. He summarizes the whole discussion with the following:

Increasingly I’ve begun to feel the same way about the various
social networks. How many networks can one person join? How many
different identities can one person sanely manage? How many different
tagging or photo-uploading or friending protocols can one person deal
with?

Recently Gary McGraw
echoed Ben Smith’s 1991 observation. “People keep asking me to join the
LinkedIn network,” he said, “but I’m already part of a network, it’s
called the Internet.”

This discussion is critical both for the internet industry, and, on a much smaller scale, me.  I am keenly following it.