Emre Sokullu pointed me to an interesting post by Ari Paparo, the founder of Blink.  Blink was a VC-backed bookmarking service, which eventually failed.  He contemplates Blink’s decisions in light of del.icio.us‘s success.

We had more money, more users, a five year head start, and some really,
really smart people working on bookmarking in 1999. The bottom line is
that we simply didn’t get it right. Some simple innovations like using
tags instead of folders, making public the default, building better
discovery features, etc made the difference between being an also-ran
and a hot acquisition target.

Bambi Francisco wrote a thoughtful column (and a blog post) on a very intriguing topic:  Could (or, will) MySpace launch its own search tools to capitalize on the reported 8.2% search traffic it’s pushing Google’s way? (UPDATE: Mark Pincus doubts this figure.)  She goes on to suggest:

…on the Web, global communities based on shared interests are actually the newest forms of clustering audiences for advertisers.

And, of course, MySpace is the largest such collection of such communities.

I think she’s touching on one of the most under-performing promises of the internet – the true intention-based ad model.  Google comes the closest so far, with the PPC offer. MySpace, mined intelligently, and coupled with a good search engine, could be better.

I have been thinking quite a bit about online video lately, specifically YouTube.  Fred’s got a thoughtful post on the topic, where he argues:

YouTube wasn’t first and they didn’t beat the big guys to market.
But they did do three things, that in combination secured them a
leadership position that to me looks pretty unassailable.

First they launched with a really slick flash player that almost
everyone else has now copied. They bet on flash and they were right.
For video playback on the web, flash is the way to go.

Second, they provided immediate playback. When Google Video launched, I uploaded a video and had to wait for days to see it playback.  Needless to say, I’ve never uploaded another video to Google.

Third, and this is the biggie, they provided an easy way to embed
their flash player and a specific video in another web page. This too
has been copied by most everyone in the online video business. But if
you go back and look at YouTube’s traffic, the day they let people
embed their videos in MySpace pages is the day they took off and never
looked back.

I agree with Fred that the third one’s the one that made all the difference.  I am curious about the interdependencies that this creates, though.  The bulk of video content on MySpace resides on YouTube.  That makes MySpace vulnerable to the potential of YouTube erecting walls around its videos (not that I think that’s likely).  However, it is a vulnerability.  If I were MySpace, I’d like to try to copy the videos linked to on my domain to protect myself.

Baris has a good post on his view of the wireless world in the US.  He asserts:

1) The ultimate winners are the wireless carriers.

2) There will be a lot of VC money lost, especially money invested since 2005.

The power of the carrier is felt very acutely in Turkey, where there are three carriers, with one over 65% marketshare, and no number portability.  Trying to make money through wireless offerings get you two immediate partners, which take their cut straight from the top line:  the wireless carrier and the government (through very high taxes).  This structure is a constant barrier to Turkish wireless services innovation.

With the recent "Web2.0 Penetrating the Enterprise" bandwagon, I suspect we’ll start seeing much discussion on what qualifies for the category.

Companies like SelectMinds, or Ross Mayfield‘s SocialText have been long applying, successfully, many Web2.0 tenets in their enterprise work. What I am afraid of is the apparent need, in blogsphere, or the tech press, to create neat matrices and tables to try to categorize and impose a taxonomy to this phenomenon.  See this chart (from Jim Cuene) to see what I mean.

Isn’t that exactly what we’ve learned not to attempt over the last couple of years?

USA Today blogged that Google’s Marissa Mayer has hinted about a health-related offering from Google.

…I asked her why Google doesn’t have more vertical offerings, like for
health. Those tend to give users better results in a specific area.
…
Marissa then said, "Health is an interesting one — keep your eye out
for that next week." But that was about it. Considering that hint,
though, an announcement of a Google Health site seems a good bet.

It’s been almost a year since my June 15, 2005 post about the need for a strong healthcare offering on the web.  I am excited by Google’s move, if it’s true.

In response to the recent announcement by Facebook that it is entering the enterprise world, Joseph O’Connell has a  good post arguing that  corporate  social networking has in fact been around for a while, enabled by solution providers like SelectMinds.

The challenge to this strategy (if, indeed, it is Facebook’s strategy) is that many corporate social networks already exist.
SelectMinds has been developing online communities and the software
that powers them for over five years to help leading companies in the
consulting, accounting, investment banking, and legal industries where
the value of networking amongst knowledge workers is vital. While we
have several great features that help people connect, including "friend
of a friend" technology made famous by Friendster et. al., SelectMinds
celebrates the value in fostering relationship-building in person as
well as online.

The strife between sales and the other parts of an organization is a truism.  Being mostly on the sales side of the companies I have been with, I can relate to this parody (via Paul Kedrosky).

[Instructions: Make sure you read it in character. (Jack Nicholson as VP Sales and Tom Cruise as VP Finance in "A Few Good Men").]

Sales Guy: "You want answers?"

Finance Guy: "I think we are entitled to them!"

Sales Guy: "You want answers?!"

Finance Guy: "I want the truth!"

Sales
Guy: "You can’t handle the truth!!!" (continuing): "Son, we live in a
world that requires revenue. And that revenue must be brought in by
people with elite skills. Who’s going to find it? You? You, Mr.
Finance? We have a greater responsibility than you can possibly fathom.
You scoff at sales divisions and you curse our lucrative incentives.
You have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what we know:
that while the cost of business results are excessive, it brings in
revenue. And my very existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to
you, drives REVENUE! You don’t want to know the truth because deep down
in places you don’t talk about at staff meetings … you want me on
that call. You NEED me on that call!

We use words like Volume
Rebates, Co-op , discounts, buy backs, cost adjustments, purchase
agreements. We use these words as the backbone of a life spent
negotiating something. You use them as a punch line! I have neither the
time nor inclination to explain myself to people who rise and sleep
under the very blanket of revenue I provide and then question the
manner in which I provide it. I would rather you just said "thank you"
and went on your way. Otherwise I suggest you pick up a phone and make
some sales calls. Either way, I don’t give a damn what you think you’re
entitled to!"

Finance Guy: "Did you expense the lap dances?"

Sales Guy: "I did the job I was hired to do."

Finance Guy: "Did you expense the lap dances?"

Sales Guy: "You’re goddamn right I did!"

UPDATE: This hilarious prank was in Paul’s comments.  If you like the movie, check it out.

Tom Evslin has a post about why he thinks one great programmer is wort 50 good ones.  He primarily defends his point with the lack of interfaces creating greater productivity:

If one person can do a whole project,
there is a whole layer of complexity, documented interfaces, and
misunderstandings that is eliminated compared to having two or more
people working on the project. Meetings don’t have to happen; schedules don’t have to be synched; joint-testing and finger pointing over faults doesn’t happen. No personality conflicts, either. The actual amount of work required to do the project is much less when it is being done by one person. Also management time is reduced.
…
But there is more to the productivity gap than just avoiding multiperson projects, as important as that avoidance is. A great programmer, working alone, is usually orders of magnitude faster than a good programmer also working alone.

His point is valid.  However, I think the greatest benefit of a superstar is her inspirational quality.  Can you imagine what it must have been for the rest of the Bulls to play with Jordan?  How can anyone resist being inspired by genius?  Remember Salieri’s awe at his rival Mozart in the film, Amadeus.

If you still have any doubt that you’ll hear that question soon from your <15 year-old child, here’s a piece of news for you.

In early April, "Crazy", a digital-only release by Gnarls Barkley, hit the #1 spot in the UK charts.  This is based entirely on downloads.  There is no physical release of this song. (You can watch the "Crazy" video here.)

Fred has posted about their incredible popularity, driven primarily by MySpace. He concludes:

That’s never happened before.  But it will again, and again, and again.

The cool thing about the story is that, unlike the pre-packaged formula pop that has invaded the music scene (think Ashlee Simpson – who the hell decided that she had to be famous??), Gnarls Barkley’s success comes through immense filtering.  You can immediately hear it in its quality, pointed out by Bob Lefsetz.

Those who are worried about the digital distribution’s negative impact on music should be comforted that digital distribution helps democratization, which helps good music to rise to the top.