Friday, I began noticing a spike in my site stats.  Looking at the referrers, I realized that I was getting a lof of hits through a link in FazlaMesai.net, a Turkish community of web developers, similar to slashdot.  Specifically, it was a post related to my Israel Envy blog entry.

So, SortiPreneur got FMd (akin to "slashdotted") and it’s now feeling the FazlaMesai effect.

Thanks, Emre, for the reference.

So, Disney’s done it first:

In an effort to extend its broadcast economic model to the Internet, the  Walt Disney Company
said today that it would offer some of its most popular ABC television
shows free on its Web sites but with commercials that cannot be
eliminated.

Fred Wilson and Jeff Jarvis are excited about the move.  Both write extensively on the future of media. Fred is impressed that it’s big media that’s stepping forward.

This is big, big, big.

It means they get The Future of Media.
They are freeing their content and monetizing it on the web. It looks
like they are microchunking it, but it’s not totally clear.  And I am
not sure about the syndication part.  But it doesn’t really matter.
They get it, they are leading they way.

Jeff comments on what he think this means for the economics of media:

And that leads to the real danger to media competitors: Ad Age reported
last week that the ad industry is “ousting broadcast TV as its central
organizing principle.” That is seismic.

…

What this really means: TV is grabbing a share of online advertising by redefining TV as both broadcast and broadband.

There are detractors, too.  Umair Haque, a prolific thinker on new media strategy feels Disney’s only taking one half of the required action, "unbundling without rebundling", and that it’s going to be destructive.

The point: unbundling media is only half the game: the value creation
half. And it’s exactly and totally the wrong half from a strategic
point of view.

Rebundling is where value capture will
happen – at communities, reconstructors, markets, networks – that
direct people’s attention to individualized ‘casts. This is where
branding will be reborn – and where advertising is already being
disrupted, ripped apart, and reborn (viz, Google, PPC, pay per call,
etc)

….

By focusing on unbundling without rebundling Disney is getting edge strategy exactly wrong. They are handing market power to folks like YouTube and MySpace – literally just forking over market power.

From a consumer’s standpoint, I find Disney’s move to be bold and courageous.  My view is more in line with Fred and Jeff.  It’s difficult to foresee what exactly happens when you microchunk content and release to the general population.  One result may be that (as Umair proclaims) that you get p2p networks flooded with Desperate Housewives episodes sans ads.  The other may be that you get MySpace-like communities created around TV shows, with strong social components.  The former scenario would hurt Disney, the latter would help.  I don’t think we know how it will play out.  At the end, Disney will benefit, even if it costs them some short-term revenue, because they will find out what happens, first.

UPDATE: Fred Wilson replays the above-constructed conversation from his prespective, in his post today.

The Yonja team has launched 7inci.  Emre Baran announced its launch today:

It provides daily articles about hidden gems of Istanbul.  These places vary from restaurants to shops, to music venues to artistic events.

It’s similar to Daily Candy in that there’s no "pay for play".  It should be a refreshing breakout from the spam lot flying around in Istanbul these days.

When Tom Evslin says "huge", I listen.  He’s got an exciting prediction that:

Within four years, possibly three, free WiFi will be available on the streets of every American city. Building
services, applications, and devices to take advantage of this
capability will be the mainspring of Bubble 3.0 and may be the saving
grace for American competitiveness.

Then, he intelligently points out that this will have implications for local search. I remember reading in John Battelle’s The Search, close to 25% of all search is local in nature.  With ubiquitous WiFi, we will have computer-assisted solutions to our remaining "search/find" problems.  This should be a very disruptive wave.
 

According to American Technology Research (backed by comScore data and via Om Malik), MySpace is now the second highest trafficked website, after Yahoo! (in page views).  It had 37 million unique visitors in February 2006, up fivefold from a year ago.  These are incredible numbers.  Om suggests that they may be the fastest growing property in internet history.

Mind you, this is not a rising tide story.  Much of this traffic came at the expense of incumbents like MSN and AOL.

MySpace is not the only high-growth story.  Google grew at 21%, and considering how big it is, it’s impressive.  Other winners were Blogger (a Google property), Citysearch and Wikipedia.

Do you remember the Yahoo! ads on TV?  How about Expedia’s TV ads?  The battle between Monster and HotJobs on SuperBowl circa 2000?…  The hidden (or perhaps not so hidden) strength of the high-growth properties of 2006 is that they do not depend on constant pull by advertising.  It’s the property’s natural draw that keeps them growing.

This huge advantage is what sets properties with strong social components apart, and will ensure their success.

All of a sudden, as Robert Young (on Om’s blog) points out:

…Rupert Murdoch’s acquisition of MySpace is now widely-recognized as such a brilliant strategic move…

I recently read When Genius Failed, so I found it interesting that Ed Sim compares the current hubris at Google to what was going on at Long Term Capital Management in 1998.

I was having lunch with a friend recently who was telling me about some
of his dealings with Google over the last year.  As an ex-Wall Street
guy, it struck him that some of the meetings he had with Google were
like the ones he had at Long Term Capital years ago.  Even when LTC was
about to crater, he remembers going to their offices, being sequestered
into an off-campus conference room, and not being able to get any
information out of them to even help bail them out.  In addition,
people would show up and leave during the meeting, take notes, and not
even introduce themselves.  Well, it turns out that his meetings with
Google over the last year were pretty similar.
…
There are other parallels-Google has an appetite for hiring PhDs. is
driven by an incredible proprietary algorithm, and is by far the best
web company on the street and performing like a rock star.  Like LTC,
the bigger and bigger Google gets, the harder it will be for them to
drive significant percentage based growth.  In addition, the culture,
since it is one driven by engineers, can also be driven by a NIH or not
invented here syndrome.  Ultimately, since history always does repeat
itself, I hope that Google understands that self-confidence is
imperative but hubris and arrogance can kill.

Auren has a provocative post on the digital footprint one creates while communicating:  your blog posts, emails, IMs, etc.  He contends:

Question: with the thousands of
letters he wrote, could we recreate Thomas Jefferson? Maybe.

Now look at
people that blog often and write lots of emails. Could we recreate them? More likely. Especially bloggers like Danah Boyd that
really inject their personality into their blogs. Even more importantly, save your IMs as they
might really reveal your personality.

Some time ago, Baris speculated that one’s financial records also served as an insightful mirror of one’s life.  His point was:

First and foremost, pictures and videos mainly capture notable events, as such they are snapshot of ones life. Your financials capture your routines, what you do over and over again, in a continuous way. It is not the one off events that define you, it is your routines, things you do over and over again. Emails
are good too, but unlike financials that focus on specific events,
email are inefficient since one sends so many of them, hard to get to
the essence of your life through email.

Microsoft
Money would capture, where you worked, how much you made, how your
salary grew over time, when you got a big bonus, what you spent it on,
where you lived, what you did for vacation, where you went on vacation,
what hobbies you spent your money, what school you sent your children
and what activities they did there. Since most transactions you enter in the system has a memo field, you can enter a little blurb about the transaction. So, in my case, every time I go to dinner I write down who I went with. It even keeps track of your social life.

I agree with both Baris and Auren.  However, my nomination for the best representation of who I am and what I think about would be my clickstream.  It’s the idea behind Root.net’s /Vaults.