Thank you all for my geeky 15 minutes of fame.   Please excuse me if I fawn over this whole thing for a moment.

Fred started me off by sending me some link love, but then it was obvious that much more of the traffic was coming from del.icio.us...  from people who were clicking on both the popular list and the "web 2.0" tag.  Here are the results from my (continuing??) stay near the top end of the del.icio.us popular list from my last top ten post:

I normally get about 500-700 pageviews a day.  In the last 24 hours, I've had 6500.

I received 100 new RSS subscribers.  (Now I have the pressure of holding on to all of you folks.)

I normally don't get much in the way of comments and trackbacks.  That post got 15 and 8 respectively.

MOST importantly, it led to discussions with three interesting  people who share my interests and have great blogs of their own.  I only talked to them for a little bit, but I got great insight into what they think because they all blog.  I IMed with Brian, Keshava and Greg.  Brian and Greg are new and had both linked to my post and Keshava dropped me a comment I think.  I'd e-mailed Keshava before a few times, but we'd never IMed before and it was a good excuse for us to try Google Talk.  We're going to do the Shake Shack next week (hmm...  probably should invite Greg, too...   Brian's a bit far for such a trip, regardless of how good the shakes are). 

Blogs and social tags connect people in a way that wasn't being done just a couple of years ago. 

Imagine the analog:

Let's say there are no blogs or tags.  Just conferences.

1) First off, no one would have invited me to speak anywhere.  So, blogs enable me to invent my own "This is going to be BIG" conference.

2) Even if someone did, after I spoke, my connection with the crowd would have been limited.  There wouldn't have been time for the 15 comments.  Perhaps afterwards, I could subject myself to the post panel crush, but I'll bet most of those people would have been more interested in showing us deals than just having a discussion.  Deals are great, of course, intellectual exchanges are nice, too.

3) Statistically, I probably never would have circulated around the room to these three guys, and besides that, even if I had, without the context of their blogs, links to what they were working on, etc. our conversations would have probably went more like, "Yeah... so... um... good conference, huh?   Did you try the cookies?  The rainbow ones are sweet." 

4) Follow up.  How many business cards to you get/give at a conference.  How many times do these lead to great connections?  Its kind of forced b/c then you have to talk on the phone, or meet, and maybe you don't really have anything to meet about, but you're searching for a connection somehow.  I'd rather passively pay attention to someone's blog, then start a conversation if I see our interests align.

So, that post was invaluable from the perspective that now I have a better connection to people around me that are thinking about the same stuff.  The traffic was nice, but people are better.

Is it me, or are there a few people talking about video lately?

And if that's not an enough of an understatement, New York City has a small vermin problem.

Its fascinating to what how many people are trying to play this every which way.

Here's the video technology list of lists... a random collection of small bits loosely joined that I'm putting out there as fodder for discussion:

The goal in figuring out where video is going next is (depending on who you are):

1. To make a lot of money by investing.
2. To not lose a lot of money you've yet to invest.
3. To make more money than you're already making.
4. To not shoot your current business in the face.
5. To figure out what consumers want and make them happy.

The players are/want to be (jeez, this is a big list):

1. Consumers
2. Cable operators
3. Television stations
4. TV producers/publishers
5. Movie producers/publishers
6. Content archive owners
7. Advertisers
8. GYMAAA (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL, Amazon, Apple)
9. Flickr for video startups
10. These guys?
11. Box and chip companies (Phillips, Intel, etc.)
12. Tivo
13. Netflix, Blockbusters
14. Bittorrent
15. MySpace, Facebook (My friends are watching...)
16. Big Telecom
17. Handset manufacturers
18. Homebuilders
19. Akimbo, Brightcove, etc.

Top ten conflicts/bottlenecks that will cause the consumer to get the short end of the stick:

1. DRM
2. Video on demand cannibalizes recent release DVD sales
3. Royalty streams for actors not setup for content ubiquity (Someone told me this, not sure if its true)
4. Home media server setup expensive and complicated for video
5. The $1.99 price point
6. No way in hell all three four (iPod) screens are going to cooperate enough so that, if I buy episodes of the A-Team once, I'm going to be able to watch them on my laptop, Video IPod, TV, and my cellphone. 
7. No universal video format (can we just lock everyone in a room and fix this)
8. Watching DVDs in your pimped up SUV likely to cause accidents
9. Add your addition here.
10. Ok, so I only came up with 7... so shoot me.

What consumers want:

1. Everything
2. Anywhere
3. Cheaper than we pay for it now, and growing cheaper  everyday, because that's supposedly the reason why we invented technology in the first place.
4. Search, Discovery, Recommendation (because, the new adage is, "You can't have everything... how would you find it.")

So, if anyone wants to piece these things together coherently in an essay or maybe in a little chart or something, feel free.  I haven't come up with a unified theory yet.

I was looking for a place to keep my photos online and Valarie from CM suggested Snapfish.  I'm trying it now and I'm thoroughly impressed with their upload feature.  I just dumped 57 hi res shots from my San Fran trip in their uploading tool and let it be.  It will take about an hour on the DTUT wifi, but its just sitting in the backround working on its own while I do other stuff.  No browsing for individual photos.  Big fan so far.  I like being able to download the high res version of the pics, too... b/c I was concerned about some of these photo albums scaling my pics down.  I'll probably never need them that detailed, but who knows.  I may go poster crazy one day and decide to wallpaper my apartment with huge reproductions of my prized butterfly pic.

Lately, I've been conjuring up all sorts of ideas for what you can with del.icio.us.  A lightweight tool distributed across an active internet userbase can be a very powerful and very interesting thing.  Fred and I have been using it a lot to search.  For example, you can go to del.icio.us/tag/restaurants+nyc if you're looking for someplace good to eat.  The good thing about del.icio.us, rather than a citysearch or something like that is that unless someone finds it worthwhile enough to remember, it probably won't be on there--so the crap is already screened out to some extent.

Anyway, while I was at the Boathouse today, I was talking about dating with someone and I came up with an idea.  What about distributed dating via del.icio.us?  The problem with dating sites is that its hard to tell which ones you should use, and they're all so closed off.  Not everyone is on Match or Friendster or MySpace or whatever.  A metasearch that crawls all the dating sites might be ok, but at the end of the day, you'll still need to pay to talk to people, regardless of whether or not those people wind up being worth talking to.

So let's take back our personal lives with a little good ole fashioned self-tagging.   Basically, it will work like this.  Pick any page, preferably a page that someone can access (as opposed to one behind a pay dating site) and tag it dateme with del.icio.us.  If you don't know how to use del.icio.us yet, kick on the Pimp My Web box on my menubar.  I have some screencasts on how to get started. 

Now, we'll need some way to search people, so I suggest you go by 10 year age groups and gender.  How about location, too?  Now, certain cities have really obvious abbreviations, like NYC is obviously NYC.   Same with San Francisco.  If you're not sure, just put your two letter state abbreviation.  So, for me, I would tag my post as follows:

dateme 20s male nyc ny

If you were a woman in her 30's from San Fransisco, you'd tag yourself:

dateme 30s female sf ca

And the same thing goes for searches.  So for me, I'll be watching the del.icio.us/tag/dateme+20s+female+nyc page and its corresponding RSS feed at http://del.icio.us/rss/tag/dateme+20s+female+nyc. 

Inherent problems with this?  Well, first of all, the del.icio.us user population, similar to the blogger population, is probably male dominated.  So, we need guys out there getting their female friends up with del.icio.us and a blog page.  What needs to happen there I think is that some newspaper or maybe Gothamist or something needs to pick up this story and encourage people to do it. 

The cool thing is that you can setup your page, tag it, even tag it anonymously, and no one would even know that you were doing it.  So, you could just be writing  a blog, and tagging yourself for this distributed dating system, and you wouldn't have to go through the embarrassment of someone at work finding you on match or anything like that...  unless they were literally on del.icio.us looking for exactly your type of profile. 

So, I'll be tagging this post and seeing what comes of it.  Anyone who reads this, forward this to your single friends and get them up on del.icio.us if they aren't already.  If nothing else, this is going to be an interesting experiment:  The del.icio.us distributed dating experiment... starting with one silly blogger--a blogger that appreciates openminded, ambitious women who like the outdoors, movies, cooking and being cooked for, and baseball.  (Just in case this actually works.)

So... who's with me??  Tag yourselves "dateme"!!

Finding new things in del.icio.us is a little bit like an egg hunt.  The Tag Team releases a new feature,  with no announcment, and then the community finds it.

So, if you haven't used the for: tag yet, don't feel bad.

Basically, if you want to send a link to another del.icio.us user, you tag it for:theirscreename.  Now, I've used the "forchristina" tag in the past and had my mentee use it to get things, but this is much less of a hack.  With the for: tag, you can send stuff directly to them and only get can see it.  To retreive your own for: tags when you're signed in, just got to http://del.icio.us/for and it will automatically default to your own for: links.  Plus, you can subscribe to your ow for: tag via RSS.

So, if anyone wants to send me a link, be it furniture for my apartment, cool events, companies of interest, etc. you can just tag it for:ceonyc and I'll get it. 

In the future, every digital advertisement you see will fit into the following categories:

1. You asked for it, because want to know more about a product or service.
2. Someone paid for your attention with some kind of an offer.
3. It was deemed funny or entertaining through social screens made up of actual humans.
4. You saw it as part of the self-expression of someone else...that they use the brand to self-identify, so your interaction with them became branded (like when your friends wear Nike t-shirts...  only this time, its on their avatar).

They will all have the following attributes:

1. Every ad not passed on through social screens or as self expression will be data targeted in some way, not contextual.  Something about what you did or who you are will drive what you see... 
2. You will always have a way to block future ads from these non-social placements.
3. You will be able to subscribe to more information or announcements about these products in a blinded way that ensures you can stop at any time and that your contact info doesn't get sold off.
4. The ads will be built for the medium they are carried on.  In other words, boring TV commercials will not follow you onto the internet and appear as YouTube pre-rolls.  They will take advantage of the format and be more interactive.

Here's some other stuff I'd like to see happen:

1. Brands will set the elements of their brand free... logos, music, images, etc... for users to do with as they please...remix, reuse...  even parody.
2. I'll stop getting junk mail.  Seriously, folks...  once a week, I just shred 99% of the snail mail I get.  Is there any way to spam block an offline mailbox?  (Oh, and btw...  I'm getting Gmail spam.. that's really annoying, b/c I wasn't for a long time.  That Report Spam button doesn't work at all.)
3. Ratings, reviews, wishlists, even product inventories of things your friends bought, will be microformatted, permissioned, standardized, etc... so that, when I need new shoes, I'll be able to see what kind of shoes my friends are buying or what the most popular ones are among Directors of Consumer Products.   

Anyone else see the nature of advertising changing?  What will be different in the future?  Feel free to post your thoughts.

I'm at WeMedia at the moment...

So the other day I ran some things to clean up my laptop...   uninstalling random features I didn't think I needed.  Who would have thought that uninstalling speech recognition features would also uninstall handwriting recognition.  Tablet rended useless for the moment... very frustrating as I try to blog the WeMedia conference.

Listening to the first panel, it makes me wonder whether or not the changing media opens up new opportunities for young journalists who have cultivated WeMedia platforms and technology to create trust.  In other words, is it easier for CBS to put Andy Rooney on a podcast or to hire a true podcaster...  and if they hire a podcaster, what could they actually provide that person in terms of channel support? 

Larry Kramer brings up an interesting point that new forms of media are increasing utilization rates of the newsroom.  Whereas in the past, political staffs couldn't find their way on the air when the station was hyperfocused on one progam, they're now publishing stories and video on the web.

According to Farai Chideya, NPR has a job opening for a New Media Music Editor.  I'll make sure Fred doesn't apply. 

Here's another digital divide:    Political/news engagement and disengagement.   How many people are less interested in the news and politics than they were ten years ago because they have so much other content to consume or because they're more connected to work?  (iPods and Blackberries gaining commuter minutes versus the newspaper.)  How many are more hyperfocused on it because of blogging and access to more and better information?  I feel like there's more of the former than of the latter.

At Demo, Mena introduced her mom to do the next iteration of "Its so easy, my mom can use it."  The team at Six Apart is building a product that her mom actually wants to use, because, these days parents can be pretty tech savvy.  (So I hear, anyway...)

Well, I'm glad that Mena's mom knows how to use a computer, but my mom doesn't, nor does Nana.  Yet, I'd love to find a way to connect them to all the content and photos I produce.  I'd even like to copy them on e-mails.

Why doesn't somebody create a "convert to meatspace" service for e-mail and RSS.  I'd definitely pay for Nana to get, each week, a printed copy of all my posts (well, minus the tech ones anyway), with embedded photos, mailed to her.  In addition, I'd like to be able to send her e-mails at nana@meatspace.com that someone would print out, put in an envelope, address, stamp, and mail for me.  I hate snailmail.  I hate stamps... never have them, never know where to get them. 

I'm not saying this could ever be a huge business or is something we'd ever invest in... its just something I want.  Plus, its got to be so easy to set up.  Printers and mail machines are automatic now... you'd just have to hire a monkey to refill the paper.  A website, a server, one printer, one mail stuffer, one postage machine and a basket that the post office picks up everyday... oh.. and the refill monkey.  How hard could that be?

I wouldn't have believed it if I didn't see it with my own eyes.

Gabe Morris wrote this on my last post:

LinkedIn annoys people to the extent that it connects you without relevance. The basis for LinkedIn and Friendster’s automatic relevance is degrees of separation. But this has weaknesses – there are second degree contacts who I have very little in common with, while I am sure there are hundreds of people in the sixth degree and beyond that I would have plenty in common with.

Excellent point.  If you're going to build a relevent social network, the glue should be something more than connection itself. 

Got video?   Try Vimeo.  I uploaded a clip of my parent's dog, Joy.

Right now, small is the new big.  Small and nimble, solve small problems, small teams.

How do you make a big difference then?  Because, after all, we're not in this to put in all this hard work to make a small impact.

You want your smallness to be "big-enabled".  And the last thing you want to do is to over-small any of your big ideas.

A CEO is tasked with 1, 3, and 5 year goals for a company.  Big.

To reach those goals he needs to create an action plan that includes things like improving customer service, hiring some key individuals, adjusting the advertising message maybe...  Lots and lots of little things that require detailed examination of every aspect of the company.  Small.

However, each of the items on that action plan, and this is where I think many companies drop the ball tend to get oversmalled.  The person put in charge of them doesn't think big enough with each of these little tasks.  A lot of times its because either the people on the ground don't have the incentives to think big with their small, microchunked tasks, or the culture is such that people thing its only to CEO's job to think big, and their job not to get in the way.

Are your departments and staff big-enabled?

So, for example, General Motors knew it needed to overhaul its car offering.  They had successfully done it with trucks, but now their car line needed a lot of work.  Big.

One area they tackled was the retro muscle car market.  GM decided it wanted to bring back enthusiasm for a powerful sedan that was sporty, but not sleek like a sportscar... Their GTO.  In the grand scheme of things, it was on model out of 77.  It wasn't going to make or break the company.  Small.

The implementation, however, was unfortunately small as well.  They took an existing model from an Australian affiliate, the Monero, and just stuck some Pontiac nameplates on it.  While they did sell, it certainly hasn't generated the kind of enthusiasm that the totally redesigned Mustang is, or the Dodge Charger.  They got a two year head start on the Charger, but I'll bet you anything that Dodge sells more Chargers next year than Pontiac sells GTOs.  Whoever is behind the Charger was thinking big.  One model in a big company, but they put had the goal of making as big an impact as they could with their small piece of the overall Daimler Chrysler pie.  If ever single person at Daimler Chrysler or Ford started thinking the same way the product manager of the Mustang or the Charger thought, those companies would be in much better competitive positions.

Sometimes, its not just about incentives, though.  Its about creating an environment where even the small people feel empowered to take a risk here and there to shoot for something big. 

I had the same personal experience when I helped Fordham start its alumni mentoring program.  When I first pitched the idea of launching a program that matches young alumni with younger students for three months of mentoring, I pitched it straight to the top.  The people at the top encouraged me to seek out the people below them who would help implement it, and their mindset was to figure out how we could start small...  with, let's say, a "networking night" to test it out.  I had a bad reaction to that and pushed harder to go for broke and try a whole program.  We did both.

The results?

The networking night didn't quite work out so well... not enough students showed up.  There was little follow up. 

The mentoring program, on the other hand, quickly grew in interest from 25 pairs, to 35 pairs, to 52 in our first year.  With the career office and the alumni office's help, it was a huge success.  Now its part of the career office's regular offering. 

But how is that possible?  The smaller, "toe in the water" thing didn't work, but the larger "shoot for the sky" thing did.  Isn't that counterintuitive, and, doesn't that pose a real problem for a manager?  If a "test" effort isn't predictive, then how in the world are people supposed to figure out where to take risks?

I think it has to do with building an atmosphere of committment.  You want all of the people on the ground to act as if they, and their company, are committed to executing all the small tasks and making them as big a success as they can possibily be.  If they act like they just don't want to make a lot of waves inside the company or that they don't carry the weight and support of the company behind them, their projects will be doomed to failure.  Your customers take something more seriously when they see you're more serious about it--no matter how small this one thing is in the grand scheme of the big vision.  They know when you're just repackaging versus just redesigning and they'll pay their attention accordingly.  Otherwise, its all just blowing smoke. 

Sometimes, that's going to mean that you might break a few eggs... that your company will put its weight behind something that has so-so results.  Fine, but at least you know that you're giving every one of your efforts a full opportunity to be successful, and, moreover to be game changing--to ultimately enable you to leap over your competition.

This is fascinating and I really hope Six Apart publishes their findings.

They just sent a note to Typepad users asking them to select what type of discount they would like to receive based on the service issues they've been having over the last month.  What's amazing is that they're basically asking people how much of a discount they should get... and depending on the honor system.

I only noticed an issue once or twice, so I'm going to stick with the default.   

Here's the note:

By default, you will receive a credit for 15 free days of TypePad service. To get this credit you don't have to do anything; we will just credit your account.

That said, we recognize that customers have had different experiences with the service, so we want to give you the opportunity to choose more, or even less compensation. If you click the link below, you'll get a screen that offers you the following choices:

•                    

  While the performance issues caused me some inconvenience ; I mainly found the service acceptable last month.
  Give ; me 15 free days of TypePad.

                     
•                    

  The performance issues made it very difficult for me to use the service on multiple occasions during the month.
  Give me 30 free days of TypePad.

                     
•                    

  The performance issues affected me greatly, making my experience unacceptable for most of the month.
  Give me 45 free days of TypePad.

                     
•                    

  I really wasn't affected and feel I got the great service I paid for last month.
  Thank you for the offer, but please don't credit my account.

Everyone wants "viral."  Its all the rage now.  What is viral?  Well, its a lot of people choosing to see something and passing it on to their friends.  Viral is the Star Wars kid and the George Bush Bloody Sunday Song.

Sometimes, you get someone at an agency who has such a pulse on the human condition that you can create viral.  But most times, viral bubbles up.  Viral isn't intended to be viral necessarily... and the best viral comes when it is created by the audience. 

Its not because there aren't agency folks who can do this... its just that individuals are so fickle that its incredibly hard to figure out what will strike them.  So,  viral becomes a statistics game...   one agency creating one video...   tough to get right..maybe impossible.   A million users creating a million videos...  one of them will go viral.  Its just stats and dumb luck sometimes.

So when Agency.com set out to create a viral video for a client, and they decided to make the viral video about making a viral video, they had a very difficult task ahead of them. 

So here's the result:

What do you think?   So, first off, I have to congratulate them for thinking outside of the box.  They obviously get that consumers don't like to be sold to, and posting this to YouTube was a sign that they understand that if you want to reach consumers, you have to come into our neighborhood.

So, no question, A for effort.  Maybe A+.

The numbers so far... 40,000 plays.  That's enough to get it in the Top 100 most viewed for the week on YouTube.   Not sure what their goal was.

And rather than tell you what I thought...  I'll link to the community's comments.  Kind of a mixed bag to put it lightly.

But, here's the thing about doing innovative advertising and branding.  There were already a bunch of videos that the community had created about Subway.  Many of them were unquestionably good.

Like this guy doing his own 4 part harmony.  (Its the same guy, right?)

Or this girl who probably loves working at Subway more than anyone else loves working at their job.

Or this cute little champion... (A shameless ploy to get her on real commercials, but that's ok... )

Hey Jarrod, we need more water.

This one is just random and disturbing...

This is so gross... and so funny.. all at the same time...   the mustard part was the best.

These two are just goofing off....

Ok, so the quality is really trailing off a bit now....

Anyway... the point is, I wonder if coming up with any content or copy for a consumer facing message is worth it anymore.   Users want to hear themselves, not the company.  They want to hear from each other why a brand or product is worth spending money on.  Is this the moment that ad copy "jumps the virus" in the workds of one YouTube commenter? 

I think everyone in the ad community should wave the white flag and just say,

"The hell with it.  We give up.  You tell us what you think of the brands, and we'll just give you some cool ways to say it, and promote you. We're out of the business of coming up with messaging or content.  Its just too hard... and then when we try to reach out to you in on your own terms, you make a Brokeback parody of us."   

That's what Firefox did.

Robert Young explains this the best:

"...follow the audience into the development of this new market by re-focusing core assets that have the capability to deepen the level, and heighten the production value, of self-expression.

Think of this way… what if “American Idol” had been produced solely by the capabilities of the contestants themselves, without the expertise and talent of the show’s producers, directors, writers, etc. As talented and entertaining as the contestants are, the resulting production quality, the level of emotional engagement, viewership/ratings and monetization potential of the full package would likely be far inferior to what we all see on the air today. Well, social networks should be seen in a similar way… people want to express themselves and the platforms that allow them to do so with the most creativity and production value, are the ones that people will flock to."

In short, don't make a commercial with monkeys.  Give monkeys to the people.  (Full disclosure, my company, Oddcast, built the Careerbuilder Monk-e-mail.)

Then how do I know you're a real person?

Funny how the internet changes our perception about who we are and what makes us real.  If I can't find "bits", I don't always trust that there is flesh to match. 

I noticed an interesting phenomenon the other day.  The amount you communicate is
proportionate to the number of different avenues you have for communication.  Right now, I can:

-email
-IM
-Skype
-blog
-text
-phone
-MySpace mail
-MySpace comment
-tag something in del.icio.us for: someone
-poke in the Facebook
-write on a Facebook wall
-email in Facebook
-Flickr mail
-Flickr comment
-Gchat in Gmail

...and I'm sure I'm forgetting some...  Oh yeah..talk in person.

The interesting thing to me is that new forms of communication don't necessarily replace the other.  I comment on Flickr to people whose email addresses I have.  Its not just getting the message across from point a to point b..its the way in which it was sent...the packaging.  Packaging allows expression through an infinately more diverse set of variables, like context, media, volume (degree of publicness).  An avatar message to someone on a blog post is a very different message than a text from one person to another, even if the worlds are the same.

Having all of these means of communication available allows for very nuanced interaction with the world.  Some people I will never get on the phone with...others I only talk on the phone to.  When I got texts, I didn't call less...  I called differently.  Less short phone calls....but then I had more longer ones because texting kept more relationships fresher in a more efficient way...  So I just had exposure to more stuff that warrented a call because I had a little bit of texting
to fill the quiet times.

Hopefully, social networks, wireless carriers, Web 2.0 companies realize that and keep their communication as open as possible.  The model for many web applications, like dating, used to be "pay to contact this person".  Instead of standing on the way of communication, I think the best strategy is to encourage as much commuication as possible.  These services don't own my ability to communicate, and there's lots of competition.  Keeping the room silient isn't  the best way to create a party.

Getting feedback from your user community is really important, but, of course, your community isn't necessarily building your product.  There are lines to be drawn, right?  You can't have the inmates run the asylum...

...or can you?

That's a little bit how I feel now.  I feel like I'm the customer.  What would make my product fun for me and my friends?  What would make me want to use it?  What's in it for me?

I can't say enough about being a user when you're building, but not how you might think.  Like just the other day, I started a Photobucket account.  The things that I thought were important... like an uploader and tagging...   not in there at all.  But yet, its just as popular as Flickr.  I didn't find the UI intuitive at all, but then again, I'm not every user. 

Being a user means you see what's out there and play with it, and instead of passing judgement, you try and understand why something is popular.  You match feature sets to usage and popularity.  Its the difference between being a pet owner and a zooalogist.  You don't have to love the stuff... just understand it and learn from it.  Of course, you build up a passion for it, and that's important, but pet owners don't always know the most about their pets, because they don't study their pets.  They interact with them and build emotional relationships with them.  Zooalogists try not to start with that and try to keep it "professional" so that you can take a stop back now and then  I've had to remind myself to do that and to keep an open mind as to what works and what doesn't, lest I overdose on my own Kool Aid.

So, after a very busy week one at Oddcast, I've started thinking about how I'll be using everything I've learned about the web...    Because if I haven't actually learned anything in the past couple of years, then I've been wasting both our times.

So, here's what I think I've learned that I need to focus on applying:

1.  The three P's.  Product.  Product.  Product.   

2.  There is no "best" UI, there is only the "right" UI.  Example:  There is no AJAX in MySpace or Craigslist.

3. I will not stop thinking about new features, because nobody likes a dead product.

4. I will maintain and active and open dialogue with my userbase and potential userbase.

5.  I should listen to the people who aren't using my product maybe even more than the people who are using my product.

6.  The more tools in the hands of the user, the more they will build the experience themselves.

7.  Products need more offline relevence... a connection to someone I know... something I can do online that affects someone else in the real world... 

8. Give people more ways to communicate and they will communicate more, not just differently.

9. We have only touched the surface so far and most of the "rules" are unwritten, so I should not be afraid to do something completely new.

10. No one likes to be sold to.

Lee Semel has build a great open calendar for the NYC tech community.  We talked a lot about how there wasn't a central resource for this stuff and no good way to find NYC tech events.

We didn't like the calendars that required sign-ins or being a member, and so we went for something that was wiki-like in that anyone could just come and check it out.

It just got launched, so we'd love your feedback. 

We'd also like your events!

Washington Post Reporter Frank Ahrens used Oddcast's Sitepal product as part of his news story.   

Cool!

Wait...  I was so captivated by the avatar, I forgot to read the article.  Damn!   Now I have to go back.