Media Mind and My Ramblings

Well folks, I have to admit its been tough keeping up two blogs. I have been pretty focused on The Trend Junkie weblog as of late and I am noticing that my content is morphing into similar context (to some degree). I have always kept the two separate and focused Media Mind exclusively on what is happening in online media, marketing, etc.. and the Trend Junkie has mostly been my ramblings and findings of obscure crazy stuff and diversions :-) however that isnt the case any more, The Trend Junkie is evolving (it even has its own podcast now). So until I figure out what to do in detail with this weblog tune into www.thetrendjunkie.com for my most recent musings on whatever it is I am talking about today. - Thanks.

Calacanis on Bloglines Acquisition

Pamela points to an interesting post by Jason Calacanis of Weblogs, Inc read this media man's take on the recent acquisition of Bloglines by Ask Jeeves. Opening lines:

Congratulations and respect to Mark for having the sense to dump the business now when it has some perceived value. However, I can tell you clearly there is no business model for web-based news readers, and in two years 95-99% of the RSS reader market will be consolidated into three of the following players: My Yahoo, Microsoft Outlook/Outlook Express, Google’s RSS reader

Linky: New Mozilla Extension

Boing points to Linky a new Mozilla extension that allows for easy tabbed browsing in Firefox:

"When you right-click with Linky installed, you get a sub-menu that lets you open a range of selected links in tabs, or all image links in one tab, text-links in tabs, download all links, and so forth. This is great for multipart Web-articles, where the pages are all linked like so: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 -- just select all the page links, and Linky them open in new tabs so they're all preloaded in tabs in your browser."

Economist On Scoble

Great article on Robert Scoble, a good insight on Scoble's world for any of you who wonder what the hell he really does for Microsoft. He is a pioneer in the next wave of corporate public relations strategy and operations. Check it out.

"ROBERT SCOBLE, known in the blogosphere as “the Scobleizer”, is a phenomenon not just because he has had an unusually strange career of late, but because his example might mark the beginning of the end of “corporate communications” as we know it."

per Winer

ASCAP Offers Podcast License

This is so cool. Finally, a break in the music licensing arena for podcasts! I have about 3-4 podcasts already produced that I had used non pod-safe music on, simply because I dont have time to make up my own music, and you probably wouldn't want to hear it if I made anyway. That being the case, I have not released any of my podcasts for public consumption, due to the sole reason that I used other artist's music on it. Now, ASCAP has released a $280 annual license, with a shitload of clauses, etc, built it that allows podcasters to use licensened material on their audio shows.

I know that this is being taken a bunch of differnet ways across the blogosphere and amongst the podcast community, however I can't help to think that even though its a little bit of "the man" stepping into the blogging/podcasting/new media revolution picture, it can only be good for the movement.

Why do I say that? Well, your listening to a guy who comes from the world of music promotion. Through my 4 years as a promoter, booking, promoting and producing shows, I always had to deal with ASCAP fees. If you think of it in a commercial sense, which is where all of this is going (sorry to all of you who I know love the medium as it is today) some kind of licensing fees are inevitable. Actually, the small fee doesnt bother me as much, since now it frees me to podcast with access to a greater library of audio. I guess I take the position of the podfather Adam Curry, lets experiment with this and see where it goes.

So, I guess I will be one of the first wave to sign up for the ASCAP licensce that will allow me to work in (hopefully) some non pod-safe music into my mix. At the same time I will work to shamelessly promote unsigned bands and DJ's moving forward. Lets rock people.

Feeder: Create and Manage Your Feed

Dave Winer points to Feeder today, a unique resource that allows non-technical persons to create and manage their own RSS feeds. As the advent of blogging and podcasting continue to emerge, we see a continuous shift in the technical toolset that is available to the end user. What is really cool is that Feedster supports RSS feeds with enclosures, specifically engineered for podcasting. Good stuff right there, the media revolution gets more interesting by the day:

"Feeder supports the full RSS 2.0 specification, including enclosures for podcasting and is packed with thoughtful features to help automate and enhance the experience of creating and managing feeds from start to finish, such as editable templates, auto-completing fields, HTML previewing and more."

Google Maps is VERY cool

I really do like this company..... Check out Google's map app.

Back in the States!

I am back in the US after a most excellent trip to the UK and the Netherlands. Great places to be in my opinion. Great times, with great people. I am looking forward to doing some business in Europe, its where we are headed. Anyway, back to building the business, LOTS happening. Time to get back to working it.

Lots of stuff happening in the world of online these days. I think its time to give the weblog a new focus. I will contemplate it and let you know!

Waking Up In Amsterdam!

I am naming today's post after my friend Todd's weblog, only because it is so appropriate! I have been on a GREAT European extravaganza since Thursday night when my plane took off from BWI airport in Baltimore, Maryland USA. My flight got me to London Heathrow Airport around 9:15am, where I promptly hopped a quick flight over to the Netherlands to spend a couple of days in Amsterdam. After arriving at the hotel, I met up with my bro Todd. I dropped off my bags and we went directly to the offices of Hyves, the absolute best social networking site that I have come across online so far. I have joined many communities, Friendster, LinkedIn, etc but nothing has kept me coming back more than Hyves. Hyves is a great group of people, a solid team thats building a rapidly growing online community. Check it out. I wish them all the best.

Immediately after the Hyves meeting, we went over to our friend Daans house, then headed out for a wonderful dinner at Blender. A very tucked away private restaurant on one of the canals. Great ambiance, great service, great people, great food. What else is there to say.

After dinner, which ended around 11:45 -12am, the crew was ready to roll. Little did I know I would be treated to some of the coolest "non-tourist" action in Amsterdam. We arrived at Club 11 around 12:45 where we all proceeded to dance our asses off until 4:15 am. That was probably the longest stretch I have had in a couple of years :-) add in the jetlag factor (no, not even a nap), and you can imagine how I felt when I arrived back at the hotel at 5am.

I got out of bed this morning around 11:45am (after 2 wake up calls that started at 11am), showered and headed out for a few more meetings that Todd had set up. We are on a mission here folks :-). After a brief stop at the flower market to pick up some Dutch tulip bulbs for my wife, we met with Manne and Phil from WickedJazzSounds. We had a great discussion on the future of the movement that they are creating. Look out for some new and exciting things from them in the future, they are going to dominate the universe one day!! Great guys check out their site, and if your in Amsterdam check to see if WSJ is having a party!

Our second meeting was with the one and only Bicyclemark, who is whipping out some incredible podcasting content with his "Audio Communique" podcast. Check him out, he is a very interesting and a super cool guy. Tonight he is going to do a walking soundseeing tour of the red-light district, should be interesting. We chatted for a few hours and Mark said it best on his blog in reference to our conversation:

"Our conversations have only just begun, but if you had to drink every time we said blogging or podcasting, you'd be getting your stomach pumped right now."

I am now chilling out at the lovely NH Amsterdam Centre hotel where I discovered (after asking two staff members about if the hotel offered high speed internet access), that there was a blazing fast wi-fi network on premise. Whats funny is that it was branded as NH hotels network specifically. So I figured after a rather stale week of posting I would get things "current."

Tonight it seems the crew has another night in store, we are heading to Panama at 0000 hours (Midnight), where the dancing will commence once again :-) I look forward to another Saturday night in Amsterdam. Off to London tomorrow. Stay tuned.

Gmail Accounts

I have accumulated quite a few invitiations for Gmail. If anyone is interested please leave a comment on the weblog here and I will follow up with you. I have to say, I have been using Gmail for various projects and it has grown on me as a mail client. I have not received one single spam message in my inbox, conversation strings are cool, and the ads really dont bother me at all. Let me know if you interested. Ciao.

The Webs Biggest Search Engine

Another search entrant. The Webs Biggest. For a great description in detail, Rubel points to Ross Mayfields weblog.

"It leverages existing search engines and scrapes the whois database. The spider captures summaries, which is all the engine searches, which gives you easy breadth, but not depth. "

Curry in Fortune Magazine

Adam Curry has a nice article in Fortune about where he came from, what he is doing and where he is going. Good stuff. Check it out.

Video Google

Google has launched a new Video Search tool. Check it out. Looks like it covers mostly recent TV programs that have been indexed plus more.... Pretty cool though, it gives you the run down of what you can expect on the reel during various times, etc...

The Thought Project

This is a really neat project - check out "The Thought Project". Simon Hoegsberg roams the streets of Copenhagen and New York City and randomly asks 150 strangers what they were thinking about the second before he stops them. Interesting project.
per Presurfer

Search Distinction for only 1 out of 6

Interesting clip from Mediapost today:

Just one in six search engine users can confidently discern between unbiased natural search results and paid search ads, according to a new report released this week by The Pew Internet & American Life Project. The study, titled "Search Engine Users," found that while most Web users said they trusted, relied on, and were happy with search results, only 18 percent felt they knew whether links were paid or not.