October, 8, 2004 archives

one thing jeremy noted about web 2.0 is that he plugged feedmesh at the “dialing on the app tone” session. too bad the effort seems stuck. no other sites appear to have moved any further along on sharing the ping data that they are currently receiving. the only change is that i have introduced a stream of changes that nobody is using.

every once in a while, i poke around on amazon to find a new cordless phone (perhaps a multi-handset one). then i see that they all have caller id screens, and get annoyed at how much caller id costs. what earthly reason is there for caller id costing over $6 per month?

another thing i’m considering doing is ditching my monthly cell phone plan and just getting a prepaid card whenever i’m going to be on the road. one problem is that the prepaid plans don’t appear to offer any international service. (i know i can just buy prepaid cards in whatever country i happen to travel to, but that doesn’t really help people trying to reach me.)

i think i could add up all of the time i’ve used on my cell phone since i got it (over a year ago, now), and it wouldn’t exhaust what i’m paying to get each month.

“assuming the profit position” is a piece from the los angeles times about yoga works, a chain of yoga studios. what makes it interesting to me is that the two founders (rob wrubel and george lichter) are former bosses of mine. the picture of them is priceless.

(here’s another version of the article in case that sticks around longer that the la times version.)

everyone has already linked to the long tail already, but just on the off chance you missed it, here’s another link to it. there’s some really amazing insights in the article, and it is definitely not to be missed.

if you look at the interesting internet advertising plays out there right now, i think the most promising are those that try to bridge the tail of the advertising curve and the tail of the publishing curve. things like blogads that make it easy for a small advertiser to publish on a small publisher’s site. marketbanker is similar. google’s adsense runs the risk of lagging behind because it doesn’t allow a direct connection between an advertiser and publisher. there’s no incentive for me to drive potential advertisers on blo.gs to adsense, which i think is an inherent weakness in their architecture of participation.

i have an idea for a business that would sort of sit in this space. too bad i’ve already got a job.