The New New Thing!

It's been a while. I dropped out from blogging here 2005, because it took to much time. I had just got hooked on Flickr and decided that I only had time for my Flickr photoblog

For the last five years I've been working as Senior Marketing Manager Nordics at Yahoo! Search Marketing. Last month I left Yahoo! and decided it was time to get rich, or die trying ;-) So, I've joined a startup called Poosty. It's not launched and it's all a bit floating, but it's one of those rare occasions in life when things seems to fall into place. So I've decided to pick up my blog again to describe the transition from one of the worlds largest Internet companies, to a very small start-up.

I will still have very little time on my hands, but bare with me, every now and then there will be something new published here and I hope you will enjoy checking state808 out every now or then.

The Flickr Bug

In my blogpost Podcasts-Remix-MOMA I wrote "podcasting and vblogs are still in its early days, but it amazes me how creative people are."

After getting bitten by the Flickr bug, it amazes me even more.
I got inspired and spent the last weeks creating my own contribution to the Flickr-community.

Please check Flickr out. You can also check my pics here .

This is of course one reason why state808 not been updated.
Time is to short & I love my Leica.


Have fun!

The Past, The Present And The Future

I'm sorry if you checked in on state808 during the summer, without finding any updates. I apologize for this.

I been having a great summer, with sun, fun and holidays. Parts of it I spent offline. There was little time and possibility to update this blog.

A lot of exciting things happened during the summer, but I will not comment on many of them. One exception is "We are the web ", the article Kevin Kelly wrote for Wired.

It's one of those articles I will remember for a long, long time. If you only read one article about the Internet this summer, why not read this one? It's a great piece about "The Power Of Us", a theme that I frequently wrote about in June.

Kelly article presents the past, the present and the future of the Net.
Read it and think about how you can be part of the next 10 years, when the Net becomes the Computer. What can you do, with a little help from you friends? Remember - We Are The Web ;-)

The Podcast Elevator Pitch

In my blogpost Podcasts-Remix-MOMA I wrote "podcasting and vblogs are still in its early days, but it amazes me how creative people are."

A good example on this is how the venture capital industry picked up Podcasting as a way for entrepreneurs to pitch their ideas. The idea is to Podcast the "elevator pitch". Wikipedia describes the elevator pitch as "a brief overview of an idea for a product, service, or project. The pitch is so called because it can be delivered in the time span of an elevator ride (roughly thirty seconds).

The term is typically used in the context of an entrepreneur pitching an idea to a venture capitalist to receive funding. Venture capitalists often judge the quality of an idea and team on the basis of the quality of its elevator pitch, and will ask entrepreneurs for the elevator pitch so to quickly weed out bad ideas."

Pretty cool. This means that the VC guys can screen more ideas if they listen to the Podcast elevator pitch when driving their cars, or when jogging.

Peer Production Search Engine

The other day Yahoo! Launched My Web 2.0 , it's integrating personal and social search. It may be very early in its development, but it offers very interesting search features already.

The Yahoo! Search Blog writes: "It is a new kind of search engine - a social search engine - that complements web search by enabling users to search the knowledge and expertise of their friends and community in addition to the web"

Imagine that you are planning a trip over the weekend to Rome. With My Web 2.0 you can save your best search results and write a tag, a short description, about the webpage. Then invite your travelling buddies, to ad their own personal search results. By combining your search efforts, you get a great overview what you and your friends like to see and do, when in Rome.

The Yahoo blog continues: "Over time, we envision communities using My Web to build their own search engines to capture and make accessible the knowledge of their community - search engines populated with the collective experience of a group of medical researchers, a community of PHP experts, a bird watching club, or members of a structural engineering consulting firm."

Chris Sherman from Search Engine Watch has written an interesting article where he explains My Web 2.0. He points out some of the issues he sees with tags being used to help improve the relevance of search.

Overall he is positive. "Despite its rough edges, My Web 2.0 is an innovative, thoughtful approach to personalized and community-based search. Many of the new features are genuine steps toward the creation of the semantic web , the next generation "intelligent" web envisioned by web creator Tim Berners-Lee." Chris writes.

If you'd like to learn more about My Web 2.0 you can find the My Web blog here.

Personally I look forward to invite some of my friends to build up an expertise search engine for marketers. Look out for the invitation in your e-mail!

We Will All Be Media Moguls

John Batelle writes that Google will introduce a digital video player from its video search beta site. The concept is that anyone can upload video to Google, tag it with category keywords so that others can search for it.

Battelle thinks that the digital video player "will be integrated with the Google payment program which was revealed to be in process last week. Plenty of folks uploaded video to Google with a payment option, and that has yet to roll out, but you can expect that it will. . . . this will help the spread of an alternative universe for video distribution and playback, one independent of the walled garden business model in which video is currently locked."

Most European markets are closing down their analogue TV-broadcasts these days. Digital technology is cheaper and offers better quality. In most of these markets, the TV broadcasts are under heavy regulation and political influence. This Google service could sidestep most current market players and let small broadcasters start their own TV-business.

The search engine will transform into the TV-remote control. When you find what you would like to see, you pay per view. Or you view something that is sponsored from the Google advertisers, for free.

If you think this is far fetched, think again. It's happening today!

Re-Mixed Editorials - Maybe Later?

On June 12th, LA Times promoted an interesting idea. The chance for readers to re-mix their editorials. "Watch next week for the introduction of "wikitorials" - an online feature that will empower you to rewrite Los Angeles Times editorials.

This initiative was met with some scepticism.

I think this is a pretty cool idea. It would have given a lot of initiated people the tools to think, argue and make the debate go from the first editorial, to some form of group opinion, depending on how much you empower the readers.

This experiment in its first form was how ever short lived. It's been put off-line, for the moment.

LA Times explains "Unfortunately, we have had to remove this feature, at least temporarily, because a few readers were flooding the site with inappropriate material.

Thanks and apologies to the thousands of people who logged on in the right spirit."

Let's hope this concept will be re-designed and put to good use in some other form by LA Times and others. "Peer Production", is if the noise level is dealt with, an idea whose time has come.