Articles are Antiquated
I was reading the Wizard of the East, Jeff Jarvis, questioning the need for articles in the near future www.buzzmachine.com/2011/05/28/the-article-as-luxury-or-byproduct/. Geoff and I have been conviced the article is antiquated and inefficent since around 2003. The article is not the basic unit of storytelling, reporting, selling or anything else. It is an antiquated by product... Read More
“Community” doesn’t matter
The way most tech entrepreneurs emphasize the word is disingenuous and possibly misleading for other startups. For example, I hear people say that users comment or participate because of a sense of community. I hear this all the time, so much so that “community” may be the new “go viral.” Users do things because they have incentive to do so. That’s... Read More
Data Sphere: Here is what people mean by “cookie cutter”
Take a good look at these screenshots from 2 different neighborhoods – nay cities – in the Sacramento region. Same layout? Check. But also . . . Same content. Now read this quote from Gary Cowan of Datasphere in Street Fight today: People throw out the word, “cookie cutter,” but what does that actually mean? Does it mean you have a website laid out in a... Read More
Hey Google! Time to fix Google Apps once and for all
Maybe enterprise solutions just aren’t that important inside the googleplex these days, but they ought to be. Why? Because cloud-based enterprise software is not just for big corporations, it’s for power users who like to work collaboratively. We’re all using tools like Basecamp and Posterous and Tumblr … and many of us are using Google apps. There is... Read More
NYT out of whack
I’ve been holding back on posting, but I’m ready now – and I won’t be pulling punches. Blogs around the web (Wired, Gizmodo, Techdirt, TechCrunch) have reported that The New York Times pressured Apple to remove the most popular RSS reader from the App Store because the reader was making “commercial use” of the NYT RSS feeds. It is an interesting... Read More
Marketplaces 2010
I’m sitting here at a huge and influential conference in San Diego, Marketplaces 2010 and all of a sudden I see a slide with the SLOAN logo. And then I see MyFolsom.com. And then I see Living in Urban Sac and Rancho Cordova Post – wait and there is a graphic from our media kit! The speaker is Joelle Gropper Kaufman, Senior VP, Marketing, Adify – our fantastic technology... Read More
Video!
Sorry for the wait everyone. Our video of the February 2010 SLOAN event is now online. The video is 26 minutes long so you might want to sit down. I will post a shorter edit a little later. Sacramento Local Online Ad Network (SLOAN) Introduction from Ben Ilfeld on Vimeo. Read More
Reality
Not long ago I was hearing about the possibility of local advertising networks and at conferences and in the blogosphere. Many intellectuals and media experts thought this was a key institution for building a healthy media ecosystem – it was seen as almost a quick fix. At the time we had already begun work on SLOAN, The Sacramento Local Online Ad network. Geoffrey Sakala from... Read More
