Life on Mars?

So we all went to the NASA.gov site at the appointed time (2 PM EST) to learn that...Realplayer sucks ass.

Just kidding. Despite the technical difficulties, we learned that the scientific community studying data from the Mars rovers believes an outcropping of rock was at one time immersed in liquid water. What does this mean? Well, it could mean that there's a possibility that Mars once had the necessary conditions to support life in some form. That would be cool. I'd like to suggest that NASA immediately send the rovers out to search for Sleestaks, giant man-eating clams and one-eyed one-horned flying purple people eaters.

The cynic in me can't help but notice how politically charged NASA's announcement was. Whoever was giving the briefing was very careful to mention that G.W. is committed to space exploration.

Isn't this just the type of thing that the Bush campaign needs in order to show the American public success? After all, we supposedly can't find a cave-dwelling billionaire attached to a kidney dialysis machine. Anyway, I don't want to get too hung up on this, because it's relatively unimportant given the magnitude of what we've just experienced.

If all of this turns out to be true - that liquid water once existed on Mars - I look forward to taking the next step. That next step would be to prove definitively that life once existed somewhere other than on Earth. Science fiction movies from Independence Day to Contact to Star Trek: First Contact have explored the notion of societal change brought about by the sudden realization by humanity that we are no longer alone in the universe. If we could bring humanity to that point, perhaps we stand a chance of gaining the appropriate perspective, such that maybe one day we'll stop blowing one another up or killing one another in God's name.

I hope I live to see the day.

Turbosurf

For a while now, I've been surfing the web with Firefox 0.8, the new Mozilla browser. It's amazing how cool this browser is, and if you pick things up quickly, Firefox's features can help you get around more quickly and easily. One of the features I've been using quite often is tabbed browsing. You know how whenever you want to open a new browser window in IE, it adds another IE instance to your taskbar? Well, that sucks if you're one of these people (like me) who likes to have a bunch of web pages open on their desktop at any given time.

Firefox deals with this problem in a nice way. Control-T opens a new browser tab, which opens up on a toolbar just below the address bar. So you can have a kajillion different tabs while seeing only the one instance of Firefox in your taskbar.

Another cool feature is the ability to click on links without the mouse. Simply type in the first couple letters of a link you want to activate and go.

There's a popup blocker, auto-downloader - even a version of the Google Toolbar. Firefox is quickly supplanting IE as my browser of choice. Not only is it easy and intuitive to use, but it helps make web browsing faster.

Another thing that's speeding me up is Privoxy. It's essentially a web proxy that runs off your machine and helps you do things like strip out extraneous graphics, ads and such. It also helps with managing cookies.

Before you freak out and call me a hypocrite for being in the online advertising business and wanting to strip out ads, let me say that I continue to use IE when I'm casually surfing. However, when I need to get to a page fast and I can't wait for someone's piggish 2-ton streaming Flash-a-ma-jig to load, I use Firefox with Privoxy.

What's amazing is how fast pages load when not encumbered by extraneous graphics. I still can't believe how fast one can browse with this combo of tools. If you're web browser is starting to get sluggish, I highly recommend it.

Ideas Without Borders

The blogging phenomenon is something I’ve been following for a while and have written a few columns about. The reason why I haven’t (until recently) thought that blogging would play a big role in how Internet users consume content is simple: Unless someone makes your blog a daily destination, you’re talking to a small universe of people. Take this blog, for instance. I don’t get a huge number of people coming here consistently, so most of the ideas and commentary I post here will never see the desktops of significant numbers of marketing executives.

People have the bandwidth for only a few daily stops in the time they spend surfing. (I’m using the word “bandwidth” here to refer to the amount of time people can spend on the web.) Unless you write the best marketing commentary out there, and people know how to find it, your audience base will end up being extremely limited in size.

But all of that is changing. We’re seeing advances in technology that make it unnecessary to visit scores of blogs every day. We’re also seeing technology that allows an idea or a discussion to exist in a manner that is not necessarily married to a particular web destination. So it’s becoming less necessary to drive traffic to your particular blog. Instead, it’s becoming critical that your ideas as a blogger are syndicated and aggregated in ways that will make those ideas more visible.

Some of the technologies that are enabling this “ideas without borders” concept are:

• Feedster – This is a major aggregator of blog content. It’s searchable, it’s growing and it’s becoming more and more important to participate in if you blog. Also, Feedster is putting tools out there that make it easy for web surfers to aggregate and consume content that deals with a particular subject matter. As this Forbes article demonstrates, you can get opinions on the news of the day, as provided by bloggers, very quickly once a news event has taken place.
• Trackback – This technology, or at least the concept behind it, makes it easy to share an idea across multiple blogs. If I like something that another blogger has posted, I can post comments in my blog and use Trackback to make sure the other blogger knows I’ve posted my own comments on the subject. In this way, ideas can be linked across multiple destinations.
• RSS – This technology makes it easy to syndicate content. It also makes it possible for web users to create pages of feeds from their favorite content sources and read them all in one place. Feedster allows for the creation of “Feedpapers,” which are simply collections of RSS feeds from different syndicators. Recently, My Yahoo introduced a beta product that allows users of the service to add headlines to their personal My Yahoo page. And Microsoft will be integrating an RSS reader into Outlook soon. I can easily imagine a day (perhaps a year or two from now) when marketers have a single stop they go to for their marketing and advertising news every day. And it’s a customizable personal page that pulls in headlines from AdAge, AdWeek, Mediapost, MarketingWonk, AdRants, DMNews, iMediaConnection and any other sites that might consider syndicating with RSS.

These concepts, pooled together, make me even more optimistic about the blog movement and what it will mean to how we consume content on the web in the near future. As these technologies gain penetration and usage, and as we incorporate them into tools we’re already using during our business day, ideas and concepts will no longer be married to web destinations. They’ll flow freely through syndication channels and be found easily, in part due to aggregators like Feedster and in part due to their popularity within the blogging community. Then, the emphasis will be less on the destination and more on the idea itself.

And then, how are content providers going to build out a new revenue model to support themselves? (Eek!)

DoubleClick Integrates with Donovan

If you've ever run an agency media department, you know that it's tough to set up a system with your finance department to make sure that the invoices that are supposed to be paid are paid. Many media departments handle this by having the person in charge of a campaign approve invoices as they come in. This tends to add a lot of work and can result in the delay of payments to media vendors, as it adds another person into the vendor payment process. However, DoubleClick has recently partnered up with Donovan Data Systems, which many agencies already use for estimating and billing, to integrate their two systems.

This rocks. Media planners who use the system can now offload their vendor payment duties to finance, which is where they belong in the first place.

Donovan already enjoys an installed base of agencies that rely on its somewhat archaic and proprietary systems. To a degree, Donovan resists making any moves that would jeopardize these agency relationships. And since there's very little incentive for Donovan to change anything about how their systems operate, I imagine that cutting this deal must have been a challenge. Hats off to those involved.