The Invisible Conceptual Idiot Baton, last seen welded to the forehead of Colin Powell's kid, has been pried loose and bestowed upon FCC Chief Kevin Martin. Yeah, let's let the telcos hold the Internet hostage. That way, the telcos get a piece of every Internet innovation that comes out for the forseeable future. What a load of crap.
This ties in to a conversation I had yesterday with some publishing folks. I'd love your thoughts on these questions, should you be so kind as to leave your feedback in comments. 1) Let's say someone puts a content site out there that is decidedly blog-like. (Chronologically organized posts, standard blog template, comments, etc.) What is your expectation concerning posting frequency? Once per day? Once per week? Several times per day?
2) When you think of successful group blogs, which sites do you think of?
3) What's more compelling for you? A group blog with a fixed roster of primary posters where registered users can comment, or a group blog where anyone can comment, anyone can start their own sub-blog, and community editors promote the good stuff from sub-blogs (a la Daily Kos)? Where would you rather be a member?
I have rather strong feelings about the topics I'm touching on here, but I want to see where everyone else's opinion is on this stuff.
Just as Eric and I were having an involved conversation about where search is headed now that everybody's tagging stuff, Kevin Ryan comes out with a nice piece on iMediaConnection.com that will give you the skinny on where things are headed. If you think about it, the Google currency has been built in part on inbound links, a concept which has been mostly fair and mostly accurate. What's the next step, accuracy-wise? Tallying the classifications that people who actually use the content give to it, and determining relevance appropriately.
Fortunately, this keeps the concept of a Google bomb workable. Just get everyone to tag a pic of President Bush with a "jerkwad" tag.
Now that the interactive tide has turned from buyer's market to seller's market, some of the ridiculousness of Dot Com Boom Part I has returned in the form of random addenda to the IAB/AAAA Standard Terms and Conditions. I've seen some strange and unreasonable shit creeping into addenda recently, including a release from the obligation to pace the campaign evenly, reversal of sequential liability (replacing it with, of course, the "jointly and severally liable" language that publishers proposed when the standard Ts and Cs were being negotiated), automatic short rates for canceled campaigns, reservation of the right to discuss the results of the campaign with other advertisers, and random carve outs to introduce guidelines that "may change from time to time." In other words, the standard Ts and Cs are no longer a standard, even for those agencies (like ours) that followed the rules during the economic downturn when you couldn't get most advertisers to touch online with a 10-foot pole.
So am I to take it that everytime market conditions change, so will the standard? What's the point of having a standard in that case?
What ought we to do now? Do we start thinking up devious clauses to insert into addenda the next time the advertising economy does a header? Should we get the lawyers to start crafting the language that forces sales reps to fork over their first born children as makegoods for campaign shortfalls?
I can't shake this feeling that our industry fails to learn from past mistakes. We've seen all this crap before. We know where this path leads. So WTF?
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