A weblog by Christopher Carfi, since 2004.
CEO Pitch winners just announced.
Winner
PeerFlix
http://www.peerflix.com/
Trading platform for trading DVDs amongst users…no rentals. Very cool…a socially-driven version of NetFlix, but at 99cents per DVD. Depending on your movie watching volume, may be cheaper than NetFlix (perhaps significantly so). Neat idea.
Runners Up
Application Security
http://www.appsecinc.com/
Blue Lithium
http://www.bluelithium.com/
A gem that was nearly obfuscated by George Gilder’s rantings yesterday.
“The concept that you can be successful by pushing things on the customer is doomed. The user becomes the producer.”
The Long Tail is the embodiment of “life after television.” Customers don’t want choice…they want their FIRST choice. A first choice culture is superior to a multiple choice culture, or a least-common-denominator culture (like television).
“TV stultifies its viewers, and kills itself. Book culture, and blog culture, can reproduce itself.”
When he’s not talking utter crazy-talk, he’s spot-on.
Sitting on the floor at the packed-to-the-gills AlwaysOn conference next to Doc, who is also blogging away. Bill Joy is up on stage, being interviewed by Steve Jurvetson.
Joy is talking through his six “modalities” of the web. These include:
Although Joy’s been talking about these items, broadly, for a while, the distinctions still seem to hold. In the near term, mobile devices such as the Treo are going to be the most ubiquitous applications of the web…the “here” web is it, according to Joy.
There seem to be some issues this morning with the Bloglines aggregator. Upon logging in, all my subscribed feeds were missing. This is not a good thing.
However, clicking My Feeds > Edit brought the list back. (Note: Clicking My Feeds > Edit and scrolling down gives an option to export subscriptions to an OPML file for backup. Highly recommended.)
Now, it appears that although the feed names are visible, they are not being updated. This is also not a good thing.
Others trying to determine what is going on can be found here:
Technorati – Bloglines
Peter Fleck
Life Hacker
The RSS Blog
Update: It looks like Bloglines is now adding new posts again, but anything that was unread (but not flagged) has been marked as read and is now in the vault of history. C’est la vie…I suppose if a post that’s been missed is important, it’ll show up again in the river of news at some point…
Tag: Bloglines
How are the folks at Yahoo! dealing with people who take up multiple spaces in their overcrowded parking lot? Public shame via the YCantPark photostream on Flickr. Heh.
(hat tip: Jeremy Zawodny)
Junxion is definitely cool.
Stop the presses…this just in…Verizon is still clueless. (hat tip: chris)
Who is the customer with respect to iTunes and podcasts?
Some thoughts on customer service.
Doc Searls and Rick Segal talk about DIY conferences, but here is the best example of the “DIY conference” (more here, and disclosure: i’m utterly and completely biased).
Ed Brenegar’s thoughts on emotional connections with customers.
The Cluetrain gains another passenger in Chris Selland. Selland writes:
“I’m changing my mission statement – and evolving the focus of this blog. Yes I’ll still write about the Siebels, Oracles and SAPs when and where it makes sense (and where either I have something important – or fun – to say (hopefully both)), but I’m turning my attention to what is – in my mind – much more important.
Ironically, this brings me back to the point of a book I truly hated – The Cluetrain Manifesto. As I was speaking with Paul, I realized that what I hated so much about the book wasn’t that it was wrong – what I really disliked was the arrogant, condescending, ‘all big companies are stupid’ attitude of the authors. (As an aside, if this bugged you as much as it bugged me, you’ll love the Gluetrain).
But the primary point of Cluetrain was that customers are increasingly less interested in being ‘managed’ by companies, and much more interested in speaking with each other. To this point, I must tip my hat to the Cluetrain authors (as much as it hurts to do so) – they had it right. The problem with the book (other than the attitude) was that they were at least 5 years early. In 2005, however, customers are supported by a technology and social infrastructure that isn’t just facilitating change – it’s hastening it.“ (emphasis added)
Excerpted from a much longer post that deserves a full read.
Paul Greenberg, author of CRM at the Speed of Light, has a new blog, the PGreenblog.
From today, Old School-New School:
“We are dealing with a very different set of expectations from generation to generation and frankly that means that the expected customer experience is very different. It’s why you can’t presume the experience. With the generations ascending to power, collaboration and tools for providing them with an experience that they can manage and create themselves is critical. You have to give them what they need to control their own experience and control it – now.”
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