I met with Aaron Stanton yesterday, who is visiting the San Francisco Bay Area with the goal of getting Google to build his idea (his home is in Idaho, and this is the first time he’s been to SF/Silicon Valley since he was younger and visited with his parents). I see Mathew Ingram is asking “now what?”

Trouble is Aaron signed an agreement not to talk further about the process on his Web site, or with anyone in the media (including me). So, now we won’t hear much more. I guess if he says he’s a Google employee we’ll know how the story turned out, but I doubt he’ll know such a thing this week.

I found Aaron to be interesting and smart, but I wasn’t able to learn what his idea was because of the agreement. He told me he wanted to stick to his goal: getting Google to use the idea (which, he admitted, was actually a combination of three ideas that he’d written a prototype for, and prepared a presentation about). Not to make his Web site popular (he was quite surprised at how popular it had gotten, in such a short period of time. That didn’t surprise me, though. The word-of-mouth network is quite efficient now and ideas spread fast). Funny enough he said most of his early traffic came from within Google and after that it got on Digg and TechMeme and other popular blogs, which brought waves of traffic.

That’s typical too. If one guy in a big company finds something interesting they email it around and you can get thousands of visits in an hour. I remember one time when I emailed something around one of the bigger lists at Microsoft and the blog owner asked me what the heck was going on, cause he had gotten 2,000 visits in a few minutes. Turns out big company employees are email happy and click on links in email at a ferocious rate.

Anyway, Aaron said his trip had already succeeded and that he was going to stick around a few more days and see Silicon Valley’s sights (I told him to visit the Computer History Museum before he goes home, especially since that’s only a couple of miles from Google’s campus). Oh, and he also told me he’s been working on the idea for several years, and that Google is best positioned to make his idea happen (he’s considered going the venture capital route, but that Google with its massive new data centers is able to take advantage of the idea right now, vs. a few years from now).

Actually, that’s the best reason to go to work for a big company. IF you can get them to implement your idea (not easy at all, as I covered yesterday) your idea will get resources that a smaller company can only dream about (and most VC’s won’t be willing to fund).

More links on this over on TechMeme.

I love this! Much more fun than the last post.

In between the talks at LIFT there were some really great animations up on screen. I asked the graphic designer, cristiana bolli-freitas of the Bread and Butter mixed media agency, to explain how she did it. This video is what results.

I love that they started with a little smilie face on my blog (only shows up in some browsers) above that is put there by Wordpress.com to help track traffic.

Look at what Cristiana did with that smile, though!

Interesting that we spend hours and hours talking about Anna Nicole Smith’s death, but we don’t see the horrific images coming out of Iraq as evidenced by this video. Warning: these are gruesome images, but I find it interesting that we don’t see these images of the sheer horror of what’s going on here. Interesting to see what the media in various countries show us. Americans seem to get the most watered-down news.

I know that everyone who loves HD is salivating at the prospect that analog TV will be turned off in two years. Here, look at Engadget HD for evidence.

The problem is that anyone who believes this will actually happen is smoking crack.

Here’s why: there are way too many people who still own analog TVs. My dad is one of them. He’s using a TV that I bought him back when I worked at LZ Premiums back in the 1980s. He’d like to get a new HD TV, but he comes from a generation that doesn’t throw things away just because a better one comes along. Not to mention that his house isn’t setup for a big screen. Oh, and older people vote, and vote more often than younger people. He also has a lot more resources than my generation does — resources that can go into getting heard.

But, you try taking away analog TV from people like my dad and you watch the political uproar.

Here’s the fun thing about living in a democracy: the majority group usually gets heard.

In this case I think it’s sheer idiocy to plan on analog TV getting turned off. It’ll never happen. Not in the next 10 years. Sorry.

One thing I try to teach Patrick, my 13-year-old son, is that he can make his dreams happen. That’s why today I’m taking him to the San Francisco Apple store. No, dummy, not to check out the latest Macs or iPods, but to meet Aaron Stanton.

Who’s he? Well, he thinks he has a good idea for Google. So, he flew to Mountain View and hung out in Google’s lobby until someone would talk with him.

I thought it was a brilliant idea. No, not his tech/business idea. I have no idea what it is. But the idea of using both this Website and his strategy for getting heard.

By the way, lawyers tell employees at big companies not to listen to unsolicited ideas. Why? Well, if the company ends up doing the idea it’ll end up with legal exposure. I’ve heard of lots of stories of employees already working on a similar idea anyway.

One question I have is: if the idea is so good, why not just visit Sand Hill Road instead and get a company funded based on it? Big companies (even ones like Google) will rarely execute on totally novel new ideas.

Why? Committees and not invented here syndrome. If you talk with 10 random smart people about an idea, at least one of them will say it’s impossible. I want you to watch the interview with Ben Segal at CERN again and again until you get this. He told me that if he had thought of doing Internet search back in 1992, he would have dismissed the idea of “impossible.”

I want you to think about that. Here’s one of the smartest guys in the world. And he thought something was impossible that clearly wasn’t. He would have dismissed that idea.

Now, Google is full of smart guys like Ben. Your idea doesn’t have a chance there.

Instead, go get some money, hire a couple of smart programmers who are looking to build something “impossible” and make a company happen. Then, get bought by Google after it realizes that it’ll miss out on a new market if it doesn’t get in (or that Microsoft could pick up some marketshare on its back).

In the past month I’ve gotten a lot of people doing the metaphorical equivilent of yelling and screaming at me, so it’s nice when I get some compliments too. Here’s a couple:

Adnans Sysadmin Blog:

“Perhaps its Scoble’s enthusiasm or passion, or his really loud and excited laugh. But ever since Scoble left channel 9, I haven’t been able to watch more than five minutes of a channel 9 video. Perhaps it was how the camera was always moving, looking at the screen, following the conversation. I keep clicking on the channel9 videos, as they show up on techmeme, but it just isn’t fun any more.

On the other hand, every scobleshow video is watched completely. Take this scobleshow video for instance.”

Loren Feldman:

“I was looking around Podtech and I came across this from Scoble. I watched the whole thing! No kidding. I’m a huge Hugh fan, and the whole thing was awesome. I know I’m alone in this but I like Scoble’s laugh he’s having such a good time it seems. “

One interesting thing is that the video tour of CERN hasn’t gotten any comments at all. It’s really sad that historical videos don’t get as much traffic (I’ve noticed this trend before — my previous tour of the Computer History Museum got a lot less traffic and comments than other videos I’d done, even though it was done by one of the greats in our field, Gordon Bell).

What’s important of the tour of CERN? It was done by the guy who freaking pushed for TCP/IP. Without him the Web wouldn’t have happened at CERN and we wouldn’t have known Tim Berners-Lee. Not to mention the work that CERN is about to embark on will have a bigger impact on what we know about the world universe everything than anything Google, or Microsoft, or any Web 2.0 company will do over the next four years.

Remember last year at LIFT? We were the first to show you CoComment. This year we did it again.

This is the first time you’ll see UrbanSeeder, a new kind of social network that’s very cool. You can sign up for a beta of UrbanSeeder here.

I did this for Mike Arrington and Om Malik, who are my favorite two sites to get news like this.

Here founder Maya Lotan explains why she started it (she was tired of online dating sites). I really liked her approach and I bet that this site has a million users in less than a year.

This service won’t be available for another month, but it’s really great and worth checking out.

This reminds me of when Stewart Butterfield first showed me Flickr in the hallway of O’Reilly’s Emerging Technology Conference. I had the same good feelings when I saw UrbanSeeder as I did when I saw Flickr. It shows that the best stuff happen out in the hallways at conferences. You just have to look for geeks giving good demos.

Oh, and the tour of CERN and the beginnings of the Web are up too (see Tim Berners-Lee’s NeXT computer: first Web server in the world). Hope you enjoy these two ScobleShows.

By the way, I’m posting this from the boardroom at Seagate, who sponsors my show. Just am showing off what their sponsorship goes toward.

Raymond Chen is one of the smartest developers at Microsoft and he writes a blog which is one of the most popular at Microsoft (if not THE most popular). He writes about why Windows does weird things. Anyway, the 15-year-old Indian wunderkind Yuvi puts his analysis tool to the test again, this time on Raymond’s blog. Finds that most of Raymond’s posts are made at 7 a.m. He theorizes that Raymond is actually a bot and that there’s no human there. Well, I know Raymond (his new book is quite excellent, by the way) and I know that Raymond just programmed his blog tool to post a post on his behalf every day (he writes and batches them up). Not quite interactive, but fine for someone who is trying to share his knowledge with the world.

Dare Obasanjo is asking “what is social media?” Frank Shaw (he’s a VP with Waggener Edstrom and is one of the key people helping Microsoft out with its PR) admits he isn’t comfortable with the “social media” term too.

The best way to understand a new media is to compare it to what’s come before? So, what kind of media do you have lying around your house? Probably these:

• Newspapers.
• Magazines.
• Television.
• Radio.
• Books.
• CDs.
• DVDs.
• A box of photos.
• Physical, paper mail and catalogs.
• Yellow Pages.

Now, what about the media (my blog) you’re reading right now? What are some attributes of it that are different than any of the “old media” above?

1. The media above can’t be changed. A newspaper can’t magically change its stories, even if society decides something in them is incorrect. My blog can be updated for all readers nearly instantly if someone demonstrates that I was wrong on a post.
2. You can interact with my blog. You can leave a comment. Call me an arsehole. Etc. Etc. With the above you can’t interact at all.
3. You can get some sense of the popularity of my stuff in real time. How many comments does each post get? How many links does each post get? I can see in Wordpress how much traffic each item gets. You can visit Digg to see voting on my blog’s items. Or, TechMeme to see which blog items got most links in the past few hours. None of the media above do you have a clue about the granular popularity of any of the items until much later after best seller lists are published.
4. With the “new media” you can look at my archives and see all posts. Try doing that with a newspaper. Yeah, you can, if you pay the San Jose Mercury News a fee. But it’s not as easy as it is here.
5. Here on my blog I can mix media. A post could contain text, audio, video, or photos. Not so on newspaper or magazines.
6. Here on my blog I don’t need to convince a committee to publish. Not true with other media forms. Imagine you walked into CNN and said “hey, I have some cool video, can you publish it?”
7. The new media is infinite. The media above all has limitations in terms of either length (a TV station only has 24 hours in a day — over on YouTube, I guarantee they publish a lot more than 24 hours of video in a day) or in quantity (try to convince USA Today to publish a 40,000 word article, or, 500 articles on the same topic).
8. The new media is syndicatable and linkable and easily reused. I can link to your media here, for instance, a few seconds after you publish it. Try doing THAT with any of the above media. Not to mention, my words here kick into an RSS feed which you can then republish using something like Google Reader, if you’d like, or you can copy a sentence out of my post, paste it into your own blog, and say something about what I just said.
9. The new media can be mashed up with data from other services. Check out that Amazon advertisement over to the right. Did you realize that isn’t on my, or Wordpress.com’s, servers? It actually gets served up from some organization I don’t control. Amazon could, if it wanted to, replace the image there with a different book. Or, something else. Many people are putting widgets on their blogs that display various things from places they don’t control. That’s impossible in the older media above.

When I say “social media” or “new media” I’m talking about Internet media that has the ability to interact with it in some way. IE, not a press release like over on PR Newswire, but something like what we did over on Channel 9 where you could say “Microsoft sucks” right underneath one of my videos.

I don’t really care what you call this “new media” but you’ve got to admit that something different is happening here than happens on other media above.

Any other ways that “social media” is different from the older media above?

Maybe we should call it “Media 2.0?” After all, I’m a new member of the Media 2.0 Workgroup (the feed there rocks, by the way).

More linkbait, this time from Sports Illustrated, but whoa, what linkbait. I wonder what the iPod team thinks of its product being used as clothing?