Every day I pass by this sign on the way to work. Every day I say “there’s Ze Frank’s sign” in my head. Yesterday he taught me why I did that — it’s the aftertaste that resides in my mouth after memories of his show have faded. He branded “little duckies” in my head. A**hole! He freaking put that freaking stupid “little duckie” song in my freaking head and now I can’t get it out. THAT is branding!

My brand? It’s the aftertaste you have in your mouth when you first wake up in the morning. Sorry. I’ll try to improve upon that.

Anyway, first thing this morning I headed over to the world headquarters of Flock. Will Pate, community ambassador (pictured here pointing to the Flock logo) met me at the front door and gave me a tour.

For the two of you who don’t know what Flock is, it’s a Web browser built using Firefox’s code base but that has integration with some fun Web services built in. Translation: if you add a favorite in Flock it doesn’t store it locally like IE or Firefox does, but it puts that up on del.icio.us so your friends can see all your favorite porn sites. Or whatever you mark as favorite. Also, they have a neato (technical term, sorry) photo bar that lets me see whenever you update your photos. And it’s easy to blog from within Flock.

Basically it’s the new hip cool browser that you can tell your dad to load so he can see your Flickr photo stream.

Anyway, Will introduced me to the engineering team, where I learned that it’s a game of inches in the software business. Joe Krauss used the same term yesterday. I wonder, is there some kind of meme generation machine going? Anyway, because everything is open source you can see all the cool new features before the “release” a new version. They swear they put everything out everyday, no hidden stuff. Takes all the fun out of trying to get a good exclusive or a leak of a new feature they are working on.

How did Will get his job? He blogged that he was looking for a job. People linked to him (I was one) and he had 30 companies contact him. Whew! Maybe I should open a job board!

Anyway, I have more than 1,000 emails now that I haven’t answered. I’m suprised that people haven’t figured out the trick yet. Just leave a darn comment. I always spend time in my comment feed before heading toward my email.

Oh, and Ze Frank, can you tell me how to get the duckies out of my head? Thanks!

To everyone else: here’s the song. Now try to get it out of YOUR head. Oh, and if you’re in the Bay Area tonight get your little duckie over to the Flock Meetup in Mountain View tonight.

Some days I pinch myself because of the interesting people I get to hang out with and interview and talk business with. Here’s an example.

This morning I interviewed Joe Kraus at JotSpot’s offices (JotSpot is a really interesting Wiki set of services, which to my eye looks like a whole lot better than either Google or Microsoft’s vision for the future of how Office workers will work together, but maybe that’s just me).

Anyway, we talked about everything from whether we’re in the middle of a bubble: “yes” to what his favorite Google keywords were (he explained how JotSpot’s employees brainstorm interesting new keywords, then measure them, and get rid of any that don’t work after a couple of weeks). He wouldn’t share his favorites, though, saying that was his competitive advantage. That’s the third time I’ve heard that from CEOs this month, by the way. Until my video gets up sometime in September you should check out TechCrunch’s writings about JotSpot 2.0. Why take that long to get a video up? Cause I need a bunch in the bag so that I can bootstrap the show. Plus editing and compression are a real PITA. Nothing like slamming out a text blog.

I should have bugged Joe about why he hasn’t been blogging lately. But he’s a busy CEO so I was happy to get an hour with him.

Then it was onto visit Better Bad News, a funny video show. They have me under NDA, but their latest video hints at what I was meeting them about. The thing they showed me? Definitely interesting, I hope to use it soon. Oh, and Jeff Clavier, they said they’re interested in your money too. I’ll hook you and them up, you should see what they are doing. My pitch to them? “Better music and drugs.” Hey, a four-word pitch, what can I say? I told them I was really there to get them to sell their souls to me for $1 a month. They were tough negotiators, though, and talked me up to $1.50.

Then tonight I met up with Simon Phipps and Terri Molini after talking on the phone with Steve Gillmor who told me “don’t send me any traffic” (which promptly make me want to link to him and send him all the traffic he doesn’t want, heheh).

Simon is one of Sun Microsystems’ guys who are working on open sourcing Java and Terri is one of Sun’s PR chiefs.

Simon told us all about the cool places he’s visited and the open source computing trends. He asked me if I was going to get outside of the United States and I told him that I’d like to visit India and China. He’d just been, so figured he’d be excited. He, instead, told me that the bigger computing stories were happening in South Africa and South America where interesting open source movements have taken hold.

I hear Simon has started a blog for the PR team (I couldn’t find it cause it’s too new, but I’ll try to get the URL tomorrow) and that she has a new way to “command and control” bloggers inside Sun. Instead of sending them nasty notes she’ll just call them out in public. Hmmm, if she really does do that that’ll make her blog one that we’ll definitely follow. She was just kidding, of course.

Anyway, now I’m even further behind on answering email. Sigh.

Christian Long was one of the people who came on the tour of Printing for Less. He wrote up his thoughts (with a slant about it teaching him a lot about school design — Christian runs a company that explores that topic, so you can understand his filter there). I too came away with the same impression. This is — by far — the most impressive business I’ve been in. Not because it makes a ton of money (it only has $24 million in sales) but because of the approach it takes. I’ve spoken to executives at many of the world’s best or most respected companies like Target, Boeing, Nestle, Google, Amazon, Sun Microsystems, and fell in love with this little company. I hope to help make Podtech even 1/100th as fun a place. Also because it is being built in the absolute middle of nowhere without ANY geek infrastructure around it.

Andrew Field is my business hero.

Awesome post Christian. Thanks for putting to words thoughts that have been rattling around in my head ever since that tour.

Oh, and I love their dog policy. At the end it simply says “no cats.”

Are you trying to avoid work? You know, by watching stuff like Ze Frank and Rocketboom? Yeah, me too. Heheh. Well, Jeff Pulver, VoIP guru, has a list of Internet TV shows. Damn, if I watch all of these my own show won’t get done, won’t get on this list, and I won’t make my $.02 off of Google ads. Damn. Hey, Maryam, tell John I’ll be finished soon. I gotta do more, um, “market research” first.

Wired Magazine writes an indepth article on Sony’s PS3 and its fight against Xbox 360. I guarantee you that folks over at Microsoft are happy that Sony has tripped over their feet a few times. I remember meeting with Xbox folks a few years ago when Xbox 360 was only a dream on their whiteboards and they were expecting Sony to come out at the same time. They were hoping to beat them by only a few days. I don’t think they, in their wildest dreams, thought that they’d have a whole year headstart this time around.

I remember one guy explaining why the console manufacturers needed to have their console in the marketplace for four years before they’d start making profits. Microsoft learned its lesson by getting only three years last time (they came into the market a year after PS2 and always have been behind and lost massive amounts of money).

We still have two more years before we’ll really know if “being first” is the only strategy that matters in the game market. But the Wired article sure doesn’t make Sony look good at this point in time.

James Robertson chimes in too with a “PS3 is too expensive” post. I guess it depends how many people will buy $4,000 TVs over the next year. If you get one of those you’ll probably open a credit account. Then $600 more isn’t really that big a deal since that’ll probably cost you another $20 a month. At least that’s how I bought my Xbox and my HD-DVD. Best Buy gave me $10,000 worth of credit by filling out a simple form. Oh, yeah, sorry to pop everyone’s bubble that I’m one rich dude. It’s the American way: go into debt for your toys.

Hey, we can all play a game in our Google searches now:

Just query “where in the world is Danny Sullivan?”

He just quit working for Search Engine Strategies and Search Engine Watch.

Danny is a genuinely good guy. I can’t wait to see what he does next. I’ll certainly be searching for it.

Yesterday Om announced he turned down the Google beta. Today PodTech’s Catherine Girardeau interviews him about why he did that. Interesting interview about the state of business service suites.

Here’s another blogging comic. This one, Being Five, is about a kid who blogs using voice recognition software.

You’ve seen what Digg can do for bringing the hotest news. Well, Nicolas Nguyen is on the phone from his home in Southern California and he’s showing me around his new site, PixPix.net.

He started this to give small bands a better chance to get found. The problem is that the most popular audio files so far from around the net, as rated by his community, are ones from popular people.

I asked him if he’s worried about getting shut down by the RIAA (the music industry, who probably really hates sites like this one). He is. So, look for podcasting and other features to be added soon (the RIAA will have a problem seeing Kelly Clarkson on here, but not Dawn and Drew).

Neat site, though, and I support it.

He built it in Java and the backend is running on MySQL.

I’m here with Russell Shaw (he’s been wanting to visit me at PodTech, just so happens it was on a day he got known for some big news about Google and eBay — his article is the top link on TechMeme for this, second only to the other Google stuff).

The news he talked about the news was that Google and eBay signed an advertising deal to do click-to-call functionality within ads that run on Google.

Anyway, Russell writes about VoIP so he’s one of the first guys I look to when something happens in that industry.

Dead 2.0 reminds us that the cup is way empty when it comes to RSS knowledge or usage.

Hmmm. The thing is back in 2000 it was “.0000001%.”
In 2006 it is “2%.”

That’s pretty sizeable growth. And the doubling effect continues.

Next year IE 7 ships with an RSS aggregator. Last week Maryam started using RSS for the first time.

Remember the old saw? Would you rather have $100,000 today or a penny doubled every day for a month?

I can hang out and watch the doubling effect.

Why is RSS usage going to continue to double? Influencers are doing it. As long as the cool kids who go to FOOcamp keep using RSS the rest of us will start catching on and doing it too. Just watch.

Where’s the business opportunity? Well, if the doubling effect continues, let’s meet back here again in 2010 and compare who won and lost this game.

Every new technology has been derided this way. Remember when Ken Olsen, CEO of DEC, said “there is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home?”*

That’s the same sentiment that’s coming up here. On the other hand, if everyone instantly “got it” there wouldn’t be any business opportunity, would there?

*Yes, I realize Ken was quoted out of context back in 1977, the Snopes article that quote links to explains how that happened. Still, I’ve heard this over and over again throughout my career. It’s why big companies miss small things that then later go on to be important.

If the big company announces something why don’t you take advantage of it and point out what you do better than the big company? That’s what Intermedia.net just did by posting “New Google service offers 24/0 support for business users.” I linked to it because it shows why I am advocating for Podtech to switch to hosted Exchange instead of sticking with Google’s suite of services.

On the other hand, check out how Steve Gillmor enters the conversation with “Beam me up, Sergey” where he posits “can we start watching more carefully who insists the Google Office strategy doesn’t exist?”

Back at ya!

Oh, aside, how did a Microsoft employee (Dare) take over top billing on TechMeme a few minutes ago on a story about Google? Damn him for taking over the conversation! Heheh.

Yeah, I can hear the PR folks in Mountain View, CA, popping the corks on their wine bottles saying “who cares, we got the New York Times!” while forgetting all the influencers that brought Google to this party in the first place.

Videobloggers Jay Dedman and Ryan Hodson visited Technorati with a video camera and got a nice little report from the people who build that blog search engine.

Too much Google talk today. Whew, I think I just went overboard there.

I just found Daniel McVicar’s video blog. This guy is funny. Not quite as funny as Ze Frank, but funny in his own way. Subscribed!

He is a former soap opera star who comments wryly on blogs and other things. Plus he interviewed Craig Newmark lately (founder of Craig’s List).

Oh, what’s this? Flickr is announcing new geotagging? Damn, didn’t they get the memo? Don’t announce anything when Google declares war on Microsoft. No one except us little bloggers will pay attention and you won’t have a hope of getting to the top of TechMeme.

Thomas Hawk, who is one of my favorite photobloggers, has more on the Flickr announcement.

I was just looking at all the blog writing about Google’s new announcement. Hey, what an awesome PR machine Google has. They don’t talk to a single blogger and we all talk about them anyway. I think bloggers like the abuse!

Anyway, Dare Obasanjo, who works for Microsoft just wrote his reactions and in the middle of all that wrote this line: “As usual, the technology blogs are full of the Microsoft vs. Google double standard.”

Absolutely 100% true. Bloggers will hype up Google stuff over Microsoft’s stuff almost everytime. Why?

A few reasons:

1) Google isn’t yet on top of the mountain. They don’t own a monopoly. They are getting close, yes, but they certainly don’t have the market share even there that Microsoft has on the desktop.
2) Google’s offerings are focused 100% on the Web. Microsoft is only about 5% on the Web. Lest we forget the biggest parts of Microsoft are Windows, Office, and Xbox. We cheer companies that pour themselves into supporting what we like. Bloggers are VERY Web-centric.
3) Office Live didn’t have a position of strength to get us excited by. Google has Gmail. Nearly every blogger I know uses Gmail. When I asked a room of Pepperdine MBA students every hand went up when I said Gmail. Yeah, a few had Hotmail, but they said they liked Gmail better. So, until Microsoft completes its rollout of the new Hotmail, er Windows Live Mail (which is very nice) then Google will continue getting the hype for its office suite.
4) Google gives us a LOT of cool free stuff. That turns into hype later on. We cheer a company on that gives us free stuff without putting a bunch of ads in our face. Microsoft still hasn’t quite figured this one out yet.
5) Expectations. When you say “Microsoft Office” to us we have a certain image of what that means in our heads. But say “Google Office” and most of us aren’t sure what that really means. That means that Google, while it explains its story, will get more attention as we all flail around and try to figure out whether it’s better or worse than what we already know, which is Microsoft’s stuff. And, Microsoft’s “Office Live” fell flat because it didn’t match our expectations of what Microsoft should do in this space.
6) Branding. Microsoft doesn’t have a cool Web brand right now. In fact, the one that they had, MSN, is being thrown in the trash and they are switching over to Windows Live. That probably will turn out to be the right decision in the long term, but in the short term Google has the better naming team — by far. Calling Google Maps “Google Maps?” Sheer brilliance! Who came up with the name “Windows Live Local?” Blllleeeeccchhh.

Anyway, we don’t cut the guy on top any slack. That’s gonna be a problem for Microsoft to get its stuff noticed. On the other hand Microsoft can get our attention the old fashioned way: it can spend its $60 billion in cash. There are plenty of bloggers out there who’ll write about you if you send some cash into the system.

Hmmm, I thought Google hired all the world’s smartest search-engine experts. Don’t they have a few PhD’s hanging out at Google? So, please explain these results as of 11:15 p.m. PST:

IceRocket, two links to the InformationWeek article about Google’s new business service offerings.
Sphere, 57 links
Ask.com, 33 links
Technorati, 9 links (and their numbering is off)
Google’s Blogsearch: zero links. <<- Google, your blog search is an embarrassment. It’s at the top of TechMeme right now (if you click on the options on TechMeme, you can turn on a search bar where you can click on blog searches around the Web).

UPDATE: Yahoo went even further and just turned off its blog search altogether and says “it’s retooling.”

Remember on Friday when I was talking about big-company PR? Yeah, Google went to the New York Times to leak tomorrow’s announcement of new business-focused services. Information Week got a good look too. It’s already at the top of TechMeme.

Hey, lookie here, 107 news stories about the exact same thing. On a Sunday night, even! I had no idea so many journalists were even working on a Sunday. (Hint: they aren’t, this was written Friday and held).

OK, most of that is big-company news sources. See how this works? One, or a few reporters get an exclusive, then everyone has to jump in too.

So, I figure since it’s Google that the blogs would be all over this one. Over to Google blogsearch I go (I like Technorati better, but this is a story about Google so you’d figure that they’d get at least a few bloggers to talk about it, right?)

I can’t find a single blogger who got leaked this information along with the big-city newspapers.

Surely they’ve given Mike Arrington or Om Malik an early look, right?

Nope and nope.

UPDATE: Om says he was invited to be on the beta, but turned it down because he didn’t like the privacy disclosure.

How about John Battelle, search engine expert who wrote a book on Google. Surely he has the inside track, right?

Nope. He had to learn about it from a spammy mail sent to customers.

How about Danny Sullivan, most important influential in the search industry? (According to Google’s founders). Nope.

Dan Farber? He writes for ZDNet (professional press, surely he got in on the news) and covers Silicon Valley like a glove. Nope, he’s reduced to linking to Information Week.

Damn, did we all piss off Google PR or something or are they trying to hide something?

Well, hope that PR strategy works for Google. In the experiences of other companies that have gotten lucky enough to get all that PR it really doesn’t work out all that well unless the influentials also back up the hype.

The funny thing is that at PodTech we’re actually using most of the “Google Office Suite.”

I hate it. It isn’t even in the same ballpark yet as having an Exchange server.

Maybe that’s why Google didn’t want to show it to influentials first. They’d tell the big-city press crew to take a pass on this until it at least gets close to Microsoft’s enterprise offerings.

And, yes, I am meeting with Google this week to show them just how far off the mark their offerings are in the Enterprise space.

Please note: that doesn’t mean Microsoft should sit back and celebrate. They are gonna get their ass kicked in this space because of their lack of attention to the Macintosh. That’s the #1 reason I’ll probably be using Google’s stuff over the next year instead of Microsoft Exchange, Outlook, and Entourage.

But more on that another day. For today Microsoft is safe from the Google onslaught.

When Google starts showing normal everyday bloggers (not even self-important jerks like me, but the “z list” that no one usually cares about) their stuff, then Microsoft should worry big time.

I just had an evil thought. In every Apple store there’s several computers setup where you can get on the Internet, play around, basically do everything you want.

What if Apple were logging everything you do and studying that for marketing information? After all, they would be able to predict what Web 2.0 sites were getting popular before anyone else.

But, even if you don’t log what’s going on, just watching over the shoulders of people tells you a lot about what people do on their computers. I just took a quick tour of the store here and saw Friendster, 123 Greetings, Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo Mail, some sort of Oracle email app, Google maps, and Yahoo messenger being used.

UPDATE: On second tour I saw two different people using Bebo. I never have used that before. Looks like a nice blogging/social networking tool. Lots of people are using Google and Yahoo to search for travel sites. I saw both Travelocity and Expedia up on screens. Three people here are using MySpace. One guy is surfing YouTube.

I bet if I stayed here all day I’d get a pretty good read on what people are actually using.

If I were planning a new Web product I’d send teams of people to Apple stores all over the world to do market research and just hang out in the stores and watch what people do on their computers.

Mgreenly says, basically, that by putting a full-text RSS feed out there it’s like giving everyone a license to copy my content and use it however they want.

Ahh, so if it’s easy to copy it’s OK to steal?

American copyright law says “not true.”

And, I’m calling bull on this. It’s one thing to use it in an online news aggregator like Bloglines and its a whole nother thing to steal my content and put a different name on it and then spam everyone I link to with trackback spam.

This is content theft and its not OK. If you are advocating this is OK you simply don’t understand copyright law.

Check out this picture or this one with Patrick that I just took in the San Francisco Apple store. They sure market blogging and podcasting big time. Too bad Microsoft doesn’t understand that consumers aren’t consumers anymore. They are producers too! Media producers. Apple gets this, at least at a marketing level (they don’t at a spiritual level, which is why they don’t encourage normal everyday Apple employees to blog and podcast). It creates a marketing disconnect. Do they really believe in what their marketing says they do?

Those are the most prominent signs, right at the front door, in the SF store (which is TOTALLY PACKED!)