Sayonara 2007, auf wiedersehn, ciao bella!

$.10 a user. Is this a trend or are VC’s assigning valuation based upon registered users - again?

One trend that we’ll definitely be seeing next year - is MP3 players, digitAL video players and computers in general - in the car. After OnStar’s stupdi closed network strategy, the folks in Detroit are finally grokking their opportunities. The question is will teh Japanese beat them at it?

Another trend you’ll see more and more is updates, synchronization and remote management.

Here’s an interesting article which shows how tilted all this identity, privacy, personal data and monetization this world. Wired (Josh MuHugh) posts an article entitled “Should Web Giants let startups use the Information they have about you?” - which I assumed was about user’s profile data, their blog posts, their list of friends and their other ‘personal data’. But instead the article is about ListPic and it’s efforts to scrape Craigslist and how Craigslist sent them a ‘cease and desist’ and eventually cut off ListPic. Now my problem with this article - is that Josh claimed that this is about Information ABOUT you - while we all know that a Listing is information FROM you - or information of stuff you WISH to sell or you’re looking for. That’s completely different than information ABOUT you or your Content. So Josh goes into a whole thing about scraping, etc. - which is true and relevant - but Josh (and others) need to be clear and concise about this so-called ‘personal data‘. In this case - Craigslist is preventing monetization of listings (which is what LictPic does) as well as degradation of their system’s performance (which is also what ListPic does.) Now I really think Carigslist should open up and allow folks like ListPic to comb through and provide a BETTER UI in front of Craigslist (and so do a lot of other folks feel that) and that’s Craig Newmarks bad - but scraping does not constitute a right and aggregating listings, doing smart things with those listings does not constitute a ‘personal data’ access and control battle. If folks post to Craigslist - they KNOW it’s locked inside that data silo. Craigslist is the epitome of Web 1.0 thinking.

Plastic web guru heroes. Coolio.

Spielberg’s upcoming movie on the Chicago 7 - sounds killer.  My father was involved with the trial and David Dellinger and John Froines lived at our house during some of the trial.  “Yes Matilda - I am a third generation red diaper baby!”  In case some fo you don’t know, the Chicago 7 was the KEY trial that ended the 60’s and gave us a cold reality of what was in store moving forward for - ‘the movement’

PBCore - public television meta-data project.

Special thanks to danah boyd for summarizing this Pew Report on Teens and Social Media. I especially like the bit on Black teens using the web to look for colleges. This is something we’ll use with RadioOne - our client - who currently has GIANTmag.com up as a social network, but which we’ll be putting LOTS of effort and investment into going into 2008 - and beyond. And thanks to Pew as well!

SocialStream - a project on unified social networks

Thanks again to John Musser for putting us - in the list of systems with APIs. We’re 341 - out of 586. When we get time - we’ll fill out the form with lots of relevant info for our potential developers. John and I have a bet -”when will over 50% of all these APIs - have two-way APIs (i.e. suck as well as spit)? I say 5 years, John says….

Subvert and Profit - this is the kind of people who get funded by VCs

All I want for XMas is a Bloog. And my two front teeth.

Signs of the Times - Perez Hilton generated only $5,000 of revenue from 25M hits on YouTube. Its called the Long Tail sucker scam.

Nice discussion on performance on HD video playback - comparing ATI vs NVidia chipsets

I really think the entire Y2K thing was a conspiracy and scam to raise prices, get corps to buy all new hardware and software which consequently led to a burst of available cash - which was used for - guess what? The bubble Web 1.0 economy. So when Y2k was proved to be a scam, the bubble burst and all the cards came falling down. The height of the bubble was Q1 ‘00. That’s when all the insiders started selling. High I may add. Y2K is another example of scare tactics. Now we have a new scare tactic - Osama Bin Laden.

Good luck to Russell Beattie on 2008! 

Pretty coolio transformer ASIMO float to be part of the Rose Bowl parade. Courtesy of Honda. Thanks to Evan Blass (Engadget) for the pointer.

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