Zach Coelius

I am not sure why he wasted his great hoax on such a slow news day but FSJ has pulled off a beautiful gambit.

If you haven’t seen it, check out his posts:

Here where he claimed to have been weighing an offer to shut down the blog in exchange for a buyout from Apple…
and Here where he follows it up with teeth-gnashing about the legal heavy handedness of apple lawyers, and the happy conclusion in one day where it all wrapped up.  A slow news day captured beautifully.

Scott has a great post about it here

Advertising as entertainment is taking another interesting turn.  If you haven’t already seen it you should take a look at Elf Yourself.  Its stupid, silly, worthless and blowing up the charts to become a huge website.   Advertising as a method of capturing attention is taking some interesting turns these days..

Happy Holidays

I got a chance to take another look at Nick Carr’s post "The Great Unread" where he discusses the mistaken belief that blogging is the chance to have a megaphone and get lots of people to hear what you have to say.

Here is the comment I left (btw, the comments on this post are amazing, a true discussion)

Wow, there is something very important happening that this post is
still relevant and commented on.  That such a moment of insight can
have significant staying power belies the ostensible transitory nature
of blogging.

I think for a lot of us that permanency and the accumulation of our
thoughts is one of the true values of blogging. I wrote a post a little
back where I discussed why I still blog
and I came to the conclusion that the real value of blogging was the
creation of a record enabling people to find out what you think .  Even
if my daily audience is small, my total audience interested in what I
am thinking is quite large over time.  In our work with thousands of
bloggers across the internet at Triggit we
are starting to see that most bloggers are writing not for the
megaphone that the fraud you describe promises but instead for the
chance to have a back fence conversation.  Blogging doesn’t have to be
about a huge daily readership to still be important.

The NYTs has an interesting article today about entrepreneurs and dyslexia.  It is a good read.  There is a lot of conjecture and extrapolation, but I think it is on to something.  As a dyslexic, and a four time entrepreneur who has never had a real job, I found a lot that resonated with me.  Certainly the fear of writing is huge.    Posting here and on the Triggit blog has been a fraught experience for me as I have struggled with the intersection of dyslexia and writing.   Whether being a dyslexic makes me a better businessman is yet to be determined.

It looks like Facebook’s unbelievably stupid ad program has blown up.  No surprise.  What I think a lot of people are missing is that the problem Facebook is going to have now is not the privacy backlash, or the users leaving, yet, but rather expectations and revenue.

By quasi putting themselves in play during this latest fund raising, they created an expectation of value they are going to have a very hard time reaching.  They sold themselves on the expectation that this "revolutionary advertising innovation" was going to be like adswords and bring in buckets of cash.  Whoops.  Now unless they figure out some other "revolutionary" way to monetize notoriously poor social network traffic, they are going to have a devil of a time making the huge numbers they set themselves up for.  And unless they pull that off, they are going to have some very pissed off investors who could have justed cashed out at a very high multiple based on expectations.  It looks like it is going to be a rough ride for them next year. 

Now the question is if my prediction back in September that Facebook Peaked is going to be true. 

Hugh Macleod has a great post today where he riffs on blogging, technology trends and of course his famous business card art.   I like what he has to say about blogging and why it is not only here to stay, but why it is important. 

     This blog recently turned two.  I started it in the same San Francisco central public library where I am sitting right now when I first moved to SF after grad school.  Over those years I have intermittently posted in it.  I built up a small, regular audience at one point that drifted away during a period when I was too busy getting Triggit off the ground to post daily.  These days only a few people visit it each day.  But that is okay.  What is important is not how many people read this blog, but who reads it.  Anyone who wants to know who I am, do business with me, connect, see what I am up to these days, or find out what I think on a subject, can come here and learn a lot.  This blog with all its spelling errors and dyslexic grammatical horrors, represents slices of my thinking that can give people a chance to figure out who I am.  That is incredibly valuable.  So while it will probably never develop an audience clamoring to hear my latest bullshit prognostications on the topic de jour, it does serve as one more connection point to the world. 

Amen Hugh…