An attractive woman comes up to you and asks if you'd be kind enough to take her photo in front of the Golden Gate Bridge. Naturally, you agree. As you're lining up a good shot, you can't help but notice the camera's sleek, lightweight design.

Sucker.

Is this the future of advertising?

“Jonathan clearly wanted to go for it.”

Go for it, he did. Mr. Abrams spurned Google’s advances and charted his own course. In retrospect, he should have taken the $30 million. If Google had paid him in stock, Mr. Abrams would easily be worth $1 billion today, according to one person close to Google. And with Google’s ample resources, Friendster might have solidified its position as the pioneering front-runner in social networking. Instead, Mr. Abrams has the distinction of founding a company that is shorthand for potential unmet.

Can't you hear Nelson's "Ha Ha!" in the background?

Wallflower at the Web Party

The deal is done.

A profitless Web site started by three 20-somethings after a late-night dinner party is sold for more than a billion dollars, instantly turning dozens of its employees into paper millionaires. It sounds like a tale from the late 1990’s dot-com bubble, but it happened yesterday.

"If you believe it’s the future of television, it’s clearly worth $1.6 billion," said Steve Ballmer.

"There are some issues with YouTube," said Sumner Redstone.

... considering testing a pre-roll ...

Dot-Com Boom Echoed in Deal to Buy YouTube

"I'm here to tell you that NBC is not some cold, corporate machine. It's people like me, trying to put their son through prep school and buy their daughter a horse."

Mark Cuban told an advertising conference last month that only a "moron" would buy YouTube.

That means you, Larry, Sergey, and Eric. Especially Eric, I suppose.

“It’s not about the video. It’s about creating a community around the video.”

There is no community in Google. If there's anything that could be Google's eventual undoing, it is this. I question whether buying YouTube could fix this.

Google’s largest investment to date was its $1 billion equity investment in Time Warner’s AOL subsidiary, which was part of a multiyear advertising deal.

I had no idea about that. What are they doing investing in AOL?

YouTube, Ready for Its Close-Up

Netflix, the world's largest online DVD rental service, today introduced a new Web site feature called "Previews" that enables Netflix members to instantly watch movie trailers that have been personalized for them based on their movie tastes.

Netflix Launches 'Previews' Feature for Instant Viewing of Movie Trailers

Go inside a Netflix shipping center.

Shortly before sunrise on a summer Tuesday, a truck left a warehouse in Rockville, Maryland. It travelled a mile to a post office. The driver backed up to a loading dock, where fifteen mail carts awaited him. The carts were stacked with boxes of those ubiquitous red pre-paid envelopes, containing DVDs addressed to Netflix. Before 1998, the only option for renting videos was a local store with a few thousand titles. Today, Netflix, as a delivery system, is almost as ingrained as the mail itself. Five million subscribers select movies online, watch them at home, send them back, and pay monthly fees: $17.99 a month for the most popular plan (three at a time, at home or in transit).

TEAR, SLAP, CLACK | The New Yorker

Google Google’s Alan Davidson and you won’t locate him readily in his current post as the search giant’s recently installed point man in Washington. Davidson keeps a low profile, at least online, but he is a presence in those circles shaping internet policy.

With a background in computer science, Davidson is an unabashed enthusiast of Google’s core mission: search. “A complex algorithm is our secret sauce,” says Davidson, for producing answers in 1/5th of a second. “As an engineer who’s fallen from grace, I marvel at it,” he says. He’s protective of the world’s largest information index --tens of billions of web pages -- and in particular, the “long tail” of a search index: the many individual, quirky sites that draw interest from relatively few users. “20% of searches that we see in a given month are those we’ve never seen before,” he says. “I find this heartwarming. People are weird and want to see strange stuff.”

Embracing the long tail figures large in Google’s “policy space.” Helping people access information and innovate requires vigilance, believes Davidson. Politicians around the world are pushing for internet regulations to control content. Davidson approves removal of certain kinds of “vile, evil” content from search indexes, like child pornography sites. But pressure on internet services like Google to act as policemen must be resisted. He describes the “hard case” of China,” which demands Google provide a filter for queries the government deems threatening. “We angst about it, but executives feel being there is better for openness than not being there.”

Other pressing issues for Davidson include net neutrality, the attempt to retain uniform fees for data transmission in the face of demands by broadband and DSL line owners to be paid more for higher speed lines. Davidson sees this demand leading to a two-tier internet, one that discriminates economically against the next MySpace or YouTube. Admits Davidson, “As a lobbyist, we’re getting our butts kicked in Washington.”

There’s also the thorny problem of intellectual property raised by Google’s book search: a “modest project….to digitize all books in all languages and create a virtual card catalog.” Davidson is convinced that Google is not violating copyright law, and is actually helping authors and publishers sell more books.

Internet Regulation and Design: A View from the Front Lines

The discussion starts with approaches to innovating in established enterprises, touching on the various challenges involved: how to improve adoption especially when trying to reach different generations within an organization; dealing with shorter development cycles and increased complexity of information; and the importance of a company's business processes and the heterogeneity of the people in those processes.

The panelists provide examples about the impact of social software such as blogs and wikis, including changes in the so-called command and control attitude of top-down organizations. To deal with increasing pace of change and complexity, companies may define new strategies internally or choose to take advantage of firms offering intermediary services, either way giving up control and moving toward more collaborative processes.

Finding the right balance is a particular challenge often mentioned by Sanford, Polese and Park. The balances aimed at include those between leaders and followers in an organization, between using traditional communication channels and adopting social software, between maintaining control and opening up and letting go, or between protecting intellectual property rights and achieving faster adoption rates.

Innovation in Established Organizations

You can be sticky, or you can be the opposite of sticky.

Traffic to del.icio.us has more than doubled since Yahoo! acquired it in December 2005. According to Hitwise data from its sample of 10 million US Internet users, the market share of visits to del.icio.us was up 122% from January 2006 to July 2006. This is impressive growth, but social bookmarking has a ways to go before reaching the mainstream - in July del.icio.us ranked at number 6,793 among all sites in terms of visits.

The most interesting Hitwise data on del.icio.us is its demographic profile. For the four weeks ending August 5, 2006, 59% of visits to Del.icio.us were from males, and 41% of its visits were from those between the ages of 25-34. That's a very large skew towards a specific age group, and del.icio.us also has a large skew towards users with household incomes between $100k and $150k per year - 36% of its users fell into this income bracket, compared to 13% of the online online population.

So who are these 25-34 year olds with incomes greater than $100k per year, and why are they using del.icio.us? Claritas PRIZM NE segmentation of the site provides some clues. For a full explanation of the segmentation methodology, visit this post, or the Claritas site. What the chart below shows is that del.icio.us is highly skewed toward the social groups U1, "Urban Uptown," and S1, "Elite Suburbs." Members of these social groups have higher than average incomes and tend to be highly educated and are more likely to be early adopters of technology. My guess is that they've heard about del.icio.us through news media or through friends and are using it because it's 'the thing to do.' This is not quite the MySpace crowd that I expected to find - intead Del.icio.us users are a more sophisticated breed of web power user.

Del.icio.us Traffic More Than Doubled Since January

This book consists of humorous observations of the characteristics and behaviours of the creatures in your organizational Zoo. It provides some essential survival guidelines for the safari that is your career.

As you read, you will come to recognize the various Zoo creatures and learn how to deal with them. This book gives great insight for the inexperienced and provides a useful reinforcement reference for the more experienced among us who every day must manage the interactions between the creatures in our Zoos.

the Organizational Zoo - A Survival Guide to Workplace Behavior