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This blog has moved to www.derekhat.com.
Friday, November 03, 2006
Thursday, July 20, 2006
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An article today from the AP says US Airways is going to begin advertising on its barf bags. And CBS will start advertising its programs on eggshells using new laser technology. http://blog.fastcompany.com/archives/2006/07/19/your_ad_here.html?partner=rss
Ads on eggshells is just plain out to brunch. FC raises a good point on this - how much of this oddball marketing and advertising can we consume (excuse the pun)? We're already being bombarded. Is this crossing a line?
Posted by derek hatchard 7/20/2006 6:57:14 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
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I recently discovered that Google posts their lunchtime sessions online. There are some very interesting talks on there, so check them out. Make sure you check out the local maritime content from Dave Astels and Lev Goldfarb. Small world indeed.
Posted by jordan lutes 7/20/2006 1:06:49 AM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
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Tuesday, July 18, 2006
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I thought I had posted my prediction about YouTube before but I don't see it anywhere so here we go again. According to TechCrunch, YouTube recently hit a milestone: 100 million videos served per day. They claim that a staggering 60% of online videos are watched through YouTube. That is freakin' incredible. There is much talk about whether YouTube will survive because it does not have a clear business model. Advertisers are hesitant because of copyright violations in so many videos. The biggest users of YouTube are pretty good at ignoring ads and they don't have credit cards. All considered that's a crummy pot of beans to be stewing in. There are only so many ways to make money on a site like YouTube - ads, sponsorships, subscriptions, and selling physical media with content (did I miss any?). YouTube will try all of these and make some significant money (they've already started). But the push to increase revenue will cause growth to plateau and blemish its user euphoria. The cool kids will be off playing elsewhere and YouTube will lose its shine. It will waft in a terrible state of semi-relevance before being acquired. Within its new parent company, YouTube as we know it will die either from neglect or being rolled into some larger service or portal. <grain of salt> I wasn't smart or insightful enough to create something like YouTube so I could always be wrong... We'll see.
Posted by derek hatchard 7/18/2006 8:25:18 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
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Monday, July 17, 2006
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I'm looking for my first real trade show display so I'm checking out companies and I'm amazed at how many of the sites don't render in Firefox properly. And some don't even look right in IE. They can make stunning physical displays and their web site is crap - what a shame.
Posted by derek hatchard 7/17/2006 10:27:01 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
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Jon Stewart made me laugh awfully hard at Ted Stevens talking about net neutrality the other night. Naturally it ended up on YouTube. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DClkE64nFDY. Very funny. "...just the other day, got internet was sent by my staff..."
Posted by derek hatchard 7/17/2006 3:56:27 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
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Friday, July 14, 2006
Thursday, July 13, 2006
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If I click on your ad, show me the good stuff you promised. Don't make me hunt and sure as heck don't fill the landing page with extraneous clutter. I just saw a Flash ad for a company selling "people_ready" software (you know who I mean, right?). It looked interesting enough to turn the sound on. It was a short clip that ended with "Watch the short film now." I thought to myself, "Cool. Maybe this is something creative like the IBM server attack ads." But alas, when I clicked, I got a very boring corporate page full of info and links to PDF documents and case studies. No short film to be seen. That is just stinky bad. That video should have been front-and-center. It probably should have started playing automatically. Being the persistent fool that I am, I kept hunting and found the video on another page. If you want to see it, it's here. It's actually pretty good for a "commercial."
Posted by derek hatchard 7/13/2006 7:46:16 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
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Wednesday, July 05, 2006
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This Week in Tech show #60 (http://twit.tv/60) has some good discussion about net neutrality. The US Senate recently rejected a net neutrality amendment to a telecommunications bill. The need for legislation about net neutrality might be a bit premature but the future of the Internet as we know it is grim without rules against traffic shaping and preferential treatment. It's worth a listen. Here's what I got from it: Net neutrality naysayers claim that companies like Google and eBay are getting a free ride because they push out so much data into the Internet. But that's hogwash. Google, eBay, and all major content providers are already paying huge sums of money for access to the Internet. I've heard folks speculate that YouTube, for example, is paying more than a $1 million per month just for bandwidth. That's an expensive "free ride." Why don't the backbone operators simply raise the price of access to their backbones? Because the issue is not the cost, the issue is that the operators want to be able to prioritize traffic. They want to say to Google, "Hey, do you want your stuff to move faster than MSN? Throw some extra change in our pocket and we'll prioritize your traffic." I don't like that idea. It's like an express lane on the highway for rich people. More precarious is the backbone operator as content provider. If that happens, every content provider that is not a telecom could end up as a second class citizen in terms of delivery. If content from Google, Yahoo, or MSN becomes dramatically slower than content from AT&T or Verizon, what will consumers do? What would you do?
Posted by derek hatchard 7/5/2006 9:49:36 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
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Trying to Cancel an AOL Account This is all over the web but in case you missed it, Vincent Ferrari is now famous for recording an unbelievable exchange with AOL while trying to cancel his account: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIVZ9b0RgmY. And Then There's the Sleeping Comcast Technician It's hard to blame the guy for falling asleep after being left on hold for an hour: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CvVp7b5gzqU Death and Resurrection of CouchSurfing A web-based service called CouchSurfing helped / helps people find places to sleep (i.e., couches to crash on) while traveling. In an remarkably bizarre set of circumstances, CouchSurfing died (http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/06/29/couchsurfing-deletes-itself-shuts-down/) because a database was dropped without working backups in place. And now in an equally remarkable community effort, it looks like CouchSurfing might be revived. My favorite part is that some volunteers recovered 2GB of data by crawling cached pages from search engines.
Posted by derek hatchard 7/5/2006 8:49:18 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
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Monday, May 15, 2006
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