Goodbye 2006, I’m Going to Miss You!

I’m not one for predictions (I’ll leave that exercise for folks like Peter Cashmore and Tony Hung) so I’ll focus on the year that was. The highlight was the birth of my son, Elias, whose arrival managed to interrupt the one movie (Bad Cop, Bon Cop) my wife and I actually went to a theatre to see. My wife, Pamela, and I are truly blessed to have three beautiful children. Among the other highlights:
- A new job with b5media Inc. after five years watching/writing about the Web with the National Post (Thanks, Jeremy Wright and Rick Segal, for convincing me to take another stab at a Web start-up).
- The success of the mesh conference, which exceeded the wildest dreams of myself and my co-organizers Rob Hyndman, Mathew Ingram, Stuart Macdonald and Michael Macderment. We’re excited about mesh ’07, which happens May 30-31, 2007 in Toronto.
- The redesign of my blog by Ben Bleikamp, who helped me move to WordPress after nearly three years with Blogware. (Thanks to Ben and TheGoodBlogs’ Vern Lun, who’s been helping me tweak the new and improved Mark Evans).
- The successful re-launch of CanadianTire.com, in which my brother, Sean, played a key role.
- New high-tech tools such as the MacBook, Slingbox, 1Passwd and the never-ending number of tool Web 2.0 services/site that continue to fascinate me.
- The emergence of a new wave of Canadian bloggers such as Tony Hung, Aidan Henry and Austin Hill.

It’s been an eventful, exciting and fulfilling year. I can’t wait to see what unfolds in 2007. I hope everyone has a great year.

Google Gazing

Why is it that Google is held to such high standards? Blake Ross (a Firefox co-founder and Google employee) wrote a lengthy and critical post a few days ago suggesting Google was being evil by trying to cross-promote some of its other products from its search results page. This prompted TechCrunch to pile on that Google has become arrogant, and that Google needs to do a better job of meeting its “Don’t Be Evil” corporate motto (editor’s note: Can someone please put “Don’t Be Evil” out of its misery?) and it has to “stop treating the outside world with disdain”. Michael Arrington even suggested Google facing a tipping point where public opinion of it could change.
I realize it’s a quiet time of the year when inspiration for blog posts is difficult to generate but, come on, suggesting Google’s could fall from grace because it’s arrogant is a huge stretch. Google’s a business; it’s not a public service to provide the world with superior search. It’s has a dominant position, it has a $140-billion market cap and a few billion dollars of cash collecting dust in the bank. And, more important, it has a search engine far better than anything else out there…at least for now.
So what does a company with market dominance, financial clout and serious strategic ambitions do now? It pushes forward and leverages its position as aggressively as possible to capitalize on the window of opportunity. Sure, it will piss people off along the way who don’t agree with its strategy, modus operandi, new services of the way its two co-founders behave publicly. But that’s how a business operates – not every company can be as altruistic and non-evil as Craigslist.
The fact Google has a growing number of critics, who are more than happen to jump on any mistakes or mis-steps, is a fact of life when you rule the roost. Unless another search engine starts to rival Google, or Google starts to make egregious blunders (or the stock plummets amid disappointing financial results), there’s no tipping point on the horizon.
For more thoughts, check out Ars Technica and Allen Stern, who longs to be a “Googler” one day.

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The Web and Sydney: Urban Myth or Reality?

In a story that sounds strangely familiar, a German tourist ended up in Sydney, Montana rather than Sydney, Australia after apparently mistyping his destination on a flight booking Web site. It was four years ago that a British couple ended up in Sydney, Nova Scotia rather than Australia’s Sydney after typing “Sydney” on a Web travel site.

Agonizing over Vista

Rather than immediately jumping into the controversy over the rightness or wrongness of Microsoft’s offer of a free Vista-loaded laptop to dozens of bloggers, I decided to watch from the sidelines for awhile to gather my thoughts. (Disclosure: I’m one of those bloggers who was given a Ferrari laptop by Microsoft. My employer, b5media, plans to give it away as part of a contest).
The Vista issue is fascinating on a number of different levels. One, it puts the spotlight on whether bloggers need to be editorially “pure” like journalists so the content they produce is seen as objective. It’s an interesting concept as blogging evolves into a mainstream medium read by people looking for information and insight. As Joel (on Software) Spolsky argues, trust is a key consideration for many bloggers who wants their posts to be seen as credible and authentic.
Perhaps what the Vista issue does is continue the fragmentation of the blogosphere. There will be bloggers who will write and behave like journalists – and expect to be treated as such by companies, PR firms, conference organizers, etc. There will be bloggers who have little interest in being treated as a journalist because it’s not a job, and they get paid little or nothing to write their blogs so how’s a freebie here and there really going to matter. Then, there’s the Pay-Per-Post crowd.
Truth be told, no one is really, really pure – not even journalists, particularly high-tech reporters who operate in a PR-happy world of product trials, demos and evaluations (and this comes from a decade as a high-tech newspaper reporter). I would hazard to guess, for example, the majority of Microsoft XP CDs sent to journalists in 2001 were never returned to Microsoft even though we’re talking about $350 to $500 product. In general, I would strongly suggest the majority of hardware/software sent to reporters is never returned, and everyone carries on their merry, objective way.
And what about when a source takes a reporter out for an expensive lunch, or a PR firm invites a group of journalists to a concert or sports event, or a company takes a reporter(s) on a junket/conference and picks up the flight and accommodation expenses? Where do you draw the line on accepting freebies? It’s a very tricky game.
That said, Microsoft’s offer – albeit generous – strikes me as over the top given we’re talking about a $2200 product. It’s awful tempting to keep something so shiny and new but to me it doesn’t seem quite right (maybe this comes from nearly 20 years as a journalist). If I were Microsoft, I would have asked for the laptops back and donated them to charity, or asked the bloggers to donate them to the charity of their choice after three months.
For more thoughts, check out Internet News, Deep Jive Interests, ex-Microsoft employee Robert Scoble, who thinks Microsoft is doing something awesome, Web Worker Daily, and BL Ochman, who provides a snapshot of the controversy.

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Instant iPod

For some reason, the idea of buying an iPod from a vending machine strikes me as brilliant. The ubiquitous MP3 players have been available for sale at a few airports in the U.S. At Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, one vending machine has sold more than $55,000 worth of iPods in the past month, which is truly impressive. And you thought shopping at an airport was all about buying booze and perfume!

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Welcome to Your Global Neighbourhood

Hoping to strike book publishing gold twice in a row, Shel Israel’s in the midst of writing Global Neighbourhoods, which looks at how the Web is creating digital/virtual communities “defined not by physical boundaries, but by common interests”. Here’s the most recent overview. Shel’s last book, Naked Conversations, (co-written with Robert Scoble) has become one of the must-reads for any company interested in blogging.

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