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John Kenneth Galbraith left us yesterday at 97.

“The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable.”

ric

I just received this month’s issue of Wired. It features Al Gore in a close-up which makes him look 60, robotic and angry–okay, maybe the close-up itself is not the problem as is the fact that these are some of Wired’s most recent covers:

This Month’s:

Some other issues (2004-present):

This month’s cover is eerily similar to the Craig Venter issue (“Fantastic Voyage” above), especially both pairs of freakishly-blue eyes. I really think Wired’s editors have developed a headshot obession.

ric

Toothpastefordinner 

From NYTimes:

“Ross Levinsohn, president of Fox Interactive Media, says he wants advertisers to have their own MySpace profiles, just like the teenagers’.”

Wow. I’m shocked. The moment this starts happening, is the moment MySpace loses cool and the next one pops up.

The NY Times article has a very good point, which was already (brilliantly) argued by Robert Young: It’s all about switching costs. These can be externally-imposed (see AOL) or internally-imposed (MySpace–the amount of effort and expresison peope put in their sites).

It really seems like we’re back to “monetizing eyeballs” (as Om Malik previously mentioned). Whenever people mention “CPM” next to web, you know it’s coming from somebody like Ross Levinsohn, who’s used to selling space on magazines. None of these guys realizes that the web has one thing which no other media form gives you: feedback. And we’re not talking about the direct-mail kind of feedback of “yes, this catalogue/ad was more effective than that one”, but feedback about the user. Who the user is, what he’s interested in, etc.

No one truly monetizes the user. No one monetizes the personality, the motivations and the preferences. This entire web suffers from a non-alignment of motivations: they’re either geeks who don’t get marketing (and don’t make money), or marketing guys who are not geeks (and thus can’t pull it off). MySpace seems to be the repeating the trafic business mistake of the Internet: a geeky thing taken over by marketers.

The winner takes all scenario? A marketing geek comes up with a no-switching costs, fully-open platform which monetizes the community by… well, let’s not give up all the marbles, shall we?

ric

“Dude, it looks like your eyes are bleeding.” –Austin R. Heap
Not quite. In a quest for cool new things, I decided to try out a pair of Nike’s new MaxSight lenses. Shown here is the amber pair, which is great for defining depth and tracking motion (Ideal for, say, approaching a runway at 100kts with a broken or non-existent VASI). It actually feels like you’re tripping on something, since anywhere you look, the colors are messed up (as opposed to sunglasses which you can “tilt” to view the true perspective). Basically, the freakiest thing was looking at the GPS and seeing lines which were previously yellow are now white. It feels great and it does 100% of what it advertises to do, but it is not something that I would continuously use on a day-to-day basis.

I also got a trial pair of the green-grey “sunglasses” one. I’ll try it later in the week and let you know how it goes.

ric

So I’m going around Wikipedia today and check out Xeni Jardin’s entry. There’s a website called XeniSucks, which mocks Xeni’s obsession with posting about sex and other NSFW topics. In her wikipedia entry, under the talk page, there was a discussion about whether or not to include a **link** to that website, resulted in an absurdly long philosophical discussion about Wikipedia and whether or not to include a parody website which Xeni herself found very humorous.

I love Wikipedia, but these guys go too far sometimes.

ric