Listics

The SF Chronicle reports,

…small businesses are starting to dip their toes into what is called
the blogosphere. Some analysts suggest that blogging presents an ideal

marketing opportunity for small business  –  that blogging is in fact better
suited to the needs of small firms than large ones.

Thanks to B.L. Ochman for the pointer

Yahoo buys FlickR.   I think this is a good thing for the people who worked so hard to make FlickR so successful.  And it can’t be a bad thing for the bigNetCo.

And, according to Caterina, we discerning FlickR Pro account holders will get some kind of nice surprise.

Jeneane Sessum’s "Content Factor" is taking off.   Look at the clients listed in this TechLinks article!  Congratulations Jeneane.   

Maybe all the good domain names were taken.  Spelling was an issue when I settled on LISTICS.  Should it be LYSTICS or LISTICS?  LYSTICS has more visual appeal.  LISTICS  is linguistically more satisfying.  What’s a white male to do?  I figured it wasn’t the right time to ask Shelley.

WWW.LISTICS.COM  is what I got.  I like it because it’s part of so many words:  Pugilistics.  Ballistics.  Journalistics.  Okay, so a lot of them are made up.  Watch this space.

Churbuck’s First Rule of Online Media: Don’t piss off your traffic. Every
aspect of online operations, design, and commercialization needs to be
analyzed in the context of this commandment.  Any violation of the law
will surely result in a fast swerve by the traffic to a more friendly
alternative.

Thus prepared I am ready to step off into the scary world of professional online publistics.

Steve Gillmor aims one straight at Moe, Larry, and Sergey:

Over and over incumbents are walking up to the light at the end of the
tunnel and saying, "Looks like a train." If Google leverages its scale
to create new inventory around links, the net effect will be to incent
competitors to route around it. Just as Google destabilized Office by
creating the world’s fastest (and free) spell checker, reference tool,
and pizza delivery service, so too will a craigslistian series of
competitors destabilize Google if they are stupid enough to persist in
refusing a conversation with the very beta-testers who are their
partners.

Audio files live on the web.  People download them and play them later.  With at least three 20GB MP3 players
available cheaper than the heavily branded trendoid Apple product
there’s finally enough competition in the MP3 player space to
commoditize the hardware and open up the audio appliance market to kids
on the bus.

Now the story begins to emerge.  What was a shifty, kind of sleazy, definitely privileged waste of bandwidth in the asynch audio distribution arena has begun to assume the trappings of legitimacy.  Markoff’s story last week and the subsequent coverage in the San Francisco Chronicle tell the real story, a story stripped of merciless ego-tripping.   This is a story full of hope now that even handed innovators and entrepreneurs have fixed their clear vision on the market.

Like the words "blog," and "Kleenex," I’m afraid we’re stuck with the boogery term "podcast" for the foreseeable future.   The good news is that the medium is opening up in terms of service, decent content, and a multiplicity of providers.

Thanks Dave and Adam, Dawn and Drew… now - what’s next?  The podcast movie is in the can.

Ahhhh… movies…  talk about a bandwidth challenge!

This is a business opportunity with a lot more potential than fart-in-a-windstorm brainwaves like fake helipads.  No offense to Gary.