The Stalwart

WhoCanISue.com?

I love the purity of this company's business model. It just... clarifies everything. From ClickZ:

Attorney and Web entrepreneur Curtis Wolfe wants WhoCanISue.com to become as common a name in the world of online legal searching as Lending Tree is when it comes to online mortgage research.

Wolfe is founder and CEO of WhoCanISue.com, a new Web service allowing people to determine if they have likely grounds for a lawsuit; if they do, it provides lists of local lawyers who bid for placement in those results.

An AppStore-Like Model For T-Mobile

Everyone knows I'm not the biggest Apple fan... that being said, they've done a great job with the AppStore, creating an environment where people are actually enthusiastic about downloading mobile apps. And you can find them. And they work the first time. And the downloads don't get borked mid-way. Anyway, my colleague Tricia Duryee has the scoop over on mocoNews.net that carrier T-Mobile is set to adopt a similar strategy across all its handsets. Good luck.

UPDATED: In Defense Of The Search Bar

The internet elite like to point out that a large swath of the non-elite population finds everything from their browser search bar, rather than the address bar. "Those morons go to Yahoo by searching for Yahoo in the Google search bar, rather than going to Yahoo.com," they say.

Ur-blogger Robert Scoble recently pointed this out in a post about "passionates" vs. "non-passionates", which apparently is some attempt to re-frame the adopter vs. early adopter (false) dichotomy. ReadWriteWeb also touched on the same thing recently wondering: "Will Mainstream Users Ever Learn About The Browser's Address Bar?"

Well let me defend the search bar for a moment. And let me point out that I'm pretty well seasoned and net-savvy. I live and work on the internet full time, as you know. Even for someone like me, there are good reasons to go to sites via search, rather than the address bar.

1. I tend to type very fast and make mis-spellings. When I search, Google recognizes that I mis-styped technorati as tehcnorati and gets me to the correct site either way.
2. When I use the search bar, I don't need to add the .com part. Basically I just need part of the URL to get to the site I want, rather than the one I'm trying to find. That saves me at least 4 keystrokes right there.
3. Ok,  you say... but the URL has auto fill. True, but let's go to the technorati example. If I start typing the first few letters, then I get something like the image below. A long list of similarly titled URL that I have to hunt through to find the right one.

It really doesn't end up getting any more convenient.

Anyway, as much as web elites would like to imagine otherwise, there are perfectly good reasons to just punch the name of the site you're looking for right into the search bar in your browser, rather than the actual address bar. If your internet connection is sufficiently fast, such that the Google results come up right away, it can be more, if not just as convenient.

And rather than see everyone else (and that includes me) as being ignorant rubes, perhaps they should consider why it is that the rest of the world chooses to go to sites in this manner.

Update: Go check out what Tim Lee offers on this subject. It's actually far more insightful and articulate than what I have here.

Blogger As DJs

I'm tired, so I won't add any extra comments, but I think Tyler Cowen's attitude toward's blogging is spot on, and his analogy between good bloggers and DJs is really sharp.

Think of a blog as competing with both Google and Wikipedia, among other aggregators.  If you knew you wanted to read about "the minimum wage," you could bypass Tyler and Alex and Google to the best entries (some of which might include us, of course).  But with Google and Wikipedia you must choose the topic.  A good blog writer can randomize the topic for you, much like a good DJ controls the sequence of the music.  Sometimes you might trust us more than you trust other aggregators, but we can't count on that and arguably the other aggregators improve at a rate faster than we do.

I've voiced my frustration on aggregators several times. I think the best way to harvest interest insight from the internet is to just find a handful of intersting bloggers and let them spin their stuff. Trying to cull interesting posts from a long list of sites has proven to be tough.

Updated: Sponsored Twitters?

Update: Just heard fromTwitter's Biz Stone. The thing I saw was a bug, not an ad. Too bad. The first person who spots a real Twitter ad in the wild is going to be famous.

Nothing is more exciting on the internet than the question of how Twitter is going to make money. So I thought I'd throw this out there.... this morning while looking through my feed, I saw an entry show up from a user that I don't follow.  I checked, I'm definitely not following this user. And yet it was right there in my feed. I'll ping Twitter later to see if it was sponsored or if it was a glitch. But anyway, here's a screenshot of me following something called @musickradio. Again, certainly possible that it's a glitch.:

The Most Ridiculous Paragraph I Read Today

There's gotta be an art to writing a press release, cause it has to sound newsy enough, while also being, well PRish and promotional. This is an honest-to-goodness paragraph from a press release involving a social bookmarking company. Seriously:

As a "bookmarklet," OnlyWire's technology doesn't actually save your "favorite" page.  Users need to drag OnlyWire to their toolbar and when on a site that they want to save, hit the bookmark icon.  By pre-registering your OnlyWire sign in name and password with the bookmarking sites you belong to, OnlyWire's technology will submit your favorite selections to all of those bookmarking sites.

What's crazy is that's the second paragraph of the whole thing, not some end paragraph filling in details on the company. I mean, have you ever seen another press release with the combination of words "doesn't actually"?

Early Adopters In Woody Allen's "Manhattan"

One of the best scenes in Woody Allen's 1979 film Manhattan is when Allen, playing the character of Isaac, runs into Diane Keaton at a trendy party filled with intellectuals. When he asks her what she's doing there, her response was excellent: "Well of course I'm here." It's the emphasis on the last word that makes it such a killer line, and Diane Keaton's delivery is perfect. Where else would she be on that night?

That line just about sums up the attitude the early adopters and technorati of the new web scene. "Well of course I'm on (insert social networking service flavor of the day)." Or: "I've course I was at (insert launch party here)."

Well of course I'm on Identi.ca.

Yet Another Hierarchical Organization Overhaul

Yet Another Hierarchical Organization Overhaul*

That is all.

*(Inspired by a comment on this post)

Corporate Branding, YouTube And Sex: RyanAir's BlowJob Comments

Here's a case study b-school students may be studying next year in some kind of internet marketing class. Exhibit A: JC Penney. Apparently it's ad agency made some YouTube video and it implied some kids might have had s e x, which caused them to freak the heck out and they demanded the videos get taken off the internet. Not only is this uncool, but it's hella naive. NewTeeVee has the full rundown.

Exhibit B: Outspoken Irish carrier RyanAir. It seems the company's famously blunt CEO Michael O'Leary made some comments about premium, transatlantic travel, referring to first class as the 'beds and blowjobs' section.  Shocking, right? How dare he. Except that Brilliant RyanAir actually put out a press release touting the fact that its video hit #1 on YouTube (in the travel section)

From the release:

Since then it is rumoured that the ‘Beds and Blowjobs’ debate comes up at most management meetings and everyone is cock sure, it would grow from strength to strength.

 

We are surprised that the translator did not find any German word for ‘Blowjobs’.  Ryanair’s Linguistic Department will offer one free return flight to a destination of your choice, for travel from October to December (including taxes and charges) to the first Ryanair passenger translating ‘Blowjobs’ into German language”

Brilliant. And here's the video:

Internal Memo Leaks: Then Vs. Now (2006 Vs. 2008)

You may have heard that a fairly well known executive at Yahoo, Brad Garlinghouse, is leaving the company. Why is he well known? Basically cause a couple years ago he wrote a scathing internal memo slamming the company. If it weren't for that, it's not clear how much would really be known about him.

Here's the thing, the famous memo was first reported on November 18th, 2006 in the WSJ. Here's what the article had to say about it:

Last month Brad Garlinghouse, a Yahoo senior vice president, wrote the memo, titled "The Peanut Butter Manifesto," for top executives. His contention: "Change is needed and it is needed soon."

So the memo came out in October 2006, at least 19 days before it was leaked.

Fast forward to today: could you imagine any such memo floating around internally 19 days before its leaked? No way. Most of the time, the internal memo comes out after a story has leaked (especially at Yahoo). Now it seems, in any given company, there's a claque of employees that auto-forward internal memos to the blogger of their choice the second one hits their inbox.

Anyway, just a little something I noticed when going back through the news.