David lafontaine's
Sips from the firehose
A site that attempts to render the internet down into one easy-to consume mental beverage.
“True Blood” and My Lawn At Night
This looks like something out of “True Blood” – the part where there’s been some devil-worshipping sacrifice and the whole lawn is tinged with red after some poor sweaty schlub got chucked into the wood chipper.
That Bloody Sky
Revisit’st thus the glimpses of the moon, Making night hideous, and we fools of nature So horridly to shake our disposition With thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls? --Hamlet Act 1 Sc.4.39
Free vs. Paid: Is Data Oil? (and if so, how can I get the stain out of my hard drive… )
My take: If you want to know what people will pay for, ask them why they start hitting the # or 0 buttons the second they hear a recorded voice when they call customer support. Interesting thesis by Gerd Leonhard about what the viable models for monetizing content...
This week in the paid content debate: Aug. 24-28
This week’s debate is not as acrimonious as in the past (although there are exceptions to that, of course), and in the wake of the biz models released by the Aspen conference, some people are taking building new revenue streams seriously. At least, they say they are. It turns out that a lot of what has been reported in this paid content debate is a little like Microsoft software releases: trial balloon “vaporware.”
Paid Content, Paywalls, the Link Economy and Mark Cuban’s Waistline
In which I get very “Meta” and write a blog post that aggregates other blog posts that were written about aggregation. The discussion in all cases gets heated very quickly. Insults are thrown around, fisking takes place in the comment threads, but a few actual new ideas & fact-based analyses sneak in here and there. The fact that some very smart entrepreneurs are actually interested enough to toss in some innovative thinking is rather heartening, actually.
Die, Domain Tasters! Die!
OK, I'm maybe a little over-emotional about this subject. But if you've ever tried to help some friends come up with a decent domain name for their business idea ONLY TO SEE SOME KNUCKLEHEAD SWOOP IN, BUY IT AND TRY TO HOLD YOU UP FOR BIG BUCKS, then you can...