It’s 7:45pm in Seattle and 3:45am here in London. Why am I up? The same reason I was up last night at this time, and, for that matter, the night before that. My body can’t seem to adjust to Greenwich Mean Time. Of course, I’ve been far too busy to sleep during the day, which leaves me wondering how long a 26-year old male can actually go without any significant quantity of shut-eye.
Luckily, this curse has brought with it some benefits. For one, this unsecured wireless network that I’m bogarting from some poor Kensingtonian has just appeared in my network options, allowing me to blog. Secondarily, and of greater interest, the massive boredom created by spending hours awake staring at the low ceiling has put a rush of ideas into my head.
Just a few:
- Why can’t Flash be search indexable? It seems very easy to me for Macromedia/Adobe to create a standard system whereby frames, and the text content within them, is issued as a parsable portion of the SWF file.
- Web 2.0 has a much cleaner definition than O’Reily gives it (IMO). I believe that at this point, when we (insiders in the web industry) refer to Web 2.0, what we really mean is simply the use of web technology to provide an egalitarian content-production and distribution system. Nearly every Web 2.0 buzzword – User Generated Content, Blogs, RSS, Wikis, etc. fits into this map. The only excluded elements are the spiffy GUIs and AJAX.
- Salon.com’s re-design sucks. That’s why I haven’t renewed my subscription. I know it’s almost a year old, but it still pisses me off.
- London’s business districts are remarkably well intertwined with their retail and tourist locations. Way to build a metropolis, Brits!
- Residents of Glasgow are, apparently, called “Glaswegians” (pronounced Glass-wee-gins)… Makes me wish Seattlites went with something more hip.
- The web’s mindshare is going through a search-dominated period, much as it went through a directory and portal-dominated period in the mid-late ’90’s. I give it no more than 4 more years before a new surfing style takes over and search becomes just one of many ways to use the web.
- Likewise, the long tail of the demand curve is going to be hot for a limited amount of time before we see a level of saturation that makes all but the smallest of industry nooks so competitive online that there will be little difference in cost and effectiveness between starting an online business vs. an offline one (or perhaps the two will blur so completely as to make it a moot point).
- I met with a client who’s part of an incubation system run by a VC today. I really like the idea of incubation – I think that in the future, I’d like to be able to fund smart people with great ideas and a passion for getting them done. In fact, it’s going on my 25-year plan.
- The audience at this site is way, way too savvy to click on ads, so if we’re going to monetize, we need to do it on a CPM (cost per thousand impressions) basis. EIther that or SEOmoz needs to start selling some content of its own…
Last thing – any tips for getting to sleep? Benadryl tablets make me feel sleepy, but I pop out of it about an hour later and don’t get any rest… Here come the chirping birds and light blue skies… Please give me just two hours before SES tomorrow.
