Canter & Pirillo notes

<![CDATA[Marc Canter: "If you are a flack or a PR person, you're business is gone."
It's all about honesty and transparency. That's blogging. But you can get rid of your internal marketing team by outsourcing the discussion to the rest of the world.
We're talking about distributed knowledge. You're acknowledging that most of the intelligence in the world doesn't work for you and Dan Rather won't cover you. There are many models, as many as there are entrepreneurs.
WIth enough intelligent people out there sending out their own intelligent messages, eventually it will make the world a better place. The bloggers really believe in where they are coming from.
Broadband Mechanics (disclosure from Mitch: I wrote a version of Broadband Mechanics' business plan a year ago, so I am conflicted) makes digital lifestyle aggregators that help organize the user experience in rich media. FOAFnet.com, a research effort, didn't take off. "Now, do I go home and cry? No." It's still there and there's another thing. OurMedia.org was just announced. It offers free uploading and hosting of media files at the Internet Archive. The reason we are doing that is that we are going to build things that rely on those resources. Why should we rely on big companies for the infrastructure of Web 2.0 when we can built it ourselves.
I started into blogging. I started into my interests and my passions, then my altruism led to paid work. That's how I made money in blogging.
Web 1.0 had something called a browser that sat on top of something called Windows or Macintosh. That lost a lot of money, because building lists of customers wasn't enough. The platform is no longer the OS, it is a Web-based world of APIs and schemas. [Sharing, tagging, and other organizational schema brings sense out of the self-organizing mayhem. We have to understand that we each see into the tangle from a unique perspective and now tools are being built to make that actually work.]
OurMedia will be a registry of media, not just a storage system. It's just one part of a vast distributed system with storage all over the Net. Marc goes on to describe how the archive will allow us to tap into creative work by many others—photos is the example. OurMedia won't make the transaction work, but I happen to know that Jeremy Allaire in Boston is starting a company to be the agent for creative artists. So, when you think about media, don't think about paying money to Hollywood. There are creative people—photographers, videographers, etc.—who we can tap without going through the old centers of power.
Humans sneak technology into the side door. No corporate IT guy said "you shall have IM" it just sort of appeared. That's happening at home now. Blogging affects everyone. You need to get your message out and blogging is one of the tools.
Chris Pirillo: I was the first person to say "Email is dead as a communication medium."
His PDF is here. He hands out RSS buttons to everyone. Why do we share information? What do we do before we brush our teeth? Check our email! That was so 1996, which allowed him to write a book, launch a radio show, become a TV guy and start a conference, Gnomedex.
He says Steve Wozniak answered an email and agreed to speak at the most recent Gnomedex. [So, is email dead as a communication medium?]
The RSS feed has transformed the information delivery model Chris relies on. There is a business model, he says, because he’s making money at it. Email and RSS coexist: “The ultimate goal is that your subscriber or patron gets the information in the way they want it.” He monetizes all this by placing AdSense ads. Using his blog, he can redirect existing audiences to new projects. Basically, he is describing a massive cross-marketing operation of one person.
Where I make money is finding sponsors who believe in me and what I do [this is the right way to think about it, as long as he can decide what the company sponsoring him is doing is wrong and criticize them]. He then offers to take press releases on his site [more power to him, but I’ll stick to not taking press releases].
RSS is just a Web page that is sucked in by a news aggregator and organizes it for you automatically. That’s why RSS is a better delivery mechanism. [That’s a bit of an overstatement, it’s sort of organized, but we have a long way to go. Organizing by source is only part of the problem.]. Chris shows how he drives downloads of files for fees by cross-referencing postings. “I drive people back to my universe where we may have relationships with people who make software and we get AdSense credit for it.” He’s developing a presentation called “How to make $500 a day on free content.” [The shameless self-promotion here is funny, subtle and overbearing all at once.]
Uses Amazon affiliate program to scrape tons of books and place links. But he says the program is sub-par as a source of revenue. He only hints at the revenues he sees, but says he could “make everyone’s house payment.” [Chris’ life is multi-level marketing, I realize at this point—everything that flows through him is a resale opportunity.] “We’re also scraping eBay and I am amazed how much people hit this part of the site. We’re just attaching our affiliate program to it. I’ll never hire another salesperson, because you all suck.”
“You can’t stop the conversation” with regard to bad news. He tells companies to track the conversation and join in.
We all begin discussing how to help companies see past the change to the reward….]]>