knofun

Ok, so I am in Costa Rica by way of the hellhole people call Miami at a little place called Punta Islita. This is heaven and I don’t want to leave. Unfortunately, we are being kicked out tomorrow, something about too much tequila. Just kidding, big thanks to the people who made this possible (you know who you are), we are having the time of our lives.

Flickr Photo Set

Lots of interesting business coming up in the next couple weeks, I will try to post what I can here. Most of it will have to wait as we are headed to the UFC fight in vegas next weekend. Yeah yeah yeah I know what you are saying, but when you work 18 hours a day you have to live by words like Tupac’s:

“What’s the sense of working hard if you never get to play? I’m hustlin!”

play

Still trying to get some decent blogs going for bPublisher, so I am trying to hire some students via NACELink, which supposedly is a central resource for students to post resumes and respond to job ads.

Basically we are looking for writers for FileSharingBlog.com, Bloglitical.com, BMXBlogs.com, and several others we haven’t launched yet. We are paying some good money for quality posts, and some solid bonuses in the way of tech goodies. If you or someone you know is interested, send a resume and some post examples to info AT bpublisher DOT com.

geek stuff, ventures, web marketing

So like an idiot I bought AAPL at 67.80 today. Then That Happened.

In a somewhat shocking turn of events, I actually made money on a stock, but of course it was purely by luck. One of my friends told me to check out this site, which appears to be all hype and scam (Check out this google blogsearch). But anywho, I figured what the hell and bought some of this stock ABZT @ $0.138. Closed today @ $0.21. Not too shabby, but we will see how it goes. I am sure the scam is about to reveal itself.

other

Just watched an awesome video of Jason Calacanis going on a rant about DRM, Apple’s FairPlay in particular. He is a smart guy and therefore expounds on the obvious points, like how no content company is going to license their products without some kind of digital locks. He also makes this great point:

“I bought a song online, I paid for it, and I can do less with that song than if i had stolen it.”

Yes DRM is a necessary evil at this point, but the point is that the average consumer is trapped between both worlds. We WANT to pay for music and movies, but the fact remains that all the cool things we can do with all these new technologies are being limited by scared people. But it is their content that people want to consume so who can knock them for wanting to control it. I just wish we had more faith in our fellow man.

Jason recently sold his company to AOL so he is kind of a big company guy but is smart enough to keep saying what he thinks. Kudos.

Not sure where this video is from, looks like a panel at some conference.
Watch the Video

Jason’s post

digital media, file sharing / p2p, geek stuff

Haven’t been attending conferences lately, just been going “darn I should have been at that one” after the fact, so I am making a list here and now.

• SES - NYC Feb 27 - March 2
• PubCon - Boston April 18-20

web marketing

Google is under intense pressure to keep up with wall street’s revenue expectations. The lion’s share of their revenues comes from adsense, so naturally they are trying to expand that as much as possible. Their latest move, according to JenSense:

Google AdSense is moving beyond the traditional text and graphical advertising to rich media, including interstitials, expanding ads and floating ads. AdSense began contacting publishers last week to be involved in the rich media limited beta test.

The campaigns will likely be site targeted, rather than contextual, but details on the actual implementation of these new ads are still under wraps. With these kind of top-secret beta tests, NDAs are often requirements before being accepted into it.

Floating ads are ads that either stay on top as the page is scrolled, or ones that “float in” from the side of the page to the center of the page. Expanding ads are those that require user interaction to expand, either with a mouseover or a click. Interstitials are perhaps the most interesting addition to this rich media beta, because they are a format that people love to hate, and that are often more annoying than pop-ups. You have likely stumbled across an interstitial ad - they appear when you click through to read a page, and before they will show you the page, you are bypassed through to a full page ad that you must view before seeing the actual content you were wanting, often by having to click a link on the interstitial ad page.

This is to be expected, but kind of disappointing. This to me is a step backward to join the likes of Burst and Fastclick, not the traditional innovation we have come to expect from Google. I want them to go forward and dominate new businesses, not backwards. Google denies any and all efforts in building a web based version of Office, but it seems fairly inevitable. I am sure their shareholders would love it.

web marketing

Big shouts out to my boys @ Freek Racing for landing some big funding. These guys are going big, pay attention!

ventures