DISQUS

Chris: This is a great post. Many of us talk about these things often, but you put them all in one place. I'd also add "be nice." It's OK to disagree online, but I'm always amazed at how quickly people are willing to get nasty and personal right out of the box. That just doesn't work in the long run. If you have a different point of view, great! That's what makes the conversation interesting, but don't just rude and just call names. That's so unproductive.

As always, keep up the great work!

Doyle Albee

Chris:

Great post. I think one of the things we're all struggling with is "advertising." That is, how does it work moving forward? If the Next Media Company can make some strides in making ads more relevant, we'd really be on to something.

For example, we talk about "targeting" ads more, but those are still an interruption. Just because I'm discussing being thirsty with a friend, or looking for beverages online doesn't mean I want to see something about Coke. It's better than a generic banner ad or similar, but it's still a guess. The question is how to make messages part of a natural conversation, yet do so in a way that can generate enough revenue to support the service. Taking my example above, could a brand like Coke ever find enough appropriate ways to join a conversation on, for example, a business blog? Probably not.

For the short term, I'm still convinced a "sliding scale" is the best answer. It's kind of like a movie: If I want to see it on release day, I have to go to a theater and pay for it. If I'm willing to wait a year or so, I can see it on network supported by commercial interruptions. We're quickly moving away from the time-mandated element of that. So, on a news site, I can pay a monthly fee and get no ads, or I can go for free and get ads, or someplace in between (maybe ads from the five vendors I get to select for a lower monthly fee). This allows advertisers to reach me, but also encourages them to engage me in such a way that I don't vote them off the island, so to speak.

There's a reason it's called "social" media — there are some social acceptable behaviors that are starting to emerge. There's nothing worse than getting cornered at a cocktail party by a guy that doesn't want to chat, but wants to add you to his Amway downline, or push insurance, or a million other things.

Folks that just push their business, affiliate or otherwise, on social networks are the online equivalents of those party boors. I believe (maybe hope?) that the networks will weed them out.

Micah: Great stuff. I continue to be amazed at just how visceral the reaction to "gay" remains. Why? I'm bluntly baffled. Outside of the two adults involved, it's really not anyone's business.

Great post. Thanks for writing.

Aaron:
As I type this comment on my MacBook Pro, I couldn't agree more. We recently moved our company from PC to Mac, and things work better and people are generally more satisfied.

One thing: I tried to go to iWork, and I really liked it (I still won't touch PowerPoint under any circumstances in favor of Keynote), but if you manipulate a lot of Word docs, saving in Pages, then exporting, can be cumbersome. I probably open, edit and save 20-30 Word docs a day, and switched back to Word for Mac just to avoid the extra step, which can be a pain. If you don't work in and out of docs that often, Pages is superior.

Thanks for showing the CFOs what the rest of us suspected (or hoped was true!).

Doyle Albee
www.metzgerblog.com

Congrats, Tara!