Some companies just don’t know when it’s time to rebrand - Like Netscape. They recently relaunched themselves as a Digg clone and the response has been rather bleak. Now I know the AOL suits think that Netscape is a household word and think they can leverage that - but not when it’s a household word for “lost to Microsoft and vanished into the ether”. And especially not when you’re trying to target the Digg demographic, which can smell lame from a mile away and is merciless to anyone who tries to be “cool and with it” on behalf of a major company like AOL.

It’s a little like Wal-mart trying to go up against MySpace. If your brand is the epitome of uncool, there’s no way to pull it out of its misery.

Take a look at Song - Delta’s little stepchild. It did so well that is started to cannibalize its own family (Delta) - but for the average consumer Song was a fresh new service with a fresh new face - that’s why it did so well.

Chaos computing and the open source movement (O’Reilly article) will change the world as we know it. The two concepts are very similar theoretically. Myspace, Digg, Yahoo Answers, and just about any open source movement all rely on chaos to propagate and grow- they let the web community provide the fire and define their path, and with some controls, their growth surpasses anything that we know as “traditional”.

Organized chaos is the wave of the future.

Microsoft is getting poised to make a big move into the personal music player market with a new family of devices, under the the name Zune. It’s a direct challenge to Apple and the iTunes stronghold.

My reaction? See my Lame 2.0 post. Once again, the MSN brand is uncool - a multimillion dollar marketing effort could not convince the world to switch away from Google last year - their search was still way better. Unless this thing does something WAYYYY above and beyond what the ipod is capable of and is a REALLY sexy unit (hard to beat the ipod), Zune will be yet another failed MSN project.

This morning I was spammed by Shark Byte Media and their new project, LuxuryHomesofSarasota.com. I’ve never signed up for anything from these people and a huge pet peeve of mine is when I get unsolicited email. Especially when it’s marked “High Importance”, which is just too arrogant and annoying. Furthermore it took me only about 3 seconds to figure out that the copy on their pages is the same as 2 other realtors’ websites.

To recap: if you want to draw the ire of the web community, harvest a bunch of email addresses, spam them with a “high importance” header, and put up a site with copied content. The beauty of the web is that it’s so transparent - if you do anything like this, it’s bound to come back and Byte you in the rear.

I hope none of the “real” Sarasota realtors signs up for this thing. There are a number of great Sarasota realtors and brokereages that sell truly luxury homes, just don’t see them using this website.