I was thinking about my blogging pattern and I realized that I’m probably better at speaking than I am at writing. I prefer the stream-of-consciousness approach. I’ve never been a big fan of podcasting on the receiving end because I don’t have to commute to work and I hate iTunes. But I realize there is a market for it and some people swear by podcasts. My biggest issue with podcasting vs. blogging is that it’s (possibly) good content that cannot be indexed by the search engines so you have to rely on spreading the message virally and really miss out on the search engine optimization angle.

So I thought about podcasting transcription and ran a few searches to see if such a service exists. It looks like CastingWords offers such a service (at 42 cents/minute). There are some others but they charge upwards of $3-4/minute which is way too expensive. It seems that to do it efficiently you could run the audio through something like Naturally Speaking (voice recognition software), then have a human edit the raw output. The services I’ve seen all look like they’re completely human powered (which doesn’t seem too efficient). If I was to do podcasting, I’d like it to be transcribed as well - so I can double dip on the content AND allow people to have the option to read it.

Any feedback on whether I should experiment with podcasting? Would anybody care to hear my thoughts about online trends, what’s working and what’s new in the web 2.0 world, development, new services, etc - maybe once a week?

Several years back it looked like Circuit City was really spiraling downward. Their business model was outdated (commission-based), they suffered some losses from a few bad moves like the DIVX fiasco and in-house appliance sales, and it seemed like the company was really losing market share.

In the last few years they have gone through a bit of restructuring, had gotten quite a bit of a facelift and once again seems poised to give Best Buy (17% market share) a run for its money.

They took some bold moves in the process, like offering customer reviews of all their products on CircuitCity.com. Best Buy must still fear a supplier backlash because they are not offering that feature to this day, which is a shame. Amazon has been doing this for years successfully, so I don’t know why a major chain wouldn’t.

I believe the next step should be bringing those reviews right into the store. They should setup either a number of kiosks that allow you to look up any shelf product or offer a “shopping companion” handheld device that allows you to scan any product and read the aggregated customer ratings and reviews for that product.

What made me think of this? I went to Best Buy yesterday to buy a printer for my mom. I wanted one with decent quality and low ink replacement costs. All the associates were busy and after waiting for 10 minutes I left and drove to Circuit City. I asked if I could get some help with printers and was told an associate will be right with me. After 10-15 minutes of waiting I got annoyed and left. I will now purchase it online.

Both stores lost that sale because no one could help me and I am too busy to wait half an hour for an associate who may or may not know the answer to my question. If I only had a connection (from a kiosk or a handheld) where I could browse socially-tagged and aggregated reviews, I would have made my decision based on other people’s experiences, without a paid associate’s help.

I think that’s the holy grail of retail stores - bridging the gap between online reviews / socially aggregated information and the physical store where you can instantly buy the product. How about it Circuit City? You have the data - just bring it into the store.

I love Borat. I’ve enjoyed all of Sacha Baron Cohen’s characters on Ali-G for years. However, I’m getting a bit sick of all the Borat stuff I’ve seen on Digg, YouTube, etc. There is a limited set of jokes in Borat’s repertoire and I’m beginning to grow tired of the same lines over and over again (just different contexts). It seems like a case of “too much of a good thing” and it reminds me of what happened with Mike Meyer’s Austin Powers back in 1999.

In ‘97 I saw the first Austin Powers and thought it was a truly original, funny film. But as the character’s popularity grew, it became sickeningly over-commercialized. Everybody started reducing the character to a few “one liners”. The Heineken commercial was the straw for me.

If you look at the recently Dugg (yet another) Borat video, you’ll see it’s actually put out by TMZ/AOL and feels a lot like “hey, isn’t this cool? but first, watch a candy bar commercial” No, it was cool when the character was genuine. The brilliance of Borat was his disarming, awkward personality, offensive language, AND the responses he would get from his interviewees. He was a disarming character who brought out people’s bigotry, ignorance, and the like - that was funny. It was funny partly because it was sad - it was humor interspersed with social commentary.

Now that the Borat movie is out, it seems like he has become the commercial whore that Austin Powers became back in 1999 and even more so in 2002. I don’t want to come across like a snob - if more people see Borat and it makes them laugh - great. It’s just that to an old fan like myself - a certain innocence has been lost forever. I once dressed up as Borat on Halloween, but now that everyone will be doing it (I’m sure), it’s just not the same. I can’t blame things for getting over-commercialized but once people reduce a character to “hey, say that one tagline everyone knows, ” the character loses its edginess. And I like edginess.

I believe we are fast approaching the death of the stock photography market (ar at least as we know it). For a very long time companies like Getty, Jupitermedia, and Corbis have held a tight grip on the entire stock photo market. Marketing companies, designers, and media shops would search their massive databases of photos and then pay large licensing fees to use the photos they wanted for print, web, and advertising. Most of these licenses were rather restrictive.

Well, that was before everyone had a digital camera and before the internet made it so easy to share photography.

Several years ago, a small startup by the name of iStockPhoto was launched with a revolutionary idea: let anyone register, contribute photos, and allow them to upload and download royalty-free images and illustrations on a profit-sharing basis.

The iStockPhoto idea took off and designers like myself were very happy to contribute some of our work and use some of the proceeds to get other people’s photos for our own designs. Since then the company has grown tremendously - they’ve added many more features, licensing options, etc. The photo prices also increased.

Getty Images bought out iStockPhoto in February of this year for $50M. Getty is now faced with trying to balance their old-school (and very profitable) stock photo model with the wildy successful (and less profitable) iStockPhoto model. One has obviously been cannibalizing the other.

As hardware costs and barriers to entry are diminishing online, there’s nothing stopping more companies like iStockPhoto from launching. As a matter of fact it’s inevitable. With the current monetization models out there, it seems like you could very well run a free stock photo site and make it successful. The challenge (as it always is) is reaching critical mass, but if you have a good strategy, it can be done.

In 2004, Flickr added Creative Commons (CC) licensing options to photos contributed by their users. In 2005 Flickr added a Creative Commons search to their database as well. As Flickr’s user base grew, so did the number of searchable photos licensed under different CC options.

As John Batelle recently pointed out, there are now 22M photos licensed under Creative Commons on Flickr. I’m actually planning on licensing my own photos under a non-commercial attribution license. Last week a Brazilian publisher emailed my girlfriend asking permission to use one of her Flickr photos in a textbook her company was producing. Since it was for a good cause (education), she obliged.

Getting permission to use Flickr photos (unless it’s already given via CC) is much smarter than paying massive royalties to Getty or any other large old-school photo aggregator who then ends up splitting the proceeds with the artist.

Flickr and other services that make it easy to search large databases of photos and contact the photographers directly are far more cheaper and efficient than the old system. The stock photography oligopoly is being replaced with socially distributed systems and I’m happy about it. More people will see my work, I’ll be able to get the work of others more easily - everyone wins! (Well, almost everyone).

Well, not really - but it might as well be. Squidoo is Seth Godin’s web 2.0 redheaded stepchild. It’s a user-generated experiment gone bad. The basic premise is that anyone can create a “lens” and become a “lensmaster” of a page about anything they want or are passionate about.

But lately the only time I hear Squidoo mentioned is when somebody talks about parasite SEO or ways to get easy trusted one-way links. About five months back Techcrunch blasted Squidoo. There are just so many problems with the Squidoo concept once reality sets in. Here’s a few notable ones:

1. Most non-seo’s probably build a page and never come back to it. There is just nothing to come back for. The site is 0% sticky.
2. Once someone claims a lens it’s theirs. This means there’s a crapload of really empty pages that will just stay that way because of point #1 and nobody will fix them. It’s like wikipedia without the wiki or the pedia.
3. The whole payment/revenue-share concept is ridiculousy complicated and confusing - how the money splits before and after expenses, what those expenses are, how much of it goes to charity and under what circumstances, etc. They even have trouble explaining it themselves.
4. The children in a Bangladeshi sweatshop earn more than the top Squidoo lensmasters. The highest payouts (if you work really hard and promote it) go all the way up into the low 2 figures range. Cha ching!
5. Even their best content (Top 100) is utterly useless and complete crap. I sure hope the Magic of Harry Wong makes it into the top 10 to overtake Chocolate Obsessions. (Did John Mark Karr shadowrite the “Wong” lens?) I’ve seen content on scraper sites that puts Squidoo content to shame.
6. Visually the whole site looks like a bunch of IRS agents decided to create their own Friendster, but with instead of writing, they scraped a bunch of articles from a network of grandma blogs. The visuals on the site are really bland and the users have no control over layout or style.

So I went ahead and created a new lens called Spamdoo. Do me a favor and go give it 5 stars. I want to see just how easy it is to move up the “most popular” rank. This is assuming the editors don’t get offended and remove it before you read this.