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An article today from the AP says US Airways is going to begin advertising on its barf bags. And CBS will start advertising its programs on eggshells using new laser technology.

http://blog.fastcompany.com/archives/2006/07/19/your_ad_here.html?partner=rss

I recently discovered that Google posts their lunchtime sessions online.  There are some very interesting talks on there, so check them out.  Make sure you check out the local maritime content from Dave Astels and Lev Goldfarb.  Small world indeed.

I thought I had posted my prediction about YouTube before but I don't see it anywhere so here we go again. According to TechCrunch, YouTube recently hit a milestone: 100 million videos served per day. They claim that a staggering 60% of online videos are watched through YouTube. That is freakin' incredible.

There is much talk about whether YouTube will survive because it does not have a clear business model. Advertisers are hesitant because of copyright violations in so many videos. The biggest users of YouTube are pretty good at ignoring ads and they don't have credit cards. All considered that's a crummy pot of beans to be stewing in.

There are only so many ways to make money on a site like YouTube - ads, sponsorships, subscriptions, and selling physical media with content (did I miss any?). YouTube will try all of these and make some significant money (they've already started). But the push to increase revenue will cause growth to plateau and blemish its user euphoria. The cool kids will be off playing elsewhere and YouTube will lose its shine. It will waft in a terrible state of semi-relevance before being acquired. Within its new parent company, YouTube as we know it will die either from neglect or being rolled into some larger service or portal.

<grain of salt> I wasn't smart or insightful enough to create something like YouTube so I could always be wrong... We'll see.

You know I love podcasts (my wife says I'm obsessed). I keep a little MP3 player and FM transmitter in the van loaded with shows. I listen while driving, mowing the lawn, blowing out the driveway, and walking (get a decent pair of earphones to block out noise for anything but driving). I *never* listen to podcasts when I'm at work because it's distracting and inefficient. A good podcast gets the mental juices flowing while I'm doing something menial like mowing. But to really get a bunch of stuff crammed into my head, I want to scan text.

In the course of catching up with some missed FeedBlitz emails from the week we moved the Ardent office, I found out Peter Davis and Scoble agree:

http://www.petertdavis.net/192-podcasts-an-efficient-means-of-content-delivery/

http://scobleizer.wordpress.com/2006/06/25/peter-says-podcasting-is-inefficient/

http://www.petertdavis.net/193-robert-and-the-other-podcast-guys-this-is-what-youre-missing/

Oh yeah, podcasts are great to listen to while puttering around airports and sitting on airplanes when you're too fried to work or when there's not enough time to get out the ol' laptop and get into a groove.

For the true music fanatic, this is all heresy. We should be listening to music, not silly podcasts. That's what I used to do. Right now I'm on a podcast kick. Who knows what I'll be doing next year.

Found this via Seth Godin. Just saving for future reference b/c I'm thinking about subscribing: http://www.bamagazine.com/.

I'm looking for my first real trade show display so I'm checking out companies and I'm amazed at how many of the sites don't render in Firefox properly. And some don't even look right in IE. They can make stunning physical displays and their web site is crap - what a shame.

Jon Stewart made me laugh awfully hard at Ted Stevens talking about net neutrality the other night. Naturally it ended up on YouTube. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DClkE64nFDY. Very funny.

"...just the other day, got internet was sent by my staff..."

It's a few years old so I'm late to this party, but this is cool: http://andrius.esu.lt/10/go2.htm.

If I click on your ad, show me the good stuff you promised. Don't make me hunt and sure as heck don't fill the landing page with extraneous clutter.

I just saw a Flash ad for a company selling "people_ready" software (you know who I mean, right?). It looked interesting enough to turn the sound on. It was a short clip that ended with "Watch the short film now." I thought to myself, "Cool. Maybe this is something creative like the IBM server attack ads." But alas, when I clicked, I got a very boring corporate page full of info and links to PDF documents and case studies. No short film to be seen. That is just stinky bad. That video should have been front-and-center. It probably should have started playing automatically.

Being the persistent fool that I am, I kept hunting and found the video on another page. If you want to see it, it's here. It's actually pretty good for a "commercial."

This Week in Tech show #60 (http://twit.tv/60) has some good discussion about net neutrality. The US Senate recently rejected a net neutrality amendment to a telecommunications bill. The need for legislation about net neutrality might be a bit premature but the future of the Internet as we know it is grim without rules against traffic shaping and preferential treatment. It's worth a listen. Here's what I got from it:

Net neutrality naysayers claim that companies like Google and eBay are getting a free ride because they push out so much data into the Internet. But that's hogwash. Google, eBay, and all major content providers are already paying huge sums of money for access to the Internet. I've heard folks speculate that YouTube, for example, is paying more than a $1 million per month just for bandwidth. That's an expensive "free ride."

Why don't the backbone operators simply raise the price of access to their backbones? Because the issue is not the cost, the issue is that the operators want to be able to prioritize traffic. They want to say to Google, "Hey, do you want your stuff to move faster than MSN? Throw some extra change in our pocket and we'll prioritize your traffic." I don't like that idea. It's like an express lane on the highway for rich people.

More precarious is the backbone operator as content provider. If that happens, every content provider that is not a telecom could end up as a second class citizen in terms of delivery. If content from Google, Yahoo, or MSN becomes dramatically slower than content from AT&T or Verizon, what will consumers do? What would you do?

Trying to Cancel an AOL Account

This is all over the web but in case you missed it, Vincent Ferrari is now famous for recording an unbelievable exchange with AOL while trying to cancel his account: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIVZ9b0RgmY.

And Then There's the Sleeping Comcast Technician

It's hard to blame the guy for falling asleep after being left on hold for an hour: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CvVp7b5gzqU

Death and Resurrection of CouchSurfing

A web-based service called CouchSurfing helped / helps people find places to sleep (i.e., couches to crash on) while traveling. In an remarkably bizarre set of circumstances, CouchSurfing died (http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/06/29/couchsurfing-deletes-itself-shuts-down/) because a database was dropped without working backups in place. And now in an equally remarkable community effort, it looks like CouchSurfing mightberevived. My favorite part is that some volunteers recovered 2GB of data by crawling cached pages from search engines.

I've been asked a number of times about which podcasts I listen to. I subscribe to a few podcasts using PodNova (and listen on my smartphone) but the only one I never miss is Venture Voice (Web: www.venturevoice.com, Feed; http://feeds.feedburner.com/vv). There is also some good content on the IT Conversations network but mostly in their archives, especially from conferences. I find that I don't listen to their weekly programs. I've also started listening to ACM Queuecasts but so far I'm not committed to adding them to the subscription list.

Here's my current podcast subscription list: PodNova-subscriptions.opml1.xml.

A few particular programs that stick out in my mind are listed here:

http://cdn.itconversations.com/ITC.OSBC2005-GeoffreyMoore-2005.04.05.mp3

http://cdn.itconversations.com/ITC.SW2004-GeoffreyMoore-2004.03.01.mp3

http://www.radiotail.com/rt/cast/742/venturevoice32_dave_sifry_of_technorati.mp3

http://www.radiotail.com/rt/cast/241/venturevoice28_john_bogle_of_vanguard.mp3

http://cdn.itconversations.com/Paul%20Graham%20-%20Hackers%20and%20Painters.mp3

http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail94.html (Philip Greenspun, Software Engineering)

http://cdn.itconversations.com/Clayton%20Christensen%20-%20Capturing%20the%20Upside.mp3

http://www.venturevoice.com/2005/06/vv_show_4_joe_kraus_of_jotspot.html

http://www.venturevoice.com/2005/07/vv_show_5_joe_kraus_of_jotspot.html

http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail848.html (Tom Barton, Rackable Systems)

An issue that when we ran into while trying to cluster 2 Asp.net boxes:

When a given session changed between boxes, the

[HttpException (0x80004005): Unable to validate data.]
System.Web.Configuration.MachineKey.GetDecodedData (Byte[] buf,
Byte[] modifier, Int32 start, Int32 length, Int32& dataLength) +195
System.Web.UI.LosFormatter.Deserialize(String input) +60

This occurred when the second machine was attempting to decrypt the viewstate created by the first.  Since  machine key used in the encryption/decryption process is not the same on both boxes, it fails.  To fix this issue, add a machinekey tag to the system.web section of the web.config on both machines.  To generate a proper machinekey tag, use the following utility: 

http://www.aspnetresources.com/tools/keycreator.aspx

I wasn't sure anyone would believe this unless I took a picture. Google showed me an unusual ad when I searched for church.

I touch type reasonably fast. I seem to have muscle memory for all kinds of words so in my brain it seems like I really type full words at a time rather than individual characters. Just now I was typing an email when a dialog box from an Adobe Acrobat update took focus. I was in the middle of typing and probably typed out at least four or five letters before my brain acknowledged the dialog box, which subsequently disappeared because of one of the keys I had pressed. I don't know if I accepted or rejected or made some other decision. Does this happen to you? Is it a widespread usability problem / failure that we just don't talk about?