Source: CNN - International

Solestrom knows an opportunity when it sees one. They've created a new $190 bikini that goes on sale next month with a UV meter built into its belt and an alarm that beeps to tell wearers when its time to get out of the sun. This one is in the same product family as the Perdue pop-up thermometer and the fruit ripeness sticker.

Source: PSFK

Brilliant video riffing on changes in media and The Long Tail.

Source: Forbes

Louis Hau says that YouTube is a lot like MTV 25 years ago. MTV "got its start airing music videos 24 hours a day - programming that it received for little or no charge from major record labels." Now the music industry knows that videos aren't just promotional items to sell CDs and MTV creates its own programming. But both are reeling from not being the dominant force they once were. So is MTV aging well? Its new strategies include launching a user-generated channel in the UK called MTV Flux, narrowcasting to niche audiences like MTV Desi (for Indian-Americans) and MTV Chi (for Chinese-Americans) and further exploiting its sizable library of original programming. Don't count them out. "It's the cornerstone of a cable-channel empire that generated $6.76 billion last year." And it can still move pop culture - witness the star-making of Jessica Simpson.

Source: Guy Kawasaki's blog

The annual TED Conference brings together 1,000 of the smartest people in the world to discuss...everything. And Guy Kawasaki posts to remind us that TED has released some of the great presentations on video for the rest of us. Larry Brilliant, now Executive Director of the Google Foundation, gives an incredible presentation on the eradication of small pox and pandemics. And do not miss Majora Carter, the Macarthur-winning founder of Sustainable South Bronx. No surprise, this stuff is better than YouTube.

Monopoly cashes out
Illustration: James F. Kraus

Microsoft design guru?
Trusting the new Web
Calling in rich
More than chasing tail
Churn and burn R&D?
Zillow banks $25m

Here's this week's harvest of links along with some eggplant...which you can harvest in the real world this weekend. Did you know that eggplant offers antioxidants with its purple shade and is actually a fruit, a berry, and part of the nightshade family? Me neither.

Speaking of fruit, a University of Arizona professor has invented a sticker that can tell consumers if a fruit or vegetable is ripe. The stickers will be available to growers next year and should make their way to supermarkets within two to three years.

Beth Kanter, who I interviewed as part of an article I wrote for The Globe on Women and Blogging is live blogging the BlogHer Conference taking place in San Jose today and tomorrow. To gear up for it, she writes a nice post with tips on how to blog live.

Not everyone is pleased with my coverage of women on Business Filter. Here's John Keith who writes The Boston Real Estate Blog and offers his opinion:

"Maura, your blog is kind of embarrassing, with all the "Go Girl Power!" entries. I mean, how does a female blog differ from a male blog? You seem really hung up on this, all the way back to your post where you say men's heads would turn, if they had to do what women (mothers) do, each day.

Are you feeling un-needed? Unwanted? Unappreciated?

What makes you think anyone else feels the same way?

In the ethernet, there's no gender. I don't know where you got the idea there was.

Wait, maybe there is. In the female world, I guess women touch their hair, wear noisy high-heeled shoes, and shop for lipstick."

John, I never buy lipstick online.

And by the way, the exploding head illustration is by James Kraus and it's one of my favorite illustrations eva on Business Filter. Here's the post it's from originally.

This week I wrote about how my iPod died and got lots of thoughtful responses and plenty of message board action.

Here's my update. I called Apple Tech Support just to see what would happen. They told me I had three options.

Source: BusinessWeek

BusinessWeek reports that Microsoft has a team of 20 in-house designers that have been diligently working for the past 18 months on an elegant new look for PCs that will run Microsoft's next operating system, Windows Vista. And now they've put out a How-To kit for the ideal PC design to leading design shops. It calls for "accelerated curves" and "purposeful contrast." The preferred colors are "Obsidian" and a translucent white dubbed "Ice." "We want people to fall in love with their PCs, not to simply use them to be productive and successful," reads the enclosed booklet. "We want PCs to be objects of pure desire." Like...Apple.

Source: Wired Magazine

Here's a few handy tips from Wired's August DIY issue on how to speed up a customer service call. Bookmark this: gethuman.com/us. It's a database of customer support phone numbers and tips on navigating their voice system. And here's how to bail yourself out of voice jail: "Press Ø repeatedly, or try combinations of Ø, #, and * or say agent, operator, representative, I don’t know, get human, or help. When all else fails, shout profanity: Some systems rush "angry" callers to an operator.

Source: CNET Media blog

Record companies generally make a big stink about downloads. And while many songs are downloaded illegally, when they're not, guess who gets the lion's share of the cash? Record companies. Michael Kanellos blogs that Dave Jaworski at PassAlong Networks says that record companies keep about 72.5 cents on average for a 99 cent song. The credit card company gets a bit and the rest goes to the site that sold the song.

Source: ZDNet Digital Micro-Markets blog

There's been a blog-insiders discussion going on about putting a price tag on the active contributors at Web properties such as Digg and Netscape, prompted by Jason Calacanis offering to pay $1,000 per month to the top Diggers on Digg if they switched to Netscape.

But Donna Bogatin says the bigger question is how much the legions of non-contributing, and non-paying, users are worth. Here's how Bogatin estimates MySpace's numbers:

MySpace 2005 acquisition price: $580 million

MySpace 2006 "friend" user base: 100 million

MySpace 2006 ad revenues: $200 million
MySpace acquisition price reflects an approximate multiple of $5-$6 per "friend." MySpace is currently generating approximately $2 in revenue per "friend."

"The MySpace effort to grow ad revenues since its acquisition by News Corp. last year provides would be bidders for Digg, YouTube...a valuable reference for measuring the financial potential of a large, non-paying base of young Internet users."

Source: Google

In writing this post on James Fallows' observations of Web 2.0, I realized I've never posted specifically on Google Earth. How do I know this? I use Google all the time to search my blog. So here's a Google Earth posting. Download it now. It's free. Then type in your address and watch what happens. Then type in Paris, France or Machu Picchu or San Francisco and see what happens. Then angle the view so you can see it at ground level and fly around. OK there. Now you're hooked.

Source: Technology Review

James Fallows spent a couple of weeks living on Web 2.0. He swapped newspapers for RSS feeds, podcasts for radio, Word for Writely. He used Google Calendar, Wikipedia, Google Earth and Windows Live Local and more. Among his many observations? The world isn't all-digital all the time, yet. So while Writely is great, you can't work on it on an airplane, so Word will stay. Fallows defines the new Web as an outpouring of knowledge and sees it as "inspiring" and "deeply human." But also potentially tragic because every bit of the Web enterprise operates on trust and if that trust is misplaced we may recognize that "the Web 2.0 era belonged to younger, more trusting people."

Source: A VC

Every week Fred Wilson posts a VC Cliché of the week and this week he picked one that's a killer. It's a concept called "Calling in rich." That's when "people work really hard, build something valuable, realize the value in some sort of transaction, get paid a lot of money, and then one day they wake up and don't feel like working anymore. They call in rich." The funny part is how aptly the phrase sums up the phenomenon. The tragic part? If it really happens at your startup. Then it's not funny. At all. It's just devastating and treasonous.

Source: Ad Age

Even though iPods may have overtaken beer in popularity on college campuses, beer, it seems, is back with the general population. A new Gallup poll says that 41 percent of all U.S. drinkers prefer beer vs. 33 percent who prefer wine. It was just one short year ago that the same poll found that Americans more frequently drank wine (39 percent) than beer (36 percent). The beer industry is waiting for confirming sales data before they all go out for a beer to celebrate.

Source: Slate

The Long Tail is a hot new book by Chris Anderson, the Wired editor-in-chief who first coined the term and the concept in 2004. Here’s the big idea:

The sales of niche products that are low in sales volume can over time collectively rival or exceed the market share of the relatively few hits, assuming the store or distribution channel is large enough (like the Internet). Examples: Amazon, Netflix, iTunes.

In the book, Anderson expands the theory broadly saying that "The Future of Business Is Selling Less of More." Let the backlash begin. The Wall Street Journal gave it a bashing today. But I prefer Tim Wu's analysis in Slate.

Wu says that Anderson perfectly visualized the long tail for cultural products like search, music, films, and books. Meaning that Amazon and Google, can make money not just on big hits, but they can also "live like a blue whale, growing fat by eating millions of tiny shrimp." But by broadening it to all business, Anderson overreaches. "As a business model, the Long Tail matters most 1) where the price of carrying additional inventory approaches zero and 2) where consumers have strong and heterogeneous preferences." But when it comes to goods that need to be manufactured and standardized, it doesn't work. There's no tail to chase in oil or telecommunications infrastructure.

I agree with Wu. The Long Tail is not a theory of everything. "There's more to this economy than chasing tail." But if you care about how our culture is changing, read the book.

Source: ArsTechnica

Jon Hannibal Stokes has a great think piece about the legacy and future of R&D. He says it's easy to make fun of those old dinosaurs at AT&T and Xerox labs. But those were the labs that lavishly funded blue-sky research that gave rise to little things like the Internet and the transistor. The information economy almost never funds blue-sky research - Google is unique in granting engineers 20% time. Today's R&D is fueled by the boardroom and the marketing department - read commercial viability. Stokes says it's fair to ask if our economy is therefore "creating enough science to replenish the stock of scientific capital that it's still burning through." It takes steady, expensive, long-term fundamental research to produce the really big ideas that change the world. Are we just churning our existing institutional and cultural landscape and not feeding it with enough truly breakthrough innovation?

Source: Engadget

My husband used to work for Parker Brothers and let me tell you, Monopoly was - is - its sacred cow. So you know times have changed when the guardians of Mr. Moneybags relent and go with electronic banking. Parker Brothers is phasing out the cash-based version's funmoney. Instead of those multicolored bills you'll find VISA-sponsored debit cards and a calculator that keeps a running tab on your riches, or lack thereof. Might as well get kids hooked on debit and VISA cards early. What could be next? Bluetooth tech that knows when your piece passes 'Go' and automatically credits you $200?

Source: Technology Review

Wade Roush writes about new services like Sharpcast and MediaMax that create personal infoclouds that don't just store your data online - they keep it synchronized across all your devices. Example: edit a photo or a document and save it on your work PC and the system will automatically update an online copy and then do the same for the copies on your home PC or even your cell phone. That saves a lot of human bandwidth - remembering where everything is - but a few factors will limit the adoption of these services: sufficient bandwidth and connectivity for all devices, and - no surprise - security. If we all have infoclouds, who makes sure they're secure?

These services give some people the shakes. Google has been rumored to be building one like it called GoogleDrive and this ominous movie predicted some possible dire consequences of such a thing.

Source: Netflix via Marktd

Last week we talked about how some back-catalog Netflix movies get returned unwatched even though we love the idea that we could watch them and we happily pay for the privilege. Here's a really clever marketing campaign by Netflix that puts their classic movies front and center. They're sponsoring outdoor screenings of classic American films at the actual locations of the films memorable locales. In August the Netflix Rolling Roadshow will screen Jaws at Ocean Park, Oak Bluffs, Martha's Vineyard. The Shining screened in Estes Park, Colorado. You get the idea.

Source: SiliconBeat

We've discussed before that home value site Zillow.com, gives realtors the Zillows. Why? Because it's incredibly easy to type in an address and instantly get estimated home values not just for that address, but for every house in the neighborhood. And up until now, getting that information required a realtor. Last week Zillow partnered with Yahoo. This week they closed on a second round of funding worth $25 million, led by Boston-based Par Capital Management, as the Globe's Business Ticker blog just reported. Which part of the home-buying biz will Zillow Zillow now?

Check out Zillow's new heat map of Boston. It will show you what neighborhoods are hot - in real estate values, that is.

Source: TechCrunch

In December 2005 Adam Penenberg at Slate wrote a great piece about how music should be sold like a commodity with real-time pricing that oscillates like the stock market. Amie Street, a new alpha-stage startup founded by three Providence, RI college students is getting close to that model. Artists can upload their music to Amie Street for promotion and sale. Users form social networks with friends, listen to, and purchase music. All songs are DRM-free (free of C.R.A.P.) in MP3. All songs are free to start but then fluctuate as demand for the song increases. And a savvy recommendation system encourages people to recommend music to their friends and if the market value of the song increases, the recommender gets account credits. Watch this one.

Source: Textually.org

On Sunday The Washington Post wrote about how it's becoming increasingly difficult to tell when someone is talking to themselves like a raving lunatic or just talking on their Bluetooth-enabled cell phone headset. Expect to see more people talking to themselves. In 2005, 33 million wireless earpieces were shipped worldwide, he says. This year's predicted number: 55 million. So you're also going to have to figure out when a headsetted person is talking to you, vs. talking on their phone. It's a whole new level of etiquette to be breached.

Source: Me, Chicago Tribune

A month ago I put my much-loved iPod on notice because of concerns over the lifetime of its battery and the fact that you can't replace the battery. Well, imagine my consternation when my iPod died mid-run this weekend. There I was keeping a solid pace, coming up on 1.5 miles, grooving to Steely Dan's 'Bodhisattva' and suddenly...silence. Dead. Kaput. When I got home I spent an hour following the instructions on Apple's site and various blogs to resuscitate it. Nothing. So now I'm off to call Apple. Arrrrggghhh.

I paid $150 for my iPod in December. I'm only 7 months in.

I'm not alone by a long shot. The Chicago Tribune reports today that while Apple claims 5 percent failure rate for iPods, a late 2005 survey by macintouch.com reports a failure rate of 13.7 percent, roughly half battery-related, while the other half were hard-drive-related.

Now I get to test Apple's customer support line.

Source: Online Media Daily

According to The Economics of Podcasting, a new report from Nielsen Analytics, the most successful podcasts get as many as 2 million downloads a month and advertisers like Sony Pictures, Shell Oil, EarthLink, Warner Bros., HP, HBO, and GoDaddy are lining up. More than 6 percent of U.S. adults - about 9 million Web users - have downloaded podcasts in the past 30 days and 75 percent of them are male.

Photo from Hello.Ken1 via Flickr

Source: TechCrunch, Billboard

Friday afternoon Microsoft confirmed their plans to go after iTunes and iPod, with a launch later this year of Zune, an umbrella brand for "a family of hardware and software products" targeting various digital entertainment services. First up? A portable music player and digital music service, with a portable digital video player and perhaps even a portable game device to follow. Microsoft employees Cesar Menendez and Richard Winn are blogging the project. Get more info at ComingZune.com.

The paradox of abundance
Illustration: James F. Kraus

Be a people person
Social search MySpace
How not to Dot-Bomb 2.0
Who are bloggers?
The 1 percent rule
Knowledge bridging

Here's this week's harvest of links along with some raspberries...which you can harvest in the real world this weekend.

The article I wrote for the Boston Globe about Women and Blogging came out this week and drew a some comments.

BlogHer Founders:
Lisa Stone liked that I didn't use a lot of blog-jargon and focused on what experienced bloggers had to say.

Jory Des Jardins felt that the women in the story really rounded out the many ways women use blogs and she thinks the mix will be useful for non or neo-bloggers.

Elisa Camahort loved the exposure for women bloggers and BlogHer leading up to the BlogHer conference taking place next week - July 28th and 29th in San Jose.

Guy Kawasaki, former Apple Evangelist turned speaker and VC, and now famous for his blog top 10 lists, wrote to say "Great stuff. I'm glad that women bloggers are finally getting the attention they deserve!"

In one of my favorite Kawasaki blog posts, Guy posits in #8 of the Art of Partnering (which is bubblespeak for no-money):

Ask women. Men have a fundamental genetic flaw. Actually, they have many fundamental genetic flaws, but I am only concerned with one here: The desire to partner (verb!) with anything that moves. They don't care about practicalities and long-term implications. If something is moving, men want to partner with it. Women, by contrast, do not have this genetic flaw. When you come up with an idea for a partnership, don't bother asking men what they think about it because they will almost always think it's a good idea. Instead, ask women and gain some real insight as to whether the partnership makes sense.

I'm a big fan of Guy Kawasaki.

Tom Curran writes that he liked the post about the Bose automotive suspension system. He says he read about it almost 2 years ago in Autoweek Magazine.

Stan DeSantis responds to How not to Dot-Bomb 2.0:

"It's amazing how fast we forget (or is it denial?) about the .com crash just a few years ago. We can rationalize the differences of then and now...the technology...the internet usage uptake...but it comes down to....show me the money. Buzz can only take us so far.

Nothing is crashing here, but major reality checks are in order. It happened in biotech the same way, until they found some viable business models. One could compare the two nicely. "

Another new blog from the biz faculty at Babson College has launched. Called Curious Manager, it's written by Anirudh Dhebar, Professor of Marketing at Babson and it focuses on Management.

Mark Baard does an amazing job writing the Boston Globe Personal Tech column - it runs along with mine on Monday's on page 2 of Business & Innovation. And now Mark has launched a new blog covering inspired technologies for healthy aging.

Mark calls his blog 39, which is inspired by Jack Benny. Even though Benny lived to be 80, but he never stopped telling his audiences that was "39."

"Benny's '39' joke suggests that it's important to maintain a positive mental attitude--even if that means denying the so-called "reality" of aging."

Check out Mark's latest post about a new wristwatch that reads vital signs can alert caregivers via SMS to sudden changes in your numbers.

Bill Ross admits he's a "wicked music snob," and writes with a great little rant about my post about Bix, the soon to launch site that will let advertisers sponsor contests like American Idol online.

"The "Web 2.0 version of American Idol" says it perfectly about where, IMHO, all the social networking sites are ultimately headed. And that's to the place called "The Lowest Common Denominator," a plane where I have seldom if ever found anything of value."

OK, OK...but this guy sure can play the harp.

Ann Handley's MarketingProfs blog had a blogout - meaning her blog went down for the whole day. So it got her thinking..." Is a blogger still a blogger if she doesn’t have a blog...?" So she emailed a few blogger friends and asked us to tell a little-known fact about ourselves, OTHER than the fact that we blog.

Here's mine:
Once worked as an intern at the Senate Subcommittee of Immigration and Refugee Policy.
Favorite band in the '80s was The Cramps.
Makes a pretty good red sauce for an Irish girl.
Sometimes regrets getting that puppy.

Here's Ann's:
I once won a year’s supply of toothpaste
I once spent an interminably long and sweaty Saturday dressed as a Care Bear for a mall opening in Rhode Island.
I peaked at age 9 (for better and for worse) when I won 6 superlatives in my 5th grade classroom: smartest, prettiest, shyest, best handwriting, longest hair, and most artistic. It's been a slow decline since.

I think I'll continue Ann's thread. What's yours? Send it to me this week and I'll post it next Friday.

Source: BoingBoing

Take a break from your busy day and watch a great stop-motion film. It took sixty-seven people acting as the "pixels" and four hours to complete the video. Now that it's been YouTubed and BoingBoing'd I wonder how many views it's had by now?

Source: PSFK

PSFK posted this video on YouTube protesting the rise of urban spam. The lead in says that the Internet offers the hope of opening a respectful, informed conversation between brands and consumers. But that ad agencies who are used to using interruption and control have responded by saying "Why change now?" They knew less of us were watching mainstream media so they created urban spam. PSFK takes a stand saying they will ignore the spam and make their own fun with social media like Flickr, YouTube, Blogger and MySpace. I think some of the environmental ads are clever, but run amok, they're a nightmare. Go PSFK!

Source: Inc.com

A new survey says that increases in corporate spending and new marketing tactics have helped fuel a boom for women-owned consulting firms. Average revenue for women-owned firms has jumped 45 percent in five years and 72 percent expect revenue to increase over the next year. The top earners in the survey were marked by their strong marketing and networking efforts...and no wonder, 66 percent of respondents of the survey specialized in some form of marketing consulting.

Source: The Guardian

Charles Arthur notes that an emerging rule of thumb suggests that for every 100 people online, one will create content, 10 will "interact" with it (commenting or offering improvements) and the other 89 will just view it. Examples? YouTube gets 100 million downloads per day and 65,000 uploads per day (wow). That's puts the creator to consumer ratio at 0.5 percent. On Wikipedia 50 percent of all article edits are done by 0.7 percent of all users and more than 70 percent of the articles have been written by 1.8 percent of all users. At Yahoo! Groups, 1 percent of the users will start a group, 10 percent will participate actively and 100 percent will benefit from the content. Plug that into your Web 2.0 business plan for a reality check.

Update 7/21/06 at 12:24pm EST:
The Guardian notes that they didn't check their math facts. The creator to consumer ratio on YouTube isn't 0.5 percent, it's 0.065 percent. But the 1% rule still holds in general.

Source: Slate

Why would a recent survey have 25 percent of boat owners say they would reduce the amount they would go boating this summer because of high gas prices? Because "powerboats get the sort of mileage that makes a Hummer look like a Prius." Ex-President Bush's new powerboat, Fidelity III (above) gets 1.5 miles per gallon. But there's a bigger reason - an economy ripe with anxiety. "Thanks to higher interest rates and concerns about employment, the types of people who would be expected to buy these luxury items aren't pulling the trigger." Yep. Same for the housing market.

Source: Slashdot

Slashdot links to a story from Baseline that reports that in a recent look at the 100 largest tech companies they found that there was a striking correlation between the highest paid CEOs and the lowest returns. From the article: "The one-third highest performing companies paid their chief executives an average of $7.12 million - while the bottom third paid their CEOs $9.29 million." Why? Something called "chasing the median" may be at play where companies benchmark executive compensation figures on peers instead looking at factors related to performance. Another potential reason? Lower-performing companies may be investing in expensive leadership talent to get things on the right track.

Source: ArsTechnica

A new study from the Pew Internet & American Life project paints a portrait of bloggers, "the Internet's new storytellers." Most bloggers are under 30, but a surprising 46 percent are older. Unlike video games, bloggers are evenly split between men and women. One third are from urban areas and 13 percent from rural areas. While 74 percent of the general population is white, only 60 percent of bloggers are. More than half of all bloggers write under a pseudonym and do it to benefit themselves, rather than others. And the most heartening statistic? About one in three Internet users read a blog on a regular basis. But instead of reading only sites with which they agree, nearly half reads news and blogs without a particular political slant, and nearly a quarter actively seek out sources that challenge their own views.

Source: Fast Company

Being lean and flexible is good. But some companies, like Hasbro, Time and Mitsubishi are outsourcing their cool by paying other smaller, more-limber companies to help them keep up with customers' rapidly changing tastes and demands. Fast Company says that's like farming out your soul. Thunderdog Studios did it for Hasbro. StrawberryFrog did it for Mitsubishi. Instead companies should create internal processes that let them recognize, and embrace, cool on their own. P&G did it by creating Tremor, an in-house "word-of-mouth marketing" division.

Source: BusinessWeek

Mattel has strong earnings this quarter, but worldwide sales of Barbie have fallen 1 percent, the 11th consecutive quarter of decline for the franchise. Some experts believe that dolls just don't capture the imagination of young girls anymore. Sales of dolls are declining. In fact the toy industry overall is in a slump. Toy sales fell 4 percent last year while at the same time video-game sales rose 6 percent. The lure of interactive gaming is strong. Can Barbie keep up with today's kids? One analyst bluntly says, "Barbie's time has come and gone."

This will date me, but when I played with Barbie she was always a swinging single girl living in Manhattan and dating Mod Ken with a fringe vest and disco moves. Look I found a pic on eBay. Hey, if Mattel can't update real Barbie, she could easily become a classic avatar on Second Life.

Source: Yahoo! Search Blog

We've covered Zillow here before. Type in any address and instantly get a map with home values marked for the whole neighborhood. Yahoo just announced that they've integrated Zillow with Yahoo! Real Estate and Yahoo! Search. So go ahead, start spying on your neighbors.

Source: Wall Street Journal

Five million people take advantage of Netflix, choosing freely, with no late fees, from 60,000 DVDs. But it seems people can overestimate their appetite for off-the beaten-track films. The result? Some DVDs get returned unwatched. Experts call this a paradox of abundance. It seems we like unlimited choice - whatever we want, as much as we want, whenever we want it - and we're willing to pay irrationally for the privilege. But in the privacy of our own homes, we slip into our low-brow ways...watching "Groundhog Day" right away and returning that subtitled award-winning film after it sits, unwatched, on the coffee table for a month.

Source: Knowledge@Wharton

A Wharton study finds that knowledge bridging - taking expertise from one field and applying it to a totally different one to create a breakthrough product or service - can help companies bring products to market faster and raise money more quickly. It takes guts to pay people to work on the unknown. Take Massachusetts-based Bose Corp., a famed maker of audio equipment. They suspected that their knowledge of the physics of acoustics could also help improve auto suspension systems. They tinkered for 25 years and invented an automobile suspension system like no other which may soon be commercially available. The study focused on biotech, finding that knowledge bridges paid off more than not.

Source: Andy Carvin's Waste of Bandwidth

Driving from Haifa to Beirut is like driving from Providence to Lowell. Using GoogleMaps, Andy Carvin of the Digital Divide Network created this incredible map and video that really puts the size of the Middle East in perspective. It's astonishing to realize what a compact area of land this is. Watch the video.

Source: InternetNews.com

We've already covered how MySpace is the most visited domain on the Web. But can it make money? InternetNews says that MySpace is now only trying to monetize through banner ads and the place to go is sponsored search results. In fact, sponsored social search results. What? Well, instead of sending computer crawlers out across the Internet to catalog the content of every page, social search engines build their database of Web pages by having members tag them with searchable keywords. Let the users build the database and then combine it with the member demographic data, search it and add sponsorship.

Source: BuzzMachine

The people seem to be choosing. Jeff Jarvis notes that Nielsen announced that the TV networks had their lowest ratings in recorded history — averaging 20 million viewers at a time — at the same time YouTube announced that it’s serving 100 million videos a day. Now if only we could crack that pesky revenue model.

Source: TechCrunch

Here's a Web 2.0 version of American Idol. With sites like MySpace and YouTube having so much trouble figuring out how to make money and brand advertisers daunted by the unregulated content, here's what Bix is thinking. Create controlled sponsorship opportunities in the form of legally sanctioned online contests, like karaoke, short films, or photo essays. Add brand advertisers and go. The site is in private beta now and will launch soon. At first glance, this model seems to fit the how not to Dot.Bomb 2.0 criteria.

Source: Dead2.0 via Scobelizer

Dead 2.0 is a blog intent on de-hyping the Web 2.0 phenomenon. They recommend you follow these suggestions, or your Internet startup may end up being skewered on Dead2.0. It starts with "Have a revenue model, right now." Then goes on to: "Don't be a feature, be a business." My personal favorite is: "Affect real people, not just bloggers." All eleven tips should be required reading for startups. Remember - don't drink the Kool-Aid.

Please note: Today's theme is CafePress.com T-shirts.

Source: TechCrunch

New Yahoo home page:

Some tweaks to Yahoo Finance, too.

Source: Computerworld

If there's one thing that corporate IT staff is traditionally not known for, it's people skills. But by 2010 the most sought-after corporate IT workers may be those with no deep-seated technical skills at all. By 2010 most of the nuts-and-bolts programming and easy-to-document support jobs will have gone to third-party providers in the U.S. and abroad. What IT departments will need are versatilists - those with the business and people skills that that allow them to architect and carry out plans and cultivate relationships both inside and outside the company.

Source: Boston Globe

Today I have a article in the Globe about how women are tapping the power of blogs. No doubt about it, women are a blogging powerhouse.

Are you a Boston woman blogger? Join the discussion.

The best part about writing this piece for me? I got to meet these smart women:

Jory Des Jardins, Elisa Camahort, and Lisa Stone are the founders of BlogHer. July 28-29 they will host the second BlogHer conference in San Jose.

Tish Grier
Corante Media Hub
The Constant Observer
Love and Hope and Sex and Dreams

Lisa Williams
H2OTown.org
Learning the Lessons of Nixon

Millie Garfield
My Mom's Blog by Thoroughly Modern Millie
Photo: Steve Garfield/SteveGarfield.com

Beth Kanter
Beth's Blog
Cambodia4Kids

Every Monday the Business Filter runs as a column in the print Boston Globe. So if you got here from reading the paper, welcome to the blog.

Vermont cow power
Illustration: James Kraus

How-to Sudoku
Universal charger
ToyotaHome
The new space race
Mass. gets an A
Imagination economy

I was at the Sox game last night so I'm a little groggy as I stayed until the bitter end. I noticed that Boston.com advertising is all over Fenway Park. Nice.

If you looked at the traffic reports this week on Da Filta, you'd say the blog was all about one thing - Sudoku. My post called Solve Sudoku every time dominated traffic to the blog and became the #1 most emailed story on Boston.com.

However, David Berman wrote to say the information he found on Instructables about Sudoku was bogus.

"I tried their method. It works against easy games, but not against difficult ones. Despite them saying it works in all cases. Actually, at the bottom of their page are many postings from experienced sudoku players confirming that this method is of limited value. Unfortunately, I didn't see those postings until after I wasted a lot of time discovering their shortcoming for myself."

Thanks for the head's up David. Hopefully it will be fair warning to Sudoku experts out there. Since I'm only passable on the easy puzzles, it worked for me.

Joe Cohen, who's a big fan of billboards, sends in a great piece he found on ChicagoBusiness.com via Digg. It seems McDonald's has launched a sun dial billboard. If it's noon, it's time for a Big Mac...

Dell's new blog was a big theme on the blogosphere this week. Howard Cronson responds to my Dell customer service posting saying that he had a similar customer service experience on Cafe Press recently.

"I had ordered a T-shirt for an anniversary celebration recently, and instead of the shirt I ordered I got a bright yellow US Corps of Chaplains shirt instead. (Complete with a big cross in the middle - not the type of thing a nice Jewish boy would wear) :-)

So I called Cafe Press, got a very nice woman who apologized profusely, shipped me the correct shirt in 2 days and told me not to waste my time returning the incorrect shirt. I thought this was key for them. If they had given me the slightest hard time about it, I would have never done business with them again. But since they took care of my problem with a minimum of fuss, I'm likely to use them again should the need arise."

Everyone I know who has used CafePress loves it. They let anyone sell, shop or create T-shirts. Great stuff there.

Piers Fawkes dropped a note to all users of his newish site Marktd and it made me remember what a good idea it is. It's sort of like Digg for marketing news. Take a look at the top marketing stories here.

C.C. Chapman writes to say he's launched a new podcast focused on new media and digital marketing. Listen in on his blog Managing the Gray.

Speaking of podcasts, David Armano said some nice things about Da Filta on his podcast with Joseph Jaffe. On the podcast they discuss the Brawny Academy, RocketBust or Unboomed, Talent, Customer Service and AOL as well as their surprise that those of us in old media are reading blogs. It's my goal to surprise all of you. Good to know I sometimes succeed. ;-)

Tom Curran writes that he's having problems with the Biz Filta RSS feed when using Mozilla Thunderbird. Anyone else having problems? Let me know.

Tim Allik writes to ask if I have a list of blogs that cover tech issues in certain categories. Absolutely. Check out my Del.icio.us links. They're also on the side of the blog. I add to them all the time.

Steve Haroutunian writes to agree with me on how we need a universal charger and points to a UK company called SplashPower that claims to have developed the world's first universal wireless power solution. Steve doesn't understand why this hasn't taken off. "Is there an International Association of Battery Recharger Builders union holding it back?" I'd love to try this product out.

Other random links:

You know Second Life is getting big when Major League Baseball does a deal with them.

Try this cool online personality test called Personal DNA.

Podcasting pioneer and former MTV VJ Adam Curry launched a new venture called PodShow and is immediately beset by criticism that he is hijacking content

Source: Futurelab's Blog

Karl Long blogs about how Motorola has launched a community-edited wiki user manual for the sexy new Q Phone. Like Wikipedia, anyone can edit the guide and it's designed as a place to capture and share the knowledge of the community of Q users...trendy, tech-forward bunch that they are. Long says that this is a good example of how large companies can use the power of social media. "Only a tiny percentage of the customer base will actually contribute to this wiki, but it will provide a huge amount of value to the larger community."

Source: WOMMA Research Blog

Ironically I just had one of those days Jeff Jarvis describes as Dell Hell. I spent about an hour dealing with Dell tech support today for a defective flat panel monitor. The guy on the phone was nice enough, but clearly inexperienced - maybe one of those just hired in Dell's $100 million effort to improve customer service. Anyway, though more like purgatory than hell, in the end, I got the service I needed.

Odds are, according to a new study by the Center for Customer-Driven Quality, I hung up from that call with more customer loyalty than someone who is originally satisfied with the product (and I did, actually). The study also found that a satisfied call center customer also makes more future purchases and is more likely to refer friends and family to the product or service. Call centers should be viewed as a great resource for generating goodwill and positive word of mouth. As Dell has found, ignoring bad customer service can be hell. But between my anecdotal experience today and my impression of Dell's new blog, it looks like they're on the rebound.

Start your day watching the new Rocketboom with interim host Joanne Colan an articulate and attractive Brit who has stepped in to take Amanda Congdon's place after the highly publicized divorce between Congdon and Rocketboom founder Andrew Baron.

She's good.

Her first episode? A take-off on the now famous One Red Paper Clip trade-up - where Kyle MacDonald traded one red paperclip for a house.

Source: Instructables via Techmeme

Go here to find easy step-by-step instructions on how to beat Sudoku without even thinking. But what's also interesting is the site behind the instructions.

Instructables is a website created by Squid Labs, a partnership of uber intelligent guys, mostly from MIT. Squid Labs on Squid Labs: "We make a lot of stuff, for business, and for pleasure." The "stuff" includes pioneering printed electronics. In their spare time they launched Instructables, "a convenient system for documenting our how-to projects, and the things we make." The site invites you to join them in sharing what you make and how you make it.

How very much in the spirit of wisdom of crowds, or at least crowds of individuals, and MAKE. The quality of the DIY tutorials on the site is excellent.

Source: BusinessWeek

I used to think it was ridiculous that kids watch other kids play video games. But then I realized that it’s no different than watching sports or poker on TV. You don't have to be a player to be enthralled with the play. Well Sundance DiGiovanni and Mike Sepso get that. They launched Major League Gaming (MLG) three years ago, raising $10 million in venture capital. Today they stage online competitions as well as seven tournaments a year, turning game play into Web content and cell-phone shorts. And in November, MLG will begin airing tournaments on Saturday mornings on the USA Network.

Best quote from the article:

"If we can make a hit out of guys racing around circles with NASCAR, we can do it with kids on their computers."
- Steven Roberts, DirecTV Entertainment VP

Source: Engadget via Digg

And here's another pet peeve of mine...power strips and how you can never use all the slots because of the various kinds of chargers and power cords overlapping the sockets. But Engadget reports that some smart Pratt students have just designed a savvy solution. "The E-rope, designed by Chul Min Kang and Sung Hun Lim, is a modular power strip which can be twisted about to better accommodate cable gore with large, bulky plugs."

This product won a 2006 IDEA Award. Check out the other innovative designs that won this year.
A whole new crop of designers each year help us to fuel the imagination economy.

Source: CrissCross.com via Digg

Just a few of my chargers, not one of which works with my phone.

File this one under things that drive me crazy. In Japan cell phone service providers and makers have just decided to try to unify specifications of cell phone sockets and battery charger plugs by around 2010. Well good, but what about the rest of our devices? We've been using all manner of digital devices that require chargers for a while now. Each of them has a different charger and it's often hard to tell them apart. What we need is a universal charger standard for everything - laptops, cameras, video cameras, cell phones, PSPs, etc.

Digital device charger standards should be at least as smart as kitchen trash can liners or toilet paper. They fit together with other things and so everyone makes them the same size. Can you tell I can't find my cell phone charger among the 50 chargers I have and so I have to get in my car to charge my phone and it's really bugging me?

Not to mention...we know where all these worthless chargers go to die, right?

Source: Bill Tancer's Hitwise blog

For the first time MySpace has surpassed Yahoo! Mail as the most visited domain on the Internet for US Internet users. To put MySpace growth in perspective, two years ago it represented only .1 percent of all Internet visits and one year ago it represented 1.9 percent of all Internet visits. This chart compares MySpace growth (blue) compared to Google (green).

While Internet visits tell where people are going on the Internet, search term data confirms what people are actually thinking about. What are they thinking about? MySpace. The site also leads search terms driving traffic to all sites.