Right on time

Looking at yesterday's post on Conan O'Brien's situation within traditional media, this announcement from Boxee comes right on time:

Image via CrunchBase

...users will be able to make purchases with one click on the remote. The content partners we launch with will offer shows, movies and channels that were previously not available to Boxee users. The content owners will be able to package and price as they wish, including pay-per-view and subscription. Content partners will have the flexibility to decide what they make available, whether it’s premium content, content from their existing library, or extras that will never make it “on air”.

...The Internet represents a great opportunity for the major media companies and for the independent content producers to create more engaging and immersive experiences around their content and for them to be paid for more eyeballs on yet another screen.

Now Boxee itself is a service not too many people know about. And while it is now relatively easy to hook a computer up to a TV, there is a mental barrier Boxee have to overcome, as they're pioneering an open source approach to this.

The flip side of this is something I got at in Digital Strangelove - we're moving from a place where the type of media has been defined by the medium (a TV show versus a movie, which happens in a theatre) and is now in a place where we'll just talk about video, text and sound as the environment in which it is consumed ceases to have anything to do with what type of media it is.

Boxee moves that agenda along in a fairly dramatic fashion; it will be interesting to see how content producers respond.

Strategy | Intent | Persistence (and tigers and bears OH MY!)

Digital strategy is a business decision, not a marketing decision. That doesn't mean your marketing team shouldn't be in the room, it means everyone else should be there with them.

Julian Cole wrote a piece a few months back saying "Don't trust an agency with your digital strategy." It does then beg the question (if I may, for a moment, speak client-side) "Then whom shall I trust in your festering cesspool of sharks, narcissists and hopeless egomaniacs?

Good question.

A single unit needs to own a company's strategy, and they need to be able to talk about each channel with authority. That sounds like a no-brainer I know, so I'm going to put this out there and see how it feels: you won't find it anywhere where the last name of an ad giant from yester-year hangs their name on the front door. That isn't because they don't have intelligent folk from all disciplines working for them, that is because their business models and internal practices will not permit the structural changes required to achieve genuine innovation and next-generation creativity for their client's businesses, let alone their own.

If anyone is hearing that for the first time, I promise I'm not the first.

I can't say I know all of the answers, or even any of them. But not enough people are asking the question. Or questions; you can phrase them in a myriad of ways, let's maybe start with something like this: why does Clemenger BBDO in Melbourne now have four people in its planning department, none of them digital natives? Tim, who worked there as a member of the planning team up until a week ago, had this to say:

I’ve been arguing for a long time now that as product, advertising, sales and service, all get closer together, advertising agencies really need to become creative marketing consultancies...some drastic restructuring needs to take place.

Drastic restructuring then did take place, though perhaps not along the lines he was thinking.

David Armano has talked about a move away from the silver bullet, much like Tim has. I took a personality test recently that told me I rated close to 0 when it came to perfectionism, but was a polar opposite when it came to creativity and a love of thinking. Call me biased (I won't argue), but that sounds like something very different to where we're currently at, and given that test it is no wonder I'm a fan of this new direction. I'm also a fan of offering substance, something advertising doesn't do very well at all.

I've talked a lot about intent, and I think this chart speaks to the heart of the same thing I'm on about. It is also the same thing Seth Godin means when he says the following:

Persistence isn't using the same tactics over and over. That's just annoying.

Persistence is having the same goal over and over.

My friend Michael Hewitt-Gleeson calls it SDNT: Start Do Notice Think.

I call it intent, and when I talk about it, I talk about constanty refining the work we're doing to ensure the outcome is matching the intent; if it isn't we change it until it is.

Intent is at the heart of everything we do, and the group that owns your strategy should have it etched onto their brains, directing nothing less than strategy that delivers the intended result tomorrow better than it did today. Starting here I'm advocating a move away from the single-minded proposition to the statement of intent; it is fluid and flexible, and it ensures the goal is forever just over the horizon. It will keep you and your organisation passionate and motivated and restless.

And that is how it should be.

Beersphere comes to Melbourne on Thursday, November 13th!

Your friend and mine, Faris Yakob decided to organise a get together in New York of Planners, social media folk, general riff-raff the kind of which your mother warned you about. Obviously we can't all attend that gathering so instead November 13th is International Beersphere Day, where a gathering just like that goes on in your own backyard (if your backyard happens to be one of the places it is being organised.)

Those who call Melbourne their backyard should come along to Red Hummingbird, 246 Russell Street, just up from the corner of Lonsdale from 6:30pm. We'll meet on the rooftop as I'm banking on the weather being lovely (currently predicted to be 29 degrees!), if you haven't been there before you will see a red birdcageover the entrance.


My friend Tim will be there, as will a bunch of others whose blogs I do not know the addresses of. Wait I can probably steal them from Jules...here we go, I am pleased to offer an extra-special invite to:


Pigs Don’t Fly, I Hate Ads , Simon Says , The Gruen Transfer , ProBlogger, Brand DNA , The Wayfarer , PR Disasters , Pixel Paddock, In my atmosphere, The Zeitgeists, Current Issues in Marketing Strategy , FRANKthoughts, Wonderwebby , Marketing Today, Gen Y Marketing Podcast, Marketing Geek , Marketing Easy, A blog about digital media, The Body Shop Activist

...as well as anyone else who'd like to join. Pre-requisites for attending are a) you are not an asshat and b) you like alcohol.

If you're not in Melbourne, take a look below to see if a gathering is happening near you, otherwise you can organise one! Get in touch with Faris or myself, we will steer you in the right direction.

View Map

The Date: Thursday November 13th 2008

[That's next Thursday]

The places - well....

New York [with me]: Obivia, 201 Lafayette Street from 6pm. [Happy hour runs until 8pm and there should be some free Ketel One splashing about too. Don't say I don't look after you.] MAP.

London [with Rachel and Co]: Will meet 6.30pm onwards at the Commercial Tavern, 142-144 Commercial Street, London E1 6NU. We've got the upstairs bar. See you there! Details.

Toronto [with Jason and Dino]: 6:30pm The Bedford Academy, 36 Prince Arthur Avenue. [Featuring interpretive dance by Dino, and late evening partial nudity by Jason.]

Sydney [with Julian]: Sydney Beersphere at 6:30pm, at The KB, 26 Foveaux St, Surry Hills right next to Central Station so there is no excuse. Details.


Berlin: [with David]: Berlin Beersphere is from 7pm at PonyBar (alte schönhauser strasse 44 10119 berlin-mitte). MAP.

Boston: [with Conner and Gareth]: Bukowski’s @ 50 Dalton St, Boston, Map.


Shanghai, Brisbane, Bucharest also going to take part hopefully - will update you once I have details confirmed.

See you Thursday, call me on 0404078686 if you run into trouble. I look disturbingly like the guy in the Facebook link to the right of this post.

Oh, and drop me a line if you're going to come along and I'll add you to the list of blogs above.

A open letter to Stephen Conroy

Many international readers will not be familiar with the goings on of the Australian political landscape. Back in January I wrote about some unfortunate measures Australia's recently-elected Government was planning to introduce, suffice to say our elected officials are engaged in a well-meaning but ill-informed program of censoring the access Australians have to the Internet. While looking in to the issue I've come to learn I reside in what is by law the most heavily censored Westernised nation, something I find rather ironic considering Sex & The City ran free-to-air here while it was confined to cable State-side.

Regardless, I have written an open letter to Stephen Conroy, the honourable member behind the intiative. Let it be known his intentions are good, but in practice his methodology is flawed, and imposing unnecessary (not to mention ineffective) rules upon the lives of ordinary Australians will achieve few, if any, of the aims of the program.

To read my letter to Mr. Conroy, please head on over to Marketing Magazine. If you feel as strongly as I do, please also visit Keep Your Filter Off Our Internet to learn how you can get involved.

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How low can you go?

Here's the thing: companies don't need strategies (even digital ones), they need a fundamental reason to exist. Having arguments about which discipline should lead is like entering a three-legged race with you and your partner on your knees; by the time you figure out something is wrong, everyone else has long since finished.

One thing I'm trying to move the folk I deal with away from is the desire to be so channel focused. While I'm a passionate advocate for digital, I'm not blinded by the channel (or even the myriad of channels that make it up). Depending on your audience there's an argument to be made for using traditional media, and some of the most innovative movements in marketing business strategy at the moment are tapping in to as many different channels at once as possible.

I said a couple weeks back things will get (really) interesting when we get down to a level where everyone functions as a single organism, and that can happen as a joint venture as Marcus advocates, but I imagine it can probably happen a few other ways too.

Whatever form it takes, it is about getting so deeply involved with companies that you do move as one. That will take a lot more trust on both sides than either client or agency is prepared to invest right now. But I believe we're headed there, and I find that pretty exciting.

What's that? How deep?

How low can you go?

--

Image courtesy of lolodrake, with thanks to compfight.

Minute by minute by minute by minute

[caption id="" align="alignright" width="240" caption="And now for something completely different..."][/caption]

Marcus's piece is thought-provoking.

Why?

Because he advocates a joint-venture between company and client over either an agency or doing it in house.

Why?

Because in house has too many political hurdles and an agency doesn't get deep enough in the business.

Why?

Because there are too many other distractions.

Why?

Because there has to be; it isn't their job to focus on it, and that is what they require.

I was with a client on Friday who told me, in no uncertain terms, that they didn't do technology. "We're just marketers" she said. "We don't understand that stuff."

Jesus. H. Christ.

"We're just marketers" was quote of the week for me, strong contender for quote of the year. Another boffin from an agency I work with had asked aloud what Flickr was, which in itself is maddening. What really frustrated me though was the lines these people were willing to draw around what they did and didn't do. Apparently being "just a marketer" means you can float through on ignorance and leave "teh interwebs" up to the geeks in the corner.

Can you imagine 50 years ago talking about TV to have someone turn around and say "Oh, I'm just a marketer, I don't understand that TV stuff"?

The mind boggles. Let's get it straight: nothing is off the table. Not digital, not analogue, not experiential, not bespoke, not DM, not TVCs, not PR, not ambient, not out of home, not print, not word of mouth, nothing. Marketers who opt for a career with blinkers on will find themselves swept aside in the eternal race for consumer's hearts and minds. You don't have to be an expert in everything, but you should at least be aware of where everything fits.

And you should also be aware that every waking minute of your day, you are marketing something.

We all are.

--

Image courtesy of M J M, with thanks to compfight.

Is it me you're looking for?

Clearly it hasn't been as long for everyone.

As Twitter's Chief Architect, Blaine Cook caught the brunt of the Twitter community's frustrations over the micro-blogging service's frequent downtime. He left the company earlier this year and has now joined Yahoo! to work on a service called FireEagle, apparently similar to Twitter but focussed on user-location.

Twitter's issue was a popular service which struggled to scale. Yahoo! already has scale, but struggles with services that offer value. Perhaps this is a perfect fit?

(By the by, if you're on Twitter, so am I)

When was the last time you went Yahoo!?

Paraphrased from this film.

You know, I can't remember what I did before I googled (by the way, can we agree Google is the company name, google is what you do? Noun, verb, cool?). I think I used Alta Vista, but I really can't be sure. Regardless, I have never been a Yahoo-er, it never grabbed me.

A friend sent this to me the other day, and all I can say is I feel sorry for the team who had to produce the below, it is such an obvious goal to kick. No doubt directives were ordered from on high, "the focus groups said we need 45% more wonder in our offering", not realising if that if they just provided value and a campaign based on relevance they would likely grab more market share by simply executing their core properties in an effective manner.

One thing I do find curious is in the hierarchy of dot points the home page design is up top. Yahoo! came to life as a portal where your online experience began, but I don't know anyone who browses the web that way. There's an interesting notion here around destination entertainment, of having to go somewhere to experience a certain thing, but without a compelling pull, the traffic just doesn't show up.

Other points of note:

• Australia's most extensive online news provider - don't tell me you're extensive, show me! Give me service names and validate that claim, I won't believe you otherwise.


• A new search giving me a better answer the first time. Again, better than what? Yahoo!'s last search offering?


• By the world's no. 1 email, they mean the most popular over all.

Email in particular is a funny thing, a good friend who is in a position to know remarked to me recently that Google knows a lot more about email and your inbox than they are letting on. The below data from Hitwise (dated April '07) paints an interesting picture.



Google popular among middle and upper-class Gen Ys? That isn't exactly the kind of news that makes you shout "Stop the press!", it does lay out an interesting road map for the coming years if you make some assumptions about user behaviour -but this is already a long post, so we'll save that for another day.

Back to the question in my title though; when was the last time you went Yahoo!?

It's in the way that you use it

[caption id="" align="alignright" width="240" caption="New media trumps the old guard"][/caption]

In thinking about switching jobs recently, one move that was suggested to me by a few people a sought advice from was to get into bed with companies in traditional media (in order to further the night job). I didn't go for it though, I didn't even breathe in that direction, largely because I don't believe traditional media is going to get any of us where we need to go. Blame it on too much time spent playing video games if you want, but I don't like media I can't engage in and interact with, a steadfast rule, the only exception coming in the form of Saturday afternoon, a magazine or newspaper, and my couch.

Music, movies and publishing are all such behemoths taking in so many stakeholders that they're all 5 to 10 years behind their markets (markets being conversations, conversations occurring between the people who buy or engage with their products - or used to any way). For the most part, the people with the power to affect change in those industries won't listen to reason, and so the gradual decline continues.

While comfortable with my decision, we all seek vindication for the choices we make, and it arrived from one of my favourite sources. Readers joining from Wide Open Spaces would be familiar with Umair Haque, I've mentioned him a few times. Fresh into my reader comes a post from him talking about digital media's cannibalisation of traditional media, and how slow they're being to react.

...unless media owners, advertisers, and, yes, agencies get together to engage in meaningful business model and strategic innovation, old business models - especially those dominated by brands - will continue to be “cannibalized” by this shift in consumer behaviour, because consumers are too busy talking to each other to pay much attention to industrial-era brands.

This only serves to re-inforce a talk I saw JJ Abrams give (last night form the comfort of my kitchen as I cooked), talking about how the barrier to entry into creating entertainment is increasingly lower and lower. Abrams is a great speaker and very engaging, his talk is entertaining but also poignant and very, very timely.

[youtube=http://youtube.com/watch?v=vpjVgF5JDq8]

Happy Monday everyone, and welcome aboard.

--

Image courtesy of ktommy, with thanks to compfight.

RSS feeds added to Marketing Magazine site

This is a bit of an admin post (1, 2, 3 - "Boooooooring!!!"). Marketing Magazine have added RSS feeds to their site for particular bloggers (including me). So, if you'd like to subscribe to my posts on Marketing Magazine you can now do so.

Additionally if you don't subscribe to this site currently but would like to, please go right ahead! It is free, easy and guaranteed to do many ill-defined and vague things.

Net-X Melbourne to close

Marketing Magazine has just broken a story on Net-X's Melbourne office being closed. The company, whose headquarters are in Sydney, was bought last year by CHE (part of BBDO) was acquired as part of a move by Clemenger in Sydney to quickly add a digital offering to their services. Unfortunately for the Melbourne office, Clemenger here already had a digital arm, Blue, and thus Net-X Melbourne was left to languish with no clear directive.

It looks to be another example of a worrying condition now known globally as IGW, or Integration Gone Wrong. The formula's pretty simple:

1. Large agency realises it needs digital on its rate card.


2. Large agency is confounded by the amazing culture at independent digital agency - all these people appear to care about what they do, and even enjoy their work. Strange.


3. Large agency buys independent digital agency and promises not to change the culture.


4. Large agency then imposes elephantine corporate structure and converts full service digital agency into soul-crushing banner ad sweat shop.


5. The culture that made the independent digital agency so attractive is smothered like a cashed-up pensioner with a pillow, talent at the agency leave, and the agency eventually dies.

This process seems to be the model for integration adopted by many large agencies, but clearly it's poisonous.

In other words...


--

Image courtesy of We The People, with thanks to compfight.

The more something changes...

A couple weeks ago Bluefreeway stock resumed trading. Actually that's a bit misleading, as "trade" implies both selling and buying in fairly equal measure, and with 6 million shares hitting the market at once thanks to Macquarie bailing out, nobody was going to scoop up that much stock.

Last week Simon Chen caught up with Rick Webb, one of the founders of Bluefreeway. The chat was completely off the record, though Simon is of the opinion now that the other side of the story needs to be told.

As of Friday the share price sat just above 7 cents, which makes it worth less than a third of its former value when the stock was initially suspended from trading so auditors could figure out how deep the rabbit hole went. There are new management initiatives being put in place to try and save the company, but when they include companies buying back their own equity at the original sell price, you have to wonder how long this flight of fancy will continue to run.

--

Image courtesy of kathycsus, with thanks to compfight.

Creative Is Not A Department (formerly Wide Open Spaces) is named in the Top 50 Australian marketing sites

Compiled by Julian Cole of Adspace Pioneers fame, he has posted the list on his blog as well as having it featured in the August edition of Marketing Magazine (which I also contribute to). Thanks to Julian for the hat tip - this site came in at #17 - I'll do my best to live up to it.

								Total
1	Banner Blog	6	6	8	6	8	9	43
2	Servant of Chaos	9	5	8	6	6	5	39
3	Duncans Tv Adland	6	5	7	6	8	5	37
4	Corporate Engagement	8	5	5	4	5	8	35
5	Better Communication Results	8	3	6	5	6	6	34
6	Young PR	7	5	6	5	5	6	34
7	Small Business Branding	7	3	0	8	7	8	33
8	Get Shouty	8	5	7	5	4	4	33
9	Personlize Media	8	5	4	4	4	5	30
10	Brand DNA	6	4	6	5	5	4	30
11	PR Disasters	7	5	4	4	4	5	29
12	Ettf.net	6	5	5	4	4	3	27
13	1+1=3	5	3	5	4	5	5	27
14	Business of Marketing & Branding	6	5	6	4	4	1	26
15	Media Hunter	7	2	6	4	3	3	25
16	Australian SEO Blog	4	4	5	4	6	1	24
17	Wide Open Spaces	8	5	4	3	3	1	24
18	The Marketer	7	3	6	4	3	0	23
19	Three Billion	6	4	0	4	4	5	23
20	Innovation Feeder	6	5	3	3	3	2	22
21	Campaign Brief Blog	6	4	0	3	5	3	21
22	Eicolab	7	5	2	3	3	0	20
23	Adspace-Pioneers	7	3	3	3	2	2	20
24	Publicity Queen	8	4	1	1	2	3	19
25	Filtered	6	4	0	2	3	3	18
26	Marketing Easy	6	3	0	3	5	1	18
27	Hothouse	6	4	1	2	4	1	18
28	Mark Neely's Blog - 3rd Horizon	7	3	2	2	3	0	17
29	Lexy Klain	7	3	1	3	2	1	17
30	Peter Sheahan Live	6	4	0	1	4	2	17
31	In my atmosphere	6	4	0	3	2	1	16
32	Elbow Grease	4	4	0	3	2	3	16
33	Falkayn	5	4	2	0	2	1	14
34	Pigs Don't Fly	6	4	1	1	2	0	14
35	Diffusion	7	4	0	1	1	1	14
36	Australian Small Business	6	3	0	0	4	0	13
37	The Jason Recliner	4	4	1	2	1	1	13
38	The Wayfarer	7	3	0	1	1	1	13
39	Adnotes	6	3	1	1	2	0	13
40	Ryan's View	6	4	0	2	1	0	13
41	B&T	7	4	0	1	1	0	13
42	Zero Budget Marketing Ideas	6	3	1	1	1	0	12
43	Blackwatch	5	3	0	0	0	3	11
44	Fresh Chat	5	2	1	1	1	1	11
45	Latin Ocean	5	2	1	1	1	1	11
46	Arrow Internet SEO	7	2	0	0	1	1	11
47	The Sticky Report	7	0	1	2	0	0	10
48	Naked Communications-The Flasher	8	0	0	1	0	1	10
49	Pixel Paddock	5	1	0	1	0	1	8
50	Send up a larger room	7	0	0	1	0	0	8

Facebook lands buttered side down

One of the joys of now being a columnist is having the editor of the magazine call up and berate you for over-due pieces. Picture any actor who has played a journalist (I'm thinking Clooney personally) called by his very attractive but somewhat neurotic editor who has told he has until the end of the day to get his story in or he is fired. Note how cool he plays it, how he has arranged to discuss his column over dinner with her (and probably breakfast too). Got that image in your head?

Right. My life is nothing like that.

Still, I was called today because my latest piece was over-due. I said I had nothing to say, she said not to worry, that I could write about butter and it would be interesting.

So that's what I did. Spurred on by the recent hoopla surrounding their blocking Google's Friend Connect, I explain why butter is a crock, why Facebook is butter, and why, for me, it starts to spell the end of this media darling.

...trying to control what people do with (their own information) is the digital equivalent of telling rain which way to fall in a thunderstorm. Facebook eschewed a bunch of good stuff to get to where it is, using ingredients that were good for a whole lot of other, better, products and services. Now they’re desperately trying to maintain hold on user data, under the daft assumption it was somehow theirs to play with in the first place.

It's already been suggested I'm wrong on this, I'm not so sure...

--

Image courtesy of bezmyaso, with thanks to Flickr Storm.

This just in: People tend to agree with me

I am guilty of opening far more tabs in Firefox than is perhaps advised, I just got to one opened earlier this week. The page loaded is a post from Laurel Papworth taking to task a piece penned by Douglas A. McIntyre titled "Web 2.0 is a bust". By that, he means his ill-informed view of how it should operate.

Laurel makes a few good points in her piece, it is definitely worth checking out. It also echoes my own thoughts from back in February, where I said the following:

Ever see teenagers at a shopping centre, hanging out and not buying anything? Look for this behaviour to continue (funnily enough). Marketers looking to capture that intention are going about it in the wrong capacity. Yes, a person is a fan of the TV show Lost. Yes, you have that on DVD and you can sell it to them. No, they do not want to buy that now. They want to buy it when they want to watch it, so you had better make sure you know enough about your audience to be in the right place at the right time.

Rumours abound; Facebook and MS and Yahoo! Oh my!

No sooner am I cracking jokes about not following Scoble than I clock an interesting breakdown of rumours swirling regarding Microsoft taking search off of Yahoo!'s hands and buying Facebook at the same time for somewhere between $15 & $20 billion. Robert is running around saying the sky will fall if this happens, I say you'll see first an uproar and then an exodus from Facebook, the kind of thing that will make the hassles with the news feed and Beacon look like the good ol' days.

I'll be leading the charge.

--

*Update* David J Hinson hit me up on Twitter suggesting I may be over-reacting a touch. Me? Noooooo...*ahem* I seriously value the ability of the web to keep moving towards a completely open future, and my instinct says a deal between MS and Facebook would not take is closer. I have nothing against Microsoft (hi to Tom and Adam at Redmond, we miss you guys), but as Andy Grove once said, only the paranoid survive.

Bluefreeway receives voluntary suspension

Bluefreeway requested and received a voluntary suspension from trading today. Their shares had been on hold since last Friday after a request for a temporary trading halt was approved Monday. The halt was due to expire this morning, the shares have now been suspended with no date attached to it.

In a letter to the ASX this morning, Bluefreeway said it needed to undertake further investigations due to restructuring efforts in order to make an announcement on its expected revenue for the financial year ending June 30, 2008. Stating it would take up to two weeks to conclude investigations, the company expects the subsequent announcement to end the suspension.

What all this means is anyone's guess, though after the spate of resignations they've experienced this year and Mitchells stepping away from buy-out talks, how deep the rabbit hole goes is anyone's guess.

Living and learning in a start-up

I recently resigned from my role as Digital Manager at Hippo Jobs, an Australian start-up focussed on the online job space. I've learnt so much in my time there it isn't possible to distill it into one or even multiple blog posts, I can say though it did hammer home a simple truth I went in with, and that's in a start-up, everyone needs to be 100% on board.

One of the first things that struck me about Hippo was its development was outsourced. Call me old-school in this regard, but while I'm a big fan of outsourcing, your ability to innovate on your core offering should never be in the hands of another company. One of my prime objectives from day dot was to get a team established in house that could lead the next phase of development for the company, and thankfully we've begun that process, taking Hippo to a place where its ongoing development is sustainable. When you place your ability to be exceptional in the hands of someone who values that less than you do, you set yourself up for a world of hurt.

Something I completely underestimated was how hard it would be to bring traditional media types around to thinking about digital media in a manner that went beyond headline grabbers like Myspace and Facebook. Talking to friends at larger organisations, it seems more generational than anything else, and only makes me wonder what people will be doing 15 or 20 years from now that I just will not understand. I hope I'll have the presence of mind to recognise it when it happens and embrace the change that will be so very necessary, but a bunch of smart people who should know better don't seem to be able to, and that gives me pause for thought. Thankfully in DMG Hippo now has a partner with a breadth of knowledge about traditional media, and some incredibly savvy digital people to boot.

I'm pretty close to signing a deal for my next move, one that unfortunately doesn't give me the five-album deal I'd like, but never the less ensures I stay surrounded by exceptionally smart folk who will hopefully inform my thinking on ways I can simply play music and not have to worry about the major labels.

For the rest of this month though, I'm committed to helping Hippo shore up its position as the leading job site for Generation Y - of which I call myself a proud member. It remains as good an idea as the day I joined, and with or without my presence can't help but go from strength to strength. Thanks to the people who have informed the conversation around this space in months past, I will continue to watch as Hippo implements the ideas brought forth over the past year, and with a little luck leaves everyone else in its wake.

Bluefreeway Trading Halt

Beleaguered digital group Bluefreeway today requested a trading halt, its shares having sat at 24 cents since the ASX closed last Friday. The ASX then suspended shares and issued an announcement saying they would remain on halt until Wednesday morning or until the company issued an announcement on its expected earnings for the financial year ending June 30th, 2008, whichever came sooner.

Last month Mitchell Media confirmed speculation it had been looking to buy the group of companies but pulled out after "preliminary" conversations. Bluefreeway had previously told the Australian Stock Exchange it had entered due diligence with a single entity This came on the back of CEO Richard Webb finally stepping away from the group of companies he helped found the month prior.

It has been an extraordinarily unfortunate year for the group, one that shows no signs of improving. The company had already warned markets on the costs of funding the redundancies currently being served to select employees, but we'll know in the next 36 hours where the company actually stands.

For those needing a primer on the Bluefreeway so far this year...

Call it unreasonable, call it progress

Someone once told me I'd never had an opinion I wasn't inclined to share, and I can't say I argued much with them at the time. Given to spouting off at the drop of a hat, it's only made possible by the fact I'm quite happy to be proven wrong. One of the more famous quotes from George Bernard Shaw is the following: "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." It's one I quite enjoy, and while I can't say I strive to emulate it, it seems to pop up more often than not.

Something has to be said for it though, as I'm lucky enough to have been invited by Marketing Magazine to contribute a regular blog to their site and a column in each digital issue they publish (that comes out quarterly). Having just submitted my first column, I was surprised how nervous I was sending it off, knowing it would be available solely in print, and solely to people who had paid for the privilege.

Do I really think my opinion is worth paying for? Frankly, I do. But in this instance it wasn't my idea. The editors of Marketing were the ones who decided it was worth paying for, all I can do is live up to their expectations, and hopefully, on occasion, exceed them. I look forward to discussions on their site and on this blog, with a few more insights from readers and hopefully a number of ruffled feathers!

In the interim, head over to Marketing's current blog and get involved. It's written by Scott Drummond who is equal parts funny and insightful. And for the record, I was saying that before they came calling.