All the Young Dudes...

want to PLAY the news. Fascinating, even compelling, for war stories, but can a video game format make Congressional conference committee budget negotiations exciting? Time will tell. Check out this trailer.

The Corporate Profile as Ad

An article about MySpace in this past Sunday's New York Times mentions that Wendy's has created a profile for an animated square hamburger on the service - and signed up 100,000 very human friends willing to get emails, updates, and offers from their new buddy.

This new form of advertising brings up a few questions: If we're having trouble navigating through the thicket of pages on the Internet now, what will happen once commercial entities start creating personal pages on various services as well? Will advertiser pages have to be labeled as advertisements, as they do in print, to alert children and those not fleet-of-mind to the commercial messages? Why a firm but not a person who might be a consultant marketing herself? Or will this streamline advertiser-to-customer messaging, as only those who want to hear from the company bother to sign up?

Online advertising works

The Center for Media Research reports on several consumer programs by leading companies showing strong ROI for online advertising. Addressable media is easily measured, the report shows, and the returns are even more impressive.

Phone Handset Calls Go A-Packeting

Just one day after news on SMS going over IP, we have David Pogue's column (reg. required) on the VoSky Call Center, a $60 gizmo that allows you to make Skype calls over your phone handset - and cell phone! Untethered from your computer now, we can make free calls over phones that have until now been the exclusive ouput device for telcos.

Disruption, disruption, disruption. The industry is shifting like an ice floe breaking up. Incumbents in all corners of media and communication will be pressed to bend and keep their feet on the ice even as it drifts apart. Atomization of content will help, allowing media firms to supply consumers with the types of information they want, when they want it. Broadening their mandate to include technology and its uses will help tmedia firms break out of the cap-in-hand position with respect to telcos, printers, internet service providers, and others who control their delivery channel (Google gets this; it has just won a bid in San Franciso with partner Earthlink to provide a wireless network). New business models will evolve, first audience and ad-driven and then, as has happened in other media historically, to subscription-based - but only when the market and products are mature enough to support them.

Have other ideas on how this might evolve? Comment here. Or send us an email. Or call us on Skype - on our computer, or on our phone or cell phone. Or...

SMS Goes A-Packeting

The Economist reports (reg. required) this week that a new startup, Hotxt, is set to inject a bit more disruption for telcos.

Following Skype's script, users download the Hotxt software to their handsets, like a ringtone or game, and, for about $1.75 per week and - get this - 1 cent per message, their notes are routed as IP packets over the Internet...and not over the telcos' messaging infrastructure.

With SMS accounting for upwards of 50% of mobile operators' profits, this could be a big hurt on them. Disruption is everywhere. What's next to go a-packeting?

Google and Yahoo as Content "Stock Exchanges"

A very smart commentary by Andreas Kluth, tech writer for The Economist, on how Google and Yahoo are trumping old media in yet another way - as "content stock exchanges."

While old media continues to struggle to create media to which their audience will flock, the online giants are opening their sites to all content producers, allowing anyone, from punk poets to multinationals to Chinese college kids, to post their work.

With that network effect - the more content there is, the more valuable it becomes to more people, thus incenting more creators to post work - advertisers become the fund managers and brokers, bidding up and down spots on pages with popular content.

By focusing on being a platform as well as creative force (Yahoo produces news, online games, and partners with others who do), the online media players are continuing to distance themselves from traditional media - and seemingly widening their lead.