April 12, 2007

It's Official: Email is Hot!

Part of me is distressed by this news and part of me is happy. Why? Because I'm eROI's Emerging Technologies Manager; guess what I do! According to this survey, 90% of 4000 people state their leading activity on the internet is sending and receiving email. Booooooooring (shhh don't tell my boss I said that)!!

While eROI is firmly embedded as a leader in the email marketing industry, I'm on the lookout for next thing, and enjoying every minute of it. And in the spirit of being completely honest, everything I am loving right now will probably never be as useful as email -or- maybe it's just too similar to notice.

I was at SXSW last month and one of the speakers said something along the lines of, "everything social service on the internet eventually becomes email." So in essence, all of the hot new stuff is just email reformatted. Take twitter for instance. Twitter is a one-to-many SMS/Text Messaging platform. It's all opt-in too. Just like email! I've been using Twitter for about a month. I subscribe to the people I want updates from. To make it even clearer, the act of emailing can be compared to sending someone a text message. The act of twittering can be compared to email marketing, or blasting to a list.

Another example is MySpace, ever heard of it? People send messages to eachother within MySpace. Maybe it's because people like the idea of clicking on people and sending them a message. Where's the pictures in Outlook?

Ok, what else is there? Flickr? You can show people photos and send messages too! We need a new paradigm to explain all of this, it's stressing me out! Ahh, I'm so divided. Should I throw away my quest for the new and cool and submit to the beast that is email? Or is there something else? I'm not sure, I think I'll twitter about it. The hive mind will surely have something to say.

Comments (1) | Posted by JoshC at 1:53 PM | Permalink

March 19, 2007

SXSW Monday - Panels

When people think of Texas, I don't think rain is something that comes up in their minds, yet that's what it did Sunday night, rain. It was unfortunate this happened our last night of the conference. We didn't get to meet many new people and most of the night consisted of drying off between stints of running in the rain, a lot. It's ok though, we still managed to catch a few shows and play some foosball on the way home from The Fray Cafe. Let me just say, Leslie couldn't handle me on the table (-; After wringing our clothes out, we went to sleep. It was a nice memory that escaped me the night before.

We woke up to a sunny Austin morning and wished we had a few more days to stay, but work called, so we had to get all we could out of that day. It turns out chance favored us.

The Panels

Scaling Your Community
Jeff and I both arrived late into the first round of panels, this one was the second of the day. We are both very glad we made it as this was our favorite panel of the conference. It wasn't so much of a panel as it was a speech. Matt Mullenweg, of the Wordpress fame, talked about scaling a community. His talk covered four main points; starting simple, bootstrapping, letting go, and embracing it. No better person to give this discussion as his Wordpress software is used by thousands of people around the world. Oh, and Matt is 23, which means he was developing Wordpress while most of us were boozing in college. The good thing though is that Matt comes across as an old soul. He was the most comfortable speaker we saw and by the end of the presentation, the audience was eating out of his hand. I think I cried a little.

Dan Rather Keynote Interview
This panel consisted of Dan Rather being interviewed by Jane Hamsher. Essentially Dan Rather thinks the problem with journalism today is it's lack of spine. I agree. It was really interesting to see such a prominent media figure in a room packed with geeks. Especially the fact that everyone walked out of there saying how good it was. Geeks are hard to please, and in doing that, Dan Rather proved his cross-generation appeal. Not a bad for a last panel.

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We then headed back to our hotel picked up our stuff. A short cab ride away (with a very friendly cab driver) put us at the ticket counter of Northwest Airlines. It's about six hours of travel to go from Portland to Austin, but well worth it. I have a love for Austin I never knew existed. I am definitely going to head back next year.

Comments (0) | Posted by JoshC at 10:57 AM | Permalink