I just finished recording a great discussion for the soon-to-be-launched, if not long-awaited, OutsourcedCMO show in which we not so much dissect, as gloss over, Amazon.com’s retail reign in spite of economic turmoil. It’s an interesting discussion that spans the history of online direct selling, including the online cambrian era in which the first macroscopic retailers emerged from the boom/crash sludge, to the phanerozoic era, in which abundant online retail life exists and many such life forms are trying to figure out whether or not they should actually kill one another.

I, for one, don’t think that they should. Kill one another, that is.

Whatever does this have to do with Amazon and the Kindle?

The Kindle is a brilliant platform — right, I said it, it’s a platform — because it greases the skids on a whole category of products that Amazon already owns outright: books. They have boatloads of them. They are known for books. They’ve been doing books forever. And other than Google, there is no other company making such hay about making books available electronically. You can’t underestimate this point: There is no cognitive leap required to go from thinking about Amazon the book seller, to Amazon the ebook seller.

But, platform? According to NYTimes, Amazon is working on making the Kindle format open to mobiles.

“We are excited to make Kindle books available on a range of mobile phones,” said Drew Herdener, a spokesman for Amazon. “We are working on that now.”

If the Kindle initiative was about channel and platform development more than just unit sales, they succeeded on many fronts. First, the device ain’t bad to hold and look at. Second, they throw in absolutely sexy always-on wireless from Sprint bundled in the cost of the device. Third, they give you access to a massive library of content, including the web, with no real strings attached. It’s hard not to be sucked into the Kindle movement, even if you don’t actually own a Kindle.

And there’s the rub. Opening up the platform to iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, and so on, suddenly has greased the skids yet again, providing content to devices Amazon no longer has to support. Will Kindle on iPhone kill the Kindle device? Probably not, but who cares? Amazon has already won on the platform.

Last night, we hung out with Tyler Stenson. He’s a musician, a guitarist and troubadour, and he joined Curt Siffert and myself for the innaugural episode of the 2009 season of Acoustic Conversations. The AC show itself hasn’t been posted yet, but stay tuned… it’ll be up online soon. Read on for a little Stenson present.

This post isn’t about the music. The music is great. Go listen to it. Buy it. Enjoy. I’ll even help out as a shill here for a bit. See how nice I am? Instead, this post is about success. It’s about what it means to be successful, what it means to know you’ve made it.

Making it casts a broad net, and it’s a theme that continues to come up in the AcConvo shows as we talk to more artists — what is the general expectation of acceptance and success, and how will you know you’ve achieved it?

“When I was a kid, I wanted to be a rock star like everyone else,” Stenson told us. “I’ve grown up a bit since then.”

I know, I must have been like this as a kid. I remember getting my first Yamaha B600 keyboard from Santa when I was a kid. I think I passed out. But take a look at what product scarcity has done to 50 kids on Christmas morning:

First, let me acknowledge just how much of a rank amateur move it is to show up for an hour presentation with an hour and a half full of content. That’s what you get for tooling around with a known quantity the day of the event without timing yourself. I apologize for leaving you all up short and will do my best to summarize here all that you missed. And again, thank you so much for braving the weather to get to the session this evening.
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Clients will note that I’m an unabashed fanboy of SlideShare, and wish I had even more time to allow myself to get sucked into presentation goodness each day. They recently held the world’s best slideshow presentation and top marks went to this bit of brilliance; educational and beautiful and not delivered by Steve Jobs.

Terry Tate: Reading Is Fundamental

I share all the Terry Tate vids in my PR courses, but I hadn’t caught this new bit of Pain Train brilliance until just this morning. Hat trick to Dr. Island for the link!

Some of these shots blow me away. This is about as close to “Speed Racer” as we can probably get. These are from the first night race in Grand Prix history.

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2008/09/the_singapore_grand_prix.html

Of particular note, make sure to look at 11 and 23, both taken with a tilt-shift lens to great affect.

As strange as they are, I admit it, I smile during the new Microsoft Seinfeld ads. For that, apparently, Microsoft deserves some props.

Thus the heart of the matter: The ads are not intended to sell Windows: They’re ads to sell The Windows Brand. Think of it as The Soul of Windows. If, by the end of this campaign, we only think of Microsoft as the company with the weird ads, then Microsoft will have saved Windows’ soul.

Well said.

Ad #2. I love the dinner conversation. The grandmother is oddly appealing. Oh, and it’s wildly insulting to everyday people.

Wonder what the strategy is there?

I bought a D3 when it first hit the streets and I’m stunned by it every single time I hold it in my hands. Then I take pictures with it. This thing belongs squarely in the middle of the secret lair of the League of Awesomeness.

Looks like the D90 is in the wild and Chase Jarvis and team take it for a hell of a test run. Of note: the D-Movie feature is absolutely stunning. 12.3 megapixels (kudos to Nikon for not shooting for the ridiculous 20). High ISO/low noise (the thing that most impresses with the D3 moves down to the D90).

Seriously considering:

Photo J possibilities. This camera will be a great second body for pro photojournalists. Commercial guys like me will be loyal to the D3 and its future, but for any PJ shooter, all the bells and whistles we’ve discussed already– especially video and audio capture–make this a no-brainer as a backup body.

Definitely worth checking out at chasejarvis.com.

Via Gruber at DaringFireball, I found myself laughing aloud at this:

Open source natural language processor that attempts to identify idiotic comments on the web — like a spam filter for stupidity.

UPDATE: Their server seems to be struggling to handle the traffic, at the moment.

Jeri Cartwright posted this at the Media Relations blog (excerpted here) regarding a recent stretch of layoffs in Utah — her home turf. Many interesting things to think about in a few short passages.

Content is still king. Talk all you want about new media, but someone has to write the content, and someone has to like the content so that advertisers will spend money to cozy up to the content. Yes, I know there’s plenty of content online. Does it serve the community and world? Or does it serve the ego of the writer?

True and true. We are in an ad-subsidized world. It would be royally great if subscription content services could compete in news distribution, but they simply do not scale.

That said, current research indicates that the burgeoning online ad sales game is taking off in spades. JupiterResearch (via CNET) recently reported that 2008 will boast 20% growth in the online advertising space while offline advertising does the Shrinky-Dink. Of course, when you look at raw numbers, there is still room to grow. Online ads represent only about 9% of total ad spending in the US, forecasted to hit 14.3% by 2013. Lots of headroom there — one could say, so much headroom that the downside is the very, very large, gaping maw of a gap between that 14.3% and the other 86% that’s in the air out there to be claimed.

And that really is the story here, more than anything else…

Granted, the Internet has given some very talented people their 15 minutes of fame. They may write well, and have enormous talent with video and audio. But do they have a compass? Can they be bought with a freebie, a pat on the back or the neighbors’ praise?

The Internet is in the process of giving rise to a new breed of journalist thanks to all these layoffs in mainstream media. This is an important shift, because it centers on the people who report the news, not the ego-bloggers and serial editorialists.

For example, take a look at Josh Marshall’s Talking Points Memo. Josh started the site as a personal platform for his political views. The site has turned into a news portal for political journalism supplied by a network of journalists. He’s still got the leftist blog, but the site is a destination for millions each year to keep up with left-bent political action.

Even more robust: The Huffington Post. As strange as I think Arianna Huffington is, she is openly working to create a network of solid reportage that rivals mainstream media. She’s built a network of citizen reporters around the world who are able to cover breaking news with speed and accuracy that rivals all but the biggest networks — and on that point, not for long.

If America’s great experiment in democracy is to survive, a free press (broadcast, etc), one that doggedly tracks the actions of government and the powerful, is the only protection we have from those who could evenutally undermine freedom as we have known it.

Outlets will continue to close, to re-org, to downsize. That’s the fundamental nature of change. But journalists will always be journalists, whether they are working for CNN or Arianna Huffington. They report the news. This will not change.

What will change is our base habit around news consumption, for a while. See, convergence is happening on more fronts that will impact media than just changing business models that throw a wrench in mainstream media dominance. Luckily, the end result may be more transparent than we think.

The first is technology. Right now, we can look at what is happening with media delivery systems like YouTube, Vimeo, BitTorrent and the like and build a personal broadcast system where consumption takes place more on your computer than your TV. And once it’s on your computer, it’s on your iPhone, your Blackberry, wherever. The pendulum will swing back as more and more cable and telecom operators penetrate the suburbs with their high-speed data, pulling coax in favor of fiber to the home and making those computer media streams ubiquitous across screens. The changing media hegemony is not about the decline of one TV screen in the living room. It’s about the virulent increase in the number of screens all around us, all the time.

And with more screens, comes more content. I should say, the need for more content. This should sound familiar to anyone who switched from rabbit ears to cable in the 90’s. As our technical capacity to shove signal into our homes increased exponentially, so did our need for more content to fill that signal. And so was born about 1,000 channels of nonsense to supplement the 3 channels of value on our cable bills. Those being Comedy Central, Sci-Fi, and Porn, of course, in no particular order.

What this increase in signal has done for news junkies is massive. Think about it this way…

The first Gulf War ushered in the era of 24-hour, round-the-clock cable news and catapulted the news channels from kitschy obscurity to mainstream competitor in about 48 hours. The viewing habits of your average news junky were pretty predictable: turn it on, keep it on, glue yourself to it.

New media journalism offers the same benefit to news junkies on a virtually unlimited content spectrum. Streaming news video from multiple sites, multiple freelance journalists, multiple war zones, all delivered in high def wherever your screens may be.

But the new media business model is even more interesting. A smart outlet with a good network of stringers can start subsidizing news production with direct ad contracts much more efficiently than the current model.

Things will change. Things will likely get worse before they get better. But there is a model in the offing that will at once upset the current system and offer something even better for consumers with every bit of the investigative and research talent that the best houses support today.

As it happens, as I’m writing this I’m catching up on This Week in Tech since I’ve been on vacation for the last few weeks. In TWiT 150, Leo Laporte and guests Jason Calacanis, Tom Merritt and Dwight Silverman have a fantastic discussion on just this issue — old media embracing and extending the new in reportage — it’s worth a good listen.

Courtesy of ReadWriteWeb this afternoon, “Corporate Social Networks Are A Waste of Money, Study Finds“, original post at the WSJ here.

In summary, Ed Moran at Deloitte did a survey of 100 major brands that have online communities. They all suck. What does “suck” mean in this case?

Thirty-five percent of the online communities studied have less than 100 members; less than 25% have more than 1,000 members – despite the fact that close to 60% of these businesses have spent over $1 million on their community projects. “A disturbingly high number of these sites fail,” Moran tells us.

This tells me a few things. First, these companies have spent WAY too much money on their community software. Part of the magic of building a community network lies in using tool that are familiar and easy to use for the largest number of people. Since the vast majority of successful communities use similar forum and photo sharing tools that are largely open source, rolling your own makes less sense, particularly for a million bucks. That is to say, go where the people are.

Second, they don’t actually have anything worth talking about. That’s not to say that they don’t have great brands, or great products. But they might not have great brands or products that inspire conversation. For example, the Purina hard-to-classify-as-“network” network has only four paltry pages of user comments. It’s just hard to talk about odor control at any length.

In contrast, Mercedes-Benz has an incredibly successful community at BenzWorld.org, offering a place for user support and discussion on the cars — even premium membership for the high-dollar owners.

The Mercedes example gets to one of the key points in the survey: offer a community only when it provides a service to the community — not to you.

Third, the survey ignores companies making great use of existing tools. Back on my first point, if you are really going where the people are, then a network on Facebook or MySpace allows you to tap into known quantities, vast numbers of connected users, on an (arguably) stable platform.

The upshot is this: in spite of the doom and gloom from Deloitte, don’t shake down the social networks just yet. We’re entering an era of connectedness unlike any we’ve yet experienced. If you know your customers — if you truly understand them — a community might be your next best home run.

Just as news continues to pour in about shrinking magazine subscriptions across the industry, MagCloud pops up to shake things up a bit. Still in beta, so publishers are by invite only, but definitely check out the service. It looks to fill a niche in industry publication that has long been empty.