I’ve been talking with my man Brad Trnavsky for what seems like years about his need for Internet Greatness. But, Brad isn’t a would-be pornographer, as far as I know, and he doesn’t have any direct connection to the Revision3 Internet Mafia Clubhouse.

He’s a sales guy. And a geek.

So about four months ago he moved from WordPress.com to Ning and launched his sales media empire, salesmanagement20.com. I’ll be damned if people didn’t start subscribing.

Today, Ning reps surprised Brad by profiling SM20 on the front page of Ning.com, and gave him a bit of love on the Ning profile blog. If you’re in the sales game, this is a site you should join. It’s highly focused and growing nicely!

Steve Jobs can do what he damn well pleases, thank you very much. If he — and team Apple — demonstrated anything in yesterday’s WWDC Keynote address, it’s that. Because frankly, they took their stage time yesterday to demonstrate a whole lot of old news, and they buried the hidden gems.

WWDC Keynote Snooze

Part of the challenge was all about bad timing. In a special event months ago, Jobs took the stage and told the world that the iPhone SDK was coming, that all developer prayers would be answered, that they would have access to the iPhone core API’s, allowing the masses to write apps just like Apple does. They would just have to wait. Be patient. It’s coming.

Then, they seeded the developers. Certain developers. OK, not very many developers. Still, the applications that were teased out of the process looked good. Really good. The world was getting excited.

June. WWDC. iPhone3G has been leaked. The furor and frenzy about this next gen device is at an all time high. Devs are counting on Apple to deliver. The public is paying more attention to this developer conference than ever before. They’re tracking secret shipping manifests for boxes on the way to Apple stores. They’re lining up at the retail locations for this product that has not been announced. It’s a drumroll of a million crazed fetishists at terminal speeds.

It was an announcement for an announcement. The iPhone3G isn’t coming for another month. iPhone 2.0 firmware, another month. App Store, another month.

This challenge of timing is non-trivial, and most likely not an accident either. From the lay perspective, the market expected a punchline to this long-running joke; a release to the flood of expectation. What was announced yesterday underdelivered on those counts.

First, the next-gen phone is less than the market expected. Yes, we knew it was going to be 3G. Yes, we knew it would have GPS. Yes, we knew it would cost less. But Apple has a history of delivering so much more than expectation, of blowing away the market with things no one has thought of yet. The iPhone 3G satisfies the market. It does not blow it away. Where is the forward facing camera for handset video conferencing, for example? How did that rumor get so out of control? Where is the 32 GB model? 16 GB has been around a while in the iPhone, after all.

Second, the App Store. The keynote languished on and on and on with demos of software we’d seen, tools that developers had been discussing for months. Screenshots had been leaked. Apps are already running on millions of hacked phones. And we had to suffer through nearly an hour of old news from a platform stage architected to deliver WOW. There was no wow. (To be completely fair, the gaming apps are amazing. You should take a look at the keynote just to see what’s coming — cell phone manufacturers have been trying to reach this level of quality for a long, long time).

Third, OS X. The next version of OS X, 10.6, will be called Snow Leopard, and it’s likely the most interesting of the big WWDC 2008 stories so far. The news? No new features.

OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard: Hidden Gem

Which, of course, is not true at all. According to Jobs, it’s an opportunity for Apple to take a step back, to focus on efficiency and security, and to build in some core evolution to the OS, while keeping on a one-release-per-year schedule. It’s a truly interesting strategy, actually, and bucks a pretty well accepted gestalt that for public consumption, there must be eye-candy. Apple is betting they can change the course of things with Snow Leopard.

And actually, they’re in a great position to do it. Look at Vista, for example. Microsoft took five years to build XP’s successor and where the OS has received it’s greatest criticism is in usability. The reason for the so-called XP Downgrade Program is because the company has put so much effort into making XP actually function over the years that it does meet user expectation at this point. If you go back in time 6-7 years, you can see Microsoft faced with the same question of direction in OS development that Apple took a stand on yesterday.

1. Focus work on XP and deliver core refinements that make the OS better, more stable, more expandable, more cooperative with more hardware, and increase performance and security… OR
2. Do everything in option 1, plus take several years to re-jigger the interface and add a bunch of eye-candy to the mix, completely changing the way users interact tactilely and visually with the OS, because then we’ll actually have something to talk about.

Vista, as it turns out, is the result of choosing option 2.

Leopard, on the other hand, is both widely accepted as structurally excellent, and functionally elegant. Users like to use it. They aren’t actually screaming for new features. They’re content with letting Apple define what it is they need to be excited about. Exposé. Dashboard. Bells. Whistles. Whatever. Apple is banking that they can cash in on this wide-eyed enthusiasm for the OS and take a break from delivering the bells and whistles, breathe deep and focus on building something truly next gen for the Mac platform.

While they’re at it, they’ll do something really special: they’ll get the consumer public excited about core OS technology. 64-bit. Multi-threading. Multicore. OpenCL. Javascript. They’ll have people using these terms, driving discussion they don’t really understand, and setting an expectation around OS excellence in a way that others will have to emulate to address. Again.

Apple has a recent history of defining a market dialog. Yesterday, they did it again. The keynote may have been a snoozer, but the hidden gems are special. In the coming months, watch how the company frames their discussion on core technology. Watch how they make it special, interesting, compelling for all-comers.

For the record, I’ll be buying a new iPhone. I don’t care about the 3G. I don’t really care about the GPS — the current system actually works quite well for me. I need the memory. And my wife needs an iPhone of her own. When Jobs made the announcement for the first iPhone, he said they’d targeted 10 Million phones by the end of 2008. Given the announcements yesterday, I don’t think 10 million is even in the cards — they’ll top 10 million before 10/1/08.

As soon as this technology incorporates Multi-Touch a la the iPhone or Surface, it’ll be something really worth looking at. Right now, it just blows me a way a little bit.

From scientificblogging.com:

The HoloVizio is a 3-D screen that will allow designers to visualize true 3-D models of cars, engines or components. Better yet, gesture recognition means that observers can manipulate the models by waving their hands in front of the screen. The function offers enormous scope for collaboration across the globe.

Make sure to scroll down for the demo vids. They really are incredible.

http://www.scientificblogging.com/news_releases/star_trek_holodeck_1_0_holovizio_3d_makes_its_debut

When I was employed by big-corporate PR, I used Google News Alerts religiously. Still do. It’s a fantastic service, constantly filtering the Google index for current news relevant to my search query and delivering it to my inbox every day. At Apollo, I was interested in news about our company, and news about our competitors, partners, and vendors. Every day I’d get slogs of data to pile through, press releases to scan, and punditry to parse.

And after the list of headlines came the list of mentions in the blogosphere; post after post of opinionated bloggers and students, some slamming the organization for one reason or another, largely for things we could do little to rectify (I lost my financial aid money, I can’t drive, the school hates me, my lemonade monkey peed in my hair, etc.). But most of the blog commentary came from conscientious, diligent writers, passionate about their cause, and eager to share that passion with the world.

Had a meeting at a new agency today — 2Plural/evive. I don’t know what their name is, actually. The letterhead says evive, and looks cool as a palindrome, but the website is 2plural, as is the moniker on their cards. A bit of identity crisis there, about which I’m sure there is a good story.

On the flip side, Joe Klegseth (pres), Courtney LeBoeuf (account manager), and Stasia Brownell (project manager), appear to be quality people in a budding quality agency. If I was looking for agency marketing and branding assistance, this is a company looking to build and extend an already impressive reputation; I’d certainly give them a holler on the short list.

Check ’em out. And thanks for the coffee and snacks!

Massive Friggin’ Annoyance Factor: All the niceties aside, why does every single marketing and branding agency have to lead with a completely bombastic Flash website? It’s heavy, ostentatious, pretentious, and it completely gets in the way of the message you’re trying to tell. 2Plural/evive is certainly not alone in this, they just come as the latest example of agentius adobus flashititus, an overwhelming need to prove to potential clients that you can deliver content in a medium that completely hides the fact that you have nothing of substance to say.

That, and if you try to visit the site in your iPhone, you’re plum out of luck.

Here is the first of four pieces I’m working on for Health Net of Oregon. The video was originally part of a four-part series on the communities that Health Net serves through their customers, intended for staggered launch in 2007. Unfortunately, it took far too long to get the four clients lined up to participate, so we were only able to complete this first one on time.

The intent of the project was spot on, however. The company was looking for a way to promote it’s own goodwill. I was — and still am — a staunch believer that the best way to frame goodwill is through the voices of your best customers: guilt by association.

Oregon Humane Society: Health Net Customer Story Part 1 from Pete Wright on Vimeo.

I don’t particularly want to comment on the quality of the production here — MS clearly put some money into this concept, which I believe speaks for itself. But if you have to make something like this to sell the act of selling your products, is that a sign that your product has jumped the shark?

Back in early February, I wrote about a wonderful presentation-cast response to a reader email that Lessig delivered on his blog, eloquently stating that he supported Obama, and why he chose to do so.

Here is another wonderful opportunity to see one of today’s great orators discussing the primary process, the disaster that the Clinton-Obama race has become — and the danger that race serves to deliver in the face of the real race, after the convention — and what Penn students and residents can do to support the cause.

“My name is Damon Wright, and I’m a business writer.”

That’s true. My name is Damon. It’s my middle name, used six years ago the hide my participation in the Apple campaign from my then-day-job. I had thought that I’d exhausted my 32 weeks of fame, but someone has just posted all the old “Switch” commercials to YouTube. Actually, not sure what took so long.

Permanent link, for those who haven’t seen it, is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umHGfSAQb-s

Thanks so much to Daniel Burka for this nod to his friend and photographer Steven Desroches. Desroches took the photo linked below at the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago. It captures so much brilliance of story-telling composition in one, single frame.

Fearless

This is, after all, an example of how to describe the wonder of a beginning-middle-end story arch from a single point in space and time. The viewer wonders excitedly at how this story was set up, and with greater anticipation about how it will resolve. It is timeless.

I had never heard of Desroches, but will certainly be paying attention to him from now on. Congratulations on a wonderful capture!

This is a good summary from Jason Calacanis summarizing his take on “Scoble’s Law” (wow, I can’t believe Scoble is coming up with a law behind his name): “The less you talk about yourself, the more folks will talk about you.”

This is more of a cardinal law of organic self-promotion, and less of a journalistic technique. But it flies in the face of Lacy’s interview strategy: put herself in the middle of every story, the sun around which all her subjects orbit. On this last note, it’s certainly time to stop talking about her, even as an object lesson.

In this personal interview with a YouTuber Omar Gallaga, I think she says it all — and highlights through what she doesn’t say just how backward it is to call her a “journalist.”

It is hard to describe the disaster that befell Sarah Lacy at the SxSW conference in Austin this week. In an interview with the often-tight-lipped Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, Lacy managed to single-handedly turn her audience into an angry mob, wielding Twitter posts like pitchforks and torches, all aimed at her head. Zuckerberg rarely steps into the limelight; thanks to all the company’s recent privacy missteps, he tends to be more of a marked man than an interesting field exemplar. In this case, Lacy’s lack of polish gave him the ultimate dodge. Facebook PR: this was a dream. If you have the time, take a break and watch the whole thing here. At about the three-quarter mark, it gets very interesting.

http://www.viddler.com/explore/allfacebook/videos/13/

For more Sarah Lacy goodness, head here: Facebook is All Grown Up. In it, she takes her low-brow sorority chiq to turn an ‘interview’ between her and a grown-up into a name-drop-a-thon in which she completely destroys the thread of the discussion by turning herself into a pundit.

This is not a discussion of Sarah Lacy as an accomplished media personality. It’s a sad reality check on the level of acceptable behavior that comes with finding yourself both a reporter of news and a celebrity yourself.

With Zuckerberg, the audience was not amused. Enough so that many began to yell out questions themselves, rather than listen to Lacy’s self-aggrandizing inner-circle-speak. Her public response in the interview? “You guys try doing what I do for a living. It’s not as easy as it looks, OK?”

Where Sarah went sideways.

1. She shunned any healthy respect for her audience. From the interview questions, and the direction she took the discussion early on, it was clear she had her own agenda for the Facebook founder and showed little interest in the caliber of both social and technical expertise in the room. To be fair, Zuckerberg likely had put some constraints on the kinds of questions Lacy could ask — it’s a reasonable PR expectation. But her dismissal of the audience heckling showed a rampant disrespect for her listeners and her role in addressing their needs.
2. She is not a humble person. I had never followed Sarah Lacy. I’d heard of her and read her blog from time to time when linked. In catching up on her work, it is clear that she is a media personality first, and a journalist a very distant… let’s say… fifth. She’ll be a great addition to “Inside Edition” one day. Once the audience revolts, concede and rebuild the relationship. Simply spitting in the fire will not put it out.
3. She pretended it never happened. On her Twitter feed: “seriously screw all you guys. I did my best to ask a range of things.” That, for Lacy, appears to be where the story ends. In the post-keynote interview between Zuckerberg and Lacy, the interview falls soundly back into PR speak, her nodding acceptance of his every word punctuated with a resounding “Uh-huh” precisely ever three seconds. Her questions completely ignorant of the events preceding this interview, which had occurred minutes prior on the keynote stage.

Becoming a savvy interviewer takes a great deal of media training and experience in front of a camera. If her ego can handle it, this experience is a ripe learning opportunity on how to handle yourself professionally, maturely, clearly, and confidently online, in the media, on camera, and in life.

Announcing the Air Poo. Available Summer, 2008

http://www.airpoo.com