Internet Happenings

There's some interesting stuff happening. Guy Kawasaki (CEO of Garage Technology Ventures, a venture capital firm, and regular blogger, whose mantra is 'empower entrepreneurs) has interviewed Jeffrey Pfeffer, author of the book "What Were They Thinking?" which explores corporate conventional wisdom (or lack thereof). The interview is entitled, "Ten Questions with Jeffrey Pfeffer" but there are actually 16 questions.

The Seattle Times has published an editorial in which Whole Foods CEO John Mackey is pilloried for maintaining an anonymous blog on Yahoo Finance for about eight years. I read the entire editorial, and I'm not convinced that Mackey did anything wrong. I'm not entirely convinced that he was right, either. The editorial's argument seems to be summed up best by one line, "You have to assume, whenever and wherever you speak, that people believe you are speaking as the company's CEO and for the company." My response would be, unless, of course, you are posting to an anonymous blog. Personally, I think that's one of the advantages of blogs. Somebody like Mackey can post his opinion (or someone else's opinion) and get an honest reaction to it. Not a reaction to it as in, this is John Mackey's opinion, just a reaction to this guy, that as far as any of us knew, was just a regular guy.

Internet Radio stations have to adhere to a new set of licensing fees starting Sunday. Several have already announced that they are closing up. This decision was pushed by SoundExchange, an organization created by the recording industry. What were they thinking? I believe that this is what Jeffrey Pfeffer would refer to as 'ignoring feedback effects.' Commercial radio stations play music, and sell advertising. The ad revenue pays the costs of broadcasting the music, and people get to listen to what are essentially samples of the music industry's product. (Generally only one or two songs of a given album are actually played on the air). Most commercial radio stations play music that they already have a good idea that their listeners are going to want to hear, so that their ratings stay high, and they can continue to charge high rates for advertising. It's kind of a symbiotic relationship. Internet radio, on the other hand, generally doesn't create anywhere near the advertising revenue (if they advertise at all), and frequently direct their netcasts to more of a niche market. That is, if you have a website, and there's a handful of bands that you really like, but they aren't popular enough to be played on Commercial Radio, guess what? If you make that music available on your website, there are other people out there with a similar taste in music, that will come to your site and listen. Get enough hits on your website, and advertisers will pay you to place their ads on your website. Get enough hits, you might even generate enough ad revenue to pay your domain fees. In the meantime, some little known band becomes known through your website, and people start buying their CD's. Except, that now you have to pay exorbitant licensing fees, because the recording industry is more concerned with making money off of the Internet than making money selling CD's. Make sense? Not at all.

Something totally unrelated: Congratulations to Clayton County Georgia Police Chief Jeff Turner for doing what every police chief should be doing. I understand that Clayton County has a Police Department and a Sheriff's Department, and the Sheriff has been trying to absorb the Police Department. I would endorse that, if Jeff Turner is elected sheriff.

Here I am again, posting to my blog ("How very interesting (yawn)"). Yeah, I know. There's something to be said for just being able to rant or vent when you need to, but, right now, I don't really feel the need. I could complain about my job, but, quite frankly, I like getting a paycheck. If you read my previous post, then you already know that I get paid fairly well for relatively little work. I like that arrangement. I also happen to like what I do, I just don't like some of the things that go on where I work. To be honest, even if I ran my own business, I still wouldn't like some of the things that would go on in my own business. Think about it: You've got a hot project that you promised the customer would be done tomorrow, unforeseen delays have prevented the completion of the project, but there is little or no money in the budget to pay your employees overtime to stay tonight and finish the project. What do you do? Either you stay the night and finish the project yourself, or you apologize profusely to the client and ask for an extension (and hope and pray that they not only grant you the extension, but continue to do business with you, AND not tell any potential clients that you missed your deadline). If your company is established and has a reputation for doing good work on time, the apology might be enough, but if your company is new and has no established reputation, guess what? you just established your rep. It takes a long time to overcome that sort of set-back. Some companies never do. One more reason why I don't run my own business.
Not that I would know what to do if I had my own business, anyway. I've tried MLM's (for the uninitiated, MLM stands for Multi-Level Marketing). That's hard to get started--it takes a lot of perseverance. Plus, there are a lot of bad MLM companies out there. Not naming any names, but one major player in the MLM field got a reputation some years ago for running a pyramid scheme. From what I understand, that wasn't even (entirely) their fault--some distributors discovered a hole in their payment plan that allowed a pyramid type scheme to be used. That flaw has been corrected, and they have changes their name, but the old name still usually comes up whenever you try to talk to somebody about MLM. Personally, I generally don't like their products anyway. Some of them are good, but most of the ones that I've tried, weren't. Anyway, I think that's enough rambling for today.