Steve Rubel has a post with a link to a fun web 2.0 test.  It actually examines a set of links and reports the percentage of web 2.0 sites you’ve visited.  The “test” is at - http://www.schillmania.com/random/humour/web20awar…

I was a little scared how high I scored. 

I wonder if I’m part of that mythical one percent for some of these apps?

Tim Sanders (the Former Chief Solutions Officer at Yahoo! and author of Love is the Killer App and The Likeability Factor) finally launched a blog - http://www.sanderssays.com/  

Tim is a person I have grown to respect significantly over the years.  I’ve always walked away from his books and opportunities I’ve had to hear him speak - with some ‘pearl of wisdom’.  I’m subscribed and I recommend you subscribe as well!

Dion Hinchfliffe wrote a very interesting post which includes a list of seven ways to fully embrace the network.  Definitely something worth spending some time thinking about.

I was in Manhattan the last two days.  While waiting to meet my sister for dinner, I decided to stop by the Apple Store on Fifth Avenue. 

I’ve never done this before, been heard from Apple Evangelist friends & experts that it was the ultimate retail experience.  I was not disappointed. 

In the online media world, we have talked since the first bubble about creating a great customer experience.   The Apple store was an amazing offline customer experience:

• The store employees were knowledgeable & friendly.
• The environment made feel cool (I know I’m not cool, but it didn’t change how I felt.)
• The “genius bar” is much better than “geek squads” (sorry Best Buy)
• The look & feel of the store truly did reflect the Apple brand (at least as I understand the brand)
• Finally it worked (see below)…

It was so compelling - I actually tried a Mac Book.  This is particularly relevant since fiance will need a laptop when we get married.  As much as I thought I’d never say it, we may end up with a Mac.  The great experience is threatening to create a customer!

Dave Morgan, the Chairman of Tacoda, has an excellent Online Spin column this entitled “Bringing Political Dollars Online”.  He raises five key challenges the online advertising industry needs to tackle inorder to attract & retain 5 to 10 percent of overall campaign spend online.  (It is currently less than 1/2 of one percent.)

I should state up front that I’m glad this is an issue a thought-leader like Dave Morgan is thinking about.  I actually felt the first four of his points excellent.  However, his fifth & final point I found a bit weak:

Audience demographics. While the Internet has certainly become mainstream, it still under-represents those who are most likely to vote: older and more blue-collar–and over-represents those least likely or unable to vote: children, teens, students, and young mobile adults.

Ultimately, I believe this was intended as a subtle way to promote the Tacoda Audience Network.  However, the interesting thing is there is a great online medium that that is an outstanding way to reach key influencers.  Nielsen//NetRatings did a study released a year ago, which found: RSS subscribers visited on average 10.6 news sites in the month of August 2005. This was more than 3 times as many news sources as a controlled sample of other internet users.

RSS readers are an engaged demographic that cares deeply about the news.  In addition, I don’t know the exact percentage but (one would imagine) a significantly higher percentage also blog regularly.  Therefore, you can reach this audience with a message and then have them participate. 

Now all that is left, ensure that the advertisements accurately contain a valuable message - not just 2 people’s names.  In other words, make sure these RSS advertising signals are profitable!

So I finally figured out how to add categories to my Windows Live Writer posts.  It has been in the left-hand corner all along:

I complained about this a few weeks ago, I’m surprised no one from Microsoft commented an answer.

Over the last 3 years, my title has always included “Business Development” (promoted from Director to Vice President.) The actual responsibilities have fluctuated significantly between direct sales and a more “classical” business development. While I enjoy the more “classic” business development more, I don’t mind selling and actually enjoy it when I get in a groove. I often comment, what the business needs to develop is more sales

Contrasting the two responsibilities (sales & “classical” business development) Upon reflecting on the last three years, two things that have struck me:

1. How much easier it is to provide insights into sales progress.
2. How the evolution of technology is really changing the landscape for business development activities.

I just read a couple outstanding business thought leaders & bloggers take on the second issue. Caterina Fake & Fred Wilson have posts that started as an email exchange between them. They do a great job summarizing the changing landscape.

I find it interesting that the changes in landscape seem to only accentuate the first issue. While it was hard in a BD 1.0 role, its even harder now to provide insight into your progress for the rest of the management team. Interestingly, this is especially challenging, because these are by definition externally facing responsibilities. However, like all roles in a company they do require strong collaboration with the rest of your organization. I definitely couldn’t deliver on anything without rockstar developers (people like Evan DiBiase & the rest of the development team at mSpoke.)

To clarify, when I’m focusing my attention on selling - there are fairly developed processes & reports that can be used to provide management & the board insight into the team’s sales progress. The best example of this is a sales pipeline that can be generated out of your CRM system (we use salesforce.com). In addition, you can come up with more creative reports - for example, I just recently read Josh Kopleman’s waterfall report - which I plan to start using. I think there are a few reasons it is easier to do this:

1. The process tends to be more replicable. Therefore, multiple opportunities are easy to compare against others.
2. From my experience, the CRM systems tend to be geared to sales. I’m not aware of any for business development / channel sales - If you are, please add it to the comments.
3. The terms of the deal and resulting economics are easier (not easy but easier) to predict.
4. It is easy to predict the amount of work necessary for your development and/or professional services team to deliver on the contract.

I’ve read a few books on partnering including Jonathan Tisch’s The Power of We and Tamm & Luyet’s Why We Partner. These type books tend to stay very focused on intangibles - like the importance of partnering, etc … When they do touch on working & reporting within your organization, it tends to focused on making sure it is a win win or as Catarina says:

“scouring the thesaurus looking for synonyms for ’synergy’”

However, they don’t focus on how you actually frame what / how to actually update your team. I spent some time on the pragmatic marketer’s site last night and I’m curious if some of those product management tools may also translate well as reporting tools for business development activities. Especially, as the we move towards more bizdev that Caterina & Fred are discussing.

As promised, for a little over the last week I’ve used Microsoft’s Internet Explorer Beta 3 as my RSS reader. I must admit to being pleasantly surprised. My summary statement is:

I’ll be sticking with my NewsGator RSS Reader, but it was very good. And certainly will be more than adequate to educate users on the benefits of consuming content via RSS. In other words, things are looking up for the ubiquity of RSS.

My feedback is exclusively on it as an RSS reader. However, I did end up using it as a browser some and found it to be pretty good. Extreme Tech has a good review of it as a browser that contrasts the user experience with Firefox & Opera.

At a high-level, I’d give it the following feedback:

Good

• Very easy to subscribe to new feeds. I found it really easy to add feeds and found myself subscribing to a number of new feeds through the week. (I understand NewsGator has just released a toolbar to do the same thing, but I haven used it yet.)
• Easy to scan and see what feeds have new items in them.

Bad

• While it is easy to scan which feeds have new items, it could definitely be easier to scan items in a feed. The space is just a little to much.
• It doesn’t have a mobile reader, like NewsGator does.

I just tried doing a few posts in Windows Live Writer. I really like it! However, I can’t figure out how to categorize my posts like I can in the Word Press editor. When I click on the “post properties” and enter keywords they don’t seem to move over.

Anyone know how to do this? Right now, I publish it as a draft and then go into the admin interface to post it from there. There must be a better way!

I believe the last video game system I played on was a Ninetendo (the original). Therefore, as I have heard more and more about in game advertising - it has remained very much a concept for me.

However, that changed this weekend as my cousin came up from Texas this past weekend. He brought his XBox 360 with him and 10 different games. We ended up playing EA Sport’s Fight Night Round 3.

The product placements was much better than anything I had seen in a movie. This is how one review put it:

“Each ‘stage’ of your boxer’s popularity is sponsored by a brand. You will be able to see the logos of Under Armour, Burger King, and more. One Dodge-Sponsored fight even has a car in the arena, with the winner taking home the car. There’s tons of in-game advertising in this title, but then again, there’s tons of advertising in real-life fights.”

Interestingly, a June article in Forbes contrasting Under Armour with Nike actually highlights their sponsorship of Fight Night 3:

“The interlocking U-and-A logo may not have the universality of the Nike swoosh. But it’s recognizable among the 12-to-24-year-old bracket that buys videogames like Electronic Arts (nasdaq: ERTS - news - people )’ Fight Night Round 3, which features a boxer, Big E, clearly modeled after Ogbogu. Lest the point be lost, announcers in the game chant, “Protect this house,” and gamers can clad their fighters in UA gear. “For high school kids Under Armour is the badge of authenticity that says I really am an athlete,” says Matthew Powell, analyst at the research firm SportsOnesource.”

I wasn’t able to do an appropriate Google search to determine what it cost them to sponsor the game. However, if you know please put it in the comments.

Speaking of Forbes - I also asked him about Second Life and his face lit up. I’m begining to believe the hype - Making Real Money In Virtual Worlds - Forbes.com