I have some friends from college who get together every six months to catch up on life and have fun wide-ranging conversations. It’s great because we are each on completely different career paths. I mean seriously different: a professional model, rock star, a renaissance man (lawyer / politician / music industry exec), the Treasurer of the Yankees, a pastor, and myself.

As our careers have started to take shape, it’s really interesting to see us wrestling with many of the same issues. Obviously, part of this is because we’re all relatively early in our respective careers. However, another similarity is that we all have a very vested interest professionally in the evolution of media and it’s intersection with society.

As a technology entrepreneur, I always finish the weekend with a renewed deep sense of responsibility and excitement for the products my peers & I create. Therefore, I was particularly interested in an article that Fred Wilson linked to a few days ago - ‘The Death of Postmodernism and Beyond‘ in Philosophy Today. The author, Alan Kirby, states:

The shift from modernism to postmodernism did not stem from any profound reformulation in the conditions of cultural production and reception; all that happened, to rhetorically exaggerate, was that the kind of people who had once written Ulysses and To the Lighthouse wrote Pale Fire and The Bloody Chamber instead. But somewhere in the late 1990s or early 2000s, the emergence of new technologies re-structured, violently and forever, the nature of the author, the reader and the text, and the relationships between them.

He goes on to discuss how this has ushered in a new generation he calls ‘pseudo-modernist’ and defines the delineation as approximately people born after 1980. It’s a really good read and I plan on spending some more time thinking about it.

Interestingly, my friends are also coming to Pittsburgh this weekend to hang out for one of our semi-annual times together. Between spending time with the guys and contemplating the fact that I’m helping create products that change society who knows what I’ll be thinking about by next week! However, I’m guessing a few think out loud posts are in this blog’s pipeline. (Consider this fair warning if you want to unsubscribe now.)

Matt Freeman is a well known digital advertising thought leader. He has been the CEO of Tribal DDB for some time and speaks at all the big advertising conferences. Advertising Age has a story on him moving to head GoFish a really interesting ad network for kids and parents.

What I found most interesting in the Ad Age story was his quote on the ad network business and specifically how Microsoft and Yahoo are missing a great opportunity:

Mr. Freeman in an interview said there is an opportunity for digital ad networks like GoFish to pick up a ball he believes Yahoo and Microsoft have dropped when it comes to online brand advertising.

“As Yahoo and Microsoft and others are trying to beat Google at Google’s game — search — they’ve taken their eye off the most valuable ball they had in their court, which is online brand advertising,” Mr. Freeman said. “Even though Google has a terrific business model, it’s not a panacea for brands. Brands can’t build equity by buying keywords alone.”

As I commented in March, the ad networks and exchanges are going to be fine. However, I still feel they need to throw out the crappy CPM metrics improve the inadequate metrics they sell against. Hopefully with Matt’s connections on Madison Ave he can advance this.

Brad Burnham has a post on the Union Square website about The Weird Economics of Information. It’s very much inline with a theme my friend Charlie O’Donnell (also the first analyst at Union Square) has pushed in his startup Path 101 calling it ‘anti-stealth’.

Almost a year ago I did a few posts on how an open ethos can re-invent an industry. It’s something I continue to think a lot about and enjoyed reading Brad’s post today.

(Found via Fred Wilson)

Jesse Vincet gave a presentation at Ignite Boston last week titled ‘Web 2.0 is Sharecropping’. I wasn’t in Boston, so I didn’t get to see the talk. He proposes a specific solution around an P2P database he’s working on called Prophet, I’m sure there are other solutions as well. More importantly I really like the issues he raises in the ‘rant’. Check out the slides below …

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(found on Jesse’s blog)