Suddenly, from left-field comes this Sydney Morning Herald interview with Mark Stevens, aka Robert X Cringely. I can’t see a news hook, or any kind of spin that brought this email interview to light. Strange. Perhaps the SMH have just discovered that, gasp, the man who would be Cringe is still drawing a crowd. And good luck to him too.

Disclosure: I’m a former InfoWorld-er who was “close” to the original (and “real”, imho) Cringe column during my happy tenure at the publication over the last three years. It’s worth noting that InfoWorld’s Cringe column is also alive and well, something that the SMH did not clarify. In fact, it’s still syndicated in IDG publications around the world.

In the process of catching up with my RSS feed backlog I came across Jon Udell’s post and video clip re David Weinberger’s C-SPAN rant. Thanks for the effort Jon - the .avi version worked just fine for me.

Anyway, it’s interesting timing because I’m currently in the process of writing a guest column for Marketing Magazine about the relationship between marketers and journalists/editors.

One of Weinberger’s comments has fed my thinking. He argues that the value of product feedback from real live users, posted on newsgroups and the like, greatly exceeds that of the trite marketing messages presented by companies on billboard-style web sites. The implication here is many marketers fall into the trap of dehumanising their message. Cheap, throwaway marketing lines that don’t underscore a real value proposition are simply ignored. Or worse, they destroy a company’s credibility by betraying ignorance about real customer needs.

And from a journalist’s perspective, the marketer is further alienating an already suspicious, jaded hack.

The DOT-POD software, available in server and client versions, lets users share tracks from their iPod with others via the Internet. The software betters a standard Web server by displaying track data in HTML, and offers specialised searches and user controls.

Very cool. Full story at PC World Australia.

Google pundits and the dot-com cheer squad are reaching new heights today with news of the search titan’s jump into the IPO deep end.

When I searched for “Google IPO,” Google News returned 1,680 results. Yup, we’ve gone nuts on the subject.

Bloggers and news organizations are applauding the company’s engineering success, marveling at how Sergei and Larry will become instant billionaires, and hope it’s a sign of a return to Silicon Valley boom times.

Most significant to me is the fact that Google’s coming of age on Wall Street further validates the rise of web-only properties. Yahoo, eBay, Amazon, and Google are not just online companies, but businesses that act as platforms for a range of applications and services that extend well beyond the “core” product.

This chart from CNN Money puts the Google money hype in perspective, but it’s also a visual reminder that these companies represent the online utility model of computing that’s replaced the PC wave.

Some other links:

Wired has an easy to digest overview of the filing and Google’s intentions,

Forbes is one of the few media outlets to step outside the knee-jerk breathless reporting mould and focus on Google’s honesty about the risks facing the company, thanks to a Reuters report.

FT has the full text of Sergei and Larry’s letter.

I’m wading through an IBM whitepaper called Media and Entertainment 2010, in which the thinkers over at Big Blue are presuming to tell us media people what our industry will look like.

To be honest, the language in this report is full of hyperbole and jargon. But I have uncovered this gem:

In an era of “pervasive media,” users around the world are confidentially tracked for their opinions, preferences and tastes in media and entertainment; actively or passively, they help shape the content they experience.

This statement is true for two reasons:

1. It’s already happening under the current media business model. Polls, research, and online tracking mechanisms already shape the way we publishers and editors present and create content. Granted, some of the methods employed these days are a tad analogue (eg. paper-based readership surveys). But an unwired, digital future will speed up the feedback loop between publishers and readers or consumers of content.

2. Digital TV, PVRs, blogs, newsgroups, and even SMS voting on TV shows is built around the notion that consumers want control over, or the ability to influence, the information they receive. Media has always been a service industry, but as digital technologies like these embed themselves deeper into our culture, we move further away from the one-way communication model of old, to one where we create ongoing conversations with target audiences.
And by the way, these conversations by their very nature are an interactive human experience. For marketers and media buyers, this is the great nirvana. The more interaction a media company has with its audience, the more information it gathers on behaviour, attitudes and spending patters etc. Media companies can subsequently build in additional justifications into the sales process. And digitally-savvy advertisers get proven ROI.

IBM thinks all this will unfold by 2010. Will it take that long? It will probably be that long before the marketing world (specifically ad agencies) catches up. But I’ll take a punt and guess that within two years you will see fundamental changes within the media that reflect an increasing desire to let the audience dictate how and what content is presented. And I’m not just talking about the current media blog-rush.

Thanks to Steve Rubel for the link.

Australian IT investors, marketers and pundits are fond of talking up the opportunities in China, and Shanghai specifically. Many here and in the US also like to talk about Shanghai as the Silicon Valley of the East. Perhaps that analogy is a blessing and curse.

Popular opinion regarding Shanghai seems to be swinging from straight out enthusiasm to caution. Put another way, China’s Shanghai-led “bubble” economy could be about to burst.

The Fin (subscription) has an interesting feature on the subject today. For non-subscribers, BusinessWeek’s International Cover Story for May 3 asks: “Can the new leaders rein in a runaway financial system?”

Australia is better positioned to take advantage of a rebound in early-stage investment in IT companies, according to a report in The Australian.

AVCAL’s Andrew Green: “We didn’t suffer the excesses that the US market suffered, so we are in a better position than they are, and we do have some very good technology companies that are coming through the ranks.”

According to this KPMG study, Australia is the best place to locate your software design business and web operations. Australia is also second to Canada as the least expensive place in the world to conduct business.

(via ANZA Technology Network newsletter)

AlwaysOn builds on what has now become common wisdom. Skilled technologists are leaving The Valley for their home countries, and taking their money and companies with them.

While this is true for much of the Asia Pacific region, I’d argue that we’re not seeing the same trend in Australia, and probably New Zealand. All the companies I’ve been talking to in recent weeks argue that if you really want to make a local startup fly you need to crack the US market. And that means warm bodies on the ground State-side. What will be interesting to see unfold is the extent to which Universities and VCs in this region can produce startups that are “instantly global,” as one VC put it to me last week. Watch this space.

Yesterday I took a call from Doug Farber over at Salesforce.com who, during the course of our discussion, waxed lyrical about Huchison’s 3G network. “It’s as fast as DSL,” he enthused, reporting he was wowing executives in boardrooms across Sydney with his notebook’s mobile Internet connection.

The service to which he’s referring is built around the NetConnect card. It offers 384Kbps download speed with pricing starting from around $50 per month. You probably need to add another $10 to $20 in additional charges if you exceed your monthly data allowance. But even so, it stacks up well against similarly priced fixed-line DSL or cable broadband. And given the $150 per month price tag for iBurst, it starts sounding better all the time.

Skip forward to today, and The Australian is leading the charge of media outlets reporting that Telstra and Huch are in talks to merge or combine CDMA and 3G networks.

The question is what would Telstra do with its new found 3G capabilities? Well, for starters it could use its marketing muscle to educate Australians about the current-day reality of mobile Internet services. Heck, it could even think about offering something other than a Blackberry.

What worries me about all this is that we finally get our hands on a decent 3G service, and now we’re staring down the barrel of trusting an 800 pound gorilla and its band of inept service people with a vital next generation technology (I switched from Telstra to Optus as a direct result of poor service).

Here’s an amusing sound file re Telstra outsourcing that illustrates my point: Download file