To ride off into the Sunset eh ? Nice Honda Chopper, Click to read more @ Hell4 Leather.

So it’s been one of those weeks/months which is a direct consequence of not enough new business prospecting, successful investment raising and wishing i could code, heck the list could go on : Oct-Dec - coming off 12 months but really longer (4 years ive been doing ‘this‘) of hard business building work. I with the team had doubled revenue 3 quarters in a row,  7 figure annualised turnover, and a reduced focused product set. Ironically I believe in the business more than ever, and it’s the most focused it’s ever been. But focus sometimes takes dollars - so u can “focus” your resources. So, in consequence if you dont have the engineering cattle on the ground, and a few unrelated “unlucky” things happen, well it’s hard to compete, and hits you the founder in the hip_pocket. This is now a market where google is retrenching. Altho Venturebeat does have 6 Aussies companies doing an innovation shootout in Menlo Park. Let’s hope it’s not a Reservoir Dogs ending or worse.

Anyway I digress, it’s 2009 + the Web 2.0 party is over - one that never really happened in Australia past the hobby\enthusiast twitcliques - definitely not at investor or corporate level. Duncan over at his fantastically hand built and bootstrapped Inquisitr sums it up well in his “Web Ad Apocalypse” microcosm which can be extended more 2.0 broadly : “Although obviously I don’t have the full picture, the sample is big enough for me to draw some conclusions, and they aren’t pretty. Advertising in blogging and 2.0 services/ apps is on the downward march, and companies that rely on advertising that were marginally profitable, or running at a loss are about to find life that much harder.”

Back from my Balnarring Coffee. Watch Latest Damages

MIKE G’s 10 reasons Why Enterprise RSS Wont Work

I  nodded my head at much of Mike G’s list below :

1. A lot of intranets are “content poor”
2. Intranet web site owners have not made their sites “RSS friendly”
3. Employees may not know about feed readers and feed syndication
4. IT organizations might not have rolled out any tools that focus on RSS
5. In tools that support RSS as a feature, IT might not have “turned on” that capability
6. Employees may be unwilling to change their behaviors to take advantage of feed readers
7. IT organizations may look at feeds as increasing their attack surface area in terms of security
8. Business and IT decision-makers may be concerned about confidentiality and compliance aspects of feed syndication
9. IT organizations may be concerned about network utilization and their inability to manage bandwidth concerns
10. Justification for back-end servers to aggregate and management feeds centrally (i.e., a feed syndication platform) lacks a clear business case.

Damages S2E2 Click to Watch

The irony will be based on last time, the larger online, media and corporates are likely to start social media spending in 2009 and ramp-up, whether it be Facebook initiatives like New York Times are stumbling towards via All Facebook : “The New York Times has partnered with Facebook on a new Presidential suggestions tool which collects the suggestions of Facebook users on various topics.. Had the New York Times enabled Facebook Connect, it would have been possible to have an ongoing conversation via the site. Instead, the New York Times has picked select suggestions from the New York Times fan page. An interesting way of accomplishing this would have been to integrate a fan page widget that submits questions directly to the Connect enabled website. Instead this is a one off flash animation that will draw a number of people to the site an will never return.”

Double Triple Cross of Damages

Annoyingly, there is still so much value creation to happen, like the Yahoo employee profiled in techcrunch, who wrote 100 lines of code to create this news\twitter search engine that delivers an integrated result of where breaking news meets microblogging; Look at how it integrates latest media with twitter on Slumdog Millionaire for example. Or how the latest plane crash was first/best captured by a twitpic. And these are examples from last 24 hours. The “freshness” meets “popularity” problem identified here is the one I find most interesting - where i want to work/build a business : Especially when u add an additional layer being “location” - But I’ve learnt while the triangulation is an interesting problem : the freshness meets popularity by location - isnt that easy to raise money for in Australia (and other than entrepreneurs that have done it before, u hardly have a conversation in Australia with an investor that gets it beyond a very basic level) But again we’ll see in February when rich Aussies come back to work. Via Zooie.Wordpress.com :

“Freshness (especially in the context of search) is a challenging problem. Traditional PageRank style algorithms don’t really work here as it takes time for a fresh URL to garner enough links to beat an older high ranking URL. One approach is to use cluster sizes as a feature for measuring the popularity of a story (i.e. Google News). Although quite effective IMO this may not be fast enough all the time. For the cluster size to grow requires other sources to write about the same story. Traditional media can be slow however, especially on local topics. I remember when I saw breaking Twitter messages describing the California Wildfires. When I searched Google/Yahoo/Microsoft right at that moment I barely got anything (< 5 results spanning 3 search results pages). I had a similar episode when I searched on the Mumbai attacks. Specifically, the Twitter messages were providing incredible focus on the important subtopics that had yet to become popular in the traditional media and news search worlds. What I found most interesting in both of these cases was that news articles did exist on these topics, but just weren’t valued highly enough yet or not focusing on the right stories (as the majority of tweets were). So why not just do that? Order these fresh news articles (which mostly provide authority and in-depth coverage) based on the number of related fresh tweets as well as show the tweets under each. That’s this service.”

Some Mila Post Zombie via Just Jared

Anyway, it’s middle of January, not exactly a time to do business in Australia, and I better update “key stakeholders” before this week ends. Seems I’ll be spending rest of month scouting for new deals, work, as well as starting some new income business models. As messed up as he is, I guess its taken Pete Doherty awhile to release his first album, but when he does it sound like it might be the real deal via NME : “So, after releasing two albums with The Libertines and another two with Babyshambles so far, what does the next installment in Pete’s musical career sound like? Well, like Gorillaz. And The Coral. And The La’s. And Blur. And Bob Dylan. The album is the most diverse album Pete has made by a long stretch. The bulk of it sees an atmospheric mix of acoustic guitar (mainly played by Graham Coxon) and strings set a keynote of tenderness and mystery – far away from the frenetic ‘Shamble-ness of ‘Fuck Forever’, ‘Pipedown’, ‘Delivery’ and the like. But there are real curveballs that may knock Pete fans sideways – most notably the Gorrilaz-esque ‘Last Of The English Roses’ and the bizarre, snaking ‘Sweet By And By’.”

GR8 NME Piece + Music Clips of PETE Dohertys new album

Watching : Latest Ep of Damages S02E02, already loving Series 2, every 1 has an angle, no1 plays it straight. Damages I empathise with That said a down market is where people make it eh…  and I am strong on self-determination, so work any1?

Damages S02E02 Click for Torrent