Dont u love Friday afternoon ? So couple days of diverse meetings, with the greatest rewards being lovely early birthday clothing (nice when a new shirt arrives as u r walking out door to meeting) along with riffing on the new $kunkwork$ and joshing it with the sharp geeks. There was even a bit of raised voice but I’ve definitely got some of the (quoted from this week’s Life) Charlie Crews Zen Vibe going after kickn it for 2 months on a lofi budget + deciding on where to take 09, via Sepinwall :

Lucky Me Uniqlo Topshopping

I know I shouldn’t of but coming from a Yellowpages background (well observing such creatures internally esp the sales side) - I had to smile at the Yelp heavy arm premium placement techniques dont surprise me at all; To beat the incumbent sometimes u imitate/emulate them but take it one stepo further, and do it cheaper. Leave yer communism at the door. And if u want to keep/enhance yer business reputation, then u better fkn give me yer monthly $299 muthrfkr hehe via the eerily down EastbayExpress (who do they get heavied by, Yelp ?) : “In fact, something seemed shady about the state of his restaurant’s negative reviews. “When you do get a call from Yelp, and you go to the site, it looks like they have been moved,” John said. “You don’t know if they happen to be at the top legitimately or if the rep moved them to the top. You don’t even know if this is someone who legitimately doesn’t like your restaurant. … Almost all the time when they call you, the bad ones will be at the top.”"

While on a confrontational language vibe, tonite I’ll definitely be checking out latest ep of Skins, the best current season of TV on the boxee; “Freddie has always been the black sheep of his family, and is growing more and more sick of this. But when Freddie’s sister Karen signs up for a reality TV show, he is forced into acting like a perfect family for the cameras.”

As you’d expect of meetings dealin in social media, one topic that came up was monetization and where that’s at. There are definitely going to be some nine figure near R+D exits for those that crack how to get 1%+ clickthrus for social network ads. Billions and prob trillions of pages used by hundreds of millions of internet users, but not enough monetization yet. Which in recessionary times, esp in a backwater like this one, becomes an easy justification to take the social networking out of the phrase “social networking monetization” - which basically leaves u with ads. Inside Facebook have some of the Harvard idea stealing borg’s progress ere :

“‘Suggestions’ that appear (see right) include Groups that friends are members of, Pages that a friend may be a fan of, or even Events that friends are attending. Friend suggestions can sometimes appear here too. The suggested content is interleaved with Social Ads on a fairly random basis. It’s fair to say that it makes the whole area much more attention-grabbing, especially since the name of the friend that is a fan of a page or a member of the group being recommended is shown.”

Facebook may want to suggest friends but as the movie says (click4cam) He's Just Not That Into You ! Wasn't too bad... pretty good.

Also interesting is Facebook’s offering of a widget via their Connect program (FB details from source ere) and the Share This usage numbers, which I’m not 100% sure can be used as a proxy for the overall internet population as Venturebeat makeout : “Sharing via email still dominated in January, accounting for 57.1 percent of stories on ShareThis. But that’s down 6.9 percent since August, while Facebook sharing has increased 12.6 percent and now makes up 21.2 percent of the total. Meanwhile, social news site Digg is also down 9.2 percent, and even Twitter dropped 0.4 percent.”

MySpace on other hand are going more down the mobile path, well that was what the readable Venturebeat interview with’em was about - along with international : “A good example is our work with McDonald’s. McDonald’s came to us and said they wanted to update the Big Mac Chant. So users were able to upload audio and video of Big Mac Chants online. Then we created a branded campaign on mobile, a mini-site on mobile where they could download ringtones as well. So we used mobile as a continuation of the online experience. In the future users will be able to capture that audio and video on their mobile device and upload it straight away. That is, of course is even more compelling. We hope to take things to this level in the near term.”

How Kewl is the Dharma Project VW on Lost S5E6 Click.

If you are more interested in magazines than mobiles or social networks : Fashionlogie breakdown the Devil Wears Prada process to name a magazine Love : “Well I really liked [the name] ‘Fame’, with its Warhol and Bowie connotations. I also liked ‘Plastic’. It was that idea that the name didn’t necessarily mean one thing, that everyone would visualize something different. Anyway, we couldn’t use either. ‘Plastic’ we couldn’t use because of Plastique Magazine and Fame we couldn’t use because of an American magazine of the same name.  It took about five months before we finally came to a decision. Another one we liked for a short while was Legend, and then when the lawyers said we could use it we changed our minds, it sounded wrong. There was also ‘X’ and ‘Sex’ (which rather surprisingly was available). We’d normally send the legal types five possible titles to clear at a time. It was quite a dreary and expensive procedure. ‘Starlet’ was another one we could have used, but when we got confirmation we felt deflated rather than elated so that had to go. Another big favourite was ‘Heroine’, but of course I was told absolutely no way! Love was one of the first names that we mentioned, but we thought it was a bit mushy. Then myself, Stuart and Lee were in the office and because we’d got so fed up with whole process I decided we should just try some covers and see what the graphics looked like. We got the Courtney Love cover up and were trying it with Sex, X and a few others when I wondered what it would look like if we moved Love up to the top — and actually, it looked really cool. It’s kind of like a ‘Face’ type banner in a way.”

Tim Roth's Lie to Me is just a Crime Procedural like The Mentalist but all the body language analysis makes it really cool. And Tim Roth is a legend ! S1E4 link.

Interested to Check Out : New Australian service called DVDs to Swap, this would be esp interesting if it allows um u know unbranded discs.. downloading multiple series of a show or high res movies costs sometimes the same as buying them based on Aussie ISP prices. For example I want first 4 series of Hustle, and 43 episode Series 1 Gabriel Byrne HBO therapy show (In treatment) - but that is close to 30 gig of content - close to $60 or more if using excess charge then it would be $120 - so it would be cheaper to buy but much better to swap it for S1-5 of The Wire + S1-2 of Mad Men, S4 of Lost (last ep ere) +/or Sons of Anarchy, True Blood, and dvdrips all the current academy award films out (Slumdog, Changeling, Gran Torino, Milk, Wrestler, Rachel getting Married,  even last night’s cam of (download ere) He’s Just Not That into You which was ok etc.)

Hitwise are reflecting that people are looking for jobs (17%) much more than normal which u’d expect… but I’m definitely not going down tghat path stil l got some moves to bust. OK Hamish and Andy then beach run, my cuz may be coming down for weekend, although while people are happy to request u drive in and back for hours at short notice so u can do the work at their leisure/convenience/designated_hours.. not as many people (ie close to none) will make the effort to do exactly the same drive down. 2 way street not so much. Like university group assignments, the real test is whether with a group u can do something quicker/better or whether it just slows things down. One needs to setup optimum team based on objective assessment of who is able to contribute what… as the current Lost season says : It’s not where we are, it’s when we are… hehe - just fkn with u.

Nice Fixed Gear Bike via Macchiato1 on Flickr

To Watch Tonite : Friday nights I like checking out latest Burn Notice (”Michael agrees to help Sam and Fiona in capturing a Haitian murderer. Elsewhere, Michael makes some headway to finding the suspect of who tried to kill him.”) and the briliant Patrick Swayze The Beast. (”The partners search for a rogue FBI agent who was trained by Barker. Ellis tracks his moves while undercover while Barker seeks out the man’s ex-girlfriend, who Barker also dated.“)

Damages Season 2 is awesome at moment. It's all about "The Trade" S2E7 Click