WPP issued their annual results [PDF link] today. Things looks pretty good for their investors -- but I'm not a financial analyst, so I won't spend time on that. However, I will point out that Western Europe (and the UK in particular) was WPP's slowest-growing region -- something we're finding is true for the ad market at large as we update our European online ad forecasts.

I was also interested to see where WPP thought future opportunity (read: growth) lies for them and their clients. Quoting directly:

"The two critical strategic opportunities for our clients, media owners and ourselves, remain geographical expansion across the globe and assessing and dealing with the implications of new technological developments – which could be glibly described as "China and the internet". Clearly, it is more complex than this, with China an icon for Asia, Latin America, Africa and the Middle East and Central and Eastern Europe and the internet an icon for mobile, iPods, video iPods, PVRs, HDTV, IPTV, gaming and social networks, amongst others. Geographical development remains relatively easy to manage. Technological development remains relatively difficult to manage as it is taxing to forecast the impact of such changes, although increasing complexity makes us more valuable to our clients."

It is indeed difficult to forecast the impact of technological changes -- but that doesn't excuse agencies like WPP for being far too conservative in their willingness to embrace those changes. Last year the Internet accounted for more than one-quarter of European media consumption, but only four percent of European ad spending. Even in the advertising world, where there's often a lag between consumers' adoption of new media and advertisers' adoption of those same media, this is a startling gap -- and an indication that advertisers are missing out on what WPP have identified as a 'critical strategic opportunity.' It's time for WPP, their clients, and their competitors to put their money where their mouth is.

After bitching earlier today about the current lack of critical thinking in the world today, Michael Hirshland of Polaris posted a long piece by his partner – Bob Metcalfe - titled Metcalfe’s Law Recurses Down the Long Tail of Social Networks – which displays an abundance of critical thinking.

Metcalfe starts out by addressing a recent IEEE Spectrum article titled Metcalfe’s Law is Wrong – explaining why he thinks the authors’ analysis is boneheaded - and then proceeds to dissect Metcalfe’s Law and then put it back together in the context of Chris Anderson’s Long Tail and the current excitement around social networking. 

It’s not an easy read (I’ve read it twice – I’ll take a third crack at it in the morning) but in between Metcalfe’s wicked sense of humor lie a couple of gems.  As someone who believes the really interesting stuff around social networking is just now starting to be worked on, V~N^2 – which has been around since I was 14 – lives on in powerful ways.

Ironically, on the heals of all of this, I saw an article somewhere today (I’ve lost it and can’t find it again) that says that the telecoms are going to have to make massive investments in the network again to support the expected demands of all the coming video and audio traffic that’s a result of all of the newly discovered Internet activity.  What was that about a bandwidth glut?  V~N^2 anyone?

I love the humor and mischief in Sun. It's one of the things that drew me here long before I joined the company, and one of the things I really appreciate about our culture. But frankly, it's one of the things that's gotten close to being rinsed away by years of cost cutting.

So I'd like to officially declare, herewith, a rebirth of fun at Sun. Good, cheap, drive the other guys up a wall, fun. And to that end...

You may have read about a very interesting art project. Some enterprising artists decided to mix technology and art, to create likenesses of technology industry titans, attach a Java phone to the sculptures, and set them free to find their way home. The project relied upon the kindness of strangers. Public spirited individuals that contributed to the return of the artwork to its rightful destination would leave their email address on the back of the artwork, and receive a percentage of the proceeds from the sale of the sculptures.

The Java phone enabled the sculptures to be tracked via a service operator, Accutracking, and via Google maps. You can read about the technical details here, and track animated maps of each piece's progress.

Now, not everyone thought this was a cool idea. When presented with the opportunity to purchase the likeness of Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard, it having made the trek from the printer ink section of a San Jose Office Depot, our friends at HP elected not to honor their founders. So out of respect for HP's legacy, the fine folks in Sun's marketing team decided to acquire the artwork. Bill and Dave are absolute legends, held in the deepest respect by all of us at Sun. We were honored at the opportunity.

So we bought them, and their garage, for $6,000. Lock, stock and Java phone.

And what better way of demonstrating the strength of our partnership than with a picture:

With nearly 25% of Solaris downloads requested on to HP's servers, we know their customers really want the partnership, and we're happy to oblige.

To warn you in advance, Bill and Dave have both indicated a strong interest in learning more about Sun and the Solaris platform, so stay tuned. We're putting together a global tour. Maybe even some new t-shirts.

Link | Posted on Fri, 18 Aug 2006 @ 1:01AM @ Jonathan Schwartz's Weblog

My dad (Stan Feld) has a great post up about why he blogs.

I have to go AFK for a few days to rush to a funeral back in the US. If you send me email in the next few days, I may not get a chance to reply until next week. Sorry.

pugetive posted a photo:

pugetive posted a photo:

I believe I’m seeing a steady increase in the lack of critical thinking from everywhere.  In an effort to be recursive, I thought about why I thought I was seeing more of this (and if in fact it was an increase, or I was just noticing it more.)  My “instinct” is that I’m seeing more of it, which amuses me when I ponder it.

My hypothesis is that it’s coming from a few places:

• The coming election cycle is causing sound bites and hyperbole to accelerate to “get the message out.”
• The proliferation of blogs – especially with fact masquerading as opinion and assertion – is changing the texture of the way people present (and consume) information.
• Mainstream media – in an effort to overcome the emergence of new media – is looking more like the new media – which creates a self-reinforcing loop of nonsense.
• People enjoy writing opinions that are not fact based because it’s easier and - as a result – leave real critical thinking by the side of the road.
• Agendas are commonplace and - if you want to accomplish your agenda – you sacrifice critical thinking for the outcome that you want.
• People are too distracted to actually do the work, so it’s easier to just pile on a current theme that one finds interesting without actually thinking about it.

I ran into two particularly strong examples of critical thinking in two categories that I’ve seen a huge lack of it in – (1) climate change / global warming and (2) Software as a Service.

1. Climate Change / Global Warming: The transcript with slides (very good ones, by the way) of Michael Crichton’s speech titled Fear, Complexity, & Environmental Management in the 21st Century given to the Washington Center for Complexity and Public Policy on 11/6/05 is an excellent example of critical thinking applied to the topic of global warming.  Actually - it’s brilliant.
2. Software as a Service (SaaS): Richard Davis at Needham is one of my favorite software analysts.  In addition to actually doing real analysis and using up shoe leather visiting companies, he’s hysterical.  His recent article titled Software as a Service: World’s Greatest Innovation or Just a Good Idea? is the best piece I’ve seen on SaaS yet and – as a special bonus – demonstrates real critical thinking.

Now - it might be that I’m just more tuned into this because of all the time I’ve been spending with Atlas Shrugged – but I don’t think so.  When Amy and I were talking about this the other day, she reminded me of the bumper stickers from the 1970’s that said “Stop Continental Drift.”  Er – um – yeah.  It turns out you can sign a petition to help stop continental drift.

Later today I'm going to upgrade the hardware that the OPML community server is running on, basically splitting it into two machine, one for the blog hosting and directory hosting, and another for everything else. I happen to have the extra server capacity, unused, so it won't actually add anything to my monthly bill.

However, it will not be a transparent change if you're using the server to host directories with your own domain name (using the Map A Domain feature).

If you read the docs for Map A Domain, you'll see that it calls for you to map your domain to 70.85.10.34.

That will change to 67.18.151.44, when the upgrade is done, probably sometime tonight (I'll post a note on Scripting News).

I'm not posting this on support.opml.org because the server is so slow I'm concerned no one will be able to read it.

Sorry for the difficulty in this transition, however, the good news is that we should get better performance. (Fingers crossed, praise Murphy.)

At 9:20PM Pacific, the hardware upgrade is done. ";->"

Shipped on 08/17/06.

Shipped on 08/17/06.