What ESPN doesn't get

So, last night was a fairly large regular season baseball game between the Redsox and Yankees. Me, being the proud owner of a subscription to MLB.tv, was ready to log in, sit back, and watch on my laptop.

One problem: ESPN had the rights to the game, and it was blocked out on MLB.tv.

So look, without going into all the hack available to work around this silly little problem, I had a thought.

We know the technology is out there to stream baseball games... we know ESPN has a huge web presence, and that there is a generation like mine (and immediately following mine) that isn't really into cable. We get our content via the web, on our terms. Want to watch Family Guy? Hulu.com. Rent a movie? Netflix streaming (soon to come to an Xbox near you... they finally got that one right).

So, ESPN... on behalf of every person not willing to pay for cable, I'd ask you this: Why don't you stream the game that you already have the rights to? You've already got a ton of page-views coming to your site... imagine if you could keep your audience there for 3 hours at a time.

I mean heck... even the NFL gets it these days.

Product advertising that doesn't suck?

So, it isn't often that I read about some new form of advertising that could be appealing to me. Face it, I live in Manhattan, and have, for the most part, become immune to most forms of advertising (when people stop to look at billboards that are big enough to cover sections of MSG, I'm usually the one who tries to figure out why they're stopped... as opposed to realizing there's a 40 foot Optimus Prime looking me in the face).

But now... it seems like Tivo might have figured out something that could work for me. The one thing I am guilty of, when falling for ads, is the impulse buy... and if Tivo can make the impulse buy super easy, it may have found itself a winner.

The most important thing about making this successful though, in my mind anyway, is making it so that people don't feel like they're being advertised to. Tivo's new toy needs to be positioned as a service, connecting customers/consumers with the products that they like.

Should be fun to see if Tivo can pull it off.

What happens if it rains?

July 4th is big in my family, so I spent the weekend in my home town with my folks. My parents are typical upstate NY snow-birds... they spend half the year in Florida and half the year in Upstate NY.

As such, they seem like the perfect people to be on board with cloud computing, rather than having to schlep a desktop computer with them every time they switch cities.

So, as I am extolling the virtues of saving docs and such in the cloud (my mom couldn't believe she could have access to her recipes from anywhere), I was asked a great question:

What happens if it rains?

Turns out... my folks' silly question became a reality yesterday, when Google docs went down.

Now, here's the question I have for users of Google's productivity suite: How much downtime is enough to make you go back to Microsoft (or open office)?

Fun day for online marketers

So... two major announcements in the online advertising world today.

1. Google's launching an affiliate network by rebranding Performics.
   
2. Flash just became SEO friendly.

Somewhere, and online marketer's head just exploded.