Mike Industries

Since yesterday’s launch of OurMedia.org, a number of interviews and articles are beginning to surface which give us a better idea as to what this thing is all about. I found the podcast with J.D. Lasica and Marc Canter to be particularly educational.

Two things are now clear to me above all else:

1. This is the most ambitious attempt at free media we’ve ever seen.
2. It’s so ambitious that it seems to open as many new issues as it solves.

In my first admittedly terse post on the subject, I said that if OurMedia is financially sustainable, it is a development unlike any other we’ve seen. But that, unfortunately, doesn’t answer if it actually is financially sustainable. To get a better idea whether it is or not, let’s look at what may be on the roadmap for the next year or two:
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This changes everything. And I mean everything. Time to completely rethink the internet now.

If this is financially sustainable, it’s the single biggest development in the history of the medium as far as I’m concerned. If it’s not financially sustainable, it’s still going to disrupt the hell out of the industry for the next several years… in a very good way.

Further reading:

• Journalism.co.uk
• J.D. Lasica
• Seth Godin
• A Podcast With the Founders

While on business at our New York offices a couple of weeks ago, I was introduced to a peculiar competition known as “The Saltine Challenge”. Apparently this has been around for quite awhile but I’d never heard of it. In a nutshell, one must ingest 6 Saltine crackers in 60 seconds without the help of water or any other digestive lubricants. The crackers must also be of the salted variety. Seems quite easy… that’s what I thought.

With a small crowd of onlookers, I tried and failed badly on the first attempt. The second attempt was a failure as well. Not even close. I managed to get all 6 decently chewed, but there were still two full crackers worth of dough when the minute mark passed.

So I went back to Seattle thinking, as I was told, that less than 1 in 10 people can accomplish this. Not wanting to give up, however, I sent out an all-office e-mail summoning Saltines from all corners of the building for use in further testing. I administered the Challenge to four more people, and sure enough, everyone failed. Before giving up, I decided to give it one more try using a special chunking strategy that my co-worker in New York Phil Berberian had mentioned in passing, and lo and behold, I did it! Six down the hatch!

Just to see if this feat was repeatable, I tried three more times over the next three days and lowered my time in each trial. Could seven be next? Absolutely. After all, if six Saltines was a great bar trick in itself, seven would bring the house down. Sure enough, I did seven on my first try yesterday.

And now a day later, I’ve officially reached the addiction stage.

I’ve already tried eight twice today and although I failed both times, 70 seconds was all it took to get everything down. It’s definitely within reach and I’m not stopping until I achieve this dietary milestone.

Has anybody else tried this? Care to post your results?

UPDATE: Chunking strategy revealed!

UPDATE #2: 8 Saltines accomplished!

I followed a link from PhotoMatt this morning over to Tribe.net and noticed a very cool feature they have over there: Upon visiting the front page, the site immediately redirected me to “seattle.tribe.net” and showed me information local to the Seattle area (where I live) even though I had never been there before and never entered any geographic information.

How cool.

A quick glance at the address bar told me exactly what what going on. The complete url is listed below:

“Guess=true”. Very nice. So what’s happening is that Tribe is looking up my IP address in a table and mapping it to the Seattle area. We use IP lookup tables at Disney all the time for targeted advertising purposes, but I’d never seen someone actually use them to redirect you to a localized version of their site. I’m sure it’s been done before, but I’d just never seen it.

One of the hardest things to do in the web business is to get users to actually use personalization options (as counterintuitive as that sounds), and by performing this first personalization step implicitly and automatically, Tribe provides users better information without forcing them to ask for it. Smart.