Of all the things I saw this week at Social Ad Summit, OMMA Global or Web 2.0, I actually liked Spinscape the best - it’s an collobrative Mind Mapping platform that also is able to plug into Google, Amazon and perhaps soon, your own site or database.

While I just activated my account and I’m playing with SpinScape, I haven’t mastered anything about it yet - but I did make a video of what SpinScape.com can do while at OMMA Global this afternoon - I think it’s work watching in it’s entirety.

Creating local content on the Web - other people’s local news is not interesting unless you live in that local area.

Market for local advertising is BIG with 8 billion to 12 billion by 2012 and people by stuff where they live.

You can Geo-Tag content in volume today and it’s a big opportunity for advertising.

If you can geo localize your content (nearby ads) you can serve local ads to visitors.

I spoke today at OMMA Global today on metrics driven optimization; it went well and the presentation will be online soon.

Thought I would checkout out exhibition and spent a while talking to Max at Compete.com on some new enhancements.

Made my way over to Web 2.0 conference and got to talk to several people and then, finally went to a session on Video 2.0.

Will need to write about all, later.

I’ve got a lot of distractions these days, just a lot of things going on, and I like what  Gary Vaynerchuk has to say (literally) about not being scared of being distracted.

It’s possible I might run into Vaynerchuk at Web 2.0 or a related event next week.

Ha, I just wrote a post about self narration and Sarah Palin, and wanted to make a TinyURL to use it for Twitter and look what I ended up with …. http://tinyurl.com/sarahpalinstory

(turns out most of the custom aliases for Sarah Palin are taken .. no surprise - but I did get one - http://tinyurl.com/Xsarahpalin - too bad I don’t have anything as interesting to point my TinyURL too - oh well - right now my TinyURL sounds like the name of a prescription drug).

Turns out you can do that with any TinyURL you make - in essence - you have the start of a whole new set of domains you can get by giving them a “Custom Alias”.   That can be super powerful.

I just make a TinyURL that says - my blog, Webmetricsguru.com, is the place you go when you want to learn about Web Analytics.

But what happens when someone else tries to do exactly the same thing?  You can’t!  Ha, I bet a few people I could name will be muttering “why did I think of that” when they read this.

I would rush and do the same for your name - before someone does it to or for you - and points it to a source you don’t want them to.

I think this is going to be big - very big - in a couple of weeks, once people figure out what to do with it.

One glitch though - you can only make one alias per url - I created one for MarshallSponder and pointed to www.theanalyticsguru.com and another one for NEWYORKART and pointed to my www.artnewyorkcity.com blog.

Ha!  Double Ha, Ha.    That’s pretty cool.

Hey, even if a domain is taken, a individual page can be aliased - provided you have a page that fits what you want to custom alias it for - I guess I could try it on some of my more important blog posts, etc.

Look, I tried to do a TinyUrl for “Art” and custom alias it back to www.artnewyorkcity.com but that one was already taken (try it - http://www.tinyurl.com/art) - darn, I wish I had that one!    I don’t even think it registers who owns the TinyURL, and I don’t think there’s any way to transfer it to someone else (meaning you can’t sell it).

I guess I wasn’t the first person to think of this - but for sure, I will not be the last one.

I’m not sure how long the TinyURL custom alias was available - but I can tell you - this is a big deal.

TinyURLs are used ALOT.

Wow - so it’s come to this - the big internet providers are now stifling  that creativity and consumption that spwaned Web 2.0, Social Media - they have now looked at us as “the enemy” and will attack users of their service with expulsion.  Read Gizmodo’s  Comcast’s 250GB Data Caps Now Official, Starting in October

It reminds me of how on one side, there are all the rules of medicine to protect life - so much so that someone can’t make many decisions about their own life - and at the other side of it - and at the same moment, the current adminstration sends soldiers to Iraq without body armor to be slaughtered in a war that was totally made up to we could take Iraq’s Oil (which we never really succeeded doing - we ended up destroying their oil capacity, to a large extent, instead).

Don't have much to write here today - Webmetrisguru.com is moving off of Know More Media in a couple of days and onto a new home, with a new template and it'll run in WordPress instead of Moveable Type.

In fact, Webmetericsguru.com blog content is about to be exported into a form that can be read into WordPress - so this may be one of the last posts I'll do before the blog move is completed.

I suggest checking out

First Drawings using NetSketch iPhone Application

and 

SEMPO Meetup Videos 7-30-08

Looking forward to a new phase in the life of this blog and the network it'll be on - more, soon.

While the screen redrawing is choppy, I like the idea of EveryScape (perhaps, better than the reality of it, so far), but Web Worker Daily has a description of what EveryScape is (Unusual Web Work: EveryScape Ambassador) and a job opportunity for people who want to do something different:

When you visit one of their sites, such as their Boston page, you can drive around and see the city in a 360-degree panning window. But you can also enter buildings and see what’s inside - places like the Paul Revere House or the original Cheers. Right now, Everyscape only covers a dozen or so cities, and that’s where the job opportunity comes in. If you live in one of the cities that’s next on their plan, you can apply to be an “Everyscape Ambassador” - someone who drives around with the appropriate fancy equipment, taking the images to be digitized. This requires a team of two and pays on a per-mile basis - supposedly high enough to be a full-time job. 

I think I'll play with EveryScape a little bit - even with the limited selections there's plenty of places I'd like to take a closer look at.

I was thinking about Oil a lot lately (who hasn't?) and had read somewhere that the higher prices of Oil are going to change many things, but most of those changes sounded rightfully negative with Paul Krugman The world gets bigger putting forward that higher fuel prices are putting the brakes on globalization: if it costs more to ship stuff, there will be less long distance travel and shipping.

On the other hand, Vint Cerf: High Oil Prices Could Help the Web because it will spur the development of Web 2.0 and Virtual Worlds:

"We may turn increasingly to video conferencing or other kinds of electronic media in order to avoid having to travel."

"…So how does that help the web? More home workers, means a larger market for applications designed to help remote workers collaborate. Things like Google Docs, Basecamp, Dimdim, and PalBee will all benefit from a larger contingent of home workers."

Maybe, we'll also, finally, stop looking at more drilling for Oil as the answer, even short term (especially for the short term, it's not the answer since nothing done now would really kick in for a few years - but it would be just a trickle.

But the real reason - the must fundamental reason, why we need to move away from Oil as energy source is the instability it introduces into the World Economy - which Krugman deals with in a post titled Embedded vs. non-embedded inflation

"…Imagine that there are two entrepreneurs, Harry and Louise, both of whom change prices only at fairly long intervals — say, once a year. Other things equal, Harry want his average price over the next year to be about the same as Louise’s; Louise wants her average price to be about the same as Harry’s. But their price setting takes place on different dates. (This is a metaphor for the real economy, in which people setting prices have to think about the prices of many competitors and suppliers that will prevail until they revise the price again.)

In this situation, inflation can feed on itself: Harry raises his price above Louise’s, because he expects her to raise her price in the future, and she does the same thing when it’s her turn. It looks like this, with Harry in red and Louise in blue.

Once expectations of inflation get embedded like this, it’s hard to get price stability back. In practice, what happens is that central banks deliberately cause a recession. This makes Harry shave his price increases a bit, and then Louise does the same, and over time both start to notice that the other’s price increase keeps falling short of expectations, and eventually inflationary momentum gets wrung out of the system — but at a high cost. In the 1980s, it took double-digit unemployment to get rid of the embedded inflation from the 1970s.

But how is this relevant to current events? Well, the problem of embedded inflation applies only to prices that are set at fairly long intervals — especially to wages, which are usually set only once a year. There’s no comparable problem with commodities like wheat or oil, where the price changes minute by minute, and goes down as easily as it goes up. It may sound perverse, but embedded, hard-to-reverse inflation is only a problem for parts of the economy with relatively sticky prices."

And then, any time there's hostility around an Oil Field, like there was today Stocks Down on Bank Woes and Oil Price Increase the price of oil spikes up by 5 to 10 dollars a barrel - usually it drops down again - but imagine what would happen if a tactical strike on an a large oil field succeeds?

Can you imagine what will happen if Iran gets invaded - or there's more instability in the Middle East?   Think $200, maybe $250 dollars per barrel of oil.

We have to get away from Oil - there's no turning back - things will never be cheap again, until we move towards another energy source - hopefully one that does not pollute the planet like Oil does.

I wrote about what might have been behind Robert Scoble declaration that he saw something at Microsoft that made him cry and that it'll come out to the world on February 27th in Robert Scoble cries over the Microsoft World Wide Telescope Project - me thinks.

I'm wondering exactly what is going to be shown at TED later this month - it seems to me that an Astronomy program with great pictures - well - it's got to be more than that - but what?

I don't think Scoble cries all that often - the couple of times I've seen him, he hasn't been crying - and he doesn't have any great love for Microsoft -though he seems friendly enough with his former employer that they invited him over for a drink and showed him one of their latest innovations.

Which reminds me - recently, another Microsoft innovation came to light - care of David Pogue at the New York Times - Office Live Small Business http://video.on.nytimes.com/?fr_story=20331d4f7dfd0d541404c93fb9bcf988c806cb31

The video is pretty hilarious - but it also gave me a good idea of what Office Live Small Business does.  I have a version of that video, below: