There is an old saying that the definition of insanity is, “Doing the same thing over and over again expecting the outcome to change”

I think of this saying everytimeI hear about music industry efforts to impact piracy.

Insanity is thinking that kids with more time than money will stop finding ways to get music for free. Even if the industry found the end all be all DRM solution that stops 100 pct of duplication, kids will sit in front of their radios with recording capability or redirect digital music from any source to their hard drives and then spend the time to pick out the music they like and burn it.

Insanity is thinking that piracy is the reason music sales are down and then focusing most of your business on selling music to the exact demographic that has the most time to spend on finding free music and most energy to spend on cracking whatever protections you introduce.

Insanity is ignoring year after year, the demographics with more money than time. Those who aren’t willing, or don’t have the time to troll through the net to figure out which network has the most music to download, searching for songs, picking out which peers to try to download from and then hoping it all worked out right. Those who would prefer to just buy music in the easiest way possible so they can get on with enjoying their music and their lives. Isn’t that why we buy bottled water? It’s easy and convenient?

Hire someone from Starbucks who understands selling music to demographics who are happy to buy the music they want in a setting they enjoy.

Insanity is repeatedly telling everyone that piracy stops the creative process by preventing artists from making a living and then time and time again, going out and giving advances to bands. Hello McFly, every start up band thinks the money is in getting the advance of a record label deal, not from selling music. They are just as motivated as ever to make music.

Insanity is continuously trying over and over again to “fix” the CD ripping problem hoping to find DRM software that makes the process more difficult and deters the “good people”from creating illegal copies, while completely ignoring DVDs as a solution. A DVD only allows you to use its increased storage capacity to add more value through more music, games, video, pictures, software, whatever, at about the same cost of a CD, while being far more of a pain to rip than any DRM/CD combination the industry has ever come up with. Dual release on DVDs and CDs and over time elimination of CDs will have far more impact than any DRM on CD solution.

Insanity is watching the digital download services develop customer relationships with music buyer after music buyer, while year after year the labels have none. When are you going to learn that it’s not only about hitting the numbers for Wall Street every quarter but investing in your customer base. ITunes, Amazon, Netflix, CinemaNow and others have my credit card on file and can find me and sell me something in seconds. Create your own services and sell the music at a deep discount to Itunes and the others. Make it easy to buy, cheap to own. The short term pain will be well worth the long term gain

The music industry has a very unique opportunity to really re-establish itself as a growth industry. It’s not like they don’t know all of the above. For whatever reason, they just love to do the same things over and over… Which to me is just insane

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There are some fun things happening in the blogosphere. It reminds me of 20 years ago on the CompuServe Forums.

There were forums for every topic possible. Politics, technology, religion, music, you name it, it was there.

One of the fun “sports” on the technology forums where I hung out was to play the “I’m smarter than you” game. These were nerd versions of rap wars that occurred on every forum. I have to admit I used to love to battle it out on the networking forums.

Ethernet vs Token Ring vs ArcNet. Netware vs Banyan vs Lan Manager. Which servers were best. Lotus Notes vs anything at all. It was a blast to try to match wits and to see where the rest of the CompuServers would come in.

The measure of success? The length and duration of the thread.If you could start or get heavy on a thread that would total thousands of posts and last for months if not years (OS/2 junkies know what I’m talking about), it was almost as if you had established yourself as an “authority” on the subject.

The forums were so good, that I used to search them first for answers to technical questions before I would call the publisher or manufacturer.

Which brings me to the blogosphere.

It’s deja’ blog all over again.

Today, there are what seem to be thousands and thousands of bloggers who spend most of their time writing about what other bloggers blog.

Thats not a bad thing.

There are people who read my blog and often link back. In fact, it’s a good thing. It expands my audience to the upstream bloggers’ audience.

What is getting a little wierd, and I have to admit entertaining, are the “incentuous networks” and how they sometimes try to game blog search engines to increase their rankings.

Some of the blog search engines try to rank “authority” based on links to a blog post. That’s cool, and it’s a valuable tool.

Lots of bloggers like to show how many other sites have “linked in”. Again, that’s cool and it’s a nice little ego boost, even though because of the different ways to count the links, it’s not really of much use beyond bragging rights. But hey, if someone stumbles upon your blog and there are lots of big numbers, they are more likely to read. So I guess its useful from that perspective alone.

But all of which has led to an interesting type of pressure occurring in the blog search engine market.

Bloggers want blog search engines to have features designed for bloggers.

That’s not a bad thing. As different bloggers do evaluations of different search engines, we will find out more features that are desirable for bloggers and how best to implement them.

But it leads to a question.

Should a blog search engine be designed as a tool for bloggers, or as a tool for people who happen to blog and everyone else.

Of course they aren’t completely mutually exclusive. You can have features that support both, but as the number of features grow, the responsiveness of engine declines.

And since blog search engines are relatively new, It could create a lot of confusion for those who don’t want to use a blog search engine as a blog reference tool, but rather as a more traditional search engine that is keyword based.

This post of course is a long way of saying that despite all the evaluations going on around the blogosphere, blogs.icerocket.com will focus on providing a service to the majority of internet users who don’t blog, or who blog as a social experience.

In particular we will focus on supporting business users who want a continuous feed of fresh information relating to those things that are important to them.

So far it seems to be working well. Our traffic is exploding.

Hopefully the bloggers who use our tags, scripts and other tools we will be providing will notice lots of new traffic driven to their sites. Hopefully it will be mostly first time blog readers experiencing all the great content bloggers create every day and they will love your site so much, they will subscribe to it.

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I first got involved with Icerocket.com because the way I searched for data wasn’t and isn’t supported by Google, Yahoo or the other traditional search engines.

In a traditional search engine, most people look for information on topics that are new to them. They want to find out information for the first time on a new product or service. Maybe they want to find out about a person, place or thing. Maybe they want to hunt down pictures on celebs. Whatever.

Searching for items that are for your personal information is a far different process than searching for information that will help you in business.

In business, you usually already know something about the people, places, things, companies, services, whatever you want more information on. Not only do you usually know something about them, but you are more interested in the latest information, rather than the “most relevant” information.

The best example of this is searching for information about your own company’s products, employees or the company itself. If you are in corporate management at McDonalds, doing a search that liststhe McDonalds website first, and McDonalds corporate or related websites 8 of the next 10, isnt going to be of much help. Worse yet, the sites listed are rarely going to change, and with more than 2mm sites referencing McDonalds, the chances of the company really getting an understanding about what is being said about it online is slim.

I like to do what I call my “daily searches”. I search for references to the Mavs, to HDNet , to Icerocket, to any of the films we are releasing or are in theaters and more. I want to know what is being said online about the businesses I am heavily invested in. IfI know what is going on in the web, I can track any issues, andwhere necessary, respond.

It used to be an old customer service mantra, that “One upset customer can tell 20 people about how poorly your company performed, and those 20 people could tell 20 more and your business could really suffer. Keep all your customers happy, and you won’t have to worry”. Those numbers are miniscule compared to today.

In today’s world, one upset customer can write in their blog about how upset they are about your product or service and it could be linked to by any number of other blogs, which in turn are linked to by any number of blogs, which is in turn picked up by a tv news show. In 24 hours or less, tens to hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people have heard the complaintand your business and brand are at risk.

In my business life “freshness” of information from a search is far, far more important to me than relevancy. I want to know what is being said, and the sooner the better.

This was, is and will continue to be the focus of Blogs.icerocket.com (it will be renamed www.blogscour.com, but we arent sure when).

Using the McDonalds example again, a blogs.icerocket.com search comes back with a completely different response. It’s still a lengthy list, but with our engine, we can limit the responses to today, this week, this month or some custom combination of dates. Of course we also then give you the option of bookmarking the search, by using our search history page or subscribing to it and having it delivered to MyYahoo, MSN, or any RSS reader.

Of course, it’s even better when you search for a specific product. I happen to like the McDonalds California Cobb Salad. (Stupid Trivia…When i travel on my plane or on the Mavs plane, it’s 2 Cobb Salads and salsa dressing for me.) A Search for the Cobb Salad finds an interesting blog from a customer who took the time to write about the quality of the service she received.

The value of being able to find this kind of information in almost realtime is priceless. The abillity to track an unlimited number of searches by having it show up in my reader on any deviceI have with me makes my life a lot easier and my job a little simpler.

Being able to respond quickly to an upset customer is the easiest way to lock in a customer for life.

Of course beyond business applications, there are great research and personal use applications.

It’s a great way to find personal restaurant and movie reviews. It’s a great way to do research on current news or political topics and to find out the latest gossip where timeliness is much more important than the relevancy of how many people linked in to it that you find on Google and others.

This isn’t to say that blogs.icerocket.com is a finished product. It’s not. There is much room for improvement. Let me know what you think of it and what ideas and suggestions you may have.

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I had always thought that this date would be seared in my mind forever. July 18th. I use 718 as part of the tailnumber on my plane. I use it as “my number” whenever asked for one. But somehow, the fact that it was 7/18 today would have completely slipped my mind today if my buddy Evan hadn’t emailed me.

Seven years ago, July 18th, 1998, Broadcast.com had our IPO on the Nasdaq stockmarket.

The stock was priced at $18. That meant that those fortunate enough to get stock as part of the initial offering paid $18. But these were the internet boom years. The expectation was that the price was going up. We knew the price was going up. The market wanted the stock to go up. So many investors, and more speculators placed bids on BCST.

I remember driving to the Nasdaq office where they had the “WALL” with all the symbols, logos and trading prices with Todd, our CFO and others all guessing where the stock would finally open up. What would the first trade of the stock be, and finally, where would it close at the end of the day.

I know my memory isn’t perfect on this but I think Todd guessed that we would open and close in the high 20s. I guessed that it would be $34 to $36.

We got to the Nasdaq with the open of the market. Then waited. That was during a period when the order books were so crazed that it took time to sort out the buy and sell orders and figure out where the opening trade would be.

Hours went by. They seemed like days. For all the confidence we had, there was the natural glimmer of doubt that something could go wrong. And we waited. Through lunch.

Finally, I think it was around 12:30 give or take an hour, the stock opened up.

Sixty Two Dollars and Seventy Five Cents.

For the next 20 minutes or so there was a lot of hi-5ing, champagne corks popping and cellphone calls coming in and out. I remember just leaning against the wall talking to people almost in total shock. I couldn’t help but do all the calculations in my head to try to figure out my paper networth and it was beyond belief.

Then the oh shitmoment hit.

People buying the stock weren’t buying it to be nice to me. They had very specific, and probably incredible expectations of what the company would be doing and how it would perform both financially and as a stock.

Going public wasn’t a reason to relax, it was as stressful a moment as I had ever experienced. I was now responsible to people who I had never met. People were buying our stock as a foundation for their future. That was scary.

When the market finally closed, the stock had gotten as high as $74 dollars before finally closing at $62.75.

There was no doubt that Todd and I had to get back to work the next day. We had to make it clear that the IPO wasnt a reason to celebrate, but rather a reason to work harder for all of our new shareholders.

But that was tomorrow, and since the market was closed, and the business day was over, it was ok for us to enjoy the rest of the night. And we certainly did.

Our first stop was a Wall Street bar, by which time we had hooked up with some of our original investors who had turned 30k dollars into 3mm. With CNN and CNBC on the monitors, every time they mentioned the IPO, we had to drink. It wasn’t pretty.

Getting up early to fly home the next morning wasn’t easy, but as bad as my hangover was, and as anxious as I was to get to work, flying back reading the articles in the Wall Street Journal and NY Times describing how the Broadcast.com IPO had the largest first day jump of any IPO in the history of the stock market made my throbbing head feel a little better.

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Icouldn’t resist responding to all the comments on podcasting

First, yes you can timeshift and transport a podcast, but any streamer can offer a podcast ofa stream. So what.

2nd, I have never seen a live podcast, have you? Not only are there not livepodcasts, but the ability to communicate realtime or breaking information doesn’t work for podcasting. Which is why streaming will always have a place and at least for this type of information, an advantage. So what.

3rd. Podcasting may be hot, but I don’t hear a single person talking about the podcast of Live8. Do you? Yet everyone is talking about the superiority of AOL’s streaming delivery over MTV. Congrats to AOL.

4th. We won’t get into video since it’s not a fair comparison. The number of portabledevices capable of receiving a video podcast right now is miniscule. (Yes,I know about the devices with potential to get them, but they can’t yet and probably all have to be replaced to do so.) So what.

What’s not so what? The economics for indivdual podcasters.

Podcasting is cheap, easy and fun. Yes it’s different than streaming.But thatdoesn’t change the pitiful economics for individual podcasters.

Let me explain to you how things will work.

People are excited about podcasts.

The number of podcasts is small relative to where it will be in the next 24 months.

Big aggregators of Podcastscome on board, a la ITunes. That will skyrocket the downloads/listens for any given podcast.

The podcasters will trumpet those huge increases.

The podcasters will sell a few ads around the podcasts. Some will even sell some subscriptions if they go that way.

Every Tom, Dick and Harry who reads:

1. How easy it isto create a podcast

2. About the “explosive growth” of podcast listeners and downloads for individual podcasts

3. The couple stories trumpeted about podcasters who have an “impact” (on what will be fun to find out) or are profitable from their podcasts (although we will never get any real numbers from them. We just know it costs next to nothing to create, and there is no cost for their time, so if they get anything, that’s profitability) will spur every Tom, Dick and Harry to create their own podcast.

4. The number of podcasts available individually or through aggregators will explode beyond where they are today.

5. That will create a massive dilution in the audience size of the early entry podcasters. EVERYONE’s audience will fall as the marginal listeners find something they like better. Yes, there will be some podcasts that get more listenership than others, but most of them will be repurposed content that already has demand.

6. Individual podcasters who don’t have some other means of generating demand other than being on aggregators will fall off first and the fastest. They will just go away, the only trace remaining will be tiny webpages on the Wayback Machine.

Finally, when those formally known as podcasters do an accounting of the net dollars they earned and compareit to the time they invested, they will realize they made about 17 cents per hour all in.

All that will be left of profit motivated individual podcasters will be the few and far between and probably less than half of a percent of all podcasters (and please don’t anyone post a comment saying…if there are a million podcasters, 1 pct is 10k, half of that is 5k. That’s a ton. I’m making up these numbers to prove a point, not to be literal…Ok?).

And like personal blogs, tens of thousands if not morewill stay on as labors of love that we enjoy because of their creativity.

So in about 3 years, the Podcast phenomena will have run its course and will just be a normal part of the digital media landscape.

Just like streaming.

Read what bloggers are saying about podcasting

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Do you remember the Dan& Scott Show? It started on Audionet way back in 1996 as the very first original comedy show streamed on the net. The guys were crazy, working out of their basement and basically willing to do anything to get people to listen.

They were one of thousands who decided to jump on the streaming bandwagon as it was starting to blossom in the mid 90s. Anyone and everyone could have their own live streaming radio show and it seemed like just about everyone did.

All it took to create your own live radio show was a PC, a microphone and either an encoder to send the show to a host site, or your own server connected to the net. It seemed like every day”the next”Howard Stern or Rush Limbaugh (it was the 90s) was putting up a website and a live show. If you missed the show, the archives were there to listen to on demand.

Streaming was hot. Companies were formed to host live and on demand shows. Thousands of Dan and Scotts tried to build a business around their shows.

For the most part they, like virtually all original content on the net,failed.

You see, on the internet, there aren’t any hits. There aren’t any breakthrough shows. For every Live8, Victoria Secret, or other big net event, there are tens of thousands or more blips on the radar. It’s the ultimate long tail environment.

That’s not to say some didn’t survive. Those projects that are labors of love, rather than financially motivated can do well. If someone is into talking about health, pets, business, whatever and they do it because they love to do it,the reward is the show itself.

The point of all of this is not to talk about streaming. It’s to point out the obvious similarities between what happened with streaming in the 90s, and what is happening with Podcasting 10 years later.

Podcasting is hot. Podcasting is cheap and easy. Podcasting can be fun.

Creating your own podcast and trying to make a business out of it is a mistake.

Unless you are repurposing content from another medium, it will be rare to find anyone making money from originating podcasts.

Talk Radio Shows repurposed from radio to a podcast. No brainer. It’s cheap and easy. Repurposing industry specific information from tradeshows, speeches, product presentations for employee or customer education or as sales support. No brainer. These are just extensions of existing content into a new low cost medium.

For those who are tying to jump on the podcasting bandwagon and create a “hit” podcast that you plan on selling advertising in, its cheap and easy to do, but even with Google Adsense for RSS its going to be really tough to do it as a fulltime job and make minimum wage back.

Podcasting is right where streaming was about 10 years ago. Before you dive into podcasting as “the next big thing”, you would be wise to do some homework on how the streaming industry evolved.

Try to find any of the many that created original content forPSEUDO.com, TSN, EYADA.com, Broadcast.com and others thatI have long forgotten.

There is a good chance that their history is your future.

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These are the good ole days. Today. Right now. Twenty years from now we are going to look back nostalgically as our kids and their kids wear TShirts with pictures of the Tattoos that were prominent the last few years. In a good natured, mocking way of course.

Twenty years from now, as our kids carry holographic cards in their wallet that store 100 terabytes and rotate pictures on the surface and maintain a complete medical history of themselves, their siblings and every family member having gone to the doctor after 2015, along with every picture or home movie they or their friends have ever taken,theywill look back longingly at the Ipodthey found in grandmas’ closet and wonder how they actually got music on something that big.

Twenty years from now we will look back at today’s sports figures and reminisce about the great players and personalities of the early 2000’s, Shaq, Barry Bonds, Tiger, Allen Iverson, Kobe Bryant, Dirk Nowitzki, etc, etc, etc. Talking about how great the games were back then.

Even so, twenty years from now we will go to basketball, football, hockey and baseball games in new and improved versions of the arenas we have today for exactly the same reason we go today. It’s fun.

Twenty years from now,media will ask fans what they think about theirfavorite sport andsome, as they do today,willcomplain about how ‘today’s’ players, don’t play as hard or as well as the players from 2005.

That is exactly how it will happen. Because it’s exactly how it happens today.

The NBA does a survey and focus groups about why certain people will or won’t watch the NBA. They respond about how they miss their favorite players and how the game just isn’t the same as it was 20 years ago when the best basketball was being played.

Of course, if you go back and look at the headlines from 20 years ago we saw finals that weren’t even broadcast live on TV. We saw allegations, convictions and lifetime suspensions for drugs. Players who said they wouldn’t play with another player becausehe had the HIV virus. But those were their favorite players.Attendance, a true reflection of interest, at far lower numbers than it is today. Ahh, the good ‘ole days.

Of course this ignorance of the real past isn’t limited to the NBA. I watched a guy throw a no hitter on TV when I was a kid. Loved the player. Only later found out that he was toasted on LSD. In the same city, in my city, my favorite team, drugs were being dealt out of the clubhouse. When those headlines hit, fans reminisced about the good old days of an earlier era. An era in baseballwhen a pitcher can hit a catcher over the head with a bat. Where racism still was rampant against blacks and Latin players. Where players substance abuse was hidden because media and players often hung out and partied together. When kids emulated their favorite players…by chewing tobacco.

‘Back in the day’, no one was ever writing that “this is the best its ever going to be”. We are the futures ‘back in the day’. No one is writing today about how this is the best it’s ever going to be.

Because it’s not.

Sportsisn’t the only entertainment medium that is subject to’The good ole days’ syndrome. We are seeing the same thing with movies. Movie receipts aren’t as good today as theywere lastyear. Of course they are better than they were 2 years ago, but that’s beside the point. So now we are being subjecttostoriesreminiscing about ‘how the movies aren’t as good as they used to be’. How going to the movies isn’t the same as it used to be. Of course people forget all the lousy movies they went to way back when.I paid money to see classics like Smokey and the Bandit. The Fish that Saved Pittsburgh. They are soooo much better than movies being made today. Right?

Twenty years from now, these will be the good old days for going to movies. But nothing will have really changed. People are always going to get out of the house and go to the movies.Everyone will still get cabin fever and want to get out of the house and do something and movies will always be a comparatively inexpensive place to go. Guys will still only be creative enough to ask their dates to go the movies or a game.Families will still need places to go together, so they can say they did something as a family and the movie gives them something to talk about at dinner. Kids will still need a place to go together as a group where they can be cool with their friends and away from their parents, but someplace their parents trust. And at some point around twenty years from now, the movie industry will have a down year and the media will ask people why they aren’t going to the movies as much as they did before, and we will read the see the same stories we see today.

All of this is exactly the reason why it’s so easy to ignore all the “good ole day” stories. It doesn’t matter whether they apply to sports, the movies or anything else for that matter. I ignore them. They are meaningless and worthless.

In the competitive entertainment industry, whether its the NBA and the Mavs, or making movies with HDNet Films or playing movies at Landmark Theaters, the goal is never to give customers the things they reminisce about. The goal is always to give customers a better experience than they have ever had before.

It’s not easy. It’s not the job of our customers to predict how our products and services should look in the future. Customer can tell us how to fix operational and transactional items. They can tell us how to make it easier for them to do things. They rarely, rarely, rarelycan tell us what where our businesses should be next year or after that. Relying on your customers for strategic direction is a recipe for failure. That’s managements job.

That’s what makes the entertainment business so challenging. It’s difficult to come up with something original that puts a smile on a customers face. It’s not easy to invest in something new, knowing it could fail and you have to raise the bar even further to make your customers happy. But that’s the sport of business.

The smart ignore the reminiscing about thegood ole daysand focus on creating unique and improved experiences.

If you do it right, 20 years from now they will write stories about you that will be far better than being called part of “the good ole days”.

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I have a problem with ticket scalpers. No, i don’t want to shut them down. There are times when they do provide value. They bail ticket holders out of events they can’t attend. They also make tickets available to those who really want to attend an event, but have exhausted all other efforts to get tickets.

That’s all well and good, except many ticket scalpers, whether online or brick and mortar, sometimes take a little bit of license when describing where exactly the tickets are in the arena, or what the face value of the tickets are.

Therehave been far too many times when I have gotten emails from upset customer who have purchased tickets onlineor on the phone expecting their “50 dollar tickets” to be 50 dollar tickets. Naive or not, the scalpers have a responsibility to not mislead customers.

I would like to see a requirement that EVERY ticket resale transactionrequire the disclosure of the face value of the ticket to the customer.

If this was something I could enforce through the Mavs, I certainly would. But I can’t. The result is that we have Mavs fans driving in from around the state, credit card already charged from a transaction in previous weeks with a broker, only to find out that they paid 2x and 3x face value when they pick up the tickets. Feeling burned is not the way I want people feeling when they walk into a Mavs game.

It’s something we are working on here at the Mavs, and I urge you to contact your congressperson to ask them to take action as well

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