Frank Gruber offers some interesting insight into what Yahoo! is up to. He is right on with the social themed aqcuisition spree that Yahoo! is on, as well as what it could bring to the table for them. Check it out.

“…Yahoo might have another direction planned for its search offering that incorporates a social or community angle to search the opinions of the masses and the blogosphere.”

The domain pimping business is still booming. Alarm Clock reports that Stanford MBA, Gary Kremen just sold the domain sex.com for $15m. Kremen was apparently scooping up domains back in 1995 and has already made a ton of cash pimping them off to other buyers. He also sold match.com to Cendent for $6m.

I never thought I would ever been saying this about a mail client, but those of you who use Gmail have had to have thought the same thing as I while you were initially getting used to the application. That thought would be, “where the F*~k is the Delete button?” Look no more, thankfully I logged into my Gmail account and finally saw a bright and shiny delete button. I understand that the nature of Gmail is such that you dont really have to delete anything, but I actually dont want to see some of the stuff that flows into my account. I don’t need every copy of the iTunes Music Store or Apple eNews that I receive. So, I am happy that we all now have “Delete” buttons in our email clients, because I know choosing each message and picking “move to trash” from that drop down was just annoying to you as it was to me. Nice job Google, thanks.

I am proud to finally annouce that my company, Blue Sky Factory, Inc has launched a weblog dubbed, “The Thinking Inbox.” I’ve been looking forward to this for a while, and its always great to see things manifest. I used to write a blog called Media Mind, which served as more of my email, online media and marketing soapbox. However, after focusing my writing on The Trend Junkie, I thought to myself, “OK, time to get blogging for the business now that I am committed to this medium,” and hence that is what we have done. A company blog should no doubt be just that, various people from the company posting their knowledge, expertise and findings and sharing them with the rest of the world.

I have a great team contributing to the blog. In addition to myself, the initial blog team includes my partner Rich, Ben in operations, Tim in business development and Keith in creative / design, and this is just the first shift It’s interesting to watch everyone settle into their own “posting rhythm.” It took a little while before we had enough content to make me comfortable in promoting the blog to the public. We set out to extend our company’s message and share our expertise by covering topics related to the email marketing and online advertising space. Its also really great to see some of the people in the company writing. I am a big believer in the idea that by writing, one also learns. I know its certainly been the case for myself. Not to shock anyone either, but next up for Blue Sky Factory, is also a podcast that will cover all sorts of interesting topics and include many interesting people. So, if you are interested in the topics of email and online marketing I encourage you to start by checking out The Thinking Inbox.

Ian Landsman links to Christopher Hawkins great post on guidelines for meetings. Talk about some good stuff. I think we can all agree that “meetings” can easily turn out to be great wastes of time, in fact ALOT of them are just that. It really doesn’t matter what you do for a living, chances are you have meetings to attend or organize at some point or another. Christopher lays out some very logical guidelines for meeting etiquette. Here is one short example:

Christopher’s Meeting Guideline #4: No meeting should go longer than 1 hour, and even THAT is too long. I think this one is self-explanatory. I don’t want to hear about how sometimes 3-hour meetings are necessary. A 3-hour meeting is a seminar, not a meeting.

Amen brother, amen! Check out his list of 10 guidelines and rules for conducting meetings, they make perfect sense to me, and Christopher even stands tall by saying:

“I’ll go on record here as saying that if you’re violating more than three or four of these, your meetings are probably life-sucking, soul-deadening, productivity killers.”

I like the way this guy thinks

I came across an interesting find in my archives today. A year ago today, I posted (in a very “note to self” fashion) about how to keep myself writing and why I blog. I linked to a checklist entitled “50 Strategies for Making Yourself Work”, targeted towards writers, naturally. I found it timely since I am in the middle of a few half baked posts that are bordering on completion, in addition to volunteering to write content for other sites such as, Podcast Free America. For me, its no doubt a timely note, 365 days later and more relevant than ever before. After re-reading “50 Strategies For Making Yourself Work” by Jerry Oltion, I think found a few things that will work for me. Check it out, there is definitely something for anyone trying to “write it out.”

For anyone who is interested in hearing some of the sessions at PodcasterCon, you can find a chunk of them on the blog. Here are a few links to check out. There is some really interesting stuff here:

Dave Shepard, recorded 3 sessions that can be found here.

Ray Moore sent in a link to the Copyright Law session led by Derrick Oien, check it out here.

There is more on the PodcasterCon blog, check them out. I will also be posting two interviews here with Brian Russell, the organizer of PodcasterCon as well as Ryan Irelan of Podcast Free America.

Serious props to Alex Tew, the british college student who was the brainchild of The Million Dollar Homepage. I posted about it on September 23, 2005 impressed that he had sold 108,000 pixels in less than one month. Amazingly, he has sold all 1,000,000 pixels in less than 5 months according to his last blog post. He decided to post the last 1000 pixels on ebay for auction and wound up getting a final bid of $38,100.00 for the final pixels on this piece of internet history. Although there are some really interesting knock offs of this concept, this is the original and the only one that will most likely ever sell out. Alex was the originator of the idea and he executed on it, a topic I will be posting about shortly. He went from a 21 year old college student to a millionaire in less than 5 months. Impressive to say the least.

per MIT Ad Lab

Here is the second part of our troll through the miles of aisles at CES. In this podcast, Andy and I chat with some of the vendors that are pitching the latest and greatest in home theatre technologies. Plasma’s, HDTV, etc.. and of course some other random rants. All good.

Download MP3 7.8 megs, 17:04

Show Links:

Optima
LG TV per Engadget
Texas Instruments DLP Technology
SDHC

Drop a comment or an email to thetrendjunkie at gmail dot com.

Todd Tweedy sums up 10 of his 2006 word of mouth trends on his cool blog “Word Spreads Quickly” Here are the first 5:

The 2006 IN and OUT list for Word of Mouth Marketing:

1. Word of Mouth - in and out — Buzz Marketing
2. Social Incentives - in and out — Economic Incentives
3. Individuals — in and out — Customers
4. Communities — in and out — Audiences
5. Strong Ties — in and out — Influencers
5. Recommendations — in and out — Referral Power

Check out trends 6-10 on Todd’s blog. Definitely good stuff.