Hard to believe, but it is already time to ring in another new year.  What did I learn in ‘08?  Here’s a list of some things off the top of my head, in no particular order:

• In hard times, it is good to be an expert at something
• You can teach an old dog new tricks, just don’t expect that they will be good tricks (sorry, RHD and IDAR.PK)
• Dell makes lousy laptops, but for some reason people are still buying them
• I still can’t believe there is a good reason to use Twitter
• There still may be a future for mobile search, but it probably won’t rely on the .mobi TLD
• Warm>Cold
• Never, ever be a long-term contractor instead of a fulltime employee (sorry, Google)
• Never stray far from what you are really good at (sorry, Yahoo)
• Never try to compete at something you don’t understand (sorry, Microsoft)
• Monetize, monetize, monetize.  There’s only value if you can monetize
• At least blogging is cathartic, since nobody actually reads what most people write (sorry, me)
• A moderately funny cat video can generate more traffic than all the SEO in the world
• I may never get a bag of crap from Woot, but that doesn’t stop me from trying

Some are reporting it as a surprising phenomena that a new site (www.sockandawe.com) is suddenly generating millions of visitors each day. I don’t know whether it is Bush’s smarmy grin, the fact that the shoe is clearly a 1984 Sperry Topsider (yes, I’m old enough to remember), or just the timeliness of the subject matter– but, I am not surprised.

The site is reporting that 40,769,800 of their items of virtual preppy footwear have been thrown at the president so far. At 10 shoes per visit (which can be challenging, as their servers are pelted like old Bushie himself) that amounts to 4,076,980 visits. Wow.

What are they doing to monetize all that traffic, you ask? Nothing, at least as of yet. Advertising is sure to follow, but once again I wonder how someone can recuperate the cost of all that bandwidth? Nonetheless, I appreciate the humor, the fun, and quite frankly the opportunity to get some of my frustrations out.

I may be late to the game on this one, but I am really getting a kick out of the Woot.com phenomenon.  For the uninitiated (if there are any left), Woot is a site that sells one item per day until it either sells out, or the day ends.  Items vary greatly in price, availability, and weirdness.  Some recent products include: a micro RC helicopter, a CD of international cursing language lessons, an Aerobed, etc. 

So, why the phenomenon?  It is because every once in a while, with absolutely no forewarning, Woot puts up a special product called the “Bag O’ Crap” (the BOC, for regulars).  The bag includes a mystery selection of seemingly overstocked items, of varying value.  The site bagsofcrap.com has tracked what each of the grab bags have included and their retail values: ranging anywhere from a couple of bucks to a couple of thousand (apparently, some have included 61″ HDTVs!!!). 

Though the daily items are often interesting, and sometimes honestly good deals, there isn’t anything too remarkable about the site except for that bag of crap.  True, the writing on the site is irreverent and at times really witty.  Is that enough to account for the $117M of revenue they posted for 2007?  No, I doubt it.  I think its because the Bag of Crap is an honest to goodness, full-fledged, internet phenomenon the scale of which might very well rival or even topple such greats as the Virgin Mary Grilled Cheese Sandwich or even Save Toby. 

Thanks to Nathan Pabich (come on Nathan, either update your LinkedIn bio or get yourself a website I can link to) for opening my eyes to this in time to join all the others (alexa has the site as the 1,124th most popular online— not bad) in my addiction to trying to get my hands on the holy grail of all holy grails, Woot’s Bag of Crap.

Alright, so nobody is actually projecting a gloomy Christmas for babies.  Things are bad, but not that bad.  Can you imagine?  I just wanted an excuse to post this photo of my girl Daisy’s recent “Santa Tantrum”.

Ecommerce, however, is truly suffering as a result of the current economy.  eMarketer released their latest numbers, revising their online sales growth projections for the critical holiday shopping season to cut anticipated growth in half. 

That’s not nearly as gloomy as the data recently released by Comscore which reported a year-over-year decline of 4% for the same period in November.  That represents the very first time that ecommerce sales declined over the same period for a previous year. 

If there’s a brighter side, and there usually is, it is that the slowdown means deeper discounts might be available online.  My inbox has already filled with “pre-Black Friday Sale” emails.  I’ve seen some great prices.  Maybe, if sale prices are good enough, the overall volume of commerce conducted over this critical period can somewhat recover.  But, profits by etailers are bound to be down either way, and this whole thing is sure to have significant impact on the online marketing world. 

Anyone who has ever seen a movie where aliens come to Earth and begin taking over knows that the only way to stop the invasion is to destroy the brain, the core, the queen, or whatever the individual case may be for that particular species.

This is also the case with Spammers, as it turns out. 

Who would have guessed that such a large percentage of spam email would have originated from a single source?

http://government.zdnet.com/?p=4186

Apparently, a little known silicon valley company called McColo “unknowingly” rented their servers to spammers that were used to control vast networks of hijacked (drone) computers.  When the company finally agreed to shut these servers down, an estimated 75% of email spam went down with them.  That’s right, 75%. 

While this is a victory in the battle against spam, it isn’t realistic to think it will take very long before the attackers will regroup.  75% is great, and I for one appreciate any difference in the size of my junk mail folder.  But, until average folks stop believing that a pill will grow their member, their PayPal password needs to be changed (yet again), or an deposed African prince wants to launder $10,000,000,000 through their US bank account, the attack will probably continue.  It won’t take long before spammers find another willing or unknowing server farm from which to base their invasion.  Then, spam will return to 100%.