It's New Years Eve. It's been a year. Yay.

To round out the roller coaster of a year that I've been having I came
to Disneyland with some friends. Specifically it's my cousins birthday
today and she really wanted to spend it at the Happiest Place on earth
with the hottest guy (@dsummer) and the funniest guy (@debono) she
knows. And @gowebbgo because that's how she rolls.

We all got wet on Splash Mountain and everyone is having a rip-roaring
time running amuck.

As fun as this is, I hope my next year keeps the roller coastering
inside the parks.

It snowed a lot last night.

I watched from the balcony as sheets of fluffy white rained down and
covered everything. The sense of cleansing and making new was very
strong for some completely emo reason.

Last night sat in the second row for Matt Nathanson and watched this
moving and passionate artist extract emotion in each song. He so
eloquently pulls the depth of the collective reality into the light of
music evoking a new level of transparency in self-reflection.

Later in the show, the haunting harmony of Ingrid Michaelson and the
lady with her ( Amy Moss ? ) just captivated me and eased me back to
normalcy.

After the show as I walked home through the snow I felt so invigorated
and refreshed. More so than in a long time.

But on the balcony watching the huge flakes floating down, a sense of
melancholy returned. A little nostalgia perhaps? I'm sure it had more
than a little to do with spending one of my first days out of contact
with some of the people I love.

In any case, I went to bed feeling very much like a sock that's been
through the washer and the dryer and sometime during the tumble cycle,
lost his partner. I'm still a perfectly good sock. Maybe you could use
me as a puppet?

The snow on the ground outside my window reminded me of how even in a
night of fitful dreams the world keeps going. In the morning, if
you're lucky, there will be a whole new playground on which to
frolick. That's part of why snow is so beautiful to me. It transforms
and makes things new.

I sit here now watching people arise and leave their homes to play in
the whiteness, I listen to my roommate snoring, about to leave and fly
to a warmer place, and I don't feel melancholy any more.

You see, that's the other good thing about snow. It's cold. It makes
you numb.

I'm a huge fan of Fred Wilson. Have been from the first time I ever read his words.

Lately, he's wrote a little something on an area that I generally ignore but had been catching my eye. Specifically, this post was about the challenges and opportunities with online advertising.

Most of the time, I tend to put my energy into learning about and understanding other areas of technology or trends, but lately I've become more interested. This is mostly because I have friends that work in various segments of advertising and those specializing in the online space have had interesting things to say.

One of the great things about Fred is that no matter whether I agree or not, he brings up the salient and pivotal points of the subject matter with precision and elegance. This is how I would want to write if I could write the way I want. Witness:

Analog and digital, it turns out, are polar opposites. Analog has physical costs which lead to scarcity driven business models. Digital has zero marginal cost (or near zero) which leads to ubiquity driven business models.
- from Trading Analog Dollars For Digital Pennies by Fred Wilson

The remainder of the article is a succinct primer proving once again that smart people are in fact out in the world, kicking ass and taking names. And then there are geniuses who take the time to write about it for the rest of us.

What struck me in this discussion is not the conclusion (in any logical progression that's typically the boring part), it was how subtly he separates two behemoths that are often deemed inseparable and treated as such. Too often, I find myself in the discussion with an educated person who is waving theirs hands about the effort it will take to "move more of our advertising to the web". Or some such nonsense. They fail to understand that the basic economics, motivators, and operating principles for digital consumers is completely different. When I listen to a "marketing person" talk about how a platform will have "captive eyeballs" or "impressions" I realize immediately I am talking to someone who doesn't get it.

This was made real in conversation with a buddy of mine recently about some time after Wii Music hit the stores. His introductory comment:

I own a Wii. I love music. How did I not know about this?

Hmm, lets think about this. When I consider his lifestyle it is like many of my friends. He uses Firefox with ad-blocking software, watches tv only online and usually just via netflix streaming, listens to pandora or online music, works from home/coffee shops, and doesn't drive. No wonder it slipped under his radar.

If you want to get his attention (or mine, or most of my friends) you need to leverage the things we do care about and the media we do invest in. Simply running ads on blogs won't find a growing hoard of us. Put that information IN that same blog and then we'll be all over it.

It's good to know that according to the big analyst firms, the key areas I'm focused on are going to continue to be the top spending areas in this down-turned economy.

InfoWorld reported in an article here, about the findings of several big IT analysis firms what are supposed to be the top 5 spending priorities for the next year.  Not surprisingly, cloud computing and business optimization were up there. 

When the economy isn't doing well, I often get the question about how my business is doing.  The great thing about helping companies do business better is that tough times are great motivator in the way that years of plenty are not.  Simply put, if they are making lots of money anyway, it's hard to get people to focus on the costs involved.  When they aren't making money so easily, all of sudden they are very interested in what things cost.

You can apply this to your own life too.  Are you in feast or famine?  Should you be making hay while the sun shines, or playing frisbee?  Having billable work is no excuse to put off training, writing, and exercise.