"He who freely magnifies what hath been nobly done, and fears not to declare as freely what might be done better, gives ye the best covenant of his fidelity." John Milton

"A great business success was probably never attained by chasing the dollar, but is due to pride in one's work - the pride that makes business an art." Henry Doherty

"You are not very good if you are not better than your best friends imagine you to be." Lavater

Today's image: Sahara by raspootin. Amazing. Thank you for sharing!

Cramer vs Kramer: Thanks to paidContent for sharing video of a great insider discussion between Jimmy Cramer and Larry Kramer on business media. Some great takeaway: What's in a name? Larry tells us that the CBS name did not boost MarketWatch traffic, however, association with CBS delivered juice to reporters - they got their calls returned - and cred to sellers - they were able to get the attention of advertisers. Larry says "Radio going to the web means they need to be just like television...they need to build an audience for it." JC picks Disney as the media outfit that will most likely make it happen, LK's bet is CBS. Bravos to Jimmy and Larry! Very well done guys. Highly recommended. Three part video here.

The importance of your main page is in decline

Import vs Export: One of the issues we are dealing with on the day job is content distribution. The mindset of what we are calling Import vs Export. Case in point. Because he has decided to offer his cartoons via widget (upper left of this page) gapingvoid artiste Hugh MacLeod gains audience by orders of magnitude. His potential exposure, his reach, is now significantly greater than before the widget. Far more will view his widget than will likely ever visit his site. Broadcast and print alike are still driven by the dated notion that viewers, listeners and readers belong to them - the pov and the related pronoun are wrong. Our viewers, our listeners, our readers. This logic establishes a one dimensional strategy and the potentially flawed lens of single measurement. How much traffic are we getting? Broadcast and print are using resources to import visitors. The key to success, in our considered opinion, is an aggressive and complimentary strategy of export. It's understanding that the days of your main page are in decline. How are you allowing, encouraging and rewarding folks to export your content? What's your mobile strategy? What are you doing to ensure that your assets are discoverable? What are your factors of findability? These are issues of and rather than or; a continuing and radical shift away from the producer-centric mindset. Cohort replacement will dramatically accelerate this shift. You gotta be everywhere they wanna be.

Survey says: Zogby has released some key findings. 68% of conservatives never watch 60 Minutes. More from the national study on Politics and Entertainment here.

Congrats & cheers: Jay Rosen and team on the launch of Beat Blogging, very cool. NPR on their beta launch of NPR Music (Kudos too to Fred Jacobs and his uber-cool crew who played a part in the NPR initiative). Rafat Ali, Wenda Harris Millard, Paul Maidment, Roger Neil, Brian Quinn, Chuck Cordray honored by min magazine and among those named on the 2007 Digital Hot List. Complete list (including The 21 Most Intriguing People) of honorees here. Bob Wood on the debut of his latest venture The ComStar Network, good luck!

Bonus: The Impact of Recommender Systems on Sales Diversity. Fleder & Hosanagar, The Wharton School. A good read here.

Larry Lessig, the rock star Stanford professor and maven of all things copyright, presented at TED this year. The video here is a little over twenty minutes and well worth your bandwidth. As readers of this blog may be aware, I am a supporter of Creative Commons. Bravos to Larry!

How creativity is being strangled by the law