Time flies when you’re having fun
: I was at Daimler Chrysler today presenting citizens’ media — us — to marketing execs and agency folks from BBDO and Organic.
Dave Rooney of Daimler Chrysler said it was 10 years go that the first banner ad appeared.
Then Jerry Yang appeared and said it was a little over 10 years ago when Yahoo started.
And it’s almost 10 years since I started at my current job.
Damn. A decade.
My beard is much grayer. Jerry — whom I met in the early days — is still young but not as young (he’s an official grown-up now). “I always thought of myself as the young person in this industry,” he said. “Having been in the industry for 10 years, I now feel like I’m 85.”
Except what was fun was that talking about citizens’ media was like talking about the Internet 10 years ago, without the hype. It’s another beginning. And that’s exciting.
: Yang emphasized a few themes regarding Yahoo.
Local is one. The company is seeing more and more searches for local information; it sees more potential. Applications are another. He talked briefly about the purchase this week of Oddpost.com, a good web-based email service, and said that thanks to increased bandwidth, the company is looking at what can reside on the client versus the server.
He said the company will do “a lot more” with personal publishing — and that doesn’t mean just blogs; it also means people “publishing” their own audio, photos, and video. He says all the right things about the value of citizens’ media content.
He was asked about Yahoo running TV networks and said that the company needs to add value. Unfortunately, he’s still using the old terms for that value — proxies for interactive TV (a promise nobody wanted): Get more information on this player as he plays. I do think Yahoo will be doing more TV but it will likely come from new sources and Yahoo’s distribution will be the value it adds.
: And thanks to PubSub, I already found this internal Daimler Chrysler blog entry about the day there.
