I'll probably try to work on the 1.0 site this weekend. I'll show you what I'm doing and ask for help if I need it.

Not a pretty thing to see 

I get peevish when Comcast is down.

New kinds of advertising 

BW's Heather Green points out Castrol Motor Oil's podcast about racing and cars and oil. I worked on a piece of business with another BP division years ago when I was with a franchise consulting firm. They're smart folks, quite willing to run with new ideas and see where they go, at least that's what I perceived in my dealings with the truckstop people.

The podcast, not just sponsored, but produced by Castol, is one way of doing the opt-in advertising that Dave talked about in his interview with Rocketboom posted yesterday. I agree that new terminology is needed. Dave was saying these new types of commercial information are not advertising. I kind of think they are. Eh, maybe more like PR. Doesn't matter, really. The language and taxonomy is sure to evolve on its own. Watch the extended interview segment labeled "on the future of advertising."

I watched them all, and thought the interview came out nicely. Dave, he talk good. It wasn't as serious as the Nerd TV IV, and probably not meant to be. Nice they included the extra bits.

More like a piece of string than a radio signal 

The neatest thing about working in franchise consulting was the chance to dive into so many different kinds of businesses. I found it endlessly fascinating. For example in working on Truckstops of America, I realized that, unlike other retail businesses that have a market shaped like a broadcast signal, a highway business has a geographic market that looks more like a piece of string. That changes everything in marketing the business, of course.

Working on TA was a nice change from the smaller franchises meant for the "be your own boss" crowd. At that time, in the late 80s, if you wanted to start a new Truckstops of America franchise, you needed about $10 million to get going.

Cute abbreviations 

In franchise consulting, always working on dealings involving various combinations of franchisees and franchisors, you'd resort to abbreviations. A common convention in notetaking was to call them "zees" and "zors." Occasionally the nicknames would be used internally in spoken language.