Every day I pass by this sign on the way to work. Every day I say “there’s Ze Frank’s sign” in my head. Yesterday he taught me why I did that — it’s the aftertaste that resides in my mouth after memories of his show have faded. He branded “little duckies” in my head. A**hole! He freaking put that freaking stupid “little duckie” song in my freaking head and now I can’t get it out. THAT is branding!

My brand? It’s the aftertaste you have in your mouth when you first wake up in the morning. Sorry. I’ll try to improve upon that.

Anyway, first thing this morning I headed over to the world headquarters of Flock. Will Pate, community ambassador (pictured here pointing to the Flock logo) met me at the front door and gave me a tour. 

For the two of you who don’t know what Flock is, it’s a Web browser built using Firefox’s code base but that has integration with some fun Web services built in. Translation: if you add a favorite in Flock it doesn’t store it locally like IE or Firefox does, but it puts that up on del.icio.us so your friends can see all your favorite porn sites. Or whatever you mark as favorite. Also, they have a neato (technical term, sorry) photo bar that lets me see whenever you update your photos. And it’s easy to blog from within Flock.

Basically it’s the new hip cool browser that you can tell your dad to load so he can see your Flickr photo stream.

Anyway, Will introduced me to the engineering team, where I learned that it’s a game of inches in the software business. Joe Krauss used the same term yesterday. I wonder, is there some kind of meme generation machine going? Anyway, because everything is open source you can see all the cool new features before the “release” a new version. They swear they put everything out everyday, no hidden stuff. Takes all the fun out of trying to get a good exclusive or a leak of a new feature they are working on.

How did Will get his job? He blogged that he was looking for a job. People linked to him (I was one) and he had 30 companies contact him. Whew! Maybe I should open a job board!

Anyway, I have more than 1,000 emails now that I haven’t answered. I’m suprised that people haven’t figured out the trick yet. Just leave a darn comment. I always spend time in my comment feed before heading toward my email.

Oh, and Ze Frank, can you tell me how to get the duckies out of my head? Thanks!

To everyone else: here’s the song. Now try to get it out of YOUR head. Oh, and if you’re in the Bay Area tonight get your little duckie over to the Flock Meetup in Mountain View tonight.

Some days I pinch myself because of the interesting people I get to hang out with and interview and talk business with. Here’s an example.

This morning I interviewed Joe Kraus at JotSpot’s offices (JotSpot is a really interesting Wiki set of services, which to my eye looks like a whole lot better than either Google or Microsoft’s vision for the future of how Office workers will work together, but maybe that’s just me).

Anyway, we talked about everything from whether we’re in the middle of a bubble: “yes” to what his favorite Google keywords were (he explained how JotSpot’s employees brainstorm interesting new keywords, then measure them, and get rid of any that don’t work after a couple of weeks). He wouldn’t share his favorites, though, saying that was his competitive advantage. That’s the third time I’ve heard that from CEOs this month, by the way. Until my video gets up sometime in September you should check out TechCrunch’s writings about JotSpot 2.0. Why take that long to get a video up? Cause I need a bunch in the bag so that I can bootstrap the show. Plus editing and compression are a real PITA. Nothing like slamming out a text blog.

I should have bugged Joe about why he hasn’t been blogging lately. But he’s a busy CEO so I was happy to get an hour with him.

Then it was onto visit Better Bad News, a funny video show. They have me under NDA, but their latest video hints at what I was meeting them about. The thing they showed me? Definitely interesting, I hope to use it soon. Oh, and Jeff Clavier, they said they’re interested in your money too. I’ll hook you and them up, you should see what they are doing. My pitch to them? “Better music and drugs.” Hey, a four-word pitch, what can I say? I told them I was really there to get them to sell their souls to me for $1 a month. They were tough negotiators, though, and talked me up to $1.50.

Then tonight I met up with Simon Phipps and Terri Molini after talking on the phone with Steve Gillmor who told me “don’t send me any traffic” (which promptly make me want to link to him and send him all the traffic he doesn’t want, heheh).

Simon is one of Sun Microsystems’ guys who are working on open sourcing Java and Terri is one of Sun’s PR chiefs.

Simon told us all about the cool places he’s visited and the open source computing trends. He asked me if I was going to get outside of the United States and I told him that I’d like to visit India and China. He’d just been, so figured he’d be excited. He, instead, told me that the bigger computing stories were happening in South Africa and South America where interesting open source movements have taken hold.

I hear Simon has started a blog for the PR team (I couldn’t find it cause it’s too new, but I’ll try to get the URL tomorrow) and that she has a new way to “command and control” bloggers inside Sun. Instead of sending them nasty notes she’ll just call them out in public. Hmmm, if she really does do that that’ll make her blog one that we’ll definitely follow. She was just kidding, of course.

Anyway, now I’m even further behind on answering email. Sigh.

Christian Long was one of the people who came on the tour of Printing for Less. He wrote up his thoughts (with a slant about it teaching him a lot about school design — Christian runs a company that explores that topic, so you can understand his filter there). I too came away with the same impression. This is — by far — the most impressive business I’ve been in. Not because it makes a ton of money (it only has $24 million in sales) but because of the approach it takes. I’ve spoken to executives at many of the world’s best or most respected companies like Target, Boeing, Nestle, Google, Amazon, Sun Microsystems, and fell in love with this little company. I hope to help make Podtech even 1/100th as fun a place. Also because it is being built in the absolute middle of nowhere without ANY geek infrastructure around it.

Andrew Field is my business hero.

Awesome post Christian. Thanks for putting to words thoughts that have been rattling around in my head ever since that tour.

Oh, and I love their dog policy. At the end it simply says “no cats.”

Are you trying to avoid work? You know, by watching stuff like Ze Frank and Rocketboom? Yeah, me too. Heheh. Well, Jeff Pulver, VoIP guru, has a list of Internet TV shows. Damn, if I watch all of these my own show won’t get done, won’t get on this list, and I won’t make my $.02 off of Google ads. Damn. Hey, Maryam, tell John I’ll be finished soon. I gotta do more, um, “market research” first. :-)

Wired Magazine writes an indepth article on Sony’s PS3 and its fight against Xbox 360. I guarantee you that folks over at Microsoft are happy that Sony has tripped over their feet a few times. I remember meeting with Xbox folks a few years ago when Xbox 360 was only a dream on their whiteboards and they were expecting Sony to come out at the same time. They were hoping to beat them by only a few days. I don’t think they, in their wildest dreams, thought that they’d have a whole year headstart this time around.

I remember one guy explaining why the console manufacturers needed to have their console in the marketplace for four years before they’d start making profits. Microsoft learned its lesson by getting only three years last time (they came into the market a year after PS2 and always have been behind and lost massive amounts of money).

We still have two more years before we’ll really know if “being first” is the only strategy that matters in the game market. But the Wired article sure doesn’t make Sony look good at this point in time.

James Robertson chimes in too with a “PS3 is too expensive” post. I guess it depends how many people will buy $4,000 TVs over the next year. If you get one of those you’ll probably open a credit account. Then $600 more isn’t really that big a deal since that’ll probably cost you another $20 a month. At least that’s how I bought my Xbox and my HD-DVD. Best Buy gave me $10,000 worth of credit by filling out a simple form. Oh, yeah, sorry to pop everyone’s bubble that I’m one rich dude. It’s the American way: go into debt for your toys.

Hey, we can all play a game in our Google searches now:

Just query “where in the world is Danny Sullivan?”

He just quit working for Search Engine Strategies and Search Engine Watch.

Danny is a genuinely good guy. I can’t wait to see what he does next. I’ll certainly be searching for it.

Yesterday Om announced he turned down the Google beta. Today PodTech’s Catherine Girardeau interviews him about why he did that. Interesting interview about the state of business service suites.

Here’s another blogging comic. This one, Being Five, is about a kid who blogs using voice recognition software.

You’ve seen what Digg can do for bringing the hotest news. Well, Nicolas Nguyen is on the phone from his home in Southern California and he’s showing me around his new site, PixPix.net.

He started this to give small bands a better chance to get found. The problem is that the most popular audio files so far from around the net, as rated by his community, are ones from popular people.

I asked him if he’s worried about getting shut down by the RIAA (the music industry, who probably really hates sites like this one). He is. So, look for podcasting and other features to be added soon (the RIAA will have a problem seeing Kelly Clarkson on here, but not Dawn and Drew).

Neat site, though, and I support it.

He built it in Java and the backend is running on MySQL.

I’m here with Russell Shaw (he’s been wanting to visit me at PodTech, just so happens it was on a day he got known for some big news about Google and eBay — his article is the top link on TechMeme for this, second only to the other Google stuff).

The news he talked about the news was that Google and eBay signed an advertising deal to do click-to-call functionality within ads that run on Google.

Anyway, Russell writes about VoIP so he’s one of the first guys I look to when something happens in that industry.