Summary:

Craig Bromberg has had a long and fascinating career at the intersection of media and technology. An early adopter of online technologies, Craig was a freelance writer when he was chosen by Pathfinder head Walter Isaacson to become the first editorial director of the Pathfinder project. Craig tells us about the thinking that went into the launch of the website and the strategic goals Pathfinder was intended to achieve. But he was also a participant in the byzantine corporate politics that so hobbled Pathfinder’s trajectory, and he gives us a fascinating first hand account of what it was like to fight for a specific vision inside a big organization like Time Warner. Craig has worked with media from every angle and so the second half of the interview sees us get into a fascinating discussion about where media is doing and how it can succeed in a digital age.

Summary:

We’ve been looking at how companies were feeling their way into the internet era, trying to create new industries and new mediums without precedent or a road map. But thus far, we’ve mainly been looking at pure-play tech companies. And when the web revolution came, everyone wanted a piece of it, not just the tech world. So, this episode looks at the creative and business efforts of those people companies who came from outside the traditional environs of Silicon Valley.

We’re largely going to look at big media. When the web began, it was considered to be a new medium, and so it was assumed by many if not most people that big media would logically dominate this new medium. The reason this did not come to pass is complicated, and we’ll look at some of the many reasons why. We’ll look at pioneering newspaper efforts like the San Jose Mercury News’ Mercury Center. We’ll examine unlikely big media web properties that got the web exactly right, like the Weather Channel. We’ll look at how one unlikely company, Reuters, singlehandedly disrupted the entire content industry by turning news into an online commodity. And more than anything, we’ll look at the rise and ignominious fall, of Pathfinder, onetime rival of sites like Yahoo, the portal that maybe wasn’t a portal, the greatest website you don’t remember.

I mention the Pathfinder Museum. Go there for great visual and data artifacts from the site.

There is an exceptional (and exceptionally long) profile of the Mercury Center saga from the Columbia Journalism Review.

Bibliography:

•  http://www.fundinguniverse.com/company-histories/realnetworks-inc-history/

• http://www.cjr.org/feature/the_newspaper_that_almost_seized_the_future.php?page=all

•  http://www.nytimes.com/1994/02/07/business/the-media-business-in-san-jose-knight-ridder-tests-a-newspaper-frontier.html
•  Bamboozled at the Revolution: How Big Media Lost Billions in the Battle for the Internet 1st edition by Motavalli, John published by Viking Adult Hardcover
•  There Must Be a Pony in Here Somewhere: The AOL Time Warner Debacle and the Quest for the Digital Future
•  http://adage.com/article/news/pathfinder-readies-year/30/
•  http://www.disobey.com/ghostsites/pathfindermuseum/2005/07/new-look-at-pathfinders-new-look.html
•  http://www.disobey.com/ghostsites/pathfindermuseum/2005/07/short-history-of-pathfinders.html
•  Stealing Time: Steve Case, Jerry Levin, and the Collapse of AOL Time Warner
•  http://www.disobey.com/ghostsites/pathfindermuseum/inside/newsletter/news.html
•  http://www.zdnet.com/news/netly-news-goes-quietly-into-the-night/100629
•  http://www.businessweek.com/2000/00_39/b3700102.htm

Summary:

Today we have an interview with Dave Zinman, co-founder of FocaLink Media services, which, if you'll recall, developed the first remote ad server. We previously spoke to his co-founder, Jason Strober. Dave is a long time advertising industry veteran. He was also at Yahoo and is currently the CEO of InfoLinks. I hope we've done a good job in these interviews of giving you a decent understanding of how online advertising developed and how it functions to underpin the internet as we know it today. Dave gives us some fascinating insights on all of this, and especially toward the end of the interview, we get in depth about how modern advertising functions. We get into retargeting, the modern advertising method that represents the the apex of advertising evolution. How does Facebook make all it's money? It's retargeting that makes it possible. So, get ready for an excellent master class on how modern advertising works.

Oh, and there's a bonus story, right at the end, about the founding of eBay.