E-Biz Babble

IBM Buys SPSS

chofack@cob.fsu.edu (Charlie Hofacker) — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 00:30:00 +0000

IBM has purchased SPSS. Not sure really why so many colleagues insisted on using SPSS, even while SAS is a far superior product for academic research. In any case, maybe Big Blue can make SPSS more logical and useful:

http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/chi-wed-ibm-spss-0729-jul29,0,7990855.story

Reed Elsevier Sues FL Man for Predator Database

chofack@cob.fsu.edu (Charlie Hofacker) — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 18:43:00 +0000

WEST BOCA - A South Florida man is at the center of a billion-dollar lawsuit that he says has hindered his efforts to help law enforcement find child predators.

http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/local/palmbeach/sfl-boca-lexis-lawsuit-child-p070509,0,3459709.story

Who Controls Journals?

chofack@cob.fsu.edu (Charlie Hofacker) — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 18:21:00 +0000

Sage apologizes to board of political science journal for making leadership change without consulting academics -- and signs deal to run sociology association's scholarly publications. This story, covered by Inside Higher Ed, is likely to become more common as academic publishing becomes more of a business:

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/07/07/sage

Nonimmigrant Visa Waiver

chofack@cob.fsu.edu (Charlie Hofacker) — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 20:19:00 +0000

Quoting from the Department of Homeland Security form I-94W given to all non-US citizens arriving in the US:

" ... are you now involved in espionage or sabotage; or in terrorist activities; ..."

This is followed by two boxes: Yes and No.

Reading in England by the Pound

chofack@cob.fsu.edu (Charlie Hofacker) — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 18:58:00 +0000

Weak pound affects UK’s access to world-class scholarly publications. So reports Information World Review. Who knew that currency exchange rates could impact the quality of science done from one nation to the next for the simple reason that libraries can't afford journals?

Editors and ERB member from outside the UK should offer some help here, don't you think?

http://www.iwr.co.uk/information-world-review/news/2240973/weak-pound-affects-uk-access

Blackboard Loses Ruling

chofack@cob.fsu.edu (Charlie Hofacker) — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 10:40:00 +0000

According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, Blackboard has lost a preliminary ruling by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. The office rejected all 57 claims in a software patent that Blackboard Inc. used to successfully sue rival Desire2Learn.

http://chronicle.com/free/2009/04/16097n.htm

Haworth Press and Its Abandoned Domain Name

chofack@cob.fsu.edu (Charlie Hofacker) — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 23:47:00 +0000

At one point Haworth Press used the domain name HaworthPressInc.com. This was used by those trying to find articles that appeared in Haworth journals. A few months ago, Haworth failed to renew this domain name and it is now being used by an online casino!

So to all you authors, editors and reviewers that donated your efforts to publishing a Haworth journal - tough luck. Your work has now become a bit harder to find online.

It is surprising to me that a company that is in the business of providing an electronic service could let this happen. And yet....

Advertising and Scientific Publishing

chofack@cob.fsu.edu (Charlie Hofacker) — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 11:43:00 +0000

Let's randomly choose an academic article. How about this one:

Sander van Triest, Maurice J. G. Bun, Erik M. van Raaij and Maarten J. A. Vernooij (2009), "The impact of customer-specific marketing expenses on customer retention and customer profitability," Marketing Letters, Vol 20, Issue 2.

You might notice that Springer is trying to earn some additional revenue using Google's AdSense program.

It is fairly amusing to see that what sorts of ads end up juxtaposed with an academic paper. In this case the moral dilemma bothers me some, but the sheer incongruity is what is notable.

Textbook Value Chains

chofack@cob.fsu.edu (Charlie Hofacker) — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 20:21:00 +0000

In the very near future I intend to offer a new Electronic Marketing textbook using Lulu's print-on-demand service. The activities surrounding that effort got me thinking about textbooks. In this posting my goals are to put some of these thoughts in essay form and thereby encourage dialog on textbooks, textbook pricing, and the textbook value chain.

Textbook Market Analysis

I have been personally concerned about the rising prices of textbooks even before the current economic climate. Now, I wonder how difficult it is for aspiring students in Asia, South America, Africa and elsewhere to acquire new, quality textbooks. Even in my country every 10% rise in textbook prices removes a layer of students from the set of those who can afford college It has been reported that textbook prices have nearly tripled since the 1980's (New York Times 2008). This leads me to an informal market investigation of college textbooks.

Industry structure - Recent decades have seen a world-wide consolidation in the textbook publishing industry with resulting increases in market power for the small number of firms still standing. What's more, like prescription drugs, in the textbook market the decision maker does not internalize prices. The decision maker who chooses the textbook for a course and the purchaser who buys it are two distinct individuals.

Fixed costs - Analagously once more to prescription drugs, there are high fixed costs associated with creating a new textbook. The market must be researched. The author must write the book. Reviewers must review the book. Slides, test banks, cases, instructors' guides and answer keys must be developed and refined. The book needs to be edited, copyedited, formatted, typeset and indexed. Artists must draw the art work and lawyers must arrange to purchase the rights to glossy photographs. The sales force has to be sent marching into instructors' offices. A strong resale market makes it even more imperative that the above fixed costs be recouped through high prices. Publishers have also astutely employed price bundling. We can note from the above that while the core value is provided by academics, important supplemental value is added by the publisher.

Variable costs - Variable costs are not trivial, especially where color is used rather than black and white. Cloth covers and binding are not inexpensive. There are also physical distribution costs. Numerous parties may take title to book shipments adding associated transaction costs. Accounting and financial settlement must be arranged and monitored.

Textbook Competition Opportunities

There is some good news in this analysis. Since the incumbents' prices are so high, there is a lot of room for price competition.

A second piece of good news is that all of the expensive resources that the incumbents bring to bear on the textbook production process slow them down, making them less than nimble. A smaller entity could produce new versions more frequently. This versioning strategy would be consistent with service-dominant logic (Vargo and Lusch 2004) and would also help combat the resale problem.

A third good news factor lies in the evolution of information technology. If service-dominant logic suggests that one might translate the textbook product into a set of services, some of these services could be e-services. Authors might create blog entries to update the text or shared annotated bookmarks to provide current news stories. Social network software could be used to facilitate a community of adopters who share materials or stories and who co-create value through their interactions. Cross-university student interaction is feasible. Distribution might be purely electronic or one could utilize a commodity e-tail delivery strategy.

So in summary, a challenger to industry incumbents might create a product where:

The core content and thereby the core benefits are roughly comparable to a branded textbook.
The physical book is generic, produced in softcover in black and white and lacking expensive artwork.
The textbook value proposition is more virtual and service-like than current offerings.
Virtual community processes might provide supplemental services and enhance learning.

Alternative Textbook Models

Open Source - One could write a textbook and just put it on the Internet for free download. I have tried this with a PhD text for quantitative courses (see http://www.openaccesstexts.org/). The license was designed to encourage the contribution of supplementary materials and updates, with a goal to create a community of adopters who would improve the book. It is being downloaded but there have not been very many improvements suggested or donated.

Self-Publishing - There is a long and somewhat stigmatized history of authors publishing their own work. This option has become cheaper due to desktop publishing and print-on-demand utilities like Lulu. I have an Electronic Marketing text (http://myweb.fsu.edu/chofacker/books.html) currently being tested in my own classes using Lulu.

Crowd-Sourcing - Management Professor Charles Wankel is producing a highly modularized management textbook in cooperation with Routledge (http://globally-collaborating.com/). As of this week, there were 924 authors collaborating to write this book.

Author Cooperative - In addition to the extent models described above, there is one more possibility that I have never seen that might lie in between self-publishing and crowd-sourcing. For example, a Basic Marketing book might employ a couple of dozen authors who each write a single chapter or module and review three chapters. In addition to the writers, you might add a few team members such as an editor. The members of the co-op could agree to make two "electronic" contributions each, per year, thus creating a weekly service. From this base, an updated version of the text might be created each semester. The book could be offered via Amazon or through another print-on-demand provider with the goal being a payment of approximately $1 per co-op member per copy sold and a sale price of under $40.

In summary, the current textbook situation is not an unavoidable fact of academic life but an accident due to the invention of paper having preceeded the invention of electronic media. I am quite interested in opening a dialog with others on this topic, either on or off ELMAR. I believe the right combination of people could make a reasonable amount of money, gain some notoriety in our field, and help students afford higher education.

References

New York Times, "That Book Costs How Much?," 25 April 2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/25/opinion/25fri4.html, Last Accessed 25 January 2009

Vargo, Stephen L. and Robert F. Lusch (2004), "Evolving to a New Dominant Logic for Marketing," Journal of Marketing, 68 (1), 1-17.

It's a Lulu

chofack@cob.fsu.edu (Charlie Hofacker) — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 15:29:00 +0000

I have created and published a textbook using the electronic service available at Lulu. Lulu's model is to allow writers to upload their books, and it lets each writer choose her or his price point. Lulu takes a fixed percentage for each print copy purchased, binds and ships the book to buyers, and generally handles all of the e-merchant fulfillment tasks. I am trying Lulu with a textbook I have written, entitled Electronic Marketing. The URL is:

http://www.lulu.com/chofack.

I see some drawbacks of the Lulu model in comparison to using a traditional publisher:

The quality of the printed product is not up to the usual book standards.
No salespeople are pushing the book across the country and around the world.
Publishers frequently arrange for reviewers to read and correct texts.
Publishers' sales forces can gather feedback useful in content creation.
Publishers offer technical help including indexing, formatting, art work, etc.

I am thinking through ways of overcoming these drawbacks, while enjoying the benefits of the Lulu model. These are:

The author can keep the price low for the book, thus benefiting students.
In spite of the above point, the author can earn more per sale than is traditional.
The author can revise the text on any schedule, thus adding to flexibility.

I am not sure how this will come out, but so far I am quite impressed with Lulu.

Blackboard Sues US Patent Office

chofack@cob.fsu.edu (Charlie Hofacker) — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 11:40:00 +0000

Blackboard is suing the US patent office - and by direct implication all US taxpayers. It seems they do not wish that office to review patents granted them already. Peek at

http://www.bizjournals.com/washington/stories/2008/12/01/daily28.html

Thomson Reuters vs. Zotero

chofack@cob.fsu.edu (Charlie Hofacker) — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 11:46:00 +0000

Thomson Reuters has decided to sue Zotero, the open source reference management software. I do not know very much about the merits of the case, but I wonder what would happen if Thompson Reuters were to put money into improving their clunky EndNote program instead of paying lawyers to sue a taxpayer-supported university?

Zotero is sponsored by George Mason University and is available at www.zotero.org.

This story has been covered by Ars Technica and the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Blackboard Market Power

chofack@cob.fsu.edu (Charlie Hofacker) — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 01:10:00 +0000

My main issue with Blackboard is that I fear that how we teach, and our philosophy of pedagogy, is already, and will increasingly be, dictated by the marketing considerations, as played out in software design, of a purely for-profit entity.

This fear is exacerbated when I contemplate what we marketers lovingly refer to as "lock-in". Lock-in occurs when management arranges the product architecture such that the customer just can't afford the cost of switching brands (retraining, recoding, ...). This goes hand in hand with proprietary standards.

Wiley and DMEF

chofack@cob.fsu.edu (Charlie Hofacker) — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 00:07:00 +0000

Wiley and the Direct Marketing Educational Foundation have come to an agreement. Hooray!

Wiley Textbooks

chofack@cob.fsu.edu (Charlie Hofacker) — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 23:00:00 +0000

This is a tale of the Journal of Interactive Marketing, which is a publication of the Direct Marketing Educational Foundation. Under a prior contract, this journal was published by Wiley but now the DMEF has chosen Elsevier as its new publishing partner.

Wiley has the legal right to publish the journal for 2008, but has decided to do so without any input from the editors or editorial review board. Wiley's plan is to republish previous articles, a plan that could have a negative impact on the journal's reputation and which certainly will reduce the journal's impact factor.

While the above paragraphs recount the basic facts of the situation, what follows below represents my opinion, and it should not be assumed to represent the opinion of any other individual or entity associated, or not associated, with this matter.

I personally find Wiley's actions to be unconscionable.

Like many other academic journals, the authors and reviewers of the Journal of Interactive Marketing are not paid for their labor on behalf of the journal. Nevertheless, the former and current ERB members and authors, with the guiding help of the editors, have year by year raised the quality and reputation of this journal.

It is this free labor that Wiley now intends to take advantage of, milking the journal for an additional year with filler content, quite possibly damaging its name, but certainly its impact factor. This punishes anyone who has ever published in the journal.

It seems that Wiley believes that academics are too busy, apathetic and disorganized to matter in this case.

Interestingly enough, Wiley is also in the business of selling textbooks, and it is academics who choose textbooks on behalf of their classes.

If you have an opinion about this matter, and you are in the habit of ordering textbooks for your students, I suggest you express that opinion with your Wiley textbook representative. You can identify that person using the following form:

http://professor.wiley.com/CGI-BIN/LANSAWEB?PROCFUN+PROF1+PRFFN15

Fingernails on Blackboard

chofack@cob.fsu.edu (Charlie Hofacker) — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 01:26:00 +0000

The taxpayers of the good state of Florida pay me a livable wage to produce PowerPoint slides for my students, among other things. The administrators at my university provide me with a way to store those slides online, which the taxpayers of course also pay for. The administration bought a product known as Blackboard, or Bb as it is usually written. You are going to have to take me at my word, because even if you are a Florida citizen who has paid for the slides, you can't see them. Sorry.

Even if I wanted to show them to you, I couldn't tell you how to get there anyway since my class micro-site does not have a URL! Now it turns out that there are various ways I can get around this, but you kind of have to know what you are doing, and these alternatives add work.

In a nutshell, Bb was designed for university administrators with some help for teaching classes tossed in as an afterthought. In fact, Blackboard was around for the better part of a decade before you could use it to create an internal hypertext link from one Blackboard page to another! It takes 12 different mouseclicks to create a page that says"hello world".

I wonder why they don't use Moodle, or the Sakai Project, both of which are free?

Lost Luggage

chofack@cob.fsu.edu (Charlie Hofacker) — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 13:27:00 +0000

Here is the scenario - you get off your flight, go to baggage pickup, and wait for your luggage to appear in the carousel. And you wait. And you wait some more. Rather than risk missing your bags, you pretty much have to wait until the last bag appears. Then, realizing that your luggage "did not make it", you get in line at the Lost Luggage Office hoping that your bags are still in this galaxy.

Of course the airlines knew long before you landed that your bags "did not make it". They are probably already queued up for the next flight or in fact are already on the next flight. So why make you go through the charade of waiting at the carousel? A little more information in the service supply chain would surely go a long way towards making it more convenient for customers, and mitigating service failures.

This reminds me of a conversation I had with a IT guy at a big European airline. He was complaining that his server received so many hits from people who ended up not buying a ticket that he had to upgrade the hardware from time to time. Kind of like Macy's complaining about too much foot traffic.

The airlines have not figured out yet that they are information processing companies with airplanes. Until they do, the airport forecast for today, tomorrow and the indefinite future is for delays.

Difficult Interfaces

chofack@cob.fsu.edu (Charlie Hofacker) — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 09:53:00 +0000

Imagine having to, by necessity, deal with a sophisticated, difficult technology. Think of this technology as a sort of personal helper for one or more biological systems. Specifically, this device helps you with the timing of an important biological function - sleep. The technology is of course, the lowly clock radio.

My wife and I are in our hotel room, the night before we are due to return home. We have an early morning flight so we need to set the hotel alarm clock. This clock has custom stenciled instructions. You can see a photo of this "interface" in this blog entry below. Note the last line of said instructions: "Press ENTER".

Huh? Where do you see ENTER? There is no enter key; the word ENTER does not appear anywhere on the front or back of the clock. How does a hotel employee or clock manufacturer manage to create instructions that require that the user press a non-existent key?

There is a fair amount of innovation going on in the economy as devices get smarter (Rijsdijk et al. 2007). More and more the economy is going to depend on the ability of people to explain tasks, procedures and interfaces to consumers. If this is any indication, we are all in trouble!

Further Reading

Norman, Donald A. (1994) The Design of Everyday Things, New York: Doubleday.

Rijsdijk, Serge A., Erik Jan Hultink, and Adamantios Diamantopoulos (2007), "Product Intelligence: Its Conceptualization, Measurement and Impact on Consumer Satisfaction," Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 35 (3), 340-356.

Academia 2.0

chofack@cob.fsu.edu (Charlie Hofacker) — Sun, 02 Dec 2007 00:37:00 +0000

Here are some Web 2.0 tools I wish we business academics had:

A news story exchange - to help alert us to stories relevant to courses we are teaching. I often run into a great story that illustrates, say, advertising but unfortunately I am teaching marketing research that term. You are teaching advertising but spot a nice example of marketing research. How about a platform for sharing these things, and letting people add discussion questions and feedback from how the class reacted?
A social network-capable version of EndNote. This would be a personalized citation library that would allow sharing and user tagging and also support comments and dialogs on papers. Maybe something like Facebook's "Wall" application but customized to let people link to other papers, and to allow different levels and types of moderation.
A version control system for academic papers. These systems have been in use for software development for years supporting groups who write code together. Despite this, people who write papers together are basically stuck with Word's "Track Changes" function.

With all the social network folks running around Silicon Valley these days, is it too much to ask that one, just one of them would turn her or his attention to college professors?

Social Science

chofack@cob.fsu.edu (Charlie Hofacker) — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 01:13:00 +0000

It is understandable that entrepreneurs go for the most lucrative markets first. You expect that the first mass produced cars will be positioned for the average consumer, rather than for the "25-30 year old left handers whose names begin with A-D" demographic. Likewise, when the famous bank robber Willie Sutton was asked "Why do you rob banks?" he supposedly replied (he denied this in at least one later interview), "Because that's where the money is."

Of course Facebook and MySpace et al. appeal to the great mass of younger, computer savvy consumers. In the US alone, that target market is many tens of millions of potential users. Instead, just to pick an example off hand, let's contemplate the scientific community. How big is that? Certainly at least an order of magnitude smaller; maybe two or more orders of magnitude smaller.

Those facts of life do not prevent some entrepreneurs from trying to serve a niche market better. In fact, the "academic" market has some social networking sites available to it.

For example, Swivel is designed for sharing data and graphs. The graph options are relatively simple though, and certainly there is no army of programmers dreaming up new options for Swivel users.

Another academic networking site is CiteULike, which is designed to let academics post and tag journal articles. But it requires that each journal article be posted one at a time, and does not accept input from popular citation library databases like EndNote.

These options available to scientists are modest; some might say paltry. Of course there are numerous listserv like entities, for the most part manned by volunteer labor, serving the academic community. I help with one of these myself, called ELMAR. But the truth is, most of these sorts of platforms are about 15 years behind something like Facebook.

In my next blog entry, I will write up my wish list for social networking sites for academics. Do you suppose some entrepreneur will think about serving this niche?

Linked In

chofack@cob.fsu.edu (Charlie Hofacker) — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 12:29:00 +0000

My blog for today is entitled "Linked In Linked Me In".

It appears as part of Sandeep Krishnamurthy's Marketing College blog.

Zazzle Dazzles

chofack@cob.fsu.edu (Charlie Hofacker) — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 01:09:00 +0000

What would you get if you combined a Long Tail E-tail strategy with a user-contribution Web 2.0 strategy? It might resemble something like Zazzle, a site where artisans create designs for tee-shirts, mousepads, handbags. The Zazzle platform offers support for artist producers, and a collection of unique items for the consumer.

The long tail is basically the idea that one can also sell a small volume of a large number of products instead of a merely selling a large volume of a small number of products. Think about the number of titles sold at Amazon, as compared to the number at your local Barnes and Noble store. The idea was used as the title of a book by Chris Anderson, originally an article in Wired magazine, and it was in turn inspired by a paper by Brynjolfsson, Hu and Smith (2003).

The approach leverages what networks do best, which is perform the classic retail function of "matching". When you add to that the ability to empower small sellers to produce the goods that go in the tail, that strikes me as a very nice niche for Zazzle.

Reference

Brynjolfsson, Erik, Yu (Jeffrey) Hu, and Michael D. Smith (2003), "Consumer Surplus in the Digital Economy: Estimating the Value of Increased Product Variety at Online Booksellers," Management Science, 49 (11), 1580-1596 [PDF].

Locked Cells

chofack@cob.fsu.edu (Charlie Hofacker) — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 12:01:00 +0000

According to Mike Elgan at Computerworld, one of the benefits of the iPhone might be that it will make US consumers aware that their cell phones in fact ARE locked.

Locked cell phones, and phones that are otherwise crippled, is something that folks from outside of the US would never put up with. We were living in Milan last Spring, and we needed to live in Valencia for 6 weeks. I just took the Telecom Italia SIM card out of my Nokia GSM phone, and put in a different one from a Spanish cell phone company. It took me all of 4 minutes and cost me all of 5 Euro, and the new SIM card came with 10 Euro worth of minutes anyway.

In the US, your cell phone and your cell phone service come strictly bundled. This raises switching costs which therefore keeps prices high for service.

The FCC is running an auction in late January 2008 for the spectrum vacated by TV channels 52-69, known as the 700 MHz spectrum. As part of the conversion to digital TV, by law this spectrum reverts to the FCC on 17 Feb 2009. The FCC is proposing that part of this spectrum be reserved for an open network, i. e. Internet-like, where any device or hardware can use it. So how did Verizon react to this exciting news? They sued the FCC (They have since decided to drop the suit).

It will be interesting to see whether the 700 MHz auction will enable someone (Google?) to free US mobile users from their locked cells. In the meantime, E' meglio essere in Italia (It's better to be in Italy).

Electronic Misnomers

chofack@cob.fsu.edu (Charlie Hofacker) — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 21:24:00 +0000

I really hate the phrases "electronic marketing", "electronic business", "electronic commerce", or its derivative, "e-commerce". The word electronic focuses on hardware, which, at this point at least, tends to be electronic. This obscures the fact that the raw material of Internet business is software. Companies do not use electronics to create so called "electronic services", they use software to do so.

The defining characteristic of software is, of course, its softness. In other words, the most useful thing about software is its sheer arbitrariness. One can do anything one wants to do with it. This utter flexibility is itself quite challenging. At the design end, complexity forces programmers to build code so that it functions well within the Internet software ecology. At the user end, complexity impacts the consumer also, since that customer needs some sort of mental model or metaphor to understand how the e-service functions.

Software is becoming more and more ubiquitous in the consumer's environment. More and more, marketing is becoming a process of managing software. Marketers need to think about its design or acquisition, adoption, assimilation and implementation, all in way that furthers the firm's marketing goals.

Marketing departments need to absorb the fact that the physical, psychological, social and commercial worlds are increasingly constructed with software. It is not an e-world, it's an s-world.

Related Paper: Hofacker, Charles F., Ronald E. Goldsmith, Eileen Bridges and Esther Swilley (2007), "E-Services: A Synthesis and Research Agenda," Journal of Value Chain Management.

Tabula Rasa

chofack@cob.fsu.edu (Charlie Hofacker) — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 12:21:00 +0000

Ah, a new blog! It feels like being a kid with a clean, blank piece of lined (college rule) paper, a sharp pencil, on a rainy Fall Saturday. All that blank space on the page, I mean what is my blogger.com disk space limit? I could write all day every day for the rest of my life and still not fill it up I bet. Unless of course I upload some movies, but that is not the point. The point is the pure flexible potential of it all; gigabytes of potential. Terabytes of it. And that is the potential of the Internet, isn't it? All that cheap disk space, all live, accessible online. What is the price of a gig per year these days? A buck? A quarter? I bet when I was in college, there wasn't a whole gigabyte on the island of Manhattan. Now, so much space just waiting for an inspired user to hit the save button and thereby make a brilliant contribution available to the whole world.

The pre-2001 crash Internet was pure potential, with everybody trying to figure out how to monetize those eyeballs wandering across the bits and bytes stored on all that cheap disk space. Sell banners! Of course, that is how you do it. By how much did all those newly networked disk drives add to the world's inventory of advertising space? Oh what a sudden glut of space.

OK, so my blog or your blog isn't going to earn anybody a ton of money, but the potential is great, right? I just have to figure out what to say.