Day: July 20, 2004

I’m driving to the Albany, New York airport on Sunday morning. As I enter the Northway (US 87) at Exit 30, my tenuous link to North Country Radio, the regional NPR group of stations, finally fades into static. So, I start the Seek experience. And I find eBay on the radio.

WOKO, 98.9 on your FM dial, offers The Sunday Morning Radio Flea Market from 7-11 each Sunday morning. I’ve learned since returning home that WOKO, out of Burlington, Vermont, is a country station, but I heard no music that morning. I listened to Lee Bodette (scroll to the bottom of the DJs page) answer the phone, listen to people rattle off their offer, and then move on to the next.

“Hi, I’m Christy from Keene. I’ve got a 1986 Thunderbird with 130,000 miles on it. New tires and nicely tuned by my father. $900 or best offer. My phone number is 555-1212.”

Lee repeats “Caller number 104, 1986 Thunderbird, phone number 555-1212.”

And on it goes.

Lee’s bio says: “I’ve been hosting the North Counrty’s [sic] largest Radio Flea Market for about ten years.” So, this has been going on for a decade, probably more. Decades? I’m not a big radio listener, but never heard the like before. And, possibly more interesting… are there others? Lee claims his is the North Country’s largest… are there smaller ones? I would think the network effect would make it the only one. There’s a reason eBay’s marketplace size hampers competitors. No reason same rules wouldn’t apply here.

The whole experience made me smile, and wonder what else I’m missing in the world. It also brought to mind William Gibson’s epigram about the future; how it’s already here, just not evenly distributed. I now have proof.

If so, read on. As I try and keep up with my reading, and blogging my reading, I got pretty excited by Booxter. A Mac OS X application for cataloging your book collections, Booxter seems to be a smart, focused, network aware application that does one thing — record your book collection — very well. I write “seems” because I just learned about it this morning and I don’t have time to experiment just yet… but I’m intrigued. Besides smart application of the online infrastructure that has sprung up around books, Booxter employs the iSight as a ‘scanner’ for ISBN #s. That’s just one of the many, many ways it offers to make a difficult, potentially dreary, task as painless as possible. The feature list offers export to a text file, which opens up a way to get the information onto a website… say, like a blog. I would think that tying an application that is already so network-aware to a website would be very compelling. In a similar vein, take a look at Guzzlefish.com for a collection management site for movies and music.

Seth Godin hardly needs an introduction if you’ve been paying attention to online marketing for the past decade, so I won’t bother. One of the books a colleague at work keeps in her “lending library” is Purple Cow, his penultimate book. Subtitled “Transform your business by being remarkable,” Purple Cow is in style a magazine article stretched into a book. (Here’s the free magazine excerpt.) A few basic points, repeated and illuminated, fill less than 150 small pages. Since I don’t need an O’Brian novel or a Clancy brick every time I start reading — who does? — the length is not a negative. Godin gets his point across and then finishes up with a bunch of Brainstorms, paragraph-length discussion starters. Godin is his own Purple Cow, which is actually pretty remarkable. Side note: has anyone since Telly Savalas made being bald a signature item like Godin?