Finally, The Internet As Intended.

We’ve all read the Peanut Butter Memo, that Yahoo! SVP Jerry McGuire Brad Glarinhouse sent to Yahoo!’s executive team. The memo produced plenty of blog-o-sphere chatter, but Robert Young from GigaOM has the best the best reflection I have seen on the memo, and what its says about where Yahoo! is with their strategic vision in light of their recent under performance. His take: Yahoo!’s comparative advantage over Google is their community. So how does Yahoo! turn its comparative advantage into a competitive one? Marketing:

it’s critical to realize that the priorities of “marketing” have been inversed… whereas the primary function of marketing used to be to broadcast a product’s benefit to consumers, the priority of marketing now should be to be a proxy for consumer control, because it is the consumers who will lead your company to success.

This is a lesson that everyone can learn from - not just Yahoo!. Make your marketing about them and not you - unclench and watch the consumer market send it’s fickle attention your way. I said something similar in a post a few months ago -

…the story of the future isn’t consumer-producers competing with traditional producers, its traditional producers embracing and enabling the consumer-producer that will make tomorrow’s markets so interesting.

But don’t take my word for it - i’m just a long tail inhabitor, read Robert’s excellent post instead :-).

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• Entrepreneurs See a Web Guided by Common Sense - New York Times
  So forget Web2.0 - NYTime’s John Markoff has gone and dubbed the semantic web “Web 3.0″. THe article has garnered lots of buzz on blogosphere.