Obsessive readers will of course already know all about the business-oriented blog I maintain, [metafeed], over at my Blogspot location. For new readers, I should explain that this is yet another attempt for me at learning more about the world of business, in preparation for opening this big-budget arts center here in Chicago that I'm trying to do these days. My reasoning was - I was reading all these dozens and dozens of articles and blog entries a day anyway, so why not just pick the most interesting ones out and talk about them referrer-style at my blog, with a kinda smartass tone to my comments like you might find at Fleshbot or Bookslut. And then having the blog will also help me keep up with my reading, because of course I'll always be wanting new items to write about there.

So I've been doing that about seven months now, and if I can toot my own horn a bit, I have a growing audience there that I'm actually pretty happy with. The actual numbers aren't too high, to tell you the truth (although who knows - I don't get stats on how many people subscribe to the feed), but it's a very interesting mix of readers over there, I think. The fact is that I am always contacting all these coolass smart marketing experts in New York and London and wherever, and as a result of my conversations many of them end up starting to read my blog as well as me reading theirs. And so I know, for example, that Piers Fawkes and the boys over at PSFK read it, as does Nick Wilson at Threadwatch, and I think that Douglas Atkin and Seth Godin check it every so often as well. And these are all the marketing people out there actually winning awards and picking up huge clients, so it's gratifying to me that such people would find it worth their time to read my goofy little business blog.

But there's been this strange side-effect to [metafeed]'s growing popularity as well; for the first time in my life, I'm getting directly pitched an increasing amount of times from tech companies and software companies and publishing companies, about me possibly reviewing their product and talking about it there. Which is quite surreal, to say the least, because I don't think of my goofy little blog as nearly anything serious enough as a traditional media outlet, worthy of a company's direct time and attention like that. But you know, we are living in the Age of the Blogosphere, so they tell me, where I guess the right pitches to the right people (all the connectors out there, like me) really can result in some positive things happening.

But of course, let's not forget that I'm not a professional journalist, am not pursuing writing as a career, am not in fact making a single penny for running [metafeed], not even the five bucks a week or whatever I could get by running Google ads there (which I don't do because I don't think five bucks a week is worth bothering my readers that damn much - and goddamnit, I wish more of you fucking bloggers felt that way too). So I can afford to be picky - to write back with questions and suggestions before agreeing to review their product, of being choosy over just whose product I'm going to accept. And what really surprises me is just how many companies abandon the pitch at that point, preferring to just not contact me again instead of responding to my questions, questions I always consider legitimate and the thing their customers are just going to be asking themselves anyway.

I mean, take this email I got a month ago, for example, from Paul at a new social-networking site here in Chicago called Meetro, asking if I would maybe give them a plug at my blog. And see, I had already known about Meetro myself, because of this great article about them in the Chicago Tribune, and had actually tried to use the service myself a couple of weeks previous. But while Meetro is admittedly based on a pretty cool gimmick (that its proprietary software sits on your laptop, and determines a location for you based on where your WiFi signal is coming from, which it broadcasts to your friends and others in your location), they have no way for anyone else to join in the fun as well. That is, as a Treo owner, I can't go down to Intelligentsia Coffeehouse and manually log in, tell the Meetro server myself that I'm at Intelligentsia, and then look for other members who are getting automatically located from there, by using their laptops. And see, I don't have a laptop, so under their current structure I'm simply shit out of luck - I don't get to play with Meetro at all.

So I wrote back to Paul and said just as much to him, and asked them, "Why don't you guys give members a chance to manually log in if they want, like they do at Dodgeball and MySpace? The automatic detection stuff is cool, don't get me wrong, and sets you off from all your competitors. But it's no good to me if I can't access it on my Treo, and if I ended up writing about it at my blog, my review would be all about this, about how I couldn't actually use it. I'd love to hear more about whether you've considered this, or if you would in the future."

And a month has gone by and I haven't heard from anyone there since. And I think of what a shame this is, really, that they wouldn't just take the time to answer my questions, which I felt legitimately deserved answers. Because how are you going to compete as a professional social-networking service, if you don't let anyone with a mobile device participate? This is an awfully big fuckin' question when it comes to a social-networking service, most of which are precisely based around mobile devices, and logging in your location through instant SMS protocol. And like I said, that automatic detection shit of theirs really is legitimately cool, and is the thing that could really raise them above their competitors in terms of popularity. But you can't offer just one and not the other, and it's a shame I think that they never really responded to it all. I would've loved to have posted some good news about that here, but unfortunately I can't.

Ah, but then there's the much better case of Scott Jacobs and Omniquiti. Scott found me through one of the Palm Google groups I belong to, and wanted to let me know about their software app Lathe, which he claimed did something that sounded almost too good to be true - that it compresses almost any video file you can give it, to play elegantly on Palm devices. (Note, by the way, that Lathe is not an actual mobile video viewer; you will need an actual player as well, such as the excellent and totally free TCMCP.) And so I said as such - "I'm sorry, but your product sounds like bullshit" - and he said he'd be happy to send a free copy to me if I wanted, and I could just try it out myself and see what I think.

So I thought, well, okay, that's about as honest as it gets - just send the damn software and let me have an unfettered look at it. So he sent it, and I downloaded it, and that went perfectly; then I installed it on my computer and that went perfectly. And so then I pull up the user interface, and it's basically that kind of UI I really love - where there are both presets for amateurs like me, and a whole vast customization system for professionals, videophiles and others. (I'd tell you what some of them were, but like I said I'm a video amateur, and don't know my KmgvHs from my MysghYs.)

So I went right to the presets, of course, and there was a button right there for the Treo 600, in icon form, so I clicked it and it asked me for the orientation of the screen when I'll be watching it. And then it asked for a video file, and I fed it one (an MPEG - old poetry video from a German acquaintance of mine named Xochil in Berlin), and thirty seconds later it had spit out an .avi file that was literally one tenth the size of what the original was (in other words, 3 megs from an original 30). And then I loaded it on my memory card, and stuck my memory card in my Treo, and pulled up TCMCP, and opened the file. And it played! Perfectly! With full stereo sound still attached! And no jerkiness or frame miscalibration whatsoever!

So then I tried a file that was originally an .avi itself, and then compressed perfectly too. And then I tried a Quicktime (.mov) file, and that compressed perfectly too. (In fact the only format it can't take yet is Windows Media [.wmv], and Scott says that even that will be coming later this year.) Wow - a piece of software that does exactly what it's supposed to, as quickly and simply and powerfully as it's supposed to. So hell yeah I'll give this product a favorable review, and get on my website and tell all you damn people to go out and get the damn thing yourselves. And note this is not just for Palms (although it is literally the first stable program I've ever seen for Palm video compression); there are presets for PocketPCs, PSPs, cellphones, iRivers and others. And if I still haven't sold you, consider this: according to other reviews (I didn't get to try this myself), it will shrink a two-hour video file (like an illegally-burned DVD, for example) to 250 megs, just perfect for fitting on a little $30 256-meg memory card, which means you can take full-length movies with you on your Palm or cellphone. And if that still doesn't sell you, consider this - that Lathe only costs five dollars. Yes, the full commercial version.

So it's all about how you pitch it, I guess - whether you follow through on original emails, give the person a chance to test it themselves, be honest about your limitations. And I guess that's why I'm today writing this big great review of Lathe, and not Meetro. Which is just funny to me, like I said, because this year is the first time I've ever dealt with this issue myself. (And jeez, let's not even talk about the half-dozen books now sitting around my apartment, that publicists keep hoping I'll read and review, even though I keep fucking insisting to them that I'm not a fucking litblogger.) Urgh, these people sometimes.

Okay, so an update about my upcoming trips, since I've still got another 600 words or so left here before my blogging software crashes:

First, I've decided to postpone my South Africa tour to May 2006, six months later than its original October 2005 date. This is because my last book, Ach Du Heilige Scheisse! still isn't even out yet, plus I'm going to do an active marketing campaign this time for that book (virtual book tour and the works), before even starting to think about the South Africa tour. And so I'm really just going to need that extra six months, especially considering that I have a whopping US$4,000 to raise for this particular one (3300 euros, 2200 pounds), because of the extra-expensive plane ticket and the extra expenses of traveling while over there. So, I'll be changing that at those web pages soon, the next time I'm on a desktop.

So this then leaves me free to go to New York City in October instead, which is something I've been wanting to do for a year, because my brother and sister-in-law live out there now and I miss hanging out with them. Plus of course I'm making plans to meet up with all these new marketing friends I have who are out there, and of course need to find time for all my old poetry friends (and will probably do a performance at the Bowery Poetry Club, so I can catch up with my old friends Shappy Seasholtz and Bob Holman), and will even maybe participate in an orgy while there, but I think I'll save the details of that for another time. And of course I need time for just the simple tourist things I want to do while there, like go to the Whitney again, and go to Moby's little teahouse on the lower east side, to see if I can stalk him and get my picture taken with him (apparently he actually hangs out there all day, whenever he's not on tour). Tee hee! So that'll all be a lot of fun, I think, and let's pray that I'll be able to raise the relatively small $400 (330 euros, 220 pounds) needed for that trip by September 15, that trip's deadline.

And then I found out that my brother and sister-and-law are actually visiting St. Louis from August 19th through the 22nd, so I called my parents and I think we're all going to try to coordinate things so that I'll be back in town that weekend as well, just because it's been something like two damn years since all of us were in the same place together. And then my old childhood chum Tom Henkey heard about this, and so now is thinking of going himself, in which case I would just tag along with him as we drove the trip.

This would, in fact, be my first car-based roadtrip since switching my blog over to an automated system, and you know what that means - that I could post live entries during the roadtrip itself, not only text but photos and audio, all straight from my Treo. Live blog entries from goofy roadtrips! What a crazy modern world! (Imagine me shaking my hands in the air Yakof-Schmirnoff style while saying that.) So if we go on this road trip, that's exactly what I'm going to do - and, well, post entries from the airports if I fly instead. Oh, I'm such a junkie, man.

Auf Wiedersehen!