The price of oil is creeping up fast. Right now as I write this post, oil has just risen above $93, a 50% increase over the average price of oil in 2006 (about $60 according to this data). While the current crude oil prices are in absolute dollar figures a record high, on an inflation-adjusted basis, we are not quite at the all-time record level of ~$98 set in 1980; source).

Without getting into the details of why oil prices are rising and if the trend will continue, let’s discuss a certain key question. A co-worker of mine recently asked me if I had changed my driving habits as a result of the increased gas prices in the past year. That was an easy answer for me: “No”. Then he asked the more interesting question: “At what price will you change? $4? $5? $10?”. $10 gas may sound ludicrous, but it’s really not that farfetched. After all, gas prices in most of Europe is at least twice what it is here. In fact, gas is approaching $9/gallon in the UK! (source)

So, what is my magic number? It’s hard to throw out a number but I do know that it’s a high number. My weekly routine does generally involve a fair amount of driving, and there’s few to zero suitable public transportation solutions. Let’s say I drive 1k miles per month and my car averages 25mpg. That’s 40 gallons a month. At current gas prices that’s about $150. At $10/gallon, that’s $400. Annualized, that’s $5,000, or about $8,000 on a pre income tax basis! If gas prices went extremely high, I would undoubtedly need to change my living requirements. Specifically the route from home to the office would either need to involve a short drive or primarily public transport. My driving habits and the fuel economy of my car are very average. With that in mind, let’s remember that the US median household income is not much more than $40,000. About 15% of your post-tax income dedicated just to gas is an impossibly high expense.

The truly scary aspect of rising oil prices is its compounded effect on the cost of living. It’s no secret that higher oil prices correlates with inflation. Not only does high gas prices increase the wallet burden at the gas pump, it also affects the price of many common consumer items because the costs associated with transporting those items rises.

It is often said that Americans view cheap oil as a God-given right. Whether that’s true or not (I tend to agree that it is true), we may soon find that right revoked for good. And at the current rate, it may happen a lot sooner than anyone had predicted. How that affects the landscape of this nation in the decades to come will be absolutely fascinating to watch.

The goal of any news delivery medium is to provide maximum signal-to-noise ratio to its target audience. “Signal” is the set of news items that is of interest to a person. “Noise” is everything else. The reality is that an infinitesimally small percentage of news is interesting to any given person. And that percentage is shrinking every day because more news is being created on a daily basis: more frequently are more people documenting more people who are doing more newsworthy stuff every day.

In order to keep SNR high, news mediums need to focus on the news interests of their audiences more intensely than ever before. However, trying to create a single focus for a group of individuals, each of whose interests differ somewhat, is not a long-term solution. Sites like PerezHilton.com, a leading Hollywood gossip blog, and TechMeme, a leading (especially here in the SV) tech news aggregator, provide a certain segment of the news to an audience specifically interested in that segment. However, over time, the amount of news created in the news segment grows and the the segment bulges. The news publisher either must choose to further narrow their segment, which will alienate some of their existing audience, or publish a higher volume of news, which ultimately lowers the SNR to any given audience member. Either of these options is not a good choice.

Long-term, the only news deliver medium which is viable is the roll-your-own news concept. Geeks here this and start throwing out terms like RSS and OPML but the bottom line is that you don’t have to know technology in order to determine whether a piece of news is interesting to you. Over the past months, I’ve found myself going to news sites, including TechMeme, less and instead refreshing Google Reader more. I’ve added many feeds and the news that arrives is astonishingly interesting to me. Most importantly, my Reader is astonishingly uninteresting to most other people. This kind of relevance is ultimately impossible to achieve by any news publisher that tries to appeal to more than a handful of people.

I don’t want you to conclude from this that I think the penultimate solution is the RSS Reader. The concept of explicitly adding feeds to a reader is just not going to fly with mainstream folks. So what is the perfect news medium that allows you to roll your own news but doesn’t require any tech savvy? Attempts have been made (NewsVine, etc..) but I think we have yet to see the killer news app.

For a long time I have been fascinated by the idea of a friend activity feed for the web. With the explosion of social/ugc websites in recent years, the web is increasingly a 2-way conversation between a website and a user. At the same time, as the rate of growth of content on the web continues to skyrocket, the need to filter new content by relevance is ever greater. One bucket that defines relevance is the bucket which contains the content (I’m using content somewhat loosely here to include activity that doesn’t necessarily generate meaningful content) created by a person’s friends and other important contacts. Finally, it’s impossible to ignore the emergence of the feed - whether it be RSS, pseudo-RSS, email or whatever - in mainstream products. A lot of people “get” the idea of a feed. Put all of these trends together and the result is, essentially, what I refer to as “life streams”: a stream that represents the activity of a person’s life. To be a bit more specific, the activity of a person’s online life. Every person who does anything interactive on the Web implicitly has such a feed and the aggregate of our friend’s streams keeps us up to date with what our friends are up to on the Web.

Now, any facebook user is quite familiar with the concept of a friend activity feed. The Mini-Feed/News Feed feature launched back in the fall of ‘06. The Mini-Feed is a log of a user’s activity on facebook and the News-Feed is an intelligently filtered aggregate of all your friend’s Mini-Feeds. Although these feeds were met with much initial controversy, a facebook without them now seems impossible. For me, the primary entry point into facebook is the news feed. I can see what’s going on with my friends and click deeper into what I find interesting. I can’t imagine having to click on each of my friend’s profile pages to check for updates. Because the News Feeds allows a user to easily discover fresh content in their networks, engagement metrics on facebook increased dramatically.

Amidst the incessant facebook buzz, it can be easy to forget that there exists a social Web outside of the facebook.com domain. Yes, outside facebook is a glorious and interesting world, a world with countless social websites where hundreds of millions of people interact. These social websites collectively face the same problem that faced the pre-feed facebook: in order to find out what my friends are doing I need to go to each of my friend’s pages. Except on the Web the problem is an order of magnitude worse! It’s not just a matter of pulling up my friend’s page, I first need to navigate to a different website. That’s a huge pain in the ass. So much so that I don’t recall in recent weeks going to YouTube, Flickr, to check up on my friends. I lose because I’m surely missing out on interesting content. Websites lose because they aren’t engaging me as well as they could or should be.

Enter FriendFeed. I first heard of FriendFeed when it was written up on TechCrunch. Basically FriendFeed brings facebook’s News Feed like functionality to the Web. I immediately requested an invite and to my surprise was granted one in a few hours. Setting up FriendFeed is a two step process. First you add all the services that you use. Of course they don’t support every website out there, but they mostly support the ones I use. Adding a service involves clicking the icon for that service and entering either your username or your personal url for that website. I added all my services, from del.icio.us to LinkedIn to this blog, in less than five minutes. It really could not have been easier. The second step is adding your friends. Of course, a service such as FriendFeed faces a classic chicken-and-egg problem and it’s growth depends on users inviting (and even compelling) their friends to join.

Pro’s:
1) Easy to set up - Like I said, I had all my services added in just a few minutes and it all worked perfectly.
2) You don’t have to change your behavior for it to work. Unlike other services in the past which have attempted to do similar things, there is nothing special that you have to do to have your activity published to your feed. FriendFeed grabs the RSS feed of your activity that the website publishes. Many services in the past have followed the bookmarking paradigm and forced the user to install and use a browser plugin or bookmarklet to make the service work. And, because of this nuisance, (surprise!) they didn’t work. FriendFeed takes advantage of the fact that every website worth its salt publishes an RSS feed for each user.
3) Social websites will love this and want to be included. FriendFeed helps people discover fresh, relevant (following the assumption that relevance correlates with proximit on a social graph). The more you can push relevant content to users, the more they will engage with your site. This has been proven in many shapes and forms.
4) Privacy from the get go. As was learned from the facebook News Feed launch, . Even if it is the case that few users will really fine tune their privacy settings, FriendFeed’s legitimate privacy controls will prevent it from receiving damning reviews from users, bloggers and the media.

Con’s:
1) FriendFeed.com is not my homepage and may never be. This is possibly the big reason why FriendFeed won’t catch on. A key reason why the News Feed is so effective on Facebook is that when you go to www.facebook.com, you get the page with the News Feed. As I said earlier, it’s a starting point on Facebook. However, FriendFeed is not my starting point on the Web. I suppose it could be if I change my browser’s setting but it’s not yet. I suppose FriendFeed can start by developing widgets for the popular homepages, but I doubt the effectiveness of that strategy for a variety of reasons.
2) Adding your friends to FriendFeed feels a bit creepy. “Hey join this service called FriendFeed so I can stalk what you’re doing on the Web..k thanks!”
3) Content may not be just a click away. On Facebook, feed events from applications are only visible to users who have that application installed. On FriendFeed, that concept is not currently present. I see all feed items for each user regardless of whether I have added that service. Right now, I’m looking at my feed and I see a bunch of Last.fm entries. The headlines sound moderately interesting but I noticed I was hesitant to click because I’m not a Last.fm user and I feel like once I click I’ll eventually be nagged about registering. Not worth the hassle me unconsciously thinks.

My bottom line assessment of FriendFeed is fantastic product execution (great site usability and the product “just works” without requiring the user to change their behavior) on a concept that is sorely missing from the Web. However, I find it difficult to be super bullish because of the homepage issue. It’s going to take a while for the average user to warm up to the idea of making FriendFeed.com their homepage and without this presence, I’m not sure if will grab the mindshare necessary to demonstrate the same success for the social Web as the News Feed did for facebook.

One of the hot news bits of the day was that the mega popular rock band Radiohead shocked the music world by announcing that not only will they not distribute their upcoming album, “In Rainbow”, via a record label (this fact had been known for some time), but also they will make the album available only on their own website for the shockingly low price of….free! Well, “free” doesn’t really capture the spirit of what Radiohead is trying to do. Instead of assigning a fixed price to the music download, they tell the customer that the price is “up to you”. The customer decides the price, no strings attached.

This marketing & distribution strategy that Radiohead can best be described with two words: brilliant and revolutionary.

Some points to consider:

1) The majority of consumers who were planning on getting a pirated copy of the album were never going to buy the album. Piraters are going to pirate…that’s just a fact. You can take measures to curb it but they’re generally ineffective. So, instead of trying to damn these people, people who want to listen to your music, instead why not embrace them. Give these people access to a free, high-quality download and hope that they will become concert-going, album-buying fans in the future.

2) Radiohead creates an incredible amount of good karma with their fans and, really, the music community as a whole. They’re basically saying to the world: “we create music for the sake of creating music and we want it to be enjoyed by as many people as possible.” There are people who truly can’t afford to spend the money for an album and others - each one a potential Radiohead fan - who may never become familiar with Radiohead’s music because they were not compelled to spend money to acquire it. By removing the cost barrier, these people can now listen to the album. Some will hate it, others will love it. Some will eventually pay full market price, others won’t pay a cent. Either way, the net effect for Radiohead is their music will capture some ears and some wallets from a new segment of music listeners.

2) Radiohead is essentially saying that they’re so confident that their album is great, their confident that music listeners will hear the music and feel compelled to compensate the band for the great product.

3) Radiohead will receive a tremendous amount of free PR for their new album from news organizations around the world. Again, the PR isn’t going to affect those people who were already awaiting the new album. Instead, the PR will pique the curiosity of millions of non-Radiohead-listeners.

The upshot of the prior 3 points is that more listeners = more fans = more concert ticket and memorabilia sales = more $ for Radiohead.

4) No record label = no revenue split. No iTunes = no revenue split. By making the album available only via their website, 100% of album revenue will go to Radiohead. (Actually that’s not entirely true..Radiohead will be selling a standard CD in record stores next year but you can almost bet that the vast majorify of people who buy the CD will be those people who had already downloaded - and loved - the digital version). For each CD sale, even a top name like Radiohead will only earn a small fraction of the selling price after everyone else in the supply chain has reaped their cut.

If Radiohead is successful with this expirement, what does this mean for the future of music?

1) This could be the final nail in the coffin for the record label industry. The Time article mentions the following:

“This feels like yet another death knell,” emailed an A&R executive at a major European label. “If the best band in the world doesn’t want a part of us, I’m not sure what’s left for this business.”

Couldn’t have said it better myself. What is left? It’s becoming increasingly clear that artists can promote themselves and their music independently from labels and, if this experiment proves successful, can even distribute and sell their music independently. Even iTunes will need to re-think their strategy. The role of the radio station music dj/director and the corner record store as marketing vehicles is dying rapidly as every iPod is sold and digital music track downloaded.

One question that has has been mentioned in many news articles is that if Radiohead, a top band, is allowing consumers to get their music for free, then how can lesser known, or more specifically the upstart, band compete? I would argue that it’s not as . Most fans who seek out new bands do so not because they can’t access (don’t want to pay for) music from more popular groups. Fans generally do so because they have already exhausted music from popular bands and are in search of something fresh and different. In this likely scenario, the upstart band will not be directly competing with well-known bands for consumer dolllars.

I’ll be eagerly following this story. Hopefully Radiohead will make an effort to be transparent about the various sales/revenue numbers for the new album. No matter what happens though, it is a real possibility that in a decade we will look back on this move by Radiohead as the crack that broke the dam in the record industry.