I’ve been following Joost for a while (who hasn’t?). If you are unfamiliar with it, it’s the new venture of Skype and Kazaa entrepreneurs Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis, where the latter of the two may just be the winner of this year’s weird-name-award.

They’re brilliant. Of course they are. I, like so many others, envy them for a gzillion reasons. They realized early on that if you get enough users of your product you can give it away for free and still make tons of money.

The ad revenues along with the 0,01 percent of users that pay for a premium version made eBay pay them the equivalent of a third world country’s GDP to let go of Skype. They did.

Enter Joost.

Where Kazaa and Skype fulfilled a need that, at the given point in time, was not available anywhere else, Joost comes up short. TV for everyone via the net. Sounds cool enough but here’s where they lose me.

1) Content is King. On TV more than anywhere else.
The content of Joost is near non-existent. The content you want on Joost is House MD, CSI, ER, Grey’s Anatomy etc. If you want user driven content, watching Joe Neighbor teaching his dog to yodel, you go to YouTube and the now endless piggy backers of the aforementioned pioneer site.

2) All TV-shows worth watching end up on the net’s torrent sites fast. Very fast.
Most of the time before they’re even aired in the US, mainly because the Australian schedule is ahead in time.

3) The technical issues are plentiful.
Streaming via peer-2-peer may be an excellent idea but so far it has yet to impress someone who’s used to 1080p on their TV/Computer.

Joost clearly has some terrain to cover still, to prove to us - the users - that it’s worthwhile downloading and browsing i.e. spending time with their product and the brands they want to push via it. Right now Joost isn’t there.

I think Joost need to figure out where they want to be in the market and what supply vacuum they should be filling. Perhaps producing their own content is the only way, because relying on users to do it for them won’t work. We got so many options that are easier and frankly better for that purpose.

Whatever Internet once was, it is now an advertising arena where links have become a highly valued commodity.

Companies have been started around it (blogvertising etc.) and nowadays everyone and their dog knows that nothing is more valuable in terms of ending up at the top of your favourite search engine, than a link from a trustworthy source.

You can have all the H1, H2 and TITLE-tweaks you want, but nothing brings you faster to #1 SERP than a bunch of good links.

The more trustworthy the source, the more valuable the link. I don’t think that it has truly caught on for everyone in schools and other governmental or federal institutions exactly how valuable a link from them really are.

A link from an .EDU or even better a .GOV source, is today something that many would pay a lot of money for. For sure.

Ultimately, if you don’t watch out, it can start to change how you think as a publisher for the worse. You start writing about subjects you know contain high paying keywords, or worse, you write about a subject just to be able to link to someone who’s further down the food chain than you, and get paid for it. Reduced credibility inevitably follows.

Anyway, it’s not all bad. I like advertising, and I like the game it comes with. Trying to stay ahead of the herd. Internet is more business than ever, and the ways to monetize from it is really beginning to become clear.

Sooner than we think it will be clear to everyone, and that’s when the early adopters can begin to cash in big, and the followers need to think about what will be the next big thing.

Where are you going to be?

Camper shoes. Great shoes. Anyone who’s somewhat savvy on the footwear side knows that Camper has that cool “now”-thing going for them. If there’s anything called “Designer shoes” that’s them.

So it’s all the more mystery why they insist of having what may be the worst web presence seen of late. Granted, there’s nearly nothing harder than coming up with a sleek and cool website for clothes or clothe like products, while being informative. But theirs is so far off the chart I think a regular list with photos of the shoes to the left and price + combo boxes with size and a description to the right would have it beat hands down.

I think parts of the reason why amazon.com has stayed in business over web for as long as they have, is due to the fact that they haven’t yet gone overboard on “let’s create an app-like web for our products”. That approach doesn’t work yet, in part because the net isn’t robust to send home 1 meg per product yet and in the case of shoes or books you want to browse, and you don’t want to be sitting with a “loading…” sign in your face, then you go elsewhere.

Everything has a format it’s best suited for, and for retail on the web, that is lists, categorized, tagged, cross-product, “other ppl who bought this”, along with great pictures in reasonable size. Resist the temptation of 360 views, user interaction with an animated version of the product, and “the story of the product - in pictures”. We’re just not there yet.

Still, I recommend you visit your well sorted shoe store in actual reality and get yourself suited in a couple of Campers for the summer. You won’t regret that buy.