Is Hugh doing this on purpose to get buzz for the wine he’s shilling ?

Intentional or not, it looks like his sensationalism may get a new group of people talking about the wine.

How large and influential that group is is debatable, but there’s some possibility of a nice coup – French cred for Stormhoek.

It’s fun watching him work.

What happens when Click-n-Clack meet Tom Peters ?

A couple of months ago, I was invited to participate in the Odeo beta. (Amazing who they invite when all you have to do is sign up on their handy webform : – )

One of the first podcasts I signed up for—just out of curiousity—was the PRI show Brain Brew (odeo page), the product of Doug Hall and his Eureka Ranch product- & business-development consultancy.

It’s rapidly become one of my favorites.

It’s a stage for idea-guy Doug to talk with small business owners to help solve common problems.

After listening to four or five shows his basic formula for small business success is pretty clear:

Currently, consumers discover vendors that fit their needs.

Dave Winer and Doc Searls are making the case that the discovery should be happening in the opposite direction.

Dave talks about allowing people to express their desires more easily:

People like me who were in Billings last month and last year and the year before, or who might be here right now, maybe even in the same hotel. Maybe I’ve been here before and did these searches and found a perfect place and now would like to find another….

So, how? I think the answer is to put the tools for constructing data formats into the hands of users. We’ve been going about it all wrong, coming up with straight-jackets for users, and expecting them to conform to some set of rules that make no sense about how the characters should be encoded, when it’s ideas and relationships to other ideas that we want to make it easy for them to express.

And Doc Searls says it more succintly:

As a customer, I want to present myself to a marketplace and have providers there compete for my business.

Of course, put this way, it’s a problem that has had application-specific offerings for years now. Can anyone say LendingTree ?

But a broader, more general set of descriptors with vendors doing the searching/matching/quoting is compelling.

I’m not sure if Dave’s prescription is right; like Steve Gillmore, I don’t quite get what he’s doing with OPML yet. As annoying and self-righteous as I find Dave’s public persona (don’t know him except from his blog posts, podcasts and the occassional video), this deserves more exploration.

I immediately go to a social application driven by tags ‘cause that’s the hammer of the moment. Like any other social-app solution, it has to be useful to individuals out of the box to overcome the scale problem and reach the critical mass that it needs to attract vendors. To help clarify the desireability of the transaction (for either vendor or customer), a reliable reputation engine would be critical.

Whatever the implementation, this is definitely ripe, fertile territory for exploration.