A friend of mine was telling me about a meeting he attended earlier this week, where the idea of “stickiness” kept coming up. “It felt like 1999,” he said. “Does anyone seriously talk about ‘stickiness’ anymore?” I have to admit that I never liked the term, even when it was in vogue as a leading indicator of success on the web. Today, however, it means even less. The fact is, in the age of RSS, YouTube, Netvibes and Digg, success isn’t about keeping visitors locked into your site; it’s about getting them to have multiple interactions with your content, wherever it is. If your visitors read your RSS feed, check your content on their phones, find you through somebody’s mashup and see you quoted in a popular blog, you’ve gained far more mindshare than you would have just from having them spend an extra thirty seconds on your site. Call it Stickiness 2.0 if you must. Of course, monetizing all of that mindshare is still tricky. But then it was never exactly a cakewalk making money from Stickiness 1.0, which is why the concept sort of fell out of favor at around the same time “portals” did. Back in the early post-bubble days of 2001, Time’s Anita Hamilton pointed out that “the hard part for sticky sites is making money. Ironically, the stickier a site is, the less appealing it is to advertisers. ‘If a site is sticky, that means people are not clicking on ads,’ says Classmates CEO Michael Schutzler, a top Net advertiser.” In the age of Stickiness 2.0, the leading business model seems to be to get acquired by Google or Yahoo. Obviously, that only works for a handful of companies, so I certainly hope some of the other companies that are enabling Stickiness 2.0 find a way to make money, and don’t end up as this century’s answer to Kosmo.com.

When I was living in Hong Kong back in the early 90s, Chinese New Year was the holiday: Thanksgiving, Christmas and July 4th all rolled into one. The town completely shut down for about a week, and flights were booked solid. While local folks went to visit family on the mainland, we gwailos would often take advantage of the break to explore other parts of Asia (if we could get a flight, that is) or to just enjoy the town during a quiet period, much as some New Yorkers take to the streets of a largely tourist- and local-free Manhattan over Memorial Day weekend.

These days, I don’t do much for Chinese New Year, but one thing I can count on is the annual email from one of my former colleagues. The Christmas letter/email has become commonplace in America, and many such letters tend to be either tedious, fatuous or both. This former colleague, who always sends his message out just ahead of Chinese New Year, is a major exception. His emails include just enough information to keep me up to date about his activities over the previous year, without lurching into the boasts, bravado and bombast so common in these yearly exercises. Most of all, his emails make me feel like I’m still a part of his extended family, even if we haven’t spoken in a decade. So, Kung Hei Fat Choi, Bao Anyou! It wouldn’t be Lunar New Year without you.

My old pals at DownloadSquad have taken up the cause of Julie Amero, and I feel it’s high time for anyone concerned about justice in the digital age to join them. If you’re not familiar with the details of the case, Amero was working as a Connecticut substitute teacher when, in 2004, she found herself facing an endless barrage of porno popups on a computer in a classroom she was supervising. If you’ve ever been stuck on a computer with an old browser, no pop-up blocker and no anti-spyware software installed, you may have experienced the chain of events that led Amero to this predicament: after clicking on a seemingly innocuous banner ad or URL, you find yourself confronted with a graphic popup. As you attempt to close it, more popups show up, in an endless stream of unwanted vulgarity. If you’re an experienced computer user, at this point you’d probably hit CTRL-ALT-DEL and kill iexplore. Or you might just shut the damn thing off. But Amero wasn’t an experienced user, and had been told not to shut down the computer. She ran to the faculty lounge for help, and was met by shrugs of indifference.

That should have been the end of the story (at least for Amero; for the school, it should have been the catalyst for a plan to upgrade its network and security infrastructure, or at least install a half-decent popup blocker). Instead, Amero found herself in the midst of a Kafkaesque journey through the legal system, culminating in her conviction last month for endangering her students by exposing them to pornography. Confident of her innocence, Amero had refused a plea bargain that could have given her probation and a chance to wipe the case from her record. Instead, she went to court and found that her expert witness wasn’t even allowed to offer evidence of her innocence, including technical information proving that the popups were driven by adware on the classroom computer.

Amero’s sentencing hearing is March 3rd, and she faces a maximum of 40 years in prison. DLS recommends contacting Connecticut’s Board of Pardons and Paroles to ask that Amero be pardoned. Here’s the contact info:

Connecticut Board of Pardon and Parole
(203) 805-6605
Chairman Gregory Everett
Rowland Government Center
55 West Main Street, Suite 520
Waterbury, Connecticut 06702
You can email Chairman Gregory Everett at greg.everett@po.state.ct.us

Cyberporn and its effect on minors are serious issues and should be addressed aggressively by law enforcement authorities and elected officials. But jailing Julie Amero won’t do anything to protect a single child. All it will do is destroy the life of an innocent woman who has already gone through far too much pain and suffering.

So, the big news yesterday was that Time Warner’s Turner Broadcasting division will shell out $2 million to make amends to the city of Boston for the “bomb scare” generated by the company’s guerilla campaign for “Aqua Teen Hunger Force.” Sounds to me like money well spent. While the blogosphere mercilessly mocks Beantowners for their gullibility, and the MSM wrings their hands about “guerilla marketing gone wrong,” the fact is that the Boston “fiasco” was the best thing ever to happen to this campaign. After all, according to the Turner people, the LED signs at the center of the marketing effort had been in place in at least nine other cities for several weeks. But the fact is, nobody noticed them. Do a search for blog entries, mainstream news or even newsgroup postings on terms like “Aqua Teen signs,” “Mooninite LED” or similar terms, and you know what you’ll turn up prior to January 31, when the Boston news broke? Zilch. Nada. Zippo. So, yes, this was definitely a fiasco — until Boston. In just 24 hours, this campaign went from being the marketing equivalent of one hand clapping to front-page news. You just can’t buy that kind of coverage. Well, actually, you can. For just $2 million, Turner got thousands of news hits, gained new cred among the hip young viewers the company was trying to reach, and even created a lucrative secondary market in Mooninite gear. And they’re guaranteed a second round of publicity once the “Aqua Teen” movie rolls out later this year. As far as marketing efforts go, this was a very successful bargain — even if the Boston incident wasn’t planned in advance.

Update: Yes, I know that Cartoon Network head Jim Samples fell on his sword over this, but I still think that, by the definition of a guerilla campaign, this was still a huge success. Yes, the mainstream media, politicos and the Boston brass were outraged and demanded someone’s head. But, the fact remains that this campaign  struck a chord with its intended audience of young, hip males. Was it right to install these devices in devices in cities all over the country, given our post-9/11 suspicions of any unusual object that shows up in public? Heck, no. But since when is marketing — especially the guerilla kind — about doing the right thing? So, yeah, maybe Samples had to go. But if the “Aqua Teens” flick is a hit, he’ll have no trouble landing a new job.