Michael is enjoying his brand new pair of Keen sneakers, which he bought from Zappos.  Michael is enjoying a triple grande latte, which he bought from the Starbucks at the corner of 4th and Brannan. Michael is comfortably clad in a pair of Levi 501 blue jeans, which he bought at the Levi's store in Union Square in San Francisco.  Michael is typing on a 13" white Apple MacBook, which was purchased for him through CDW's remarkable online store.

Trevor Edwards, Nike's corporate vice president for global brand and category management, in the New York Times on how they're shifting their advertising and marketing spend: "We're not in the business of keeping the media companies alive. We're in the business of connecting with consumers."

Kevin Kelly on sell-side advertising. Worth quoting at length and reading in full.

The simple idea is that you can craft a publication, or a reading/viewing experience, primarily by choosing and sequencing ads. Selecting the right cool ads -- not merely cool content -- is the attraction. Not just tiny adsense text ad boxes, but full page ads, or even commercials inside widgets. When I was part of the team making Wired magazine a decade ago, half the battle at launch was landing the right cool ads. We had to convince the advertisers to join (and pay) us. But what if we could just choose the cool ads we wanted, without having to ask permission? What if we could simply harvest the the best ads (measured by any metric we choose) and were paid for the ones we ran according to the traffic we brought to them?

Two potential options for iPhone "early adopter refund" logistics:

1. Require users to present their original purchase receipt for their iPhone (along with the phone itself) at the Apple Store by a certain date. Check receipt for validity, check iPhone serial number for valid date range, check the customer's photo identification. Have them fill out a form, and only after validating the purchase and collecting appropriate personal identification, present the user an Apple Store gift card for $100.

2. On iPhone sync, during a scheduled update, recognize that the device was activated before the price drop, or through the serial number that it was purchased before the price drop. Connect the phone to the user's iTunes store / Apple ID email address. Offer the customer $100 (or potentially even more, $110?) in iTunes store credits on the spot, or an emailed coupon with a custom code and potentially a custom generated bar code that can be printed and brought to the store.

Option 1 has the potential to maximize breakage. Option 2 has the potential to minimize breakage and provide more immediate data to Apple on redemption patterns. If they do something like option 2, in something approaching "real time" (like they pull that off in the next week or two), you have to wonder if the price drop and resulting letter from Steve was planned well in advance...

Remember the Google / AOL deal of December 2005? One of the bullet points in the press release was the announcement of "enabling Google Talk and AIM instant messaging users to communicate with each other, provided certain conditions are met." I'd love to find out what those conditions were, and what so far has prevented them from being met. A boy can still dream of federated AIM, can't he?

Stephanie DiMarco, CEO of Advent Software (and my old boss) tells the story of starting, leaving and coming back to the company in the Sunday Times.

Not only was I young, I looked young. It was a challenge to be taken seriously. I was at a trade show when I overheard a competitor talking about Advent. He said, "It’s that little company in California run by that little girl." I wasn’t going to let it get me down. I turned it into an advantage. As the public face of the business, one that people didn’t expect, I was able to surprise a lot of customers. That competitor is no longer in business.

Eh, who needs clickthrough rates. From the Facebook Flyer FAQ, the answer to the question "Can I see how many people clicked on my Flyer?"

Unfortunately we can't provide you with a click-through-rate for your Flyer. These rates vary drastically from one Flyer to the next because they depend on the interest that is generated by the ad's content. The value proposition of Flyers is primarily the high volume and localized exposure of your ad, not click through rates.

Business Week's Jon Fine on the Dow Jones two tier stock structure:  "This insulated the Journal from some of the harsher, short-term demands of the market. It also insulated Dow Jones' management from feeling market pressure to make any moves that might have made the company bigger—and thus much harder for News Corp. to swallow."

I'm loving Cringely lately.  From his latest, about the 700mhz spectrum auctions:  "There is, however, an alternative motivation here beyond simple megalomania and corporate self-delusion: Google may actually be playing a game of poker."

John Funk riffs on pmarca's post re. working with whales: "When you're a minnow, shouting, threatening, arguing, and getting pride confused with objectives gets you exactly nothing. You'll end up with no deal, chewed up and spat out by the whale...."

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(un)filtered is a product of michael sippey. there are older things at sippey.typepad.com/filtered, with archives back to 2003, and even older things at stating the obvious.