Part 1: Software junkie, advertising and convergence

Howdy and welcome, Sean. You founded Cool Tool in 1996 a short time before the Internet boom. Why did you create the website?
I started the site because I was (and am) a total software junkie. When I was writing the "Internet Power ToolKit" in 1995, I kept wondering why there wasn't a good site with all the Internet programs people needed on it. There were a few, but nothing I liked... so I decided to start my own.

You also have the Cool Tool Network newsletter, can you tell us about its purpose and target audience?
The purpose of the newsletter is to promote the site. We publish "teasers" for the daily content as an effort to get people to click through and view the site. The target audience is other nerds...and I mean that in the most loving way possible! Currently we've got over 6,000 subscribers.

What are some things you recommend to someone who is considering launching a website and/or newsletter?
Test, test, test. Put something up and see how it goes. Change it as you need to. Pay attention to your users and respond to their requests. Don't expect that it's going to make you a millionaire...it probably won't. You just have to do it because you love it.

You use advertising banners on Cool Tool. How do you go about obtaining advertisers?
They come to us. We're running Cool Tool more as a promotional vehicle for the company and not as a major venture. We have no ad sales people.

In Click-Z, you recently wrote about FragranceNet.com, a successful online business that uses performance-based advertising. How does it work?
Basically, they just work smart. They have only grown when they have the revenues to grow. Sure, they're still small potatoes (roughly $5 million in sales) but they're alive and thriving. This makes them a lot more successful than the giant venture-capital-sucking dot.bombs (eve.com clickmango.com come to mind) that were their competitors. And they only pay for performance-based advertising, keeping marketing costs way down.

What do you think are other effective ways to advertise and market on the Internet?
Not to be evasive on this one, but the best ways to advertise and market are what works best for the goals you've set for your campaign. If you're doing direct response, then pay-for-performance is probably best. If you're doing branding, then screw the click thrus and go for experiences that best communicate your brand.

Nobody looks at banners anymore, so going with contextually-placed links and mini-sites is a lot more effective in the long run. In some cases, advertorials are good if they're handled honestly.

What are three tools that you consider the coolest today?
That's hard to say. The market has gotten so saturated with "me, too" technologies that there are few things coming out that have gotten us really jazzed. I do like Spiderdance's TV/Web synchronization software, which lets broadcasters link live television shows to live Web content. I think that it's the first major step towards real convergence.

I'm also a huge fan of some of the P2P technologies: Gnutella and Napigator, simply because of what they've done for the debate on what intellectual property means in the digital age.

Finally, it's kind of tough to beat Apple's QuickTime technology for ease of use and utility.

Earlier, you used the term "convergence" and many of your ClickZ articles refer to it as the next big thing. Can you tell us what it is and why we're headed there?
Convergence is a vague term, but necessarily so. It refers to the technological vanishing point we're headed to, where PC intelligence and functionality becomes embedded into everything we interact with. Convergence on TV means that we'll be able to access an increasingly wide range of data services from our couches...without having to keep a separate PC in the room.

Convergence in mobile data technology means being able to access inventory data while you're on a sales call with a customer. Convergence in our cars means that we'll have live access to travel data as we drive...in a way that we control. Convergence means that we'll have access to information any time, anywhere we need it.

In effect, the concept of convergence represents the logical next step in consumer behavior as consumers, powered with increasing access to information, take control of their lives away from the producers of products and hold the reins of control in their own hands.

Continued...