It's easy to call something innovative. People do it all the time. They relaunch their site to include a +1 feature over a competitor and all the sudden they're hailing their product as innovate and new. Really, innovative implies something that hasn't been done before, and should imply something that pretty much makes the alternatives feel obsolete in comparison.

Google released AdSense, a truly innovative way to create an effective advertising network. It, and the ensuing copy cats, took over the advertising world and made publishing online for profit approachable by even the smallest, most obscure people. YouTube, as simple as it may be, made online video accessible and launched an entire genre of copy cats. Friendster, even if it was kind of lame and lacked a sense of purpose, kick started a million social networks. Blogger brought blogging to the masses.

Tough economic times seems to bring out the next generation of innovation. After playing with AppStore and some of the Apple dev tools for the iPhone, we may very well see a slew of truly innovative out of the box thinking come out of the mobile landscape. The stuff that's out there right now is fairly tame, nothing has really blown me away, but no doubt it's coming. It's probably waiting for approval on appstore this very moment. We'll see.

In thinking in terms of the "new web", are there other examples of things that are truly innovative, or are we building better and better variations of existing themes? Any thoughts on real world applications for mobile? I saw some stuff on crowd sourcing traffic data. That may not reach a critical mass, but that's a killer line of thinking in terms of applications.

Digital Music
Some of you may know that I'm a fan of Stephen Wolfram. Every since "A New Kind of Science" was published, I've used "rulethirty" on many of the various forums I'm on, in IRC, etc. (which I thought was fairly unique until I just google searched it and find some creepy looking dude using it on a porn network... fantastic..) When I was young, we had a copy of Mathematica. Even though I didn't understand much of its power at the time, it still was a pretty fascinating piece of software. I still don't fully comprehend its power, of course.. but.. I can appreciate it ;)

Anyway.. Marc Andreessen posted something on Stephen Wolfram talking about starting companies. It's a great read, but more interesting was the link at the end to this. Behold, the power of math.

Orlando Magic
The magic are looking good. I know, I know.. "Fool me once.." But for real, we're looking like we got us a squad down here in Orlando. Over the off season, it was really tough to see how it was all going to come together. The billy d thing, the paying rashard 1.4 billion thing, etc. So far so good, and I think SVG was the right man for the coaching position after all.

Billy D was the good looking girl, while SVG is the girl who's good at cooking and cleaning. You just have to decide what you're looking for. Magic fans have been hungry long enough. Cook us a championship Stan!

Okay, okay.. I'll stop.

Kevin Smith
Robbed, as all non-bcs conference athletes usually are, from the doak walker award. 24k told Florida Today that he was planning on coming back for his senior season though, so there's always next year.

We have a more favorable schedule, we're only losing 18 seniors, we have some great talent coming out of of their redshirts, and Conference USA will be just as awful as it was this year. I smell an outside chance of a bcs busting opportunity, with kevin leading the way. Can't wait.

Thanksgiving
We're heading to Ohio this year to spend time with Kat's family. It'll be the second time I've been away for thanksgiving, and my first time in Ohio outside of spring/summer months. Gotta go figure out what box my jacket is in.... ;)

Happy thanksgiving!

Sorry, listening to NoFX for the first time in awhile...

Random stuff from around the web:

• Is Mahalo Already worth $100m? Jason Calacanis is a pretty persuasive guy with a whole lot of connections. I have a feeling he's going to be pulling in a boat load of VC funding on this one.
• The Seek One of Gavin's sunday side projects we just launched under Humidity Labs. Nothing to crazy, just a pretty little instant domain search thingy. You may have noticed we linked to QuarterlyCall as well. While not resembling its actual intention, we figured getting a quick mashup out there was better than parking it. Hopefully the domain will "mature" and gain some search engine street cred before we get around to actually pursuing it. We'll see.. Yay sunday side projects.
  
• Internships A small guide we put together on Internships over at the Emurse blog. Timely information to help capture some of that summer search craze ;)
• Google timeline search Pretty cool. I'm not exactly sure what for. But cool.
  
• Collection of Jerry Falwell Quotes Just, you know, in case you wanted a refresher.
• Suspended Disbelief In such a heated playoff series, this is truly a shame. 2 players suspended over something silly.
• "WWTD? Who Cares?" Lots of folks in a tizzy over Ron Paul's GOP debate comments the other night. While his baseline assertion that our foreign policies over the last 50 years are to blame for 9/11 are echoed in Bin Laden's fatwa, Jonah Goldberg from the National Review has a great piece outlining some of the specific objections with Congressman Paul's statements that many on the right share. Personally, I enjoyed seeing Rudy return to form and lay the smack down ;)
  
• Blogsmith.com launches Finally, our cute blogging platform has a home.

Around the Web:

• Summer Jobs - Summer job search tips and advice. It's that time of year.
• Personal Branding Blog
  
• How to Start a Business
• Cool Workspaces

Happy holiday :)

We're busy on Emurse today trying to line up some big changes we have coming out later this month. We went ahead and knocked out a couple of user requests though, and will probably mix in a few more here and there as we go. Users now have weekly traffic digests for their web resume and can now change their subdomain -- I was probably changing one a day for people who picked things that were completely ridiculous for a job hunt ;) Good work people, good work.

In other news, the crocodile hunter is dead. Someone should build another recipe thing but maybe also another online calendar somewhere, seriously, maybe a to do list manager for good measure. Paul Graham says something I think sums it up -- "Make something people want." I guess he never got around to telling Kiko (ooohhh snap! j/k). Also, Christoph and his friends do neat things, Chris Messina and his friends have neat ideas and our UCF season tickets rule (see picture). Theocacao has a relatively interesting post on Apple's recent success.

That is all.

Things are busy on multiple fronts.. Hoping to get 100% of the netscape.com traffic pointed to the new site soon (we've only taken on about 50% of it so far, bleh.)

Netscape link:

• Jason blogs about why the old netscape.com site was tossed.

Emurse link:

• I recently did some Q&A with C.M. Russell over at Secrets of the Job Hunt. The last couple of interviews I've done have simply come from people emailing me and asking. If anyone else is looking for information or content for a blog post, feel free to do the same ;) alex at emurse.com

Fun:

that Orlando has 168 lakes? It also has the second largest convention center in the country and is the nations largest tourist destination with over 50 million visitors annually. Once your done hanging around the world famous amusement parks, you can enjoy a big mac at the world's largest McDonalds or enjoy one of the many PGA caliber golf courses.

Or you could just hang out near UCF, the nations 7th largest university, and sleep on your buddies couch.. Either way, I mean.. it's cool..

I'm here until next wednesday, with a brief field trip to melbourne for the weekend (Chris VanMeiter's wedding -- word.) God bless working 100% virtually.