The “Wow” starts now, says Microsoft launching Its Windows Vista with a 500 milion dolar marketing campaign. The faces of the executives present at the event express something completely else though: boredom. Once again: believe in you message. Not believing your own message results in, well, just empty marketing. The picture is by The New York Times. | via Seth Godin

After having revolutionaized the long distance call market, the founders of Skype set out to do the same thing for television. Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis have been working on a project codenamed ‘the Venice Project’ (named after the conference room the first meeting was held in). A few days ago, the projects real name was revealed as being Joost.

The idea of Joost es to distribute television content over the internet, through a Peer to Peer technology (unlike iTunes). The big advantage of the P2P network is the fact that popular content is actually easier and faster to access (since it is stored on most locations) whereas in a normal service high demand often means slow delivery.

In a first stage, Joost will be an application you install on your PC (and Mac?) which would be hooked up to your television screen. Later on, the idea is to cater other screens as well (think mobile).

The Joost application is based on Mozilla, which is open source. This means that soon we will be able to download plug-ins and overlays made by third parties, FireFox style (also Mozilla based). So not only will the service allow you to time shift content, it will also offer an enhanced viewer experience.

Imagine a plug-in that adds directors comments to a movie (who hasn’t ever dived into IMDB after watching a flick?), or a plug-in showing similar content. Obviously, there’s a lot of nice things marketers could do as well, such as linking products in a show (the casts wardrope?) to ecommerce websites.

Joost is still in Beta, for now. Below a few nice screenshots from BBC’s Fifth Gear as seen on Joost.

‘Go Outside, membership is free’ and ‘Access your closet to build your FirstLife look’ are some of the headlines that remind us to have our ‘first lives’ figured out before we enter in SecondLife. True. Link: Get A FirstLife | via DigitalAgency