Ah, the free sample—staple of bakeries and food courts everywhere. “Hey buddy, check out this ginger chicken on a toothpick!”

That’s confidence, right? This stuff is so good you just taste it and you’ll want to buy it.

You know what I love about the food court sample? It’s always there. Sometimes on a busy day I just walk back and forth grabbing toothpick after toothpick. Score!

Think they notice it’s me over and over? Think they care? Listen, the chicken is cooked anyway, someone’s got to eat it.

When the day comes that I’m hungry enough, I’ll buy a meal. In the meantime I tell hungry friends to go eat there—ooh, did someone say viral marketing?

And now is when I compare ginger chicken to Web applications.

I just finished an online whiteboard collaboration with my team that works 80 miles away from me, and it was fantastic. “Oh, WebEx,” you say. “Maybe MS LiveMeeting or Adobe Connect.” Nope. Check out vYew, a FREE online collaboration and conferencing tool. It rocks.

Their model is much like the ginger-chicken-on-a-toothpick model (as taught at Wharton). After a simple registration, I get a taste of the chicken, not the whole bird. But I can return again and again whenever I need it. No trial expiration, no watermarked examples.

Much like the generous folks at 37 Signals, which offers up free online tools like Campfire (group chat) and Basecamp (project management), vYew is giving away their product to folks who need just a little bit. Currently, I may only need to use this online collaboration tool a few times a year, but now that the sample hooked me, it means two things:

1. If I need more (more pages, file uploads, etc.) I will become a paying customer to them as opposed to one of the other players
2. I’m telling other people (you) about them

Great product. Great model.

Perry Marshall starts off his article, “Old-Fashioned Discernment in the Age of the Internet,” with the following:

You know what’s wrong with the Internet? Smart people and stupid people get equal airtime. And since stupid people tend to shout longer and louder than people who have acquired wisdom and judgment, ignorance generally prevails.

He goes on to say that stupidity is cheap and plentiful:

. . . with stupidity, your options appear to be endlessly open, whereas wisdom is scarce and expensive and usually involves up-front commitments.

More surprisingly, he claims that you—and your customers—decide between the two every day. This seems to be contradicted by his later claim that “in the 21st century the #1 success skill—a skill that NOBODY ever seems to talk about—is discernment” (defined as keenness of insight and judgment).

I’m perhaps wrong to conflate “wisdom” and “discernment” here; perhaps he sees them as different. But assuming they are the same or at least related, do you decide to be wise/discerning, or is it a skill you learn? Maybe you must decide to learn discernment.

Regardless, I think he’s got a point about the importance of the skill. In a world where we have exponentially more information competing for our attention than a generation ago, discerning what is important enough to pay attention to will be ever more important. Advertisers become more adept at manipulating us, so if we don’t want to lose our shirts, we’d better become more discerning.

However, Marshall’s bread and butter is Internet marketing and publicity. He lists some observations of wise men vs. fools, including this one:

Wise people research online and offline. Wise people take a trip to the library and search collections of used books. Fools suppose that if it can’t be found on the first page of search engine results, it surely must not exist.

Sound observation, but if stupidity really is cheap and plentiful, we marketers are going to have to keep working on making that first page.

I can’t decide if I should be saving my lawn-mowing money to buy a big-screen TV or a small-screen mobile device. Which takes priority: vegging out at home in front of oversized sports, or accessing videos anytime, anywhere?

While the big-screen is supposed to be every man’s ideal, there are increasingly compelling arguments for, as Steve Martin said in the 70s, “getting small.”

The e-newsletter Mobilized landed in my in-box today, profiling some very cool things that are happening with mobile video.

Story one: new handsets have better-than-ever image quality. Good to know. If I hold out a bit I’ll be better off, eh?

Story three: Discovery is producing a product just for mobile devices. Interesting. There’s actually content I couldn’t get in my living room no matter how big the screen is.

Story five: “Laughter is the best Medicine on www.lime.com“. The lead:

What makes mobile movies successful? Personally, I think that, in short bursts, comedy works a hell of a lot better than drama. With drama, you have to BUILD tension. That takes time. And horror on a small screen fares even worse. How scared can you be of a psycho with a knife the size of a clipped fingernail? A PINKY fingernail!

Makes sense, but I wouldn’t limit that logic to mobile or movies. I’d like to see more companies dare to add a little humor to their web presence. Web marketers are all about the immediate impact of landing pages, and what happens during the first few seconds a visitor is staring at a particular website — capitalizing on the short burst of their attention span, if you will. Marketing pros are always wondering, “What content or imagery can I use to quickly hook that visitor?”

If humor offers a fast hook, why not try that? Certainly the big hits on YouTube are humorous, right? If your company can generate something humorous (and sure, useful to your marketing efforts) you might hook many a visitor, and even end up a viral marketing sensation.

But are you funny?