Churbuck.com

CNET goes to CBS for $1.28 billion (thx Chris) – a 44% premium over yesterday’s closing price. Silicon Alley Reporter has the skinny and is blogging the call at 8:30 EST. What can I say? CNET started as a TV show, morphed into an online network, blazed some strong trails in the early days (from developing its own content management system, early moves into video and user reviews, extension quickly from computers to consumer electronics), grew like a weed, ate the traditional tech rags lunches, acquired ZDNet, then, post 2000 bubble-pop, hiccupped a little, soldiered on, the founders (Halsey Minor, et al) moved on, and then, indigniities of indignities, upstarts start picking fights with them.

The sale makes sense, but I never have really figured out CBS and the internet. Sure, there was CBS Marketwatch — a great site in the early days, but that was sold off to Dow Jones. Now Les Moonves is back in the game with a geek content acquisition? One getting the heck challenged out of it by the long tail specialist sites and gadget blogs like Engadget, Gizmodo? We shall see.

Then along came Carl Icahn, eater of companies, who decides to show Microsoft how to do a hostile takeover. Icahn, who is best known for his 1985 assault on TWA, has accumulated 50 million shares in Yahoo and is plotting a board takeover. As someone blogged yesterday, Jerry Yang is hiding under his desk.

…at the Harris-Teeter supermarket. Having given into the need to get a Harris-Teeter (why are names like “Teeter” and “Cooter” so southern? Harris-Teeter is now Harris-Cooter) VIC card (don’t ask: it’s one of those plastic barcode discount-getter cards) I went to the Courtesy Desk and filled out a form. As I put pen to paper I realized the following things are securely stored behind the Courtesy Desk and not out on the shelves.

1. Canned crabmeat
2. Lottery tickets
3. Tobacco
4. Infant formula

The last made me sad and I thought about people so strapped for cash they have to steal baby food, enough so that management has to hide it away and guard it.

On the face of it, Facebook groups would seem like one of those cheap, quick, and effective ways to build quick cross-enterprise communities. Set up a group, invite attendees, guide the non-users in how to establish an account, and then control membership.

The alternatives would be a paid account like 37Signal’s most excellent Basecamp, but that is less quick and less dirty than a Facebook group, which to my eyes has a lot in common with the Web 1.0 world of Yahoo Groups. One could also think about any number of wiki solutions, but let’s say the requirements come down to an virtual team room for a collection of four to 400, heck 4,000 users all united in some cause that requires a fast, familiar, and cheap platform.

Facebook would meet that bill except for one vital detail: not everybody can use it.

It’s blocked, along with some other social networks, by many corporate network admins. Right there game over. I was pretty surprised to be in a meeting today, to hear Facebook proposed, and then watch it get shot down in less than one minute as first one, then two, then three seriously senior IT people said their organization’s blocked Facebook. I would argue that no big deal, the platform was, after all, designed for college kids to check each other before attempting a hookup. Having old farts and suits invade it as an enterprise collaboration system was not its intention.

So, the old issue of cross-organizational collaboration is still with us. How would you solve it? Rules are: open platform, open APIs, no fee, no onerous set-up. Needs a file sharing/library including rich media hosting. Must be secure.

All Things Cahill » Blog Archive » Social Media - Shark Jumping?

Jeremiah’s Tweet that Avenue A has trademarked “social influence marketing” prompted me to ask rhetorically if the shark had been jumped. My good buddy Mark Cahill posted:

Half-a-century. Old fart. AARP. Etc.

Thanks to everybody for the birthday wishes. I’ve seen it blogged before, but it is truly amazing the impact of birthdate registration has on the automation of the experience.

Highlight of the day was just now when I strolled into the Durham Gold’s Gym, swiped my barcode thing, and the clerk’s PC played “Happy Birthday”, a cartoon cake popped up next to my name, and the man, instead of saying: “Here’s your towel” said “Happy birthday.”

Reel-Time, the Internet Journal of Saltwater Flyfishing used to wish me happy birthday, but it’s dead because SOMEONE forgot to renew the domain.

LinkedIn, Plaxo, The Ladders, Facebook, random financial newsletters, and my sister all emailed me today to say Happy Birthday.

Everytime any one IM’d the sentiment to me, I replied with “f%&k you” because that’s the nice guy I am. How did I spend the day? In a windowless ballroom with our Customer Advisory Council. Highlight was failing to perform 120 pull ups and dips at the gym as the CrossFit workout of the day insisted I must.

Ah. All I want now is a Red Sox game and an empty inbox.

Lenovo’s Web Marketer: Twittering’s Not for Twits

Warning, Raging Ego alert. Brandweek piece is live. Need a new headshot.

“Another big component in the strategy is online, where the effort is being headed by David Churbuck, vp-global Web marketing. Churbuck is an award-winning journalist who formerly worked at Forbes magazine, where he founded Forbes.com and helped develop the company’s digital strategy before joining Lenovo in 2006. At his new post, Churbuck gets to flex his journalistic muscles with an independent blog, churbuck.com/wordpress that covers various issues in marketing and media and rarely even mentions Lenovo. Churbuck is also an outspoken critic of some new media and a fairly avid user of Twitter, the social networking site that consists of short messages called “Tweets” from people in the community. Churbuck corresponded with Brandweek editor Todd Wasserman, who shot Churbuck the following questions via e-mail.”

Monday: 5-12, Cotuit

Tuesday-Thursday: 5-13 to 5-15: RTP

Friday-Sunday: 5-16 to 5-18: Cotuit

This morning Mom said she’d take a bluefish if I happened to catch one, so Fisher and I finished up the yard work around five on Sunday afternoon, dug out a couple rods, tied on some wire leaders and poppers, and headed down to Hooper’s Landing for a short row out to the boat.

We zipped out of the harbor and to the end of the channel to Last Red, the final channel marker. The wind was kind of snotty out of the Southeast (”wind east, fish bite least”) and the waves were tough enough to make the going wet and footing difficult, but I passed a couple slicks, smelled melons, and said, “I smell bluefish.”

The slicks are caused by the bluefish (pomatomus saltatrix) feeding on bait: the bluefish bite the bait, the bait releases oil, the oil makes smooth patches on the surface. That oil smells like melons (according to some noses). We cast a few times, optimism was low, but we stuck with it and I saw a fish dart under the boat, spooked off of the lure by the sight of the hull.

I finally hooked up, landed the fish, gave it a kiss, and threw it back for good luck. The second fish wasn’t so lucky, and went into the bucket. I fileted and skinned it, and Fisher and I took it to my mom to finish her Mother’s Day with a fish and some flowers (we planted morning glories around the lamppost).

All is well in my world when there are bluefish in Cotuit.

I have always written off Mother’s Day as a manufactured holiday promoted by the greeting card companies to plague me into an annual bout of May guilt. This is indeed, is not the case, as the day originated in 1870 through the efforts of one of the most remarkable woman in the history of the United States, Julia Ward Howe, renowned for penning the Battle Hymn of the Republic, but also for her diligent efforts as a social reformer, suffragist and bearer of the New England Transcendentalist tradition.

She was an amazing woman given the span of her accomplishments and interests and this day should be dedicated to her. Here is her proclamation, written in response to the horror of the Civil and Franco-Prussian Wars:

“Arise, then, women of this day!
Arise, all women who have hearts,
Whether our baptism be of water or of tears!
Say firmly:
“We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies,
Our husbands will not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause.
Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn
All that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience.
We, the women of one country, will be too tender of those of another country
To allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.”
From the bosom of the devastated Earth a voice goes up with our own.
It says: “Disarm! Disarm! The sword of murder is not the balance of justice.”
Blood does not wipe out dishonor, nor violence indicate possession.
As men have often forsaken the plough and the anvil at the summons of war,
Let women now leave all that may be left of home for a great and earnest day of counsel.
Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead.
Let them solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means
Whereby the great human family can live in peace,
Each bearing after his own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar,
But of God.
In the name of womanhood and humanity, I earnestly ask
That a general congress of women without limit of nationality
May be appointed and held at someplace deemed most convenient
And at the earliest period consistent with its objects,
To promote the alliance of the different nationalities,
The amicable settlement of international questions,
The great and general interests of peace.

Just when I thought I was done with 2L, Brandweek asks me to do a Q&A with them and one of the questions was:

“As Web-marketing vp for Lenovo, you have been a vocal critic of Second Life, writing on your blog: “There is nothing to do in Second Life except, pardon my bluntness, try to get laid.” Why are you so down on it?”"

If I ever make it into Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations I’m going to go down in history because of that stupid dildonics quote. Forbes nailed me with it a year ago, now back it comes.

The reality is this: I haven’t logged into Second Life for months. Definitely not this year. I don’t think about it, I don’t care about it, and I certainly never read about it anymore now that the media has moved on to something more lurid to hype. I see the former CEO of Organic left that agency to become CEO of Linden Labs — he certainly must see signs of life. Businessweek hasn’t put 2L back on its cover. Indeed, not much news at all has come out of the land of Furries and Griefers.

Whatever, I have moved on. Stay tuned for the Brandweek Q&A next week.

Today’s NYT has a piece by Steve Lohr on the occasion of IDG (publisher of InfoWorld, PCWorld, CIO, etc.) achieving the vaunted print/online revenue crossover.

“In 2002, 86 percent of the revenue from I.D.G.’s publications came from print and 14 percent online. These days, 52 percent of the revenue is from online ads, while 48 percent is from the print side.”

I joined IDG for a brief period in 2005 to help with that transition, ultimately leaving at the end of the year to come to Lenovo. What I saw was a company in the throes of a difficult transition from decades of print excellence to the more ephemeral but pressing world of online news. Print and online dichotomies were tough, but in the end it was the red ink that pushed the print legacy to one side (InfoWorld went online only) and broke down the old artificial barriers between print and online editorial staffs.

Mike Friedenberg and Bob Carrigan were the two guys I worked most closely with, and both are prominently and deservedly called out in Lohr’s piece.

While publishing is not the profit engine of Pat McGovern’s empire (that honor falls to his venture capital operations), it is the flagship of the global brand, and seeing the transition occur, sooner than most traditional publishers, is a good sign for the future of a pretty beleaguered profession.

Smart move by Microsoft to walk away from Yahoo. The gap in price was probably the least of the stumbling blocks in front of the deal occurring. There was just too much unhappiness evident on both sides down in the rank and file.

As a customer and partner of  both, I couldn’t see how media buyers, ecomm advertisers, application developers, or content creators would have benefited. The acquisition would have created Time-Warner/AOL redux, been a clusterf%$k of the first order, and done little more than accelerate Google.

In my opinion:

1. Microsoft needs to focus on the OS for a while and get Vista to where it needs to be for the sake of the PC industry. I went to their media upfront last month in NYC — no disrespect intended — but MSFT and content has never been a match in my mind.
2. Yahoo needs to look inside at its best apps — Flickr, del.icio.us, etc. — and figure out how to move from the Semel-Braun days of content network to a SaaS powerhouse. The old portal aggregation play is toast, just not working, and further programming investments will be a disaster.

3. Microsoft needs to pin the future on Mesh and persuade users there’s a benefit to Office on the hard disk versus Google apps in the cloud. Right off — let me say the offline  blog post integration in Word is a damn good precursor to the way local and cloud applications should work.

My wife is a tad obsessive about television, and sank some money into a big flat panel two years ago. With the advice and counsel of Uncle Fester — he-who-knows-all-about-AV — she decked the sucker out with a massive DVR (Tivo to us mortals), HD tuners, Dolby 5.1 surround sound, etc. etc. etc.

The result is a far cry from the black and white Zenith I grew up with, watching one of four channels (NBC, CBS, ABC and PBS), and messing with rooftop antennas, rabbit ears, and then considering things like color and remote controls to be as astonishing as a butane lighter is to a Stone Age cannibal in the forests of New Guinea. We were easily amused in the 1960s.
Unfortunately DirectTV recently dropped Tivo — which seemed to me to be an exemplary great example of user interface design — in favor of its own retarded, brain-dead interface. But, since the wife needs to have the latest HD signals, out went the nice Tivo which she bought hacked and juiced from Weak Knees (one of the best company names ever!), and in came the  stupid DirectTV unit with no capacity and an on screen guide designed by bureaucrats.
A few weeks ago she noticed “VOD” on the menu of options — video on demand — and had to have it. I took a look and sure enough, the DVR has an ethernet jack and wants to be connected to the home network. The simple but ugly solution would have been to run an ethernet cable from the cable modem/wireless router (Westell), but she’s severely allergic to wires so that was the topic of a short but brutal discussion one rainy Sunday back in March.

Then I went to the most brain dead of solutuions — an A/C network extension — which is the networking equivalent of the pink/green/blue transparent acetate filters sold in the back of comic books in the sixties for people too poor to afford a color TV. They just don’t work.

The only solution was to get the DVR — which lives in a closet — to connect wirelessly to the home network. Off to Best Buy I went in search of a Linksys WGA54G — a wireless gaming adapter — a dee-vice for connecting an XBox or Playstation to one’s network. Not in stock. Nor at Radio Shack. So online I go (where I should have gone in the first place) and I order the sucker for $74 from B&H in Brooklyn.

It arrived yesterday. So, while watching the Blue Jays spank the Red Sox last night, I tried to configure the adapter to connect the DVR to the network. Of course the Linksys installation wizard didn’t work. Does it ever work?
Here’s the punchline: all the recurring bullshit we’ve heard from the tech industry about the digital home is going to remain bullshit until our devices connect to each other as easily as kitchen appliances connect to wall sockets.

I am not an engineer. But I did work as a tech reporter for twenty years and I do work for a PC company, and if I need to get on the 800 help line with Linksys, and both me and a tech get completely confounded in IPCONFIG, firewall, 64-bit key encryption … then Aunt Edna in Peoria ain’t gonna be experiencing VOD anytime soon.

I told the Linksys guy no thanks when we started down the command line path. I know how that story ends and it always ends badly. So I dragged the game adapter right up to the router, plugged it in, surfed into it through the browser on a notebook (good old 192.168.1.1), manually configured it to ignore the neighbor’s WAN (named Corehealth of all things), gave it the hexidecimal so it would get through the WEP security on my WAN, burned the EEPROM with the right info, ran down stairs, plugged it into the DVR, and …. to quote the engineer at McKinsey who insisted I didn’t know how to spell — “Wah-lah” — connected the TV to the network.

Of such small victories is one’s prowess proven in this world.

So, now I can download old South Park episodes at a snail’s pace. And, here’s the killer. The old pay per view model of purchase and view and store ostensibly forever on the DVR’s harddrive? The one I’ve enjoyed for a decade?
Those days are over. Hollywood, those masters of pissing off their customers by being brain dead when it comes to intellectual property, has decided that PPV will become Video on Demand (at a cost of course) but that the video will only be available for a day or two. At which point it goes poof.

#$%^%^#$%^&&!!!!!!

Anyway, I sat down at my PC after this scintillating hour of home tech support hell, and saw that Microsoft Media Player had detected a DVR on the network, and wanted to know if I wanted to share my library of PC videos with it.

Sure. Why not? I’m a sucker for a gadget. Except it doesn’t work.

1. I haven’t been posting a lot lately because I haven’t had anything to say.
2. Twitter is bugging me personally but intriguing me professionally.
3. There were no squid to be had last night in Nantucket Sound.
4. Honda Lawnmowers continue to suck.
5. Budgets suck.
6. Metric for the sake of metrics suck.
7. I did not post this video so stop asking if I did.
8. Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy is one very disturbing book
9. My wife went to France without me. Nice. So I guess that means I get to go bonefishing by myself someday.
10. I am definitely going to see Iron Man tomorrow. 
    

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vhgzIM-9lfA

11. CrossFit has changed my life. I met Pukey the Clown yesterday for the first time.

Astroturf: Fake Bloggers, Go Directly To Jail!
Fester points to Gawker:

“..the UK is about to make it a crime for companies to misrepresent themselves as consumers in their online marketing. That means, for example, that a company setting up a fake blog to hype its own products could be prosecuted, fined, and jailed. Free speech? Whatever. This is an awesome development. And bloggers can be locked up, too!”

AdAge has the story here. 

Monday 4.27 - Tuesday 5.13: Cotuit. No travel. Wife is visiting France so I am hanging in Cotuit to watch Fisher.

We woke at 4:30 am this morning to drive 185 miles from Cotuit to Derby, Connecticut to watch our daughter row for the University of Virginia against my alma mater, Yale and their arch nemesis Harvard-Radcliffe. Seven and half minutes of rowing, only the last two minutes of which are visible to the spectators standing on the balcony of the boathouse, but the drive was worth any minute, as this was my one and only chance to see her row this year after three years of loyally going to races in eastern Massachusetts.

The bad news is her boat, the novice eight, lost. As did the varsity first and second boats – a blow as Virginia is ranked third nationally after Cal/Berkeley and Yale. Yale Women’s Rowing is arguably the best over time as it was one of the earliest and produced a disproportionate number of Olympians, including Ginny Gilder, whose family donated the magnificent new boathouse that replaced the tired aqua blue bunker I rowed out of in the 1970s. I was kind of happy to see the Bulldogs do well, but had to empathize with my daughter who rowed a very tough race down a choppy course into a brisk and cold headwind. It was also her first race after a frustrating season of back injuries, and I know she climbed into the bow seat in part because she wanted us to see her behind an oar.

The races were run on the Housatonic River, and while the boathouse was unrecognizable (this was my first visit), the view across the river and the finish line to the dam downriver was very familiar and brought on a bad Pavlovian reaction as that stretch of water in front of the boathouse docks is where I spent probably the most miserable 90 seconds of my entire life, sprinting down the last 500 meters of a 2000 meter race in an oxygen debt sort of like smothering in a dry cleaning bag while splitting a cord of wood at the rate of 40 whacks per minute.

Blisters are a rower’s badge of courage

(apologies for video quality, FlipCams are not cut out for filming rowing)
When the races were finished I explored the boathouse bays and marveled at the gleaming new Vespoli shells, the vast docks, the wakeless catamaran launches. Rowing is one of those things where the clothing may improve and the boats may get a little better, but in the end it’s the same hard work it has always been, an impenetrable experience for someone who has never done it, an addiction for those who have.

We took on three laundry bags in anticipation of the end of semester move back to the Cape, handed over a grocery bag of stuff to eat during the ten hour bus ride back to Charlottesville, hugged our goodbyes and headed into New Haven in search of apizza – that’s correct – “apizza,” the uniquely New Haven nomenclature for a pizza pie, but one cooked in a coal oven in a way that most connoisseurs of pizza would agree gives New Haven the proper title of best pizza on the planet.

The usual spots on Wooster Street – Sally’s and Pepe’s – open at 4 pm, so we went to Modern Apizza on State Street, which opens for lunch. I had never tried Modern before, but am glad we did. I wouldn’t rank it above the aforementioned masters, but it’s a very very good pizza, better than anything I have seen outside of New Haven, and right in the ball park with the charred crust and general gestalt.

After lunch I took my wife and son on a walking tour of the Yale campus. It was a gorgeous spring day, the trees were in full flower (I love the Emerson line: “The earth laughs in flowers.”), and we started at my residential college, or dorm, Timothy Dwight. Alas, security has changed and the gates were locked, so we peered through the bars and walked into the center of the campus and my favorite place of all, the Sterling Memorial Library, where I spent most of my time either studying, writing, or working as a printer in the library’s letterpress. Fortunately tourists were allowed in and it was very cool to show off one of the world’s greatest libraries to my family.

The Harkness carillon was pealing as we pulled out of town and so we returned to Cotuit with a spare pizza in the trunk.

BBC carries this interesting piece on Jonathan Zittrain’s warning about the rise of closed devices (e.g. gaming consoles like the Xbox 360) leading to a closed network. (As a marketer of “Generative” nodes, or PCs, I obviously would have to agree):

“With the second billion of the planet’s citizens due to go online in the next 10 years and an avalanche of online-enabled devices hitting the market with each passing year it would be understandable to assume that the internet is in a healthy position.

The 1960s vision of a network of networks has grown into a tool that encircles the globe, drives economies and connects citizens.

But Professor Jonathan Zittrain, one of the world’s leading academics on the impact of the net, is warning that the future is potentially bleak.

His book, The Future of the Internet: And How To Stop It, highlights key concerns about the direction online society is heading in.

“I want a recognition from people that the network they enjoy now is in many important respects a collective hallucination,” he said.

“If too many of them start treating it as a cash and carry service they are going get the network they deserve.”

Zittrain is the professor of internet governance and regulation at Oxford University and co-founder of Harvard Law School’s Berman Center for Internet and Society.

He said the “happy accident” of the net, which was designed by researchers for researchers, resulted in an open platform which facilitated innovation because it enabled anyone online to implement ideas at the edge of the network.

He calls these technologies “generative”, meaning open tools that can be put to a multiplicity of purposes.

Fundamental backbone

A PC is a good example of a generative device because it can be reprogrammed for many uses, and one machine on the net can impact every other without compromising the fundamental backbone of the network.

He contrasts generative devices with “sterile appliances”, closed systems which appear to give consumers access to the net.

He argued such devices were damaging innovation and potentially putting easilly-abused powers into the hands of a few companies and governments.

China ties US for most Web users at 221 million people - New York Times

Marketonomy: Web 2.0 Expo: Bloggers vs. Reporters

Christopher Kenton is at Web 2.0. This insight hit me hard. I remember the days when the press room was the rowdiest place in the building. Comdex. Massachusetts State House. Now — press rooms are morgues. All the fun is with the bloggers. You betcha.

“When you walk into the media lounge, it’s deadly silent. There are a couple of rows of banquet tables, about half full. People diligently typing away, head down. You walk two doors down to the blogger lounge, and you can hear the buzz outside the door. Similar rows of tables, but they’re all full. There are couches with people lounging with their laptops. Pandora radio is set up putting out tunes. There’s a small video/sound stage setup for video interviews. But most of all, people are engaged in conversation everywhere–talking while posting, twittering, texting.”