Churbuck.com

All Things Distributed: Naked Answers

The contrarian view that all corporations should not leap into blogging is growing. This in from Amazon’s Werner Vogels, chief technology officer, who after getting the Naked Conversations treatment from Scoble and Shel Israel, asks the Emperor’s New Clothes Question:

“I wanted them abandon their fuzzy group hug approach, and counter me with hard arguments why they were right and I was wrong. Instead they appeared shell-shocked that anyone actually had the guts to challenge the golden wonder boys of blogging and not accept their religion instantly. I have been a promoter of weblogging for a long time, so I didn’t feel particularly bad to challenge these two authors to tell me why customers would get a better Amazon product if we would institutionalize blogging at a wider scale around Amazon. Beyond “a more human face” and “conversations with individuals from Amazon” there was no real response how blogging will make the product named Amazon.com better for our customers given all the techniques we already use from soliciting customer feedback to discussion forums to snooping weblogs and comments sites, etc,.”

A while back I blogged on the absence of any customer service links on Amazon. That is not the case anymore. Vogels makes some excellent points, points I’m wrestling with as well as noted experts come to us with the strong recommendation that we blog, blog openly, and pervasively. Initially, I was all in, excited to open the corporate gates (in large part due to the exuberance of Naked Conversations), but now, after watching Scoble get scorched on the Vista delays, and sensing some serious nastiness and fatigue and incestous backbiting throughout the blogerati, I wonder, truly wonder, if a corporate blog — a general corporate blog — is an invitation to hell on earth.

I have more than ten years in so-called “community management,” was online participating in the Well in ’88, and consider myself as wise to the tribal customs of online discourse as the next guy — but doing so as a corporate faceplate, striving for transparency in an environment scrutinized by regulators, auditors, attorneys and other non-business development types … it doesn’t make a ton of sense to just open the lemonade stand.

Now GE launched an R&D blog earlier in the week. That is useful and cool. But does GE’s investor relations  people need to blog? Does any CEO truly need to blog?

I scratch my literary itch blogging about stuff like this, clamming, flowers, birds, friends, whatever — but to dash off some corporate message as blithely as this spew …. danger ahead.

Sitting at RDU awaiting a delayed flight home. A long week but a work-at-home Friday is a good thing indeed.

Thanks to blogger buddy Jim Forbes for his enthusiastic support of the Chatfield Project. It is a lot of fun, personally very gratifying, and something I’ve wanted to do for the past ten years.

I’m off to Asia for the first time in three weeks. A few days in Singapore, then onwards to Beijing. I’m reading Lonely Planet’s China guide to get ready and am very keen to meet my Asian colleagues and visit my step-sis in Beijing.

All is well.

Part 8 – The Reminiscences of Capt. Thomas Chatfield

The Captain returns to Cotuit, finds his house has been sold and the family has moved into the village, ships out on a coastal schooner, a grain ship, then enlists in the Union Navy, where he is commissioned as an Acting Master.

He visits the Monitor in Hampton Roads, fresh from her victory over the Merrimac, then off he sails to Key West as part of the East Gulf Squadron in a converted ferryboat, the U.S.S. Somerset and immediately captures a big prize off of Cuba, The Circassian

» The Cookie Monster in the Closet | Jeffrey Young’s Technicon | ZDNet.com

Vintage Jeff Young on a tear about metrics, online advertising, corrupt bloggers, and the price of milk at the local 7-11. Seeing as how he links to my metrics booklist, I thought I’d reciprocate:

“I’m talking about the unquestioned adoption of the religion of the Holy Church of Internet Advertising, and its scary priestdom of “metrics”, whose dominance is destroying the beautiful egalitarianism of the Web. It is about to get worse by orders of magnitude with the appearance of “location based services” as the patents recently revealed by Google make clear. If that all wasn’t bad enough, there is the Faustian deal with the Devil crafted by Google to hobble Chinese access to the Internet. The rise of a cult of advertising, the silence of the lambs as we go quietly to slaughter, and the howls of protest when our government listens in to Al Qaeda coupled with the muted protests about Google’s “do no evil” manipulation of search results in order to do the bidding of a repressive and authoritarian regime strikes fear into my heart.”

Jeff, Jeff, Jeff. First, as the Great McNealy once said, “You have no privacy, get over it.” Second, apply the Free Lunch rule to any website and ask yourself: would I pay for this? If you aren’t paying for it, then some marketer is picking up the tab for you in the slim hope that you might reach up and Punch the Monkey.

As for the Blogosphere Eating Its Young (not you): sure; it’s the way of the world. Slag and be slagged and watch the traffic pile on when the bodies start flying across the Infomercial Stupid Hypeway.

And metrics are fun. Seriously. To be able to divine the entrails of one’s traffic is very, very refreshing. Don’t get all privacy-crazed. No one knows who is who in a traffic log. It’s the patterns, the data mining, that human drive towards perfection in all operations, and the footnoted realization that you can never, ever, ever be 100 percent sure, but you can keep tweaking and optimizing until you know, down to the penny, what’s working and what’s failing ….

This scrutiny is murder on editors used to two metrics — newstand and paid circ. Now they can see who did what to them when. Accountability is a bitch.

The Galveston County Daily News
A Baton Rouge man was in jail Tuesday after a Monday theft report involving fire, two packs of pantyhose and two bottles of cologne.

It’s been too long since a cycling post. So here’s one. I would have loved to have written that lead.

I committed Amazonian self-abuse yesterday, ordering the following scintillating titles for my future edification.

”

1 “Web Site Measurement Hacks : Tips & Tools to Help Optimize Your Online Business (Hacks)” Eric Peterson; Paperback; $15.72 Sold by:Amazon.com

Shipping estimate for these items:  March 28, 2006 Delivery estimate:  March 31, 2006 - April 3, 2006 1 “Web Analytics Demystified: A Marketer’s Guide to Understanding How Your Web Site Affects Your Business” Eric Peterson; Paperback; $37.77 Sold by:Amazon.com

Shipping estimate for these items:  March 29, 2006 Delivery estimate:  March 31, 2006 - April 4, 2006 1 “Search Analytics : A Guide to Analyzing and Optimizing Website Search Engines” Hurol Inan; Paperback; $19.99 Sold by:Amazon.com

”

My question is this: how did an English major wind up in a profession obsessed with “metrics?” This is my version of hell on earth. I need to take my pants off to count to twenty-one and now I am living in Excel.

Rough Type: Nicholas Carr’s Blog: Seven rules for corporate blogging

For some reason Carr’s polemic against corporate blogging strikes me as a troll. Take on the most visible corporate blogger – Scoble – make a list, buck the conventional wisdom that corporations must blog, and then wind it up by suggesting that comments be disabled and the lawyers called in.

As it is pointed out in the comments — Scobelizer is not the Microsoft official blog, it’s Scoble’s personal blog, he just happens to have the balls to talk about work in it.

I do not talk about work here. Would I behave differently under the corporate banner? Sure.

I’ve been working my way through Thomas Wolfe’s last novel, You Can’t Go Home Again, for the past few weeks, reserving it for flights to and from North Carolina as a way to while away the time. I just finished it and feel a sadness for having done so, somethingI haven’t felt for some time from a piece of literature.

The old cliché of the “Great American Novel” comes to mind; Wolfe avidly pursued it, as no one has before or since, and in places, actually quite a few places, he manages to write it. His descriptions of New York City during the Great Depression rival, and outrank Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath. His Whitmanesque elegies to the vastness of America, the rawness of the countryside, the power of the cities, the perspective an expatriate has of the nation looking homeward from a Europe poised on the brink of war, is a very fine thing indeed.

Time has not treated Wolfe well. Fitzgerald, Faulkner and Hemingway held their own through the decades following this Golden Age of American Literature, but Wolfe fell by the wayside, his reputation perhaps diminished by the perception that he was highly edited (by the legendary Maxwell Perkins at Charles Scribner, then Edward Aswell at Harper), unstructured, and completely autobiographical. The balls of the man, who threw his hometown of Asheville, North Carolina to the world, naming names as it were, in his first novel, Look Homeward Angel, is amazing, the quintessential proof that a novelist makes no friends in mining the stuff of his or her own life and relations in building their masterpieces.

There are so many great passages, so many great lines, it is staggering to consider that Aswell assembled You Can’t Go Home Again from an eight foot packing case of notes and 35 notebooks. The sadness of the conclusion and the foreknowledge of Wolfe in the conclusion, in predicting his own death, is wrenching:

“Something has spoke to me in the night, burning the tapers of the waning year, something has spoken in the night, and told me I shall die, I know not where.”

And so he died at the age of 38 of tuberculosis.

Churbuck.com » Part 7 – The Reminiscences of Captain Thomas Chatfield

Coming to the end of his first, and very successful voyage as Captain, Thomas returns to the Sea of Okhotsk to rescue Uncle Bethuel, who wintered on Elbow Island in Shantar Bay. I’m on page 88 of the 162-page typescript. Tomorrow, he returns to Cotuit, hangs up his harpoon, and the tale shifts to the Civil War.

I’m proud of myself. I Newegged a new 60 gb Hitachi 2.5″ 7200 rpm drive, swapped it into a dead Lifebook p2040, reinstalled the OS, drivers and apps, and voila, a classic subnotebook is alive again, on its way back to school with my daughter, who justifiably regards it as a sweet PC.

It did eat up most of Saturday, but hey, waste not want not, and I didn’t manage to croak the system with some March static electricity.

I loved this laptop when I owned it. 12 hours of life with all the batteries installed. A little pokey due to the Transmeta Crusoe — but it has a trackpoint, good DVD playback, and nice bells and whistles. Plus it’s little.

I may be dreaming here, but why couldn’t a metrics system such as Omniture be integrated into a CMS such as Interwoven, and based on rules, automatically shift traffic down predetermined paths?

Example: if a vendor is driving traffic through banner URLs and paid search to landing pages, and if there are multiple instances of those landing pages as part of a standard A-B/multivariate suite, why couldn’t the “winning” page begin to receive the majority of the clickstream as it wins out over its alternatives? The metrics system would need triggers that would run against a rules engine, modifying in real time the destination URLs to funnel traffic to the appropriate page.

It would seem the human interaction in the production-analysis-placement chain is the weakest link in the flow. I need to think more on this one and see where it goes.

You have new Picture Mail!

Originally uploaded by dchurbuck.

I want this font. It is in nearly every airport I’ve been in, and seemingly nowhere else.

If I were to pick my default web font, it would be this.

I first saw it in Frankfurt, LaGuardia has it, and this pic is from BWI.

I challenged a design team at Rare Medium to use it for Forbes.com in 1999, but alas, no one could find it.

Motley to Leave Time Inc., Plus More Job-Hopping Fun – Gawker

“Charles Dubow, the lifestyle editor or Forbes.com, has quit Forbes and is moving to BusinessWeek. The move is more significant than it might appear because Dubow’s lifestyle stories are a key profit driver for the Forbes brand. Forbes.com bills itself as the world’s number one source of business news. But the vast majority of Forbes.com’s readers arrive at the site somewhat accidentally via links, and a large part of this traffic is from what Forbes.com’s executive editor calls “wealth porn” —- and much of that is generated by Dubow. It’s the regular “slide shows,” pictorials of the “most expensive houses,” the “most expensive cars,” and even the “best topless beaches.” These stories get prominent play on AOL and elsewhere —- and the AOL users are morphed into “Forbes readers.” Dubow was most responsible for making this happen for Forbes.com, which made the site quite profitable. Now he is taking his act to BusinessWeek.”

I hired Charles in 1995 after asking Forbes FYI editor Christopher Buckley for some recommendations for a lifestyle editor for Forbes.com. Lifestyle — essentially the lives of the rich and famous and powerful — has always been a big differentiator for Forbes from its competitors, genetically embedded by the late Malcolm Forbes’ joie de vivre, balloons, collections, harleys, etc.

Charles is a genius at building online content. His additions and contributions to Forbes.com, as the Gawker item above correctly states, was the solid backbone of expanding Forbes’ audience far beyond what the print brand deserved with its emphasis on business news and chronicles of the corporate leadership of the world. Charles intuitively understood audience development — how to hook people in and then get them clicking, over and over through interactive slide shows of mega houses, luxury vehicles, fashion …. you name it, Charles invented it.

Not to second guess the management at Forbes.com, but they just lost a secret weapon to an online brand that is coming on very strong after a decade of inactivity. Fortune blew it in my opinion by folding itself under CNN Money, but Businessweek, thanks to its emphasis on blogs, is on a roll, and I know from discussions with Reuters over a year ago that they too have their sights set on taking some marketshare away from Forbes.

With some nostalgia, Charles’ was one of the few remaining founding fathers of Forbes.com, back in the heady days of launching, of Adam Penenberg and Kambiz Faroohar breaking the New Republic/Shattered Glass scandal, and now, all that remains is Michael Noer, the founding managing editor now running special projects.

Good luck to Charles and congratulations to McGraw Hill for having the wisdom to snag him.

When I was an innocent young man, given to affectations of being cynically “grizzled” and smoking up a storm in a newsroom in Massachusetts, listening to the police scanner, drinking vending machine coffee out of paper cups with poker hands printed on them, hanging out with derelicts who did funny things like de-ice their frozen windshields with Lawry’s Garlic Salt (thus making their car smell like a hellish pizza for life), I began to collect a scrapbook of bus plunge items.

What, you may ask, is a bus plunge?

Look at a newspaper — the paper kind — and you will find, on any given day, a little inch of text about a bus “plunging” off a cliff and killing a couple hundred people. This is a horrible thing, but apparently occurs often enough to persuade me to never, ever take a bus ride in the Andes. The headline always — repeat always — uses the verb “Plunge.”

Reading the word makes my stomach flip like the descent on a roller coaster. Buses always plunge. They don’t crash. They don’t fly. They don’t plummet. They plunge.

And when they plunge a lot of people die, anonymously, notes in less than 50 words drummed up by a hassled copy desk denizen who needs to plug a chunk of white space on page 5.

In the same genre of bus plunges are ferry capsizes — usually occurring in the Phillipines — and I soon expanded my scrapbook to include those horrors of manmade disaster.

This was not a happy project and the notebook, amazingly, quickly filled up as there seems to be a bus plunge or ferry capsize every single day of the year. Someone stole it.

Point of this macabre digression? If newspapers are toast, and there is no physical layout problem with online news, is the bus plunge doomed? Is this a Zen question?

Google reveals the genre is still alive and well, but not as finely crafted into the telegraphic style of days ago. Now there are actually some details:

• Turkey
  
• Rome

And of course, you knew it was coming, there is a bus plunge portal. I am in awe.

Churbuck.com » Part 7 – The Reminiscences of Captain Thomas Chatfield

“It was the first of October, and no help would reach them, or anyone know anything about them before the following May, with food enough, with close economy, to last from three to four months and scurvy (that scourge of the High latitudes) sure to make its appearance in a short time…”

Wow, poor Uncle Bethuel goes ashore on an island in the Ochotsk Sea, builds a camp, crosses the frozen straits, finds some Cossacks, and doesn’t lose one of his 32 men. Let’s see, today I listened to a tele-direct web discussion about PTI rates, accessory attach rates, and debated the fine points of a merged agenda for an Integrated Media marketing presentation ….. Garrr. Time to swash the buckle and batten the hatches.

“American Business Media – ABM
Best Web site: Category 3
CIO, CIO.com – IDG
Editorial Staff”

Congratulations to the staff at CIO.com and the crew at CXO Inc. They’ve achieved a huge amount of progress in the past year, are in the middle of a massive IT and design upgrade, and this award is validation of those efforts.

Janice Brand, Todd Borglund, Jennifer McCarthy, Bill Hall, Chris Murray, Sandy Kendall, Chris Lindquist, Joe Nguyen, Paul Kerstein, Irina Gabecchia, Jim Alla, Danielle Tetreault,  Jennelle Hicks, Ann Butera …  online GM Rob O’Regan, and CEO Mike Friedenberg …. and the magazine staff. Great job.

Jim Forbes asks if the “bone” that Chatfield talks about — he shipped tons of the stuff back to Massachusetts, estimating one load’s value at $18,000 in 19th century dollars — is “baleen.” Nope. Baleen is a fibrous material that some species of whale sport in their jaws which acts as a strainer. The whale would plow through a mess of sardines, anchovies or krill with its mouth open, scoop up a ton of protein, and then expel the water through the balleen, leaving the food inside. Bone was just that — bone. It was used, these were the days of pre-plastic, for fake ivory applications. Scrimshaw is not bone, but whale teeth. Baleen was used for corset stays, collar points, hoops in hoop skirts. All sorts of uses.

Jim also asks about “kedge” anchors. Anchors were a very big deal for a whaler. They were like emergency brakes on a steep hill in San Francisco. Captains lived in total fear of a lee shore — meaning, they never wanted to be blown onto a beach. The more distance between the ship and the shore, the safer they felt. So, if the wind is blowing off-shore — meaning, the wind is coming from the direction of the land,  then, if all hell broke loose — a mast breaks, a rudder is disabled, the ship will be blown away from the reefs and shoals. If the wind is blowing on-shore, towards the land, then any screw up could result in utter disaster and the loss of the ship. That’s where the anchors come in. If you are totally screwed and being blown ashore, time to drop anchors. Ships were constantly losing their anchors. Either because their lines snapped, or because they became fouled on the bottom and had to be dropped. Most ships had two.

A kedge anchor was a small anchor that could be placed in a ship’s boat and rowed someplace. Think of it as a manuevering device. You’d run it off the stern, drop it, and then winch up tight to move the stern back and forth. Very useful for winching a ship sideways, off of a shoal, etc. Here’s a definition:

“[the]…smallest anchors, the kedge anchors were used when the ship was anchored in a harbour. They helped to steady the ship and keep her clear of the bower anchor cable. They could also be used to ‘kedge’ or warp the ship. Warping was a way of moving the ship in a confined space or if there was no wind. The kedge anchor would be rowed away from the ship by boat and then lowered. By pulling in the anchor cable the ship could be moved along. This could be repeated until there was more space or the sails caught the wind.”*

*HMS Victory website 

BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Apology over ‘fake’ Clooney blog

Duh. Posting George Clooney when you are not George Clooney is a highly stupid move by Huffington. The one great loss to online journalism in the blogification of mainstream media is the utter collapse of quality control, fact checking, and accuracy (not that the MSM is a shining paragon).

“For God’s sake, Captain, do shorten that sail, you’ll tear the masts out.”

This is salty stuff. The Captain is crusing the “Artic”, dodging bergs, floes, and growlers, learns why Captain Cook got snuffed, returns to San Francisco, and has a close call with a lee shore.

I’m having a blast with this. Almost half-way and realizing I never truly read these memoirs before. Cousin Pete lent me his copy of the Captain’s war letters, which will be the night-time lonely guy project in Raleigh after this transcription. Then to the annotation with maps (I’m think of footnoting directly to Google Earth) but that may require a trip to the Kendall Whaling Museum in Sharon, Mass. which has Chatfield’s original ship’s logs with the latitude and longitude.

(I majored in American Maritime History at Yale, so this stuff is a dream come true. In another dimension I’d have become a college professor of maritime history.)

[update: added another five pages to part 6 -- amazing description of nursing a wounded mate back to health after he gets whacked by a whale off of California: "...then with four men to help, and another with his elbow bare for a model, I got the elbow joint in place."]

MarketerBlog: Measurement & Metrics: Time for the Internet to Join the Grown-Up’s Table

Smart blog that is going into the blogroll.