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Google Finance

Google launches a finance thing. Is it a portal? Is it a portfolio tool? Is it headlines and tickers?

Well, it won’t track OTC pink sheets, so that sucks. Yahoo Finance does that. Actually, in a five minute kick of the tires I see absolutely nothing of interest. Yuck. This is like a sub component of Google News, only worse. The portfolio tool is entire unsophisticated, and sure, there’s a little AJAXy rollover thing going on with the market charts. Headlines click to news.

What was I looking for?

A very sophisticated portfolio management system — those are so 90s and have been beaten to death by the finance pubs, but ultimately owned by the brokerages. People want their stocks and bonds where they can trade em, not where they can look at them. To own portfolio page views you need desktop widgets, realtime quotes, etc. etc. Goog Fin ain’t even in the parking lot of the ballpark.

News is news. I don’t see any customization capabilities of headlines related to my stocks.

No technical analysis.

No original content — no Bankrate, no Money, no personal finance.

Here’s what the FAQ says is notable about the product:

• Company Search — With Google Finance you can search for stocks, mutual funds, public and private companies, using both company names and (where available) ticker symbols. [really? Imagine that. DC]
• Interactive Charts — Google Finance charts correlate market data with corresponding dated news stories to help you determine if there is a relationship between them (for instance, by seeing news stories that came out about a certain company in the context of what that company’s stock did that day). You can also click and drag the charts to see different time periods and zoom in to see more detailed information. [we'll see. DC]
• News and More News — Google Finance incorporates our Google News service, which gathers stories from more than 4,500 English news sources worldwide. Stories are clustered by topic so you can see different opinions on a single subject; you can also review news stories by monthly date range and by importance (which is determined by algorithms). [snore. DC]
• Blogs — If you want the opinions of citizen journalists, you got ‘em; Google Finance includes company-related postings from Google Blog Search. [I haven't checked out the finance blogosphere ... seems ripe for the pump-and-dump gang. DC]
• Company Management Team — Google Finance helps you put a face to a name. Mousing over an executive name shows you their picture as well as links, where available, to their biography, compensation details and trading activity. [Semi-cool. Forbes.com does a much better job with the tearsheet model. DC]
• Discussion Groups — Talk amongst yourselves. Google Finance offers high-quality Discussion Groups whose dedicated team of moderators work to keep conversations on and spam-free. [Moderation is semi-cool. DC]
• Portfolios — Google Finance offers a fast, easy and powerful way to keep create and maintain your portfolio of stocks and mutual funds.” [Not in this first rev it don't.DC]
  

Blech. This one should have stewed in beta longer. I’m sure it will get cooler, but for now, Yahoo wins in finance.

[update: the power of the product is what we called at Forbes.com a "tearsheet" model. to see it in action, run a stock symbol through the search box and the results are a fairly good consolidated tearsheet of what one needs to know about that instrument at that point in time. Google gets a B+ for tearsheet design and is actually superlative to Yahoo in that regard. The charting is pretty cool with the designators of major news events against the trendline -- Google didn't invent that -- Valueline did]

T.F. Green airport in Providence, RI was pure lunacy this morning. A bazillion Clampetts and Kettles heading for the bus in the sky to get themselves south for the winter. I think it was some weird harmonic convergence of spring break, March Madness, and my bad luck of taking a late flight instead of the usual 6 am dawn patrol.

Utter suckfest. Because the lines were so long I couldn’t check my bag, and in my bag was my Swiss Army knife/USB drive/key chain.

Busted. Got away with the drive and the keys. Goodbye knife. Like I was going to rush the cockpit with a 1.5″ pen knife. Then I discovered, when I took off my shoes for the metal detector, this gem from dressing in the dark. The TSA lady was horrified.
Now I think I understand why the news staff at the Lawrence Eagle-Tribune gave me clothing as a going away present in 1984. Something about hemming my pants with a Swingline Stapler.

Dowbrigade News: Dowbrigade News

An interesting twist on the Nigerian scam — getting American dupes to cash bogus Postal money orders and send the proceeds back to the scammer.

Which reminds me, I need to finish my saga as a check forger one of these days.

My Weblog: Internet Commerce: Sephora.No, HP, Yes!

“Internet commerce has to be drop dead simple and build a consumer’s confidence. There are two computer purchasing sites that I do business with and which come close to replicating the Amazon.com’s gold standard. In addition to HP’s commerce site, I also like Lenovo. And Lenovo comes close to establishing a sense of community. If i have a problem with a ThinkPad notebook one of the first places i go is to Lenovo.com. The site queries my computer, determines what model i have and establishes its configuration. Logic trees take over from there and pretty soon I’ve found the answer to my question, or more importantly, a solution to my problem.”

Jim makes some good points about getting in-and-out out of a shopping experience in as little time as possible. Usability comes to a sharp point when applied to the transactional web. Where a media site is all about delay and diversion — related links, click here, please don’t go away — a commerce site is all about masking complexity (ship to multiple addresses, remember my account details, find-it-and-buy-it) and getting people in and out of the store as soon as possible. When a consumer has a negative experience, like Jim did at Sephora trying to get a gift certificate, to when they have a positive, like one gets from Amazon’s One-Click, the chances of a repeat transaction are highly predictable.

I  had two commerce experiences yesterday — one was with NewEgg as I purchased a new 60 gb 7200 rpm Hitachi drive to revive a dead Fujitsu P2040, the other was at Fujitsu when I tried to get the OEM information on the dead Toshiba drive. Fujitsu failed. NewEgg ruled. Now, Fujitsu was able to find my machine based on the serial number, but had no level of detail about the components. I had to google out to a third-party “enthusiast” site for P2040 owners, look at the discussion threads, find the part I wanted, then hit NewEgg. Fujitsu lost all opportunity of selling me an upgraded drive — I suppose it’s understandable given the complexity of any PC manufacturers catalogue and the impossibility of keeping sunsetted machine information active for any period of time.

I want to hit a site and be recognized as a customer, to be asked how my machine is doing, how that book was I ordered, and then be offered suggestions on how to improve it.

Full throttle around Osterville’s Grand Island on a sunny day when it’s 34 degrees and blowing 20 kn out of the northwest is a re-definition of wind-chill. I’m still shivering. The problem was too hasty a launch last weekend, water in the gas, and not connecting the gas-line tight enough. Thanks Pete.

You know you’re a townie when:

a) you are in the only boat on the water.

b) you are on the water before the channel cans are on the water.

c) you think wearing waders is cool and normal and think nothing of walking into the grocery store wearing them.

d) you don’t leave your boat on the mooring because since it is the only boat in the harbor it will become the world’s seagull toilet.

You know the scene. The hero needs to track the bad guys, so under the cover of darkness he crawls under their car — preferably a late 70s Plymouth — and sticks a little tracking device under the bumper, a gizmo with a blinking red light and a mini antenna. Then, as the Plymouth winds and wends its way through the streets of the city, our hero and his partner keep one on the road and the other on their dashboard display, tracking a flashing dot as it moves down Maple and hangs a louie onto Elm.

So it goes with the sisphyean and semi-creepy job of tracking users through cookies and “tracking beacons.” The cookie debate has been with us since their introduction in the mid-90s, and many a paranoid user would express outrage that some hapless publisher was sticking a bug under their bumper. I would write explanatory FAQs, debate the ethics with the corporate legal department, answer angry emails from those paranoid users, all trying to explain that cookies were a convenience, didn’t disclose their bank account numbers, and weren’t being sold to spammers.

As the web moved from the wild west to a highly buttoned up vision of metric nirvana, the nature of the bug under the bumper changed from one of establishing a state between the user’s browser and the destination site — “remember me” functionality — to one of following the user’s clickstream, establishing repeat visit behavior patterns, and painting a mostly anonymous picture of what John Battelle eloquently calls the “Database of intentions.”

The old model of web metric was slow and rear-facing, looking at log files generated by the servers to determine the kind of gross tonnage traffic figures that dot.bomb CEOs loved to throw around like golf scores: “My site gets a million hits a day,” not understanding the difference between a hit, a page view, a visit, a unique visit, a weekly unique visit, pages per visit, etc. etc. — the high level numbers that make some people happy but aren’t very useful to a web team buying advertising, optimizing pages for conversions, and studying clickstreams to see where users are coming from, what search terms are getting them there, etc. etc.

The present state of metrics is very advanced from where things stood five years ago. Omniture’s SiteCatalyst, Web Side Story’s Hitbox, are examples of the ASP model of web metrics (with Google Analytics coming on as a free alternative for SMBs and less sophisticated users) that are giving great insights into user paths, fall off points, A-B testing, promotional tracking, and the lifeblood insights that spell the difference between pissing away ad dollars in the case of a commerce site, or losing users to bad nav for a media site.

All ASP systems depend on a tracking beacon — a script embedded into the html of every page that tracks the user from one page to the next. Spyware detectors don’t like these things, and sophisticated or paranoid users are growing more and more accustomed to purging them as nuisances and potential spam threats. Omniture found itself in hotwater last summer when the Wall Street Journal reported on its “2o7″ cookie, and how spyware and privacy watchdogs were calling into question Omniture’s lack of transparency in divulging the source or purpose of the cookie.

That didn’t stop us at IDG from continuing to live within Omniture — the producers and editors in the clickmap — a graphical overlay of the pages, and the marketing types inside of custom dashboards which at the very least spared me — the chief analyst and bottle-washer — from having to wrestle with ad hoc queries. Or at least not as many.

The point of this digression is to report that the science of web analytics and metrics has moved far from the days at Forbes.com in the mid-90s when everything was a best guess informed by the blunt Web Trends analysis of the log files. Further integration of metrics with other quantitative measures — customer satisfaction, cart revenue, SEM CPCs — could yield a new model of content management where sites will tuned on a minute-by-minute basis for maximum yields. When that happens — and it is happening on the most sophisticated sites, the repercussions on interactive agencies, paid search, and insertion engines such as Doubleclick will be massive.

Learning how to measure and optimize in as close to real time as possible will prove to be the most valuable skill in web management, one that will see the old paradigm of web masters tweaking content with designers and then firing it into the ether through an FTP client, only to see the results a week later (like driving with an eye on the rear mirror), doomed and done.

Scrolling through my Nano on the plane(black, 4 gb, already scratched), I realized that there is one playlist — consisting of twenty songs — which I have listened to, nearly every day, for the last ten years. It’s titled ERG II and it is a masterpiece of musical ugliness.

Any fan of the John Cusack film, High Fidelity, (an excellent soundtrack and great example of the perfect mix) has heard the protagonist’s theory of building musical mixes. In the old days — pre-MP3 and shuffle mode — the perfect mix was defined by what would fix on a 90-minute Maxell cassette. One would drag out the old vinyl, or use a double-cassette deck to dub a mix for that upcoming road trip or as a cheapo birthday gift with a personal touch. Twenty-year olds in the 80s depended on mix tapes as a prime gift source. There are some lost mix tapes in my past that were true gems — I remember a reggae mix that was universally acclaimed for its brilliance, compiled by my musician brother Henry when he did a University of Colorado reggae radio show under the air name of Highly Unlikely, the Redneck Rasta. Alas it is lost. Victim of being parked on a dashboard on a sunny summer day.

The art of the 90-minute mix was taken to a new high by Time Editorial Mandarin Norm Pearlstein in the early 90s when he set out to build the ultimate 90-minute rock mix. Think about it — what would have to reside on the perfect mix? Would you open with Bill Haley and the Comets? Would Elvis make it? What Beatles song? What Stones? This is the sort of metaphysical argument that can whittle down the tedium of a long car ride faster than a hundred games of Twenty-Questions.

But I Digress (I want to launch a new blog just under that title). Back to ERG II. This mix was born in 1994 when I decided to get into kickass shape and return to rowing. I bought the world’s finest piece of exercise equipment, a Concept 2 Model C Rowing Ergometer, and started seriously training, posting my scores on Concept 2 Online Ranking site and getting very competitive out in the garage with virtual opponents like the legendary Ad Bax, and other names with faster times than me.

Ergometers are hellish beasts, they are the sort of machines that a NASA flight surgeon would use to determine the VO2 Max level of a candidate for the first mission to Mars. Olympic rowers hate them but live on them. College rowers make their boats largely on the basis of their scores. The machines are so simple, but so accurate, that an entire sport — Indoor Rowing — has taken grip, with non-rowers competing against “water” rowers in massive indoor championships like the CRASH-B sprints and the European Indoor Rowing Championships.

You can’t read while erging. Your head is swinging back and forth and you can’t take your hands off of the handle to turn the page of a magazine or book. So music is the answer. I started off in the mid-90s listening to highly syncopated Disco or House music, relying on mix tapes in a Sony Sportswalkman, the unit shoved down the back of my sweaty rowing shorts and the wire run up the inside of my t-shirt and out the neck so I wouldn’t run over it with the wheeled seat. The problem with old analog mix tapes is they can’t be easily edited. So I’d be flying along, cranking away at 30 strokes a minute, maintaining a 1:45 split at the end of a 30 minute piece, driving hard to break 8,300 meters and move up a notch on the virtual ladder, when the snappy songs would give way to some horrible sap music like James Taylor crying about Fire and Rain. It was the athletic equivalent of seeing a naked old person.

Then came the MiniDisc — a nice little format that at the very least was good for building custom mixes. I soon discovered the Napster thing in its earliest days, and started trolling other people’s hard disks for true erg music.

What resulted, over the next ten years, was ERG II. The music on ERG II is best characterized as demented head banger. This is not easy listening. This is music for people in anaerobic shock, people pretending to be human motors, nut jobs who like to pretend they are diesel engines in a diving U-boat escaping a British corvette dropping depth charges. Indeed, a look at the set list shows a lot of songs about misery and suffering.

First the list, then an expiation of why they are on the iPod and why they are essential to a proper ergometer session, a workout that usually takes anywhere from 30 to 60 minutes to complete.

1. Scum of the Earth: Rob Zombie
2. Who Was in My Room Last Night: The Butthole Surfers
3. Jesus Built my Hot Rod: Ministry
4. Ain’t my Bitch: Metallica
5. Rusty Cage: Soundgarden
6. Sex Type Thing: Stone Temple Pilots
7. New World Order: Ministry
8. Hey Man, Nice Shot: Filter
9. My Own Summer – Deftones
10. Astro-Creep: White Zombie
11. Them Bones: Alice in Chains
12. Time Bomb: Godsmack
13. Blizzards, Buzzards, Bastards: Scissorfight
14. Du Hast: Rammstein
15. God Save the Queen: Sex Pistols
16. You Think I’m Not Worth a Dollar, But I Feel Like a Millionaire, Queens of the New Stone Age
17. Jump Around: House of Pain
18. Liberate: Slipknot
19. She Sells Sanctuary: The Cult
20. California Uber Alles: The Dead Kennedys

This is not easy listening. Women hate this music. Children dig it and slam dance instinctfully to it. Play it through ordinary speakers and the neighbors will call the cops. Guaranteed. This is music soccer hooligans and skin heads listen to before beering up and terrorizing the 5:15 from Manchester to Leeds. Music to drive drunk to, a soundtrack for vandalism, music for a LA highway highspeed chase with the helicopters hovering overhead. This is not Michael Bolton, American Idol music. But if you want to bust a nut and get all jiggly with your theoretical maximum heart rate, this is the music for you. My son calls it Stoner Industrial. I call it Ergathon.

This is not my favorite music. That would be Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks. This is what I just happen to listen to every day, for 45 minutes.

What the music has in common, aside from lead singers who sing like the Cookie Monster, is a particular beat that ties nicely to the cadence of a rowing stroke. For those who have not pulled on an oar, just think in terms of fours.

The stroke consists of the catch, when you’re all scrunched up with your knees around your ears and your arms outstretched, coiled for a rolling horizontal squat jump — the drive, when your legs do most of the work and send you rolling back on the rail, the finish, when your back and upper body and arms take over and bring the oar handle into your lap, and then, gratefully, the one moment of slight rest, the recovery, when you roll back down the slide to start it all over again.

Some rowers, and I am unfortunately one, count. Like Rainman, I count. It’s an old bad habit. The coach would say through his megaphone: “Build in four to full power to a 34 for two minutes.” Which, translated, means, in four strokes I want you start honking as hard as you can 34 strokes a minute for two minutes. And then I’d start counting, one-two-three-four on every stroke, then another count for the strokes pulled, so at stroke number 68, I’d know I could ease off and pant for dear life to get some air into my lungs.

These songs are great for the four count. You can really get moving to the music, breathing twice on every stroke for syncopation’s sake, once at the catch, the other at the finish.

The problem is racing. Those events are 2,000 meters long and last, if one is REALLY fast and in Olympian condition, around 6 minutes. My fastest time is under 6:30, like 6:24 at my last CRASH-B sprints (the true world championships of indoor rowing, the acronym stands for the Charles River Association of Sculling Has-Beens). The problems of listening to a real psych-up song during a 2,000 meter race are manifold. One, you have your hands full of oar handle and can’t be dicking around with iPod buttons before the start. Second, you can’t start a song and sit there, the good parts will be playing while you wait for the starting signal. And finally, who records six and a half minute songs?

So, this set list is a training list, and sure, after a while it gets old, but like the order of the songs on a favorite CD, I always know what is next, and have mixed the sequence to perfectly coincide with the predictable phases of an ergometer workout.

There’s the first five minutes, which are usually kind of a bummer because I’m not warmed up, I dread the hell to come, and some weird aerobic transfer phase has to kick in, which generally happens right around ten minutes when the sweat cocks get turned on and I begin to turn into Aqua Man. At 15 minutes things are getting interesting. The heart rate is over 160 and it’s time to decide whether this piece is going to be one for the books, or just another good day of exercise. If I cross 4,000 meters at 15 minutes, then the good news is I am fast, the bad news is I have to do 4,000 plus in the next 15 minutes to make the 30 minute piece notable. It’s at twenty minutes that one enters the phase of utter desperation — what my erg buddy Dr. Dan calls “The Talk with God” when you start bargaining with yourself and slicing time into 15 second increments, doing frantic math in your head and trying to solve a hopeless equation of how many more strokes need to be yanked, at what split (pace) to overtake the next loser on the online ladder.

This would not be considered a musical listening experience like settling in for Yo-Yo Ma playing Schubert’s Trout Quarter.

I hate my erg. Love my Nano, and pavlovian creature of habit that I am, listen to ERG II (Erg I is lost to time) even when not erging, like now, on the 6:10 Delta from Raleigh to Cinncinati, the noise leaking out of the ear buds causing some suspicious sideways glances from the tired looking propeller salesman in the aisle seat.

Escapa!

Allegedly used by Air Force — pilots are supposed to be able to handle it for two minutes. My best is 12 seconds.

In this episode, things really get going, in a Moby Dick kind of way, and the Captain gets stove in by a whale. Arr matey. And goes home to win his first command at the age of 25. Sheesh, at 25 I was covering car wrecks at a daily newspaper and making $113 a week, not trying to outswim angry whales.

Tis conference season — PC Forum, eTech, Demo, etc. etc. — the sort of thing I was forced to attend when I was a tech reporter in the early 90s, now a dim memory of getting harangued by flacks, begging for interviews with the high and mighty, and suffering through interminable presentations. Now I avoid these affairs but wonder, after reading vicariously on the blogs, what it would be like to be a professional tech conference attendee? To do nothing but fly around and hang out in warm places (inside of course), listening to the brilliant prognosticate while chattering away on the IRC backchannel with the rest of the snarky people. Does anything actually get accomplished at these $4000 a head affairs other than business card exchange?
It seems like a closed loop — the way it was in the 80s when PC conferences were actually cool. Now it is Web 2.0 conferences where those hoping to get run over by the Google/Yahoo/Fox/etc. money truck make their debut with some ajaxy social networking thingy that no one will ever use, where the A-list (the modern Digerati) all blog and crosslink, and then pick fights with each other afterwards.

I think I will stick to clamming strategy and my own circle of friends. I rather read Jim Forbes bitch about hailstorms in his garden than some unnamed pedantic blogger moan about how Dave Winer is threatening to stop blogging, or how Ben Metcalfe got b$%^-slapped by Mena Trott, etc. etc. etc.

There’s more to life than bloglines, technorati, and wordpress.

You have new Picture Mail!

Originally uploaded by dchurbuck.

Coprolite is the word that comes to mind.

A colleague loaned me his autographed edition of Louis V. Gerstner, Jr.’s Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance, and in the course of a five-hour flight from Raleigh to Cinncinati to Providence, I plowed through it, testament perhaps to my speed reading prowess or perhaps to the less-filling-tastes-great density of the story of IBM’s dramatic turnaround under Gerstner from 1993 to 2002.

• IBM lost $8.1 billion the year Gerstner took over the helm from John Akers. It made a profit of $8.1 billion in 2000.
• The stock price was $12.72 on 3/31/93. It was $120.76 when Gerstner retired.

Any questions? Good. First, let me first praise Gerstner for writing the book himself. No ghost in the wings and the writing is actually precent decent. Sure, there’s an element of messiah-walking-on-water, but give the man his due; a non-technologist walking into an epic mess, he did one thing and he did it well: he executed a plan, using Chrysler’s ex-CFO Jerome York to attack the expense-side of the business while he developed the transition out of hardware and software into services. His management incentive plan gave the executive team some skin the game — and while Gerstner doubtlessly and deservedly enriched himself in the process — the turnaround reads like a page from the McKinsey playbook, where Gerstner was the hot star in the 60s and 70s, making partner at one of the youngest ages in the firm’s history.

I would recommend Douglas Garr’s IBM Redux for a better, more objective account of the turnaround, and for some better and nastier anecdotes about the dysfunction that was in place when Gerstner arrived. Who Says Elephant’s Can’t Dance is actually pretty good with the leadership econiums:

“Passion. As a student going through Harvard Business School, I would never have guessed that passion would be the single most important element of personal leadership. I don’t recall the word ever being spoken during my classroom time at Harvard.”

While you could print that on a poster with a picture of a high jumper, the reality is that in technology especially, it’s the passionate leaders that lead the dynamic companies. Ballmer, Jobs, Ellison, McNealy — these aren’t dry corporate-speak drones, and Gerstner points out, with some awe, the degree to which the technology business is insanely cut-throat in its ad hominen attacks, religious wars over formats and standards, and chaotic in its pace of innovation and decline. That he was able to walk into an organization beset with acronyms and legacy systems, investing billions in things like SNA and OS/2, and turn it around is, in the end, the most amazing turnaround story ever told.

Days don’t get any better than yesterday. Spring came in on a southwesterly breeze, so I opened the morning with a beach walk with Daphne and the dogs, followed it with a fast 90-minute bike ride to Sandy Neck, then started the ritual of re-commissioning the Tashmoo for another season of clamming, fishing, and expeditions to Dead Neck.

The battery was dead, victim of a defective bilge pump, and the tool “borrowers” had made off with the trickle charger, so off to the hardware store for a new charger, which, upon return, was too smart for its own good and would not permit its “microprocessor logic!” to bring the battery back to life. I took Fisher to his last YMCA basketball game, calling the mechanically inclined Cousin Pete on his cell phone to see if he could sort out the charger while I was rooting in the stands.

Returning 90 minutes later, Pete had sorted out the charger and there were electrical signs of life, enough so that we pulled oun our waders, collected the clam rakes, licenses, baskets and buckets, and made ready to launch and be off to the clam flats.

Once in the water, we dropped the engine, gave it a crank and … nothing. There wasn’t nearly enough charge to get the engine alive after three cold months of inactivity. Pete took the car to the house, grabbed some jumper cables, and in a move out of the handbook of stupid things not to do in saltwater, we got the nose of the car close enough to the boat battery to get the jumper cables on and crank the Honda four-stroke back to life.

That was a very good sign and optimism filled the hearts of the clamming crew. Pete reparked the car, my son Eliot climbed aboard — yelling at us because he insisted of listening to iPod for the rest of the afternoon and instantly turned into our version of Forrest Gump, unresponsive to all questions, louder than a deaf codger for anything he cared to share — and we pushed off from the beach with an oar, lowering the idling engine until we were ready to click into gear and head out to the head of the harbor.

Bad move. The boat always stalls out the first time it goes into gear, and this time it stalled again. Now we were fifty feet away from the beach and the engine hadn’t been running enough to get another crank’s worth of charge into the battery. I tried, we crossed our fingers, but alas, the boat needed to be paddled back to the boat ramp, the car un-parked and brought back down the water’s edge, and again we jump started. This time waiting ten minutes before getting back into gear.

This time it worked and we winged across the Bay at full throttled to the cove where the clams were. I ran us aground in the shallows and nearly lost the engine — an unacceptable outcome given there was not another start in the battery yet — but recovered nicely in time to jump aboard in my waders and push us back into the channel.

We unloaded and left the engine running at an idle, something I don’t like to do as idling outboards get overheated and foul the plugs, but the clams were calling and the day was waning into the late afternoon. Pete took his new Ribb jerk rake — a mini two-handle bullrake — and I dropped to my knees and started pawing through the cold mud for steamers while he worked the inlet for cherrystones and Eliot walked in circles, iPod distracted and ignoring my waves to come over and work the productive section of flat I had found.

I waded into the cove and raked some quahogs for stuffed quahogs and Clams Casino — doing pretty well but paying for the effort this morning with pulled muscles in my shoulders and back — while Eliot and Pete continued to fill the steamer bucket. Lost in the reveries of basking in the sun and the smell of the clam mud, watching a beautifully restored biplane fly low over us and waggle its wings when I saluted it with my rake, I remembered with a jolt that the outboard had been idling for an hour with no attention.

I returned to the flats, took a turn on the Jerk Rake (I didn’t like it so much, and prefer my basket-rake) and started packing up our gear for the return to the mooring and a post-clam beer.

When I waded out to the boat I didn’t hear anything — a normal enough condition given the silence of the Honda, but, to our horror, the engine was off, the ignition switch was on, and we got one crank, a quick start, then deadness.

We were hosed. There was no walking home for help. Only a long, long paddle back to the mainland in the approaching darkness.

Pete opened his cellphone and called his foreman, Greg, who had been out on the water earlier that afternoon. We were in luck, he was at his mooring only a half-mile away. Fortunately we had the jumper cables, so when Greg arrived we were able to give it a start. The engine wasn’t happy though. The gas left in the tank was a bit messy — water, over-winter varnish — and it wouldn’t come up to speed. So we rigged a bridle, transferred Pete and Eliot to Greg’s boat, and towed me ashore, the more ignomious of outcomes.

Oh well. Pete and I knew what would happen when we left the hard with a weak battery, but it was too good a day not to clam. As we drank the post-clam beer and watched the sun set pink behind the library, we had a good laugh at our knuckle-headedness, and agreed, had Greg not been afloat to come save us, it would have had a much worst outcome than it did.

Today the battery should have a full night’s worth of charging in it, I will buy new gas, and we’ll make a return to top off the clam baskets and get some more steamers for tonight’s clam fest of fried clams, Clams Casino, and Ultimate Stuffies. It’s another great spring day here in Cotuit, no thoughts of returning to Raleigh for the week are permitted to cloud my mood, all children are upstairs in the beds, and all, given a working boat, should be right with the world.

Real men carry their own bags and the total takeover of AirWorld by dweebs towing their luggage behind them is now officially out of control. Overhead bins have been lost to them, every retard who steps out of the plane and into the jetway is begging for a solid kick when they stop, lean back, retract the spiffy telescoping handle, and roll on their way while I am hard charging to make my connection right on their heels.

Then it’s squeaky-squeaky-squeaky down the industrial carpeted concourse, briefcase and waterbottle laced through the retractable handle, falling off half the time, once again causing a pause to recover and begging for another boot of the old Bally in the butt. Again, real men use their hands, shoulders and backs; burn some calories, or pack their baggage like a Sherpa.

Then there are the Bluetoothed Borgs — sorry, unless you are driving in a state that forbids the use of a cell phone in a car, headsets do not make you look cool — people talking on headsets in public look like a maniac on the median of Park Avenue preaching at the big shiny skyscraper — talking to themselves about uncovered electric outlets and behaving like full-on candidates for an aluminum foil turban. Borgs and Wheelie People are usually one and the same.

Noted author Jeffrey S. Young, author of iCon — the recent Jobs biography that resulted in all of publisher Wiley’s titles getting banned from the shelves in Apple’s stores — is blogging for ZD Net, a good thing because Young’s been a blogger for years but hasn’t known it. Dan Farber will find himself with a handful in Young — who I edited in the first days of Forbes.com — but if initial posts are any indication, Young will distinguish himself.

Formerly colleagues at PC Week — where his scoop on Job’s first Next machine (ask Jimmy Guterman about that escapade, traveling to England to find the black box clad in a down-vest to cover it from inquiring eyes) shook things up, and then at Forbes, where we collaborated on what should have been a cover story on the impact of broadband on rural backwaters inspired by the late Walter Wriston, and where he went on to write a compendium of the greatest technology stories for Forbes and Wiley under the Forbes “Great Stories of Business” imprint, Young has been a part of my professional life since the mid-80s.

He is also the screenwriter behind Flesh Gordon, an utterly bizarre soft-core porno he penned while at the UCLA film school.

Today he is encamped in Rescue, California, somewhere in Gold Country above Sacramento, setting his fields on fire and tending his vineyards with fellow PC Week alum, Jim Forbes, who need desperately to come up with a better title for his excellent blog than the generic “My Blog.”

http://blogs.zdnet.com/Young

Young’s current take on Cisco’s China play is pretty savage and to the point. While some may take exception to Young’s assertion, especially John Chambers, that Cisco is helping China build a Big Brother society through the deployment of IP-enabled security cameras just in time for the ’08 Beijing Summer Olympics, he displays some good reporting and blogger-esque editorializing. Into my Bloglines he goes.

FT.com / Comment & analysis / Comment – Old media must embrace the amateur

Tom Glocer op eds in the FT about the role of MSM in a citizen journalism world. Good points, now let’s see Reuters put it into action. Sample suggestions I would make are:

1. Make all content bloggable — no cost walls, no reg walls

2. Make photographs, charts, maps, and other graphics bloggable under fair use. No server side blocks.

3. Initiate del.icio.us tagging on all Reuter’s stories

4. Open a contribute function to permit citizen journalists to upload their contributions adjacent to the “professional content”

Borgy101 – Nothing to see here.

Todd Borglund, the acerbic wit of CXO Media, and manager of production services, has launched a blog. When we were trialing a new blog system at CXO in the 4th quarter, the Borgy Blog was a personal favorite, but since it was hidden in a sandbox, the world was spared such great posts as the guy who sued Home Depot because some glued his butt to a toilet seat.

So Cousin Pete text messaged the call to clamming this coming weekend, and so I texted back “Weather?” not really being of the mind to dig through the ice before digging in the mud. “60s” came the reply, so I’m in and this is what we will do.

1. Check the tides. An hour on each side of low tide is the time to be clamming. Low tide is late in the afternoon on Saturday, so that gives me the morning to put the boat battery on a trickle charger and to think about repacking the bearings on the trailer (the big procrastination point for me every spring).

2. Renew the clam license. It expired on March 1. This needs to happen Friday and I might as well renew my mooring permits at the same time, at the same office.

3. Buy beer.

4. Buy gas.

5. Launch the boat.

6. Shake the spiders out of my waders. Put them on, look like the Michelin Man.

7. Drive the boat to the secret clam flat.

8. Dig clams.

9. Return home, open the clams (while wife protests that I am making a mess out of the sink), fry them, stuff them, make Clams Casio out them. All while drinking more beer.

10. Eat clams.

In some circles of interactive marketing, there is an unhealthy obsession with the term “viral.” Essentially it is a synonym for cheap in my opinion, and completely misunderstood unless one takes it with the same rough definition that you’ll know it when you see it.

There’s pedestrian viral — the stuff that clogs your inbox from your brother-in-law. Today’s meme is the crazed guy in Brooklyn ranting about Starbucks into his webcam and dropping F-bombs every other word. Okay, sixty second video rant, delivered to me via video is not viral. The second time it gets forwarded to me, like the Numa Numa guy, the Star Wars Kid, or the Car-Sunroof-That-Decapitates-Cats, then it is a phenomenon, but is it “viral?”

Then there’s overcooked viral — the dumb crap that some ad agency bakes for a client and then buys advertising to promote. I won’t cite any examples because I don’t know any.

Let’s first look at the attributes of Internet viral.

1. It is spread by email. Mostly. Blogs can spread it too. Slashdot, Boing-Boing, they are the mass media of the medium.

2. It is generally video. Four year-olds shooting M-60s, Seth Godin at Google, the aforementioned ads. Text viral is stuff like the Darwin Awards or urban myth stuff. Jokes are not viral.
3. It is rarely a game. Viral games … I remember an animated quiz that asked guys to select which urinal they would use under several situations. A plastic surgeon friend was quite taken by a “Real or Fake” quiz (which I kicked his professional butt at).
4. Viral is often pornographic, involves obese people, and makes fun of rednecks.

5. Animation can go viral. Jib-jab, etc. and indeed is very viral when done right. PPS — or powerpoint slideshows are viral too. Paul Allen’s MegaYacht hit my inbox a lot. The Engrish Powerpoint was big in January. The world’s biggest piece of construction equipment. That British music cartoon hit thing around Christmas about the kid riding in his father’s “JCB”
6. The best product viral was the Subservient Chicken — and that proves the other attribute of viral, it must carry a high dementia factor. Burger King rules at dementia. I think I saw the Subservient Chicken get ridden in a rodeo last night on the tube, but the killer part of the ad was the set up so the singers could shout “Buckin’ Chicken” at the end. That will make anybody look up from the newspaper.

I worry that he who sets out to be viral is as doomed as a geek who sets out to be cool, or a bore who works at being funny. I regard good viral as a stubbed-toe opportunity. You go “aha!” and if you’re lucky it will pyramid faster than a get rich scheme in Albania.

cmurray.org » The Content Management Gap – Part II

Chris Murray throws down the challenge — why isn’t there a mid-tier CMS solution between the realm of opensource and the heights of enterprise CMS?

I say there needs to be an ASP model. There’s no justification for a company to consider CMS management a strategic IT investment. For those who do, they build their own and tune it to their model. For them’s that don’t, they need to treat it as a utility.