Churbuck.com

Blogging on the taxiway at Philadelphia on my way to Raleigh this morning. Completely excellent experience not being dependent on the local wi-fi bandits for airport connectivity. Coverage is excellent — I picked up the EVDO signal in Cotuit this morning — and the price, if one takes the $70 per month flat fee all-you-can-eat plan, is easily amortized against airport wi-fi charges at $7 each. Hats off to Verizon for being so aggressive in EVDO. This is going to shake up T-Mobile’s wi-fi franchise.

Downside is battery life suffers. I need to upgrade to an eight-cell LI-ION to get more usage out of the system. Down to minutes now and watching the power meter like the gas gauge on a Hummer.

Digital Influence Mapping Project: Co-Creation & Customer Made

John Bell at Ogilvy PR on the concept of co-creation. Provocative concept.

Captain Thomas Chatfield

Originally uploaded by dchurbuck.

At home in Cotuit, here is the man in all his glory. According to the handwritten note on the back of the picture, this was taken in 1910, twelve years before his death.

I’ve scanned and uploaded a good number of photos into my Flickr account. Now the project moves onto the second phase of correcting the scanned war letters. When that is done I will need to decide how to treat the letters vis a vis the Reminiscences and whether to annotate the narrative with the details found in the epistolary account, or keep them separate and standalone.

Then I’ll move everything to Blurb, mock up the book itself, import the high res scans and finish the facsimile portion of the project before moving onto the primary research with the ship’s logs to determine the path of his voyages. That research will lead me to a Google Map tour, more contextual research (I want to learn more about the Gold Rush and Civil War is particular, having studied the whale fishery extensively in college.)

Then, when all the contextual research is finished, time to think about the book and getting it published. This is a very rewarding project personally and the antidote to a career obsessed with internet marketing.

There is a “Chatfield” photo set on my Flickr account to be found here.

I just scanned the letters by Captain Thomas Chatfield, written between 1863 and 1865 while he was stationed on the Gulf coast of Florida as an Acting Master in the U.S. Navy. Most of these letters were written to his wife, Florentine (Handy) and some to his daughter Mildred (Millie).

The PDF is 6 megabytes is size. And can be downloaded here. 

I need to clean up the RTF file and convert the file into live text. I take back what I said about the scanner earlier, I just saved myself three months of work!

Connecting the Dots: Web 2.0: Connecting people to dots

I discovered Steve Borsch’s blog via Foldera’s news paper this morning. Seems smart and genuinely engaged with the online collaboration space. Into the blogroll he goes.

Thomas Chatfield

Originally uploaded by dchurbuck.

This photo was probably shot in New York City or Brooklyn shortly before Chatfield was ordered to the USS Somerset as acting master.

He would have been 31 years-old at the time of this photo, recently returned from San Francisco and his first successful voyage as captain of the whaler “Massachusetts” his fourth Pacific whaling voyage in all aboard that ship.

I bought a Canon 8400F to scan some photos for the Chatfield project and to attempt to accelerate the transcription of his Civil War letters. The photos are fine. No big deal there. A scanner is a scanner and I use the “import” function through Photoshop to grab the pictures, crop, save as .psd and .jpg.

Getting the thing to recognize simple typescript is another matter altogether. While I think it is faster than a 100 wpm transcription exercise, the typescript is so messy due to strikeouts and the preservation of Chatfield’s bad spelling that I spend a good five or ten minutes per page cleaning things up in an interface that isn’t too intuitive to play with. I’m using Omnipage SE Ver. 2.

Thomas Chatfield

Originally uploaded by dchurbuck.

Guess who got a scanner today? This is Thomas Chatfield sometime in the early 20th Century (he passed away in July, 1922) in the dining room at Cotuit. The desk, known as a secretary, is still in use and bears his bootmarks on the desktop.

More photos to come.

BBC NEWS | Americas | Snake bursts after gobbling gator

While we’re on the topic of food ….

I introduced my son to Sally’s Apizza in New Haven last night. This is, according to many pizza freaks, the best pizza on the planet, one of those subjective designations that will spark many a debate among food geeks and their sub-genus, pizza geeks, for the rest of time.

If you check out the wikipedia entry on Pizza, you will see that Sally’s and its Wooster Street neighbor, Frank Pepe’s, are not the original pizza parlors in America, but, being in operation since the 1920s and 30s, among the earliest in the nation. Sally’s followed Pepe’s — Sal Consiglio was a nephew of Pepe and started a dozen years later.

I prefer Sally’s because they burn the crust — black lips and fingers are the sign of a Sally’s dining experience — and the carbon-enhanced taste, while hard to imagine as a positive, is indeed the signature of a Sally’s pie. I also prefer Sally’s because it’s the place where my New Haven pizza experience began in 1977, with a bunch of classmate, crowded into the same booth. The large cheese pie came out on a big paper-lined pan — no plates — and the instant I bit into the first slice I was able to declare: “This is the best f—ing pizza I have ever eaten.” The hour-long lines one usually has to endure is testament to this fact.

We lucked out last night — we breezed right into a booth, no wait, probably because Yale is finished for the year and there aren’t any hungry students contending for seats.

We started with a medium pepperoni apizza (it’s “apizza” in New Haven and you have to specify mozzarella else you get a crust with tomato sauce), moved onto a classic cheese, an ordered another pepperoni to go. My son the skeptic, who told me the build up was a bit excessive on my part, agreed, one second into his first, bite, that it was indeed “the best f—ing pizza” in the world. When we arrived in Cotuit at 11 pm with the cold pie you’d of thought we were bringing the rarest delicacy in the world home with us.

As of 8 this morning the pie was gone, the victim of a cold pizza breakfast. (apologies for the sucky cameraphone pic)

BBC NEWS | Asia-Pacific | Site launches ‘Chinese Wikipedia’

Baidu launches a Chinese “Wikipedia.” The original is inaccessible in country.

Genuine VC: The Simple Online Inventory Equation

Great post by David Beisel at Masthead on online advertising and the transformation of CPM to “cost per reaching the right customer.” Developing this efficiency is not going to be fun, but expect the behavioral targeters like Tacoda to lead the charge. Online advertising is beginning to walk upright from its old posture of crawling on all fours and measuring CPM, CPC and other blunt “stupid” measures.

“The beauty of the interactive medium is the ability to more effectively target the right consumer for the advertiser’s message. Whether advertisers realize it or not, the right metric to view media buys isn’t CPM, but rather effective cost per reaching the right target customer. And while television and print advertisers have striven towards improving this measure though demo- and geo- targeted buys, the interactive medium allows for much more granular targeting. Witness e-mail marketing, contextual CPC campaigns, and search. Now with behaviorally-targeted networks like Tacoda, advertisers can reach consumers with even more precision (e.g. demonstrated car buyers who are surfing ROS news, weather, or sports pages). So while publishers are earning higher CPMs for their pages (thus raising the weighted-average CPM on the ‘net), the technology allows advertisers to more effectively reach who they want, which is the true goal in the first place.”

First look: Foldera shows great promise by ZDNet‘s Marc Orchant –

“I had an opportunity recently to get a first-hand look at Foldera in an online demo with founder and CEO Richard Lusk. For those of you unfamiliar with the as-yet-to-be-released online application, Foldera is an AJAX-rich information manager that combines e-mail, instant messaging, a calendar, task management, and a document repository to produce a browser-accessible collaboration space.”

Good first-look review of Foldera, the hot web-based collaboration tool I’ve been advising since 2003. As the product moves into beta and people start banging on it, I expect there will be a big uptake as people begin to challenge their preconceptions formed by a lifetime of bad personal information managers and clients such as Outlook and Notes.

Slice is a great pizza blog that has been in my blogroll for two months:

I’m a major pizza binge lately; both eating and cooking it. Trying to hit the best of the best and this blog tracks them. Going to college in New Haven spoiled me with Frank Pepe’s and Sally’s. Proximity to NYC, Providence and Boston’s Pizzaria Regina and Santarpios has me looking for more real temples to pie.

China Tech Stories: Summary of Search Market in China

Interesting report at China Tech Stories of tech.163.com’s report on the state of search in China. This graph shows — in green — Baidu’s current domination, but Google is coming on strong, contradicting the anecdotal trashing the company received at the hands of the Chinese users I spoke with last month in Beijing.

Google is even better when it comes to monetizing search. Maoxianjia’s analysis:

“First, Baidu has gained commanding lead in both usage and popularity reach. However, Baidu’s monetization on search is still very limited.

“Secondly, the data pretty much prove Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s remark that the China market is up for grabs. In such a short time, from Aug to Dec. 2005, Google has grabbed 14.4% of the market share in revenues in China which is quite remarkable.”

And in related China internet news, some squawking over the Chinese character domains — the censorship crowd is crying manipulation of traffic — me, it seems logical that you’d have domain names in the same character set as the users, no? Separate issue from who issues and controls the domains.

And finally, read somewhere yesterday that some pundit is predicting 60 million Chinese blogs within a year.

Sort of a rhetorical question, but this comes down to answering the age-old question asked by senior management everywhere: what are the key performance indicators that should be applied to a corporate blog to determine its success, failure, or general indifference from the audience?

I took a crack. There is the obvious “gross tonnage” statistics of visits to the blog itself, then there are RSS hits — filtering out the crawlers of course — and then there is the rankings — Technorati, etc. …

What else should and could be enumerated? Number of post comments? In-bound links? Bloglines subscriptions? Happy comments vs. angry comments? Google juice?
I need to dig more into blog metrics/analytics. It’s one thing to monitor external blog activity around a brand, but another to measure activity on one’s own blog. And again, I mean more than the old “hit” crap.

I did find some qualitative measures by Jeremiah Owyang from last November and I am too lazy to go dig out my copy of Naked Conversations to see what Scoble and Israel recommend — gauging from the b—h slapping they got from Amazon’s CTO earlier this spring, I don’t think they had an answer at the tip of their tongues either.

I’ve come to the end of the transcription process with very mixed emotions, but now I have another long road ahead of me in transcribing Chatfield’s letters to his wife Florentine during the Civil War years.

Anyway, the entire reminiscences are now done and I’ll post a word document for anyone who wants to read it in one take rather than skip from one web page to the next.

I can’t wait to start the primary research project. I’ll seek out his original ship’s logs from the Massachusetts at the Kendall Whaling Museum and thus be better able to cross-correlate the place names during the Pacific whaling fishery sections. A lot of the place names are misspelled or lost to time, so there is a lot of work to go before this can be put into accurate historical context.

The huge shame is that these reminiscences only cover his life to the age of 34. After that, little is known. At least there is nothing like this written record.

“You are all familiar with the life I have led during the last forty years, so I will not allude to it. The writing of the story has been a labor of love, and I have had much pleasure in doing it. Old memories have crowded upon me, and I have found it difficult to avoid making tedious by recording minor incidents common to all seafaring men.

“With all my love, I am your father ….

“AD 1905″

Squid up close

Originally uploaded by dchurbuck.

Saturday’s mission was to catch the last of the spring squid migration and load up on some calimari and some ika-yaki (Japanese grilled squid) as well as bait for later this summer when fluke (summer flounder) fishing begins.

Fisher (my son) and Peter (his godfather and my cousin) launched the boat at 10 and were off the Wianno Cut within an hour, running our jigs down to the bottom and almost immediately pulling in nice 18″ long squid.

Squidding is a total mess. The squid blast out big gouts of ink, covering the boat, our faces, our clothes with black stink. We kept at it for a couple hours, filling a 5-gallon bucket with at least 50 squid. We moved on to look for bluefish, but they are a week away, not a single sign of the choppers was seen yesterday despite some promising looking slicks which the fish make when they tear through the bait.

Squid strike the small jigs because they have laid their eggs and are protecting them from what they think are minnows. Fascinating creature, they change colors rapidly, iridiscent one second, red the next, neon purple, white ….

We cleaned them, cut them into rings, dipped them in tempura batter and tossed them into the deep fryer. Sunburned, a couple beers to wash them down, and all were happy with a nice May hunter-gatherer dinner.

Micro Persuasion: Chinese Blogger Tops Technorati 100

Well, I’ll be. A couple days ago I pick up on the meme that China bloggers are underrepresented if not completely uncounted in Technorati — making the syllogism that if I couldn’t get to Technorati inside of China then how could Technorati get to Chinese blogs.

Wrong. This is wild. Now comes the news that it ain’t Boing Boing on the top of the charts any longer, but now it is Xu Jing Lei. From the numbers quoted to me last week by Sina and Sohu — the blog counts in China are insanely off the charts. Here you go world, this is the face of the blogosphere and it ain’t the usual “A-List” cross linking to each other either:

Captain Chatfield proves himself to be a good housekeeper when assigned to the filthy plague ship Honeysuckle, docked in Tampa. The war is over, the defeated Confederacy is getting back on its feet, and it is fitting Captain Chat gets the job of mucking out the bilges and whitewashing the decks.

So begins the final section (I think).