Churbuck.com

And I am going clamming. I need some fresh air after this past week. Five hours and I roll into Cotuit. I need an hour on the rowing machine to blow off some sushi and general jet lag torpitude, reunite with dogs, and start planning an Indian summer weekend on Cape Cod. Perhaps some striper fishing this evening … So many options, so little time before the leaves blow off the trees and Cape Cod turns into a frozen black and white movie.

The Japanese win the prize for cell phone etiquette. Rarely, if ever, did I overhear a person on their phone. Every train, bus, waiting lounge and restaurant had a sign asking people not to use their phones. Sure, people used the phone for SMS and mobile data, but never, in three days, did I have to listen to someone yak.

Contrast with gate K9 at O’Hare waiting for a flight to Boston. 25 percent of the mob is driving me insane talking about the usual inane b.s. and one frigtard is using a Nextel/Sprint walkie-talkie and making that evil squeak-beep everytime they press the talk button. Over and over and over. Who ever came up with that sound — which I guess passes as some sort of audible brand signature — needs to tortured with it like I am right now.

Yep, we’re recalling over half a million batteries shipped between 2/05 and this month. To see if you’re affected, hit this link and download the app that checks to see if the battery needs to be replaced.

WOMMA: Word of Mouth Marketing Association

I’m bummed I missed this call by WOMMA to address the issue of disclosure in marketing initiatives focused on social media and viral. Call it the Lonelygirl13 effect, but I think the days of sneaky viral — kicked off by the Subservient Chicken are behind us. Fingerskilz, the Lenovo Tapes are examples of PC vendors releasing viral without overtly tagging it as a corporate campaign. Is that wrong? Would it impede the spread? Probably. But the tide has turned and people are quoting the Who, “We won’t get fooled again.

Those tactics — hiding the origin of a campaign, sockpuppeting, etc. — done.

From the WOMMA notice:

“A foundational building block of that ethics code, which we believe is as relevant as ever to evolving social media, is what is known as the “Honesty ROI.” This includes the following:* Honesty of Relationship: You say who you’re speaking for
* Honesty of Opinion: You say what you believe
* Honesty of Identity: You never obscure your identity

We especially call out the “honesty of identity” provision, which speaks most clearly to the new forms of social media that are quickly unfolding. “Disclosure of identity,” the code notes, “is vital to establishing trust and credibility. We do not blur identification in a manner that might confuse or mislead consumers as to the true identity of the individual with whom they are communicating, or instruct or imply that others should do so.”

Thanks to ConsumerGeneratedMedia.com for the pointer. 

Good round of meetings yesterday with the Tokyo team, followed by a subway ride on the Ginza line with a transfer to Akihabara, the fabled Las Vegas of Japanese consumer electronics. If I were a Gizmodo or Engadget writer I’d probably have been jaded, but the insanity of the place, the neon, the noodle shops out of Blade Runner, the pachinko parlors (think vertical pinball), and general Japanese anime/manga weirdness made this the place to see if time is short and a real Tokyo experience is required.

Here’s the random reporter’s notebook:

• Vending machines: The Japanese use vending machines for everything. Take a stool at a noodle counter and stare stupidly at the staff until it becomes clear that the little vending machine on the wall serves a purpose. Stuff 1000 yen note into machine, press a button (any button) and out comes a chit which will yield a bowl of most excellent soup and noodles. This is not undergraduate ramen we’re talking about. Made me think of Tampopo. I did not see a vending machine with used underwear in it, for you peverts who are bound to ask.
• Umbrella dryers: racks that stand outside of every restaurant, hotel, and shop. Stick a wet umbrella in it, and it gets dried while you are inside.
• Subways: I half hoped for the sardine experience where the platform guard wedges people in like a football nose guard, but no, it was very civilized and efficient.
• Cell phones: When I was at McKinsey working with the mobile commerce initiative, I coined the term “Idle Moment Applications” to describe the appeal of mobile phone content to people waiting in line at the bank or commuting on trains. Every, and I mean every Japanese rider on the subway was glued to the little screen of their cell phone doing the DoCoMo thing.
• School girl uniforms: Okay, so they wear uniforms to school. But at ten at night, in high heels in Roppongi? Also, the racier stores are big on selling these weird pinafore uniforms out of anime cartoons. I don’t get it.

• Cartoons: The whole anime, Hello-Kitty, thing is everywhere, from pictures of little Pokemon creatures getting crushed by subway doors as a warning not to let your Pokemon creature get crushed by the closing doors to inexplicably big-eyed creatures plastered on everything. Cute?
• Blade Runner: My favorite sci-fi movie. An evening in the rain in Tokyo, with wet streets reflecting the waterfalls of neon; elevated highways buzzing with traffic and trains; dark skies and scurrying crowd of umbrellas. I expected a replicant in a sex shop to come crashing through a window at me with blazing rail guns at any second.
• Food: Sushi on the conveyor belt the night of arrival. Easy, no language barrier involved in picking up a plate of raw fish as it rolls by, but last night me and two colleagues went to a place with no English capabilities and got into a picto-gram order fest that involved pointing at pictures and hoping for the best. I had one hand-roll that I swear was made with Ban Roll-On deodorant and seagull droppings. It was, hands down, the worst thing I have put in mouth that didn’t carry a phone number for the National Poison Control center on it.
• Wasabi: They don’t serve wasabi with sushi. The chef evidently feels he’s done his thing with his wasabi.
• Napkins: Forget about it. Not part of the program.
• Jamaicans: Yep, the sidewalks of Roppongi are cluttered with Jamaican barkers who try to press cards into your hand and tell you in “hey mon” accents that there is a titty bar inside. How did they get here? Why did they come?
• Plastic Food: The Japanese are the masters. Scary stuff some of it. This was my favorite. Ice cream weirdness that looks like baby aliens.

• Phone poles: weird to see ugly utility poles all over the place. Makes me think of the sets of Godzilla.
• Thinkpads: They are everywhere. All over Akihabara. Old ones though, not the latest and greatest.
• Office hours: People work until 8 or 9 at night. They arrive later than Americans (I hit my desk at 6 am most days), say 9 or 10, but they leave a lot later.
• Dress code: this is the land of the suit and tie. I am underdressed in my usual dot.com uniform of khakis, button down, loafers and Brooks Brothers blazer. Next time I bring the kick-ass pinstripes, the Hermes bow-tie, and the Bally cordovans.

I found my Halloween costume.
A full day of meetings today, dinner with the Japan marketing team tonight, morning meetings tomorrow, then off to Narita for the long haul back to Boston.

Mitch R. blogs about preparing for BuzzLogic’s debut at Demo. The ringleader of Demo, Chris Shipley, used to sit on the other side of the cubicle wall from me at PC Week and we became very good pals as a result of mutually overheard conversations. Now she’s the doyenne of the start up and Mitch is sweating the six-minutes his baby gets in front of a very discerning crowd. Jim Forbes, former ringleader of Demo Mobile, and yet another PC Week alum, blogs on his tips for making it through.

Mitch writes:

“Preparing to present at DEMO is a psychological marathon. You get six minutes, including all the time you have to get up onto the stage after Chris Shipley introduces you, getting your product to do its dance and explaining it to the audience, as well as gracefully wrapping up the presentation. Elevator pitches are chimp work by comparison, because you can expect an interruption, to have the pitch turn into a conversation, even for a moment. But at DEMO you get your shot, then it’s over.”

Good to see BuzzLogic get some buzz from Dan Farber and elsewhere. In fact, I should start a track on their buzz and influence maps right now …

Beware of toilets with “STOP” switches. Stop what? This baby turns on a fan when you sit on it — an alternative to the courtesy flush — and looks like it has functions that I for one, do not intend to explore. I am dying to know what the difference between a “shower” and a “bidet” is.

Ate sushi next door to the hotel with my buddy Ajit. It was one of those mechanized conveyor belt places that sends an infinite loop of fish on rice around and around. Stack the plates and get charged by the color of their rim. Perhaps, if the uni turns out to be bad, I will get to explore the multifunction toilet later on.
I have jet lag bordering on dementia at present. Boston to London to Tokyo without a bed is nasty. JAL seats turned into quasi-beds (“quasi” because they were exactly two inches too short of me) but a Restoril took care of that in now time. Now it is time to stop dicking around with Powerpoint and fretting over to-dos happening 12 hours away and crash.

I’m a sucker for stupid blogging tricks, and paying Boeing $27.00 for eleven hours of internet access while winging from England to Japan is stupid … but what the heck, I have to get some work done (note the shameless need for justification of the business expense) and I can either continuing replowing through Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose (arguably the best novel ever written about the American West), wait for the JAL hostess to bring me my dinner, or watch insipid seatback television until I throw in the towel, chow a Restoril, and go into la-la land until 5 pm tomorrow Tokyo time (it is “now” 6:37 am on Tuesday in Tokyo).

Anyway, I’ve blogged in a helicopter, now I’ve blogged in a 777, not nearly as cool as the blogger who watched his Slingbox via a Connexion connection, but still, cool enough for me. It is amazing how a little internet connectivity can while away the hours of desiccated, recycled air, wailing babies, and Japanese news shows on the cabin monitors. And now that Boeing has pulled the plug, I figured I’d get airborne and online at least once until someone else figures out airplane connectivity.
(Aside: how cool are runway cameras on planes? I only see them on foreign carriers, I guess American airlines are too cheap or too concerned they’ll freak out Ma and Pa Kettle to show them what it looks like to hurtle down at runway at a gazillion mph).

Last winter, shortly after joining Lenovo, an old friend, Mitch Ratcliffe, pinged me to see what I was up to in the role of VP of Global Web Marketing. A lot of former journalism colleagues were surprised to see me join a “vendor,” but most, like Sam Whitmore, saw the point that everyone is media in this day and age.

Mitch, who is a perpetual fountain of cool ideas (Audible, On24 to name a couple), asked if I’d be interested in checking out his latest project, a tool for monitoring blogs. Being more a blogger than a blog monitor, I was mildly interest, but had arrived at Lenovo with blog management — both our own and the sentiment externally — in my portfolio of responsibilities. As I’ve blogged before, I monitor blog discussions about Lenovo and ThinkPad through a simple RSS feed on those terms out of Technorati into Bloglines, doing the same with Google’s blog search. This is cheap (free) and powerful enough that I can satisfy my curiosity many times during a day without waiting for an analyst or third party to alert me.

The crucial thing in blog monitoring is to get everything, not just what someone else feels is critical, but the whole feed, all the time so one can make one’s own decisions.

Mitch was involved with a Bay Area startup called BuzzLogic. I signed onto the beta program, was briefed in a teleconference by the execs,and given an account to start tracking things with.

Buzzlogic does a few things differently. First off, I won’t go into a tedious description of blog search. That topic has been pounded to death by others and crawler and spider technology doesn’t interest me very much. What does capture my attention is cartography and dashboards, both of which BuzzLogics delivers on top of a very capable blog search mechanism.

Mapping a discussion is a very interesting and powerful tool for tracking down the spread of an online meme or rumor. Tracking back to the source of an original concept isn’t very easy. Example: I may detect in a regular blog search, a post that quotes or references a news article or an original blog post. Getting to the source — where the idea was born — isn’t easy, not very precise. But more interesting is the role that “amplifiers” play along the way.

Amplification is an interesting concept, but one that is very important as you try to ration one’s finite resources in paying attention, and in some cases, reaching out to bloggers with an audience and a platform to spread a meme. Amplifiers may not make the news, but they can give it legs, and in many cases are as important as the original source poster, who may not have the audience and reach, but has the original meme. Case in point, Boing Boing — if Boing Boing points at a blog post, as it did this morning with a blogger who reverse engineered his favorite New York Pizza — they essentially hold up a megaphone to a small voice and instantly turn it into a very loud one.

Buzzlogic’s mapping capabilities allow one to graphically map the interconnection of posts, trackbacks and comments and follow that spread, over time, through the blogosphere. Right there they have a winner.

But place on top of that a dashboard that permits an operator to encapsulate a blog event and build from it a report suitable for forwarding to a busy exec who needs an at-a-glance window into an incident.

I used BuzzLogic to identify Rick Klau’s problems with his ThinkPad, reached out to him based on the hit, but was able to follow the aftermath as he posted about his experience and that in turn was picked up by other bloggers.

BuzzLogic has a winner, one that promises to do for brand communications and customer satisfaction, public relations and press relations what web metrics has done for online advertising. It builds amazingly precise and quantifiable measures of impact and influence into a world once characterized by clipping services that delivered stacks of “press” hits to PR managers.

I think BuzzLogic is the first blog monitor with the capability to truly enable my vision of proactive customer relations — where the operator can use the discoveries from the tool to drive change internally and externally in nearly real time. I wish them the best of luck with their debut at Demo this week, I think this is a service with a strong, strong potential for success.

BuzzLogic is seeking other beta testers. You can apply here at buzzlogic.com

[full disclosure: I am not paid by Buzzlogic, have received no consulting fees, options or shares.]

[update: Dan Farber at ZDNet has better details.]

I pulled my skiff yesterday, it was time, the fall rains always fill it up while I am away at work and I lay awake at night worrying about it. The best of intentions at the end of summer always assume the boat will be sailed until Thanksgiving, but the reality is one or two sails happen, always under the influence of guilt, and thus most people pull their boats right around Labor Day and be done with it.

I also pulled #28, the Lowell skiff, which was astonishingly given to me by Charles and his son Alex (daughter Izzy is an old cycling buddy) to restore and revitalize. My son Fisher bailed out the boat and together we took the sails off both skiffs, pulled the spars and hauled them up the hill to the yard where they stand now on sawhorses, next to #36, making three Churbuck-built skiffs in all. A veritable armada.

Now to tie up some loose ends and pack for my flight to London tonight. Not looking forward to landing at 6:30 am in Heathrow, cabbing to a day of meetings in Basingstoke, and then back to Heathrow for a 7:30 flight to Tokyo, where I will be until Friday.

I’ll try to post on the road and will bring the digital camera, but this is going to be a disconnected week of circumnavigation and jet-lag.

Apologies to my RSS subscribers. I’ve been doing the unpardonable and messing with WordPress plugins to attempt to direct my feeds through Feedburner, and in the process have been breaking subscriptions left and right. Sigh. I hate when that happens to me and I hate doing it to others.

Proof, as I discovered last winter when I hosed this site messing with the site template, that sometimes good enough is good enough and best left alone.

I was compiling a list of good design and industrial design blogs yesterday and out of curiosity checked their footers to see what blog platform they were running on. WordPress was the platform of choice for four out of five.

Why? Having only experienced one other blogging tool — Google’s Blogger — I don’t have much insight into the attributes of Typepad, Drupal, Telligent, etc.. I was pointed at WordPress by Om Malik in the fall of 2004, when I was ready to move off of Blogger. Om gave no compelling reasons, told me to use the default template — Kubrick — but trusting his taste in all things, I downloaded the code, built it on my server, and have been happy ever since, continiously delighted by the abundance of plug-ins, tolerant of the quirks, and intimidated by the CSS.

Here’s the list I compiled. All save the top one are on WordPress.

1. We Make Money Not Art: Regine Debatty’s blog.
2. History of the Button: On. Off. Snooze. This blog is about buttons. The kind you push, not the kind on your shirt.
3. Hi-iD: You don’t need to read it to love it.
4. Dexigner: Beautifully designed, a treasure trove of news about design.
5. Inhabitat: Interior design and architecture.

The Dynamics of Viral Marketing

Excellent post by Eric Kintz at HP:

#1 – Viral marketing does not spread well. In epidemics, high connectors are very critical nodes of the network and allow the virus to spread. In recommendations networks, a few very large cascades exist but most recommendation chains terminate after just a few steps.#2 – The probability of viral infection decreases with repeated interaction. Providing excessive incentives for customers to recommend actually weakens the credibility of those links. The probability of purchasing a product increases with the number of recommendations received, but quickly saturates to a constant and relatively low probability.

#3 – Viral effectiveness varies depending on price and category. Social context has a high influence on the potency of viral infection. Technical or religious books for example had more successful recommendations than general interest topics. Smaller and more tightly knit groups tend to be more conducive to viral marketing.

Three years ago I noticed my vision was a little out of focus — highway signs were a little blurred and I started compulsively cleaning my eyeglasses, believing that they were smudged or, after a while, scratched. So I went off to the opthamologist for a new pair, the first time I had seen an MD about my eyes in a few years (having used the usual optometrist services attached to places like LensCrafters).

The doc looked into my eyes and asked me how old I was. 45. Did I work around hazardous chemicals? No. Was I a weightlifter? No. Did I use steroids? No.

Why?

I had cataracts. A clouded lens in my left eye with a less clouded one in my right. Excellent. I had a vision of wearing a pair of these for the rest of my life.

On my way to my AARP membership and a walker twenty years too soon. I was bummed. I needed surgery, not a new pair of glasses, so I called my buddy, Dr. Dan and he referred me to an eye surgeon at Mass Eye and Ear, Dr. Dmitri Azar. Azar did the procedure under local. Essentially he zapped the old lense, broke it up ultrasonically, sucked it out of a tiny incision and replaced the lens with a plastic one.

I felt like someone poured a mixture of Tabasco sauce and powdered glass in my eye, and got to sport a pirate’s eyepatch for a couple weeks. Today, left eye is awesome, but I have to wear a contact lens in my bad right eye.

This sucks. I liked glasses. I’ve worn them since I was 12 years old. I wake up in the morning and I see the left half of the world just fine, but need to stick a floppy piece of plastic into my right eye. I still need glasses to read, so I constantly am running to the drugstore to spend another $10 on a pair of cheap reading specs.

I went to an optometrist and asked for a special pair of glasses. Essentially a clear piece of glass over the eye with the artificial lense implant, and a corrective lens for the right. Logical? Nope. The optometrist decided he had to correct some of the cataract eye and came up with a pair of glasses that make me cross-eyed. Literally. I want to throw up when I wear them.

It is time to get a monocle.

We’re talking Mr. Peanut. German generals in World War One. The Monopoly Tycoon.

From the Wikipedia:

“A monocle was generally associated with rich upper-class men. Combined with a morning coat and top-hat, it completed the costume of the stereotypical Capitalist in the game of Monopoly. Monocles were also stereotypical accessories of German military officers from this period, especially from the First World War, where the stereotypical German Oberst would plot the demise of enemy forces with monocle in place to examine attack charts. German officers who actually wore a monocle include Erich Ludendorff, Walter von Reichenau, Hans von Seeckt and Hugo Sperrle.

Monocles were most prevalent in the late 19th Century but are rarely worn today. This is due in large part to advances in optometry which allow for better measurement of refractive error, so that glasses and contact lenses can be prescribed with different strengths in each eye, and also to a reaction from stereotypes that became associated with them. The monocle did, however, garner a following in the stylish lesbian circles of the mid 20th century, with lesbians donning a monocle for effect. Such women included Una Lady Troubridge, Radclyffe Hall, and Weimar German reporter Sylvia von Harden.”

Now to find one.

Well, not that new, but thanks to my colleagues in Beijing, I have a GSM smartphone to take with me when I’m on the road and my Sprint PCS Treo goes dark.

This is a decent phone with a very nice camera (4 megapixels), but you can’t buy it in America. I couldn’t even activate it in the States, but had to buy a T-Mobile card in Berlin during the World Cup to make it work. My plan is to buy a new card when I hit a GSM country and just run that when I’m overseas.

This model is about a year old. Engadget wasn’t particularly nice to it, but gave it some praise for the camera specs.

“Normally we’d just skip right over yet another random Pocket PC Phone, especially one that is almost definitely not going to find its way over here, but Lenovo’s new ET980 stands out from the crowd because it just happens to sport a built-in four megapixel digital camera. Not the biggest or baddest you can do in a cellphone (that honor goes to Samsung’s seven megapixel SCH-V770), but this is the highest resolution you can get in a Windows Mobile device, at least for the time being. Can’t vouch for image quality (why do we have this feeling that the optics on this thing are for crap?), but the ET980 has a 312MHz processor, 64MB of RAM, and 128MB of flash ROM.”

I don’t use it enough to get into the hairy details. But the MSFT OS is familiar from my old HP Pocket PC PDA I lugged around Zurich a few years ago.  Meaning, more features that I need.

manninchina.com

Michael Mann from Lenovo.com is on assignment in Beijing. He has one of my favorite China blogs.

“BACK RUBS/PATTING in the bathrooms. This doesn’t happen everywhere, but you will find it at some of the bars in Beijing. A lot of places have bathroom attendants…use a comb, take some mints, hand you a towel. But here, while you’re standing at the urinal letting it flow, they sneak up behind you and start giving you a back rub. Come on, is that really necessary & how many people actually like that? Not to mention, when you start punching my back, it hurts my aim, so you might get some on your shoes (they don’t care). So bathroom attendants…no more back rubs at the stalls. Relax, I’ll give you 10RMB, just give me a clean towel to dry my hands.”

tecosystems: A Word on Comments

“Make no mistake; comments are a good thing, and to be actively courted whenever possible. But don’t make the mistake of making them out to be something they are not – a pass/fail metric for you efforts.”

Stephen O’Grady of Redmonk, blogging at Tecosystems, takes exception to my assertion that “comments are king.” I agree with his point that comments are not the be-all measure of success, and that too many comments can cause a loss of audience connection, and further, that comment counts are not a measure of one’s own commentary on other blogs. While Stephen gives a nod to metrics tools such as Google Analytics and Feedburner, I still think we’re both looking for a measure of merit that may not exist other than the satisfaction of good old fashioned writing, commentary, and interaction on our own terms. Good post, go read it.

Blogs About Business Travel Begin to Feel the Power – New York Times

Hmm. I’ve missed my calling. Given that most of my life is spent at 30,000 feet or in a strange bed, I should be doing more along the lines of the previous post.

“Some are taking them as seriously as the work of journalists. For example, Marriott International began an ambitious program to reach bloggers this spring. Its efforts included asking bloggers to speak to its corporate communications team, inviting them on press trips and offering them news in advance of print media.

“A lot of business travelers are getting their information from blogs,” said John Wolf, a Marriott spokesman. “We wanted to have a better understanding of blogs.”

To do that, Marriott assigned an employee to monitor the blogosphere and generate daily reports on what bloggers were writing about the company. It also began pitching bloggers on Marriott-themed postings, recently offering bloggers an exclusive about a plan to put airline check-in stations in its lobbies. “The news got out there within minutes,” Mr. Wolf said.”

12 F – in the exit row, no seat in front of it, enough room for Manute Bol to stretch out and I snagged it this morning. Such small victories make all the difference. You have to make eye contact with the nice steward and say “yes” when they ask if you are man enough to be the first out of the plane (I never want to be punching out some old lady in the rush to evacuate), but talk about easy living …..

I’ve redirected my feeds through Feedburner and tagged the site with a Sitemeter tracker.