Churbuck.com

Research Triangle Tuesday through Friday

Cotuit on Saturday and part of Sunday

Basingstoke, UK Monday and Tuesday – 25 & 26.

Tokyo 26-29

Cotuit 30th – October 2nd

NYC -Oct 3-5

“Gunkholing” is the act of exploring the heads of harbors and bays in a small boat, poking one’s bow into the nether regions of an estuary, following channels and streams through salt marshes and shallow water into the “gunk.”

Saturday was the perfect day for such explorations, so with Cousin Pete at the helm, my wife, son and I shot out from Cotuit over glassy waters across Vineyard Sound to Menemsha, a little fishing village on the southwestern corner of Martha’s Vineyard. We ran down the Tisbury coast, running along the glacial scree-strewn shoreline of sand cliffs and slight hills, dotted with cottages and summer homes that must enjoy one of the best views in all of New England.

At Menemsha we were greeted by a crowd of anglers standing on the breakwaters. The annual Martha’s Vineyard Striped Bass and Bluefish Derby opened last week and the competition brings out the maniacal side in all Vineyard fishermen. We motored inside, past the red-roofed Coast Guard station and over the bar into Menemsha Pond, crossing over Carribbean-clear water and fields of submerged eel grass. We gunkholed up inside of Nashaquitsa Pond until we ran out of water at the highway bridge.

Ashore we ate a lobster roll and stuffed quahog at Larson’s Fish Market, close by where Steven Spielberg built Quint’s boathouse for Jaws. The hulk of Quint’s boat, the Orca, allegedly lies rotting on the Lobsterville Beach shore.

After poking around the village we reboarded and headed back north along the Tisbury coast, stopping to explore Lake Tashmoo on the northshore of the Vineyard. At the very head of the Lake we found a beautiful abandoned factory overlooking a millpond and I’m still trying to figure out what it was for. We netted some bait (baby menhaden) and tried our luck for fluke (summer flounder) on the rips at Middle Ground, Hedge Fence, and finally, with success, at Succonnesset.

All in all a perfect day.

I’ve never been so crass as to blog about this blog’s Technorati rank, nor do I obsess about what my server logs are telling me or Google Analytics for that matter. To be frank, there’s a lot of things I could be doing better to build audience, or at least track what audience I have, but since this is a personal affair designed to cure my ongoing case of cacoethes scribendi (yes, I studied Latin), I haven’t focused on audience development.

I do have a corporate blogging project under management, and that does deserve some serious audience development. It softlaunched back in the late spring, with utterly no fanfare, as I wanted to let it simmer for a while and get the bloggers contributing to it comfortable with the ineffable customs of Blogistan before really seeking some traffic. This post is an attempt to come to terms with what constitutes blog “success” and then share some of the tricks I’ve picked up from reading the masters and from messing around with blogs since 2002 when I launched my first one on Blogger.

While a personal blogger — which I am under this umbrella — may not give a rat’s ass about traffic, it’s still nice to know that you aren’t talking to yourself like a psychotic in the median strip of Park Avenue shouting at skyscrapers with a Bible in hand. So what are the indications of life on a blog? How does one declare success on a corporate or commercial blog? After the jump I get into it. Continue Reading »

It took me an hour to clear the spam out of the comments this morning, perhaps because there were over 2,000 pieces of bounced spam in my churbuck.com inbox. I need to do something about the spammer who have hijacked my domain and are forging churbuck.com return addresses onto their crap. My ISP isn’t a lot of help.

I generally nuke about 200 spam comments from this blog every morning — mostly Asian thanks to tendency to blog about China every now and again. (Do not blog any Chinese characters unless you really really want to pick up a flood of double-byte character spam.)

Then my spam filter, Messagefire, crapped out, telling me it was nailed by disk quota issues, so I had to clear out 750 pieces of suspected spam over there — Messagefire is a good service, but it doesn’t deal with the flood of bounces that come from the spam attacks on my domain.

Grumpy.

Lenovo Ranked No. 1 for Notebook Customer Satisfaction | The Business Edition

Normally I don’t honk my Lenovo horn on this blog, but TBR issued its customer satisfaction report yesterday and I was especially gratified to see this:

“Lenovo’s customer complaint management was identified as a strong differentiator for its proactive approach to remediate customers’ technology-related concerns.”

Our customer satisfaction teams and service crews have embraced the proactive blog support concept wholeheartedly and the proof is in accolades like this one.

row2k News: Ernestine Bayer, 97, Mother of Women’s Rowing in United States dies in New Hampshire

I spoke with Ernestine Bayer while researching The Book of Rowing. The amazing success story that is women’s rowing is due to her tenacious support and advocacy of the sport. She will be missed.

“Mrs. Bayer was a world leader in introducing women to the sport of rowing. Through her efforts, women’s rowing was added to the summer Olympic schedule. During her life time she earned every award given by the national rowing association: Nominee for the Sullivan Award from rowing, member of the first Women’s rowing Olympic Committee, member of the National Rowing Foundation (NRF) Rowing Hall of Fame, First United States Gold rowing medal, Carlin Award, Coach of the Year, and named one of rowing’s 10 most influential people of the century. She to this day holds the world record on the rowing ergometer for women 90 .”

Edge Perspectives with John Hagel: Mastering New Marketing Practices

I’m a Hagel fan. This is from a great post on the “new” marketing.

“* Attract – create incentives for people to seek you out.
* Assist – the most powerful way to attract people is to be as helpful and engaging with them as possible – this requires a deep understanding of the various contexts in which people might use your products and a willingness to “co-create” products with customers.
* Affiliate – mobilize third parties, including other customers, to become even more helpful to the people you interact with.”

Colin’s Corner: William B. Ziff Jr. passes away

I am sad. This man was a hero to me. A lion in publishing and the smartest man in any room he stood. I worked for him for four years, interviewed him for a big Forbes story when he was selling the company, visited his Pawling home, and got to know his sons Dirk, Robert, and Daniel. My condolences to them, for he was larger than life. Ah, how I wish those years from Forbes were online so I could link to the story.

Bill passed away at home at the age of 76.

I have two Bill Ziff stories. The first time I met him I was returning to my office at PC Week following a weekly story meeting. My office was, to put it politely, trashed, a total health department violation, with heaps of press releases, torn apart PCs and general Dave-junk everywhere. When I flew through the door there was a man sitting in my chair looking out the window at the Charles River. He looked like a janitor, dressed in green khakis and looking a little dishelved.

“Can I sit there?” I demanded. He stood up, smiled, stuck out his hand and said, “I’m Bill Ziff.”

We talked for about five minutes until a writer stuck her head in the door and said there was an emergency at the copydesk that needed my attention. I excused myself, stepped outside, and was assaulted by a belly dancer who had bad odor on the occasion of my birthday. Bill Ziff stood by with a very sly smile on his face.

The second Bill Ziff story followed my big Forbes story (which should have been a cover and which was amazingly awesome in the first draft until my editor assaulted it). Bill was obsessively smart about certain topics: horticulture, sports statistics, the theory of relativity, and the Civil War, another passion of mine. So he invited me and my wife to Pawling for a weekend with him and his wife Anne to talk about the Civil War. The house was amazing, 40,000 square feet on a 500 acre arboreum. He sang me the Union song, Marching Through Georgia, and bellowed the refrain:

“Hurrah! Hurrah! We bring the Jubilee.

Hurrah! Hurrah! The flag that makes you free,

So we sang the chorus from Atlanta to the sea,

While we were marching through Georgia.”

He then proceeded to analyze me which was a thoroughly discomfiting experience, but one he apparently — gauging from the number of people who have undergone the Bill Ziff Analysis — was fond of performing.

I will miss him. Ave Atque Vale Bill.

NDBC – Station 44018

Here I was at dawn on Saturday morning, three hours after departing Popponesset Bay aboard the Champagne, a 23′ SeaHunter. It was flat calm under a full moon and the air got colder and colder as we left the shallow waters of Nantucket Sound for the deep blue briny of the Atlantic.

As false dawn pinked up the eastern horizon we passed this buoy, a weather station maintained by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration — known as the “BB” buoy. It was foggy, but I saw the flukes of a whale’s tail break the surface before we were utterly socked in.

We trolled five lines across the thermoclines (differences in water temperature), hoping to lure a pelagic out of the emptiness and into the boat. I had eagle-eyes and saw bluefin tuna break the surface twice, sightings which gave us hours of false hope. The VHF radio was alive with cryptic chatter between fishing boats: “What temperature is the water where you are?” “Are you fishing where you fished yesterday? If so, I am two miles northwest of you.”

We didn’t see another boat for six hours, yet the radar showed they were all around us. It was like being in a vast sensory deprivation tank. A quarter mile of visibility, grey ocean, grey fog, and the diluted disc of the sun overhead.

We came home at 4:30 in the afternoon. I was exhausted, but it was cool to have been so far out in the ocean. Somewhat frightening when I thought of the possibilities of what could go wrong, but delightful given the calm conditions.

The Sunday paper is especially thick this morning, burdened down by the fifth anniversary attacks on the World Trade center. The television stations have been portentious with teasers for their five-year recollections, and commentators ask the question: when will it happen again?

There are signal events in history that we all live through, track marks in our lives that we can all point to and say, “I remember where I was and what I was doing when I heard….”

My father was in the boat shop on a cold Sunday evening in December, listening to the radio with his father when Pearl Harbor was announced. I was playing with blocks on the black and white linoleum floor of my parent’s house in Houston, Texas when JFK was shot, watched Neil Armstrong step onto the moon in the living room of Aunt Betty’s house ….

There will be a lot of this in the next few days. A lot of “I remember” and “It will happen again” writing. We trade our stories and anecdotes: “I know a guy who talked to his brother standing on the roof of the north tower when it collapsed and he’s been completely unhinged ever since ….”

I identify 9/11 with the weather.

Any cloudless blue sky in late August or early September makes me recall it. Walking through Terminal A of the Delta Shuttle in Boston makes me recall it.

Here’s my story:

I flew out of Logan that Tuesday morning on my way to LaGuardia. I am still chilled by the idea that I was in the same airport, on the same morning, headed in the same direction as the terrorists. I am chilled that they got to Logan on the same commuter airline I flew for years to Manhattan, Colgan Air. I arrived in the city an hour before they did, took a car into the city and through the Midtown Tunnel to my office on 51st and Park. Stopped at the Starbucks in the lobby and was in the elevator, on my way to my desk, when a bicycle messenger said, in a joking tone: “A plane hit the World Trade Center.”

I thought about King Kong. I thought it was a Cessna. I thought it was a traffic helicopter.

I walked into my office and saw the tower ablaze.

Like most of the world I watched the rest of the disaster unfold on television. My phone rang — friends were calling from around the country to check on me. I made arrangements to return to Boston. No rental cars were available, so I found my two Boston colleagues and discussed our options. Stay in the city. Take a ferry to New Jersey and work out a solution from there. Walk to the South Bronx.

After the collapse we left the building and walked to Grand Central. I saw people in the crowds I hadn’t seen for years. F-16s from Otis Air Force Base, five miles from my home on Cape Cod flew down Park Avenue. Grand Central was choked with people, dotted here and there by survivors who were completely covered in dust, standing out like snowmen in the mobs.

There was a Metro North leaving for New Haven. We boarded it. Cells phone didn’t work. I read the wire news on my Palm through an early wireless modem and shared updates with my colleagues. We were met in New Haven by a colleague’s husband and driven to Logan, arriving there around midnight. The airport was roadblocked but the State Police let us in to get our cars from the parking garage. The garage was adjacent to the airport hotel where the families of the dead on the planes were gathering. I found my car and drove home.

I couldn’t return to work for the next two weeks. I went fishing by myself in Nantucket Sound and did a lot of thinking. There were no planes in the skies and the skies remained as blue as they did that Tuesday morning, only without contrails.

BBC NEWS | Americas | ‘Goat-free roads made me speed’
In the Swiss Weirdness category:

“A Swiss man caught speeding on a Canadian highway has blamed his actions on the absence of goats on the roads.”

The end of my cycling career is essentially sealed now that I have sent the insurance settlement check for my old bike (The Viktor Rapinski Team Saturn LeMond) onto New York University so my eldest can become Martin Scorcese.

That means getting on my other exercise vehicle, my Empacher T18R training scull, and logging some meters around Grand Island here on Cape Cod.

I rowed in high school and college, gave it up after I graduated, then returned to it in 1995 after writing The Book of Rowing for Overlook Press. I bought my scull in 1997, named it the Arsch Clown in honor of Michael Bolton, Office Space, and the boat’s German origin, and have raced it a couple times in the Head of the Charles and the Green Mountain Regatta.

Here I am in the HOCR. I later hit a bridge abutment,  but managed not to capsize despite the exhortations to do so by drunken Harvard students. That would have been more than embarassing.

I carry the boat on my head down the hill to the harbor, launch off of the beach, and row approximately 9,000 meters around Grand Island. Here’s a link to the route.

It’s a great workout on some of the most beautiful sculling water in the Northeast — maybe a little less fun than cranking around on a racing bicycle, but infinitely safer and a better overall bang for my exercise buck.

This is painted on the floor of my boatshop — probably painted by my grandmother who was the type of person who could pull off this type of work.

I believe these are called “scantlings” — essentially full-scale plans that boat builders referred to as a template for cutting planks. I don’t fully understand how they were used, and when in the boat building process, but it’s pretty cool they’re still there after 60 years.

Cotuit Skiff Scantling Plans

Originally uploaded by dchurbuck.

Found myself cheering against Maria Sharapova in tonight’s U.S. Open simply because I couldn’t abide her shrieking. She won despite my negative mindbullets aimed at the television, but honestly, who deserves to shriek save those suffering mortal pain? I know, it’s some sort of hai karate chi thing, but it still sucks.

Apparently some opponents feel the same way I do:

“Sharapova, who at 16 is one of the game’s most promising young players, was warned by tournament officials after Dechy and players on an adjacent court complained about her high-pitched shrieks.”

Flickr: Explore everyone’s geotagged photos on a Map

Geotagging is addictive.

Here’s the photoset for Cotuit, Mass.  My fotos as well as the rest of the world’s. Flickr grows more indispensible to me with every session.

johnon.com

“You probably won’t listen to me if I suggest you keep your voice lower, not discuss tactical or strategic issues in a pubic forum, or speak in secret code, so this is the least I can offer you. If you finish your overly loud public “search marketing” pitch and walk out leaving your dream client behind, I will feel compelled to hand her my business card and offer her a free review of your written proposal. Like I just did.”

Ah, the perils of the Starbuck’s economy. This looks like a keeper for the blogroll.

John Bell at Ogilvy points at this build-an-ice-cream-sundae app at Friendlys.com. This is a chain of restaurants that started in Massachusetts but has gone semi-national. Anyway, I spent some time building an ice-cream sundae, named it the “Cape Cod Catastrophe”, gave way too much personal information, and moved on.

Is this a harbinger of customer creation tools? Design-a-laptop? I dunno, but John and I are working a cool project to figure it out. The man to check out on the topic is Navi Radjou at Forrester. Back in the days when Jimmy Guterman was editing the now defunct Forrester Magazine I did a feature on “innovation networks” based on Radjou’s research. I think his time has come.

I guess there is some moral to the story to the news that octagenarian boss Sumner Redstone gave Viacom CEO Tom Freston the heave-ho for not moving aggressively enough into the Internet. Sheesh. Take any media company (with the exception of News Corp. which is blessed with Fox Interactive chief Ross Levinsohn) and you’ll see an org chart still dominated by dodos who don’t get the online joke.

I don’t think Freston, per se, was anti-Internet. Heck, MTV.com has done great work in that regard but got its ass handed to it by AOL during that big charity concert a year or so ago. But now it’s Bubble 2.0 time and corporate boards are demanding that their executives be on the acquisiton prowl for social network plays, tagged content services, and rich media sites.

There are days when I really miss the big online media game, but for the time being I need to sharpen my chops on the buyside — going back into production would be a step backwards — before yearning for the biz dev end of the business.

Okay, I have a book to write (two actually) and tuitions to pay. But I’m looking for some weekend projects to keep me sane over the next eight months. Three come to mind, all are nautical in nature, all require some new skills to be learned.

1. A strip built kayak. I want to build a cedar strip kayak using the WEST epoxy system. This has been proposed before to Mrs. Churbuck with a negative reaction. This will tax the patience of my woodworking capable friends, whose tools I will need to borrow. Plus — the final product is pretty. Minus — time, cost, smell, and space.

2. New spars and rudder for my Cotuit Skiffs. I need two new masts, new gaffs and new booms. Good buddy Dr. Del Vecchio has some experience here. This involves gluing long strips of spruce together and then planing it down into a nice round spar. Upside — seems simple. Downside, time, expense, lack of woodworking expertise.

3. Rebuild an old Churbuck Cotuit Skiff.

I have an offer from the Lowell family to take #28 and rebuild it. This is a massive, multi-year job. Pros: my grandfather built it. Cons: I have no idea what I am doing. As Cousin Pete says, “A Churbuck with a tool in his hand is a dangerous thing.”

Here’s the boat in question. I will go visit it on Friday. So many things to do, so little time. I can’t wait until I can retire.

SPECIAL: “Winning Online” — A Manifesto

Mark Cahill (one of the smartest guys on the topic of publishing technologies) points to this Editor & Publisher manifesto by Tom Mohr – formerly head of KR Digital on newspaper websites. Mohr posits that if newspapers want to get their acts together online, they need to converge on a common standard and set of tools. Mark and I kicked around a business plan two years ago on this very model — there is no viable reason in the world, aside from sheer hubris, for a publication to own its own CMS, metrics, and ad servers.

“Newspaper online infrastructures dot the United States like a thousand points of light. It is a massive waste of financial and intellectual capital. As Knight Ridder proved, multiple newspaper websites of all sizes (from the Biloxi Sun Herald to the Philadelphia Inquirer) can sit on common platforms and deliver Pulitzer Prize-winning quality.”What, specifically, is meant by common platforms?

“They include a common content management system, common classified marketplace solution, common ad serving capabilities, a common ad network, shared content and feature functionality within key channels, a common underlying technical infrastructure and common supporting financial systems, metrics and analytics.”

In a book I ghost-authored with some Gartner experts — Multisourcing — the panoply of IT enabled systems was stacked up against their impact on competitive and strategic advantage … a riff on Nick Carr’s polemic against the value of IT. Only the most rarified, business-transforming, bet the company initiatives deserve internal development, most, if not all systems from lowly lights-on, cost of doing business IT system such as email, can be outsourced or managed against cost.

That the publishing industries insist on building their own web infrastructures is ludicrious. It’s time for a major systems provider like IBM Global Services to step in with a common platform and let the publishers focus on what their true business is — incisive journalism.

Thank Mark for the pointer.