Churbuck.com

Sheldon Brown’s Journal – Health Issues

Sheldon Brown is the authority on cycling. He works out of a cycling shop in Newton, Massachusetts (Harris Cyclery) and is cited by every bike geek as the authority on everything from Sturmey-Archer hubs to fixed-gear cycling set ups. In fact, there is an acronym devoted to Sheldon: AASHTA (As Always, Sheldon Has The Answer).

The man seems to live and breathe cycling and his site, Sheldon Brown’s Bicycle Technical Info is literally an encyclopedia of cycling. He also seems like a really great man gauging from his personal observations and approach to life.

Now it appears he has multiple sclerosis and has to give up cycling. This is tragic. Having made the decision to voluntarily give up cycling as a pastime after my accident in May, I know what it feels like to miss it, but can’t imagine the pain of having it taken away the way it has for Sheldon.

This sort of thing frightens me but reminds me of this:

Just a lot less funny.

I learned to type when I was nine-years old. My handwriting was spastic, the third-grade teacher attempted to convert my left-handedness to right-handedness by tying my left hand to the back of my belt and tossing blackboard erasers to me so I could learn how to catch them with my right. The result was further chaos in penmanship, so my father gave me his old Remington manual typewriter and that was that. No typing lessons, just the order to stop writing things with my crabbed left hand and start pounding keys.

I graduated to an electric Smith-Corona when I was 14; went off to college with an massive IBM correcting Selectric (which I parlayed into some serious cash by starting a paper typing service for desperate classmates) and by the time I finished my first novel (unpublished, don’t ask) in 1980, I was up to 100 words per minute using only my index fingers and thumbs.

I edited that novel on the first Wang word processor — an amazing machine that stored the product on 8″ floppies that looked like old LPs. When I graduated and got a job at the Cape Cod Times, I went back to the Selectric, moving to a Hastech editing system at the Lawrence Eagle-Tribune. The job interview at the Tribune went pretty much like this. The managing editor grabbed a book, told me sit down and start typing. I started typing. He watched for about 30 seconds and said:

“I see you can’t touch type. Good. I don’t hire touch-typists or journalism school graduates.”

Indeed, almost every journalist I have ever seen types the way I do — two index fingers flying like dervishes, with thumbs whacking the space bar. This method of typing pounds a keyboard like a drum, and as a result I find myself yet again in the market for a great keyboard.

People of my age learned to type on typewriters, where some serious physical effort was required to smack the letter onto a ribbon. Electric typewriters were actuated, so the effort required was a lot less — like power steering in a car — but it wasn’t until I sat down in front of the original IBM PC and its massive, heavy, metal keyboard that I understood bliss.

In the 90s I converted to a “natural” ergonomic keyboard — the split kind — after discovering that moving the keys apart an inch decreased my typo count. I am so accustomed to the ergonomic form factor that I have serious issues with a traditional rectangular keyboard.

Now I love the keyboards on my ThinkPads. I have heard their praises sung far and wide. But when I work at a desk I like to dock the notebook and attach a USB keyboard. Shortly after arriving at Lenovo I went to the local office supply and bought a Microsoft 4000 keyboard. Slick. Black (so it sort of matches the black of the ThinkPad) but covered with useless media management buttons I never use. What I lust for is a Lenovo external keyboard — what we call our “UltraNav” model that has a TrackPoint embedded between the G,H,B, and N keys. Having the pointing device on the keyboard is an immense boon to a fast typist as one’s hands don’t have to leave the keys to move the mouse.

The only problem for me is the UltraNav doesn’t come in an ergonomic format. I went searching last night and it appears external keyboards come down to this:

1. Crap plastic traditional rectangles
2. Microsoft Natural Ergonomics (I go through two a year)
3. High end Lenovo/IBM style ones that are only available as rectangles
4. Off the chart ergonomic ones for carpal tunnel sufferers like the Kinesis ergo

I need a new keyboard now. Any suggestions?

Talk Talk China

ImageThief clued me in to the impending end of my favorite China blog — Talk Talk Chine — a nasty, snarky, anonymous slam on life in China from a western pov. On Saturday it goes dark. I’ll miss it. There were moments of high humor from TTC.

“The time has come to say goodbye. In the 1.5 years that TalkTalkChina has been up and running, we’ve had our soapbox to complain – and complain we did. This blog was set up because we just needed to get things off our chest and validate our frustrations. You have helped us do just that!”

For years I have relied on the Wall Street Journal’s emailed new alerts. Who ever owns the “send” trigger knows exactly when to push it. They never irritate me and are always on the money.

Just crossed the inbox. Rumsfield is saying sayonara:

“__________________________________
NEWS ALERT
from The Wall Street Journal

Nov. 8, 2006
Republican officials say Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is stepping down. The move comes amid growing dissatisfaction with the war in Iraq and Republican loss of the House and possible loss of the Senate.”

…and no lockups in the last hour. Fingers are crossed. I was actually reverting to IE 7 for most of the morning and not happy about it. I do have to say Firefox’s crash recovery capabilities are pretty robust, and I’m an expert having go through nearly a hundred in the last two weeks.

Update: The reinstall didn’t work. So I’ve disabled all extensions and will bring them back slowly.

Update 2: stable so far with only the del.ici.ous, FTP, and colored tab plug in enabled. No crashes in 12 hours.

Techmeme was leading with TechCrunch’s take on the Riya relaunch as Like.com — true image search. This permits a user to search for images that “look like” other images.
Arrington writes:

“The Like.com engine takes both text and images as queries, something no one else does. To return results based on an image query, Like.com compares a “visual signature” for the query image to possible results. The visual signature is simply a mathematical representatioin of the image using 10,000 variables. If enough variables are identical, Like.com decides the images are similar.

What this means – If you see an image on the web, like a watch that Paris Hilton is wearing in the picture to the left, and use it as an image query, Like.com will return results showing watches that look very similar.

If you enter a text query, like “brown boots pointed toe,” Like.com will convert that query into variables in the visual signature and look for related image results. See screen shot below for the results from this query.”

This is insanely cool stuff. Check it out

E1E Executive Elite® flashlight – E1E-HA available from SureFire

Cousin Pete handed me one of these a couple weeks ago after I admired his while surfcasting for striped bass one night in early October. He had his clipped to the brim of his baseball hat and I had to express my lust for one.

The engineering on this is superb. It is very heavy, uses a 3v Lithium battery (camera size), and the best part is the “pocket” clip — or hat clip. Snap this onto the brim of a hat, hit the on-off button, and where you look there is light. This came in handy last weekend during the ski-house work weekend. A couple years ago my buddy Charlie and I were on the roof as the sun set, trying to screw down some metal panels by the light of my Treo 650. That was not fun. This year, Charlie and I were able to inspect our paint job by the light of the Surefire.

“Ultra compact (finger length) incandescent flashlight for everyday carry and general use. Puts out a smooth, brilliant beam as bright as a big two D-cell flashlight. Light enough to clip to hat brim for hands-free operation. Small size, light weight, and long runtime also make it perfect for travel.”

I am a total sucker for mini gadgets. This one rules.

I’m presenting to a group of marketing executives at Babson’s Innovation and Corporate Entrepreneurship program on Friday on the topic of “What’s new and innovative in marketing.”

Being a reluctant presenter, especially when the evil powerpoint is involved, I actually welcomed this opportunity to help me collect my thoughts on where interactive marketing stands in this day of transition from the old page-view world of the past decade to the “engagement” model of today.

Anyway, here’s the deck. Standard stuff but the best I can do for now.

This was an amazing year for my flower garden here on the Cape. It went into the ground in April and bloomed right into November — I still have snapdragons and alysium going strong, but a frost over the weekend pretty much ended everything.

Here it is at the start. All order and tidiness.

Here it is at its peak:

And here it is as of this morning:

There’s a metaphor hiding in here somewhere.

Two blog posts on this blog have given me first-hand confirmation of the staying power that an unhappy customer’s beefs can have on a brand.

On September 14, 2005 I posted about Amazon’s lack of an easy customer service link. A month later some misguided, but angry soul, doubtlessly searching for relief, found that post and made a comment in the belief I was Amazon’s customer service blog.

“Please refund the $19.91 balance shown on my account and close my account. I don’t want to do business with you any longer. “

Last summer I vented my spleen over Southwest Airline’s customer service after getting stranded for the second time in a month. That post, due to the headline with the hot word “Sucks”, still has legs and garners comments long after the post scrolled into the archives. Why? Google “southwest sucks” and see who comes up second.
To any unbelievers in an organization that don’t believe blogged complaints have a erosive effect on your brand — listen up. Any posted negativity is going to get crawled, indexed, and put into the permanent record for the next unhappy person to find. While a blogged beef may not be representative of mass consensus, it has one single salient edge — it’s treated the same as any review by Consumer Reports, Travel and Leisure, or any traditional medium, last as long, and arguably has the same potential effect.

Listen to this stuff and respond. This is the engagement that matters.

11.6-9: Cotuit

11.10 – Babson Innovation and Corporate Entrepreneurship Forum

Work weekend at the ski club in Jackson, NH with temperatures of 11 forecast for tonight along with some snow. Should be most excellent. Photos to follow.

I painted this. Paint does not go on well, nor dry at 20 degrees F.:

This is what we were starting with. If a paint company ever wants to torture test their product. Pick this house. 

Lots more noodling in Blogistan about the “lies, damn lies, and statistics” of emerging media. As I draft my first column for a major business magazine’s online version on this very topic, I am gathering string.

First from Steve Safran at Lost Remote, via Scoble, is this commentary sparked by the zeFrank/Rocketboom nerd fight.
Lost Remote TV Blog

“There’s simply no way for us to measure viewership of podcasts. But we keep reporting numbers from the networks, big sites and podcasters without questioning them (guilty as charged) and we need to step back for a moment and ask: “How do we figure out who is really watching or listening to our podcasts?” Then we have to admit “We don’t know.”

Let’s back up a second and understand why this stuff is even measured in the first place (above and beyond bragging rights along the lines of mine-is-bigger-than-yours, which I call the “Time Warner PathFinder Effect” back in the day when Time Warner’s execs boasted about getting “millions” of hits the way McDonald’s quotes the nebulous statistic of “Billions Served). Why do we care about accuracy in media measurement? Especially since the old media measured crap like “reach” and “audience” based on the numbers of cars projected to crawl past a billboard on Highway 101 during rushhour and the number of Nielsen households who pressed the right button at the right time during the Beverly Hillbillies? Or magazines that claimed precision on completely freaky statistics like “pass-along” (which would seem to count a moldy copy in a dentist’s office about a gazillion times) or “recall?”

The reason that numbers matter, aside from the tyrannical rise of the “measure to manage” actuarials in the CFO’s office who worship at the altar known as “ROI”, is that marketers are still buying at the head of the long tail –where things like “mass” and “reach” seem to matter.

Now we find ourselves in the wonderfully mechanical world of web logs, when every hit, download, and interaction is logged by our Apache servers, and suddenly the Web world has been held up as the most accurately measured media in history.

Hah!

I’ve gamed web logs. Everyone has. I can pull some pearl out of a web log and say, “Aha, Left-handed Latvians prefer my site on Sundays!” Now, as we exit the era of Page Views and enter the era of Engagement, things get even squishier and gamier. Downloads versus views? Good luck.

My confrere, Jim Hazen, asks the simple question today about third party verification.

“Should there be some sort of official, universally accepted standards that all companies adhere to in determining true traffic? Like SEC accounting rules for Web Metrics? How bought a federally mandated web metrics tag for all sites?! Maybe some crazy alogrithm that can be based on Google searches or something, since they essentially run the web now. Not sure what the answer would be, but it’ll probably end up as another highly questionable reach calculation like the ones they’ve used forever with tv and radio.”

Jim, welcome to the world of ComScore, and Nielsen, and that total farce, Alexa.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, the burden of proof and measurement can’t be abdicated to a third party measurement system. The Internet Advertising Bureau has fallen down in not presenting a solid set of standards for metrics reporting. The equivalent of the BPA or the ABC hasn’t emerged for online, and in the end, it comes down to the buyer has to beware. The only statistic that matters for a person renting eyeballs is this: did it work for me? Did the traffic to my site, the click through on that search term, the download of that funny viral yield anything of value to me.

In other words, stop pointing a radar gun at the pitchers. Worry about whether the catcher is on the ball.

James Governor’s MonkChips: Blogger Relations at Adobe, Oracle and SAP (and a bit of IBM, Microsoft, Sun)

“Is a blog just a publishing tool? If so, would anyone ask how tech companies deal with people that use pens? I am not being facetious. Just trying to parse the issues.”

An excellent overview of how three companies are approaching blogger relations — SAP, Oracle and Adobe — by James Governor at Redmonk.

FTC Weak on Online Ad Industry Regulation, Watchdogs Say

From ClickZ this morning, behavioral targeting come under attack:

…. and the first class car is dying.

The dowagers next to me have stopped yakking about real estate prices and are fanning themselves with magazines. The guy in front of me has taken advantage of the olefactory disaster to sneak in a truly paint peeler of an audible fart which makes for my own personal hell on earth. I wonder what the engineer is doing. He’s been tooting the horn for the last five minutes.

This week’s theme seems to be developing into the metrics of “engagement” and the rules of thumbs to describe participants, lurkers, and fanatics. Since opening my first Blogger blog in the spring of 2002 (which quickly went dark as I tended to run my mouth off and was horrified one of my reserved Swiss employers would freak out if they read it), I’ve been looking at the differences between blogs and forums and the impact they have on that fuzzy liberal-tinged buzzword: “community.”

Community, for those of you born after 1998, was the power word of the first web revolution. It always conjured up images of community gardens, Morris Dancing festivals, church bake sales and youth soccer tournaments, but I digress.

Community was theoretically engagement in the form of a dialogue between the reader and the publisher and readers and other readers. I got into it as an operator in 1995 when Thorne Sparkman and I decided to launch an online magazine for saltwater fly fishing called Reel-Time. Thorne found an email list archival tool called HyperMail and had it hacked to serve as a crude threaded discussion platform. One of those discussions was named “BBS5″ and it was very popular. I won’t go over the whole tale of Reel-Time — it’s over ten years old, has tons of traffic, is ranked first in Google for its key terms, and has a devoted “community” of people obsessed with saltwater fly fishing. There was an article written about one of our attempts to get people to meet face to face — on a beach in the middle of the night in October — that is pretty funny. You can find it here.

Reel-Time embodied a threaded forum, or BBS (bulletin board service, a hang-over term from the days of dial-up community when someone would run a community on a PC and people would dial into it one at a time). This is the format made infamous by USENET newgroups, and the basis for such legendary communities as the W.E.L.L., The Source, CompuServe, etc.

The interesting thing about a threaded forum is that it is a Maoist construct where everyone is on equal ground. Sure, contemporary software can grant different levels of power to different classes of users, but the content is pooled as opposed to “pulpited.” Meaning, anyone can start a thread or discussion, anyone can contribute, and no one’s postings is given prominence in terms of display or prioritization.

The first threaded community constructs were completely classless — the tools lacked any semblance of moderation capabilities, so me, as the “moderator” had to manually go in and surgically delete offensive remarks with no powers to ban members of the tin-foil hat league. Trying to run a community with no “god” powers was like trying to run a Vermont commune full of peaceful hippies with a few Charles Manson’s mixed in. BBS-5 eventually collapsed under the weight of anonymous flamers, forged identities, and general mayhem. So we migrated to another commercial platform which royally sucked and drove most of the committed posters to another site, where the same issues reemerged.

Eventually, thanks to Mark Cahill at Vario Design, we moved to a php system, VBulletin, and everything has been good ever since. We designated about ten “super” users as moderators, giving them some administrative powers so they can move spam posts into a rogue’s gallery, and keep the garden, as J.P. Rangaswami refers to it from the Chris Locke days (Reel-Time was born out of a project I collaborated with Chris, aka RageBoy, back in 1994 at InternetMCI).

Here’s the money graf: blogs are not communities. While there are comments and trackbacks they are not the place to build communities of engaged participants for the simple reason that the blogger, not the commenter, owns the pulpit. While there are group blogs where multiple writers share the same space (Boing-boing is the model there) there are no massive group blogs where 10,000 users vy for attention. In fact, the snake-display model of a blog — with comments hidden until one clicks through the headline to the permalink — is totally opposed to the thread and post model of a forum.

I write this as I:

a) look at forum technologies for a corporate project

b) think hard about Reel-Time and our fail efforts in offering our most active participants blogs (which we called Flogs — for Fishing Logs).

c) wish there was a better format for displaying comments in line or at least more visible in the context of the master post. (there is, I am too stupid to implement it.)

To the tune of a massive lockup every other session. I may need to revert to 1.5 which was as stable as could be.

So here I am at OgilvyOne’s Verge Digital Summit on digital media and interactive marketing and a non-Ogilvy, Time-Warner center usher-goon tells me to turn off my laptop which I am using to take notes and blog. What’s up with that irony … or is it a paradox? A room full of marketers getting preached to about social media, engagement, and nary a blogger in sight.

Nor permitted apparently. I’m not blaming Ogilvy. My hosts were bewildered too. I guess I go to too many conferences where backchannel ICQ chats are projected and everyone on the house has a laptop in front of them ….
Sheesh. I can see the staff getting nervous during a live performance if I whipped out an iRiver and a set of microphones, or a video camera during the premier of Borat. This entire bloggable/unbloggable conference thing got rolling last week when BuzzMetrics asked attendees to a client meeting not to blog it. I can see the reasoning there — clients trading notes don’t want those notes published.
update from the lounge because I skipped dessert:

1. Morning session hosted by Michael Wolff — he of Burn Rate and Vanity Fair. Stewart Butterfield from Flickr, Shawn Gold from MySpace, the founder of Heavy.com and someone from Gather.com. Wolff tried to be contentious and play Mr. Mainstream “where’s the money” but the discussion begged more questions than it answered.
2. zeFrank was intense. I’m not worthy.
3. Dennis Kneale moderated the “I See Dead People” panel represented by NBC, AOL, Economist.com and weirdly, the chairman of Technorati. That was particularly infuriating. Lots of buzzword bingo and old/new media people groping for their butts with both hands.

I’ll be more reasonable on the train since I’m still royally pissed I can’t use my laptop and being sour.

update on the train

Good conference all in all. Ogilvy people who presented in the afternoon were in many ways the highlights. More on that in a second.

Back to the morning. I’ve been predisposed to not like Michael Wolff due to my dislike of any Boswellian figure, and his panel was a bit of a buzzfest with “engagement” and “informed” and “ROI” and “Web 2.0″ getting tossed around with abandon. The guest lineup was a tad too eclectic — I’d have rearranged the deck chairs. Butterfield was great. Gold from MySpace was great. Gerace from Gather.com and Assad from Heavy were lesser lights.

The Kneale panel had a buddy from Ogilvy and me rolling our eyes. Kneale doesn’t like blogs — indeed, no one really took the time to explain that a blog is nothing more than a cheap CMS and like any tool will not solve the garbage-in/garbage-out factor. Anderson’s Long-Tail spiel shook the crowd when he presented a Technorati influence chart mapping big media against bloggers and demonstrated that Boing-Boing, Daily Kos, et all kick the stuffing out of the sad, beleaguered newspapers and networks.

In general there was too much of the rhethoric about interactive croaking established media. The discussion should have been on the death of the old page view model and the emergence of conversational/engagement marketing. A few brushes with the topic were pretty satisfying, but there was way too much time expended on the pace and immensity of the transition that to my thinking has already gone down. There was literally no discussion of subscription models or registration walls — which would have dominated this conference five years ago.
Shelly Lazarus, Chairman and CEO of Ogilvy opened up after lunch. High light was Dove commercial, “Evolution”.

Ogilvy showed a short film on digital media habits in eight countries. Good stuff to scare marketing people with.

Chris Wall, Ogilvy’s co-chief creative officer, came out and gave a brilliant presentation on episodic marketing and brand journalism. He struck me as scary smart.

Chad Hurley from YouTube was excellent and delivered the line of the day when an audience member asked him YouTube planned on improving its search capabilities: “I hear Google is pretty good at search.”

Don Tapscott from New Paradigm was excellent. Brian Fetherstonhaugh, the CEO of OgilvyOne was my hero when he showed the gap between online usage at 20% of media consumption while online ad spending was 6% of overall media spends.

I stayed for a TV commercial panel that was okay and showed some cool tv spot customization and targeting technologies from SpotRunner and Visible World.

Then I bailed for the train.

Key Takeaways:

1. Buzzword Bingo players would have been happy.

2. Trying to blog a conference, after the fact, from handwritten notes that look like they were written by the victim of a head injury is useless.
3. Advertising and media shifts are not the issues. The old 4 P’s are irrelevant. The trenchant points are co-creation and customer innovation, conversational marketing, reputation management, integrity and transparency, and optimization.

4. The Ogilvy people were the smartest people in the room and I sensed they are desperate for clients who can take advantage of that.