Churbuck.com

A cold but clear day with no wind, so my wife, daughter and two dogs set out for a big walk at noon, determined to walk all the way to the southernmost point in town by the water. This is a walk that can only be done at low tide, there is a tidal creek that needs to be crossed and at anything but lowtide the crossing can be a wet one.

Aside from the length of the walk and the great sunshine, a few standouts from the stroll.

We saw the Behlman’s out in their toy tugboat.

Found a lot of rice on the beach, indicating some lucky couple was married on the sands this morning.

Saw a lot of Canada Geese

And came home as the sun went over the bluffs to the west.

There was no sadness over this walk being the last, because tomorrow will be the first!

Full Flickr gallery here. 

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You are Spider-Man

Spider-Man 70% Green Lantern 60% Hulk 60% Iron Man 60% The Flash 60% Superman 55% Catwoman 55% Batman 45% Wonder Woman 41% Supergirl 36% Robin 35%

You are intelligent, witty, a bit geeky and have great power and responsibility.

Click here to take the Superhero Personality Quiz

Thanks to the MIT Advertising Lab blog for this pointer:

“SEO for Firefox is a little plug-in for search engine optimizers (optimizators?) that ammends Google and Yahoo search results will all sorts of related trivia on sites that show up in the search results. This will give you an idea why certain site is ranked higher up than others for a particular search term. To give an example you guys can relate to: if you search for “advertising blog”, these three come up at the top: Adverblog, Adrants and Adland (I was pleasantly surprised to learn that Ad Lab is #4).”

I downloaded and enabled the plug-in and find it fairly useful.  The MIT blog is a recent discovery and a good one that has gone into the blogroll.

Slob Evolution (Dove Spoof)

This is the 75-second version of my holiday vacation.

Then use Google Reader  … you can sail through a hundred feeds in no time, can star and note them with a touch of the pen, and using the X60 tablet’s “bezel mouse” can scroll and pan to your heart’s delight. Marking a feed as “read” is a snap … I am in love.
I used to consider Microsoft OneNote to be the killer app for demonstrating a tablet’s power, but rolling through an AJAX interface to screen hundreds of feeds via Google is my new de facto show-off app.

I would not recommend trying to blog or comment using the pen interface — my handwriting sucks and it is just as easy to swivel the thing open and start typing.

I have been using a combo of SnagIt and Flickr’s uploading applet to snag screen shots and move them to my Flickr account — this cool little applet does both and spares me from the eternal process of resubscribing to SnagIt.

Webimager

The past few days have been an education into obscure film. Working off of my son’s spectacular Janus collection of 50 Years of Art House films, I dove into (with his recommendations), three great classics of French cinema and one Italian great.

This morning I finished Pepe Le Moko, a gangster film set in the Casbah, starring Jean Gabin and directed by Julien Duvivier. Gabin, who also starred in one of the other French classics I watched this past week, The Grand Illusion, has been described as the French “Bogart.” He is incredibly charismatic in the role of Pepe, a fugitive thief self-imprisoned in the exotic back alleys of the Casbah, a dark place the police dare not enter. The film is about their repeated efforts to lure Pepe out of the safety of the Casbah into the city where he can be apprehended. Deceit and treachery, plot and counterplot, and some of the best lines I have ever heard (or read in subtitles), made this one of my favorites of all time.

The Grand llusion is one of those films you know you should see, but manage never to get the chance to watch. This is hailed as a classic of war films, set in a World War I German prison camp and focused on the experience of some French officers and their German guards. Another Jean Gabin film, Grand Illusion ends on a beautiful note near the Swiss border, when Gabin and his fellow-escapee find refuge in the home of a German farmwoman, widowed by the war. The scene reminded me of Barry Lydon, when Ryan O’Neal seeks refuge from the wars in the home of a German woman.

Wages of Fear has been remade as Sorcerer and stands as a prototype for suspense films. Clouzot’s original was chopped up for American distribution, so when I first saw it as a Saturday afternoon television film, I know I was missing something and this reviewing in the original cut confirmed it. William Friedkin’s remake with Roy Schieder was great, but the original, as always trumps. The synopsis: four men accept the impossible task of driving two trucks filled with nitroglycerin to the scene of an oil well fire in South America.

Fists in Pockets is the 1965 debut of director Marco Bellochio, who, at the age of 26, filmed this tale of family dysfunction in his own family home. The protagonist, played by Swedish actor Lou Castel, manages to solve that dysfunction in such a way that the film freaked out the Catholic Church and Italian political establishment, as well as earned Bellochio rebukes from his heroes Bunuel and Antonioni.

And the last film in the ongoing series:

Alexander Nevsky: Sergei Eisenstein’s comeback made for Stalin as an anti-German propaganda film. The cinematography was pretty amazing. Especially the big panoramas and facial closeups. The plot — medieval Russian prince kicks ass on the German knights invading Russia. Battle scenes are pretty cheesy, the exhortations to defend the motherland are kind of quaint. Can’t recommend it unless you want to be able to say you saw it, or have a hankering to see more Eisenstein than the Potemkin

More pick-up of my post on why I don’t like Second Life. What I do like, conceptually, is the Croquet project pointed out by Redmonk’s Stephen O’Grady blogging at Tecosystems.Again, Second Life defenders, I am not throwing Second Life under the bus, I just challenge the ROI, from a marketing standpoint, of committing to a closed architecture controlled by a single commercial entity — again, it’s Prodigy’s walled-garden crumbling under the onslaught of the Open Web. If more of a committment was made to a Croquet-like architecture, where an organization’s or individual’s “island” was on their own server or hosted environment, and where there was an open source community supporting the tools and standards, then I’d be moving into a 3D metaverse at the drop of a hat.

The latest pickup is from Business Communicators of Second Life :

“Waves. You know, they swell, hit the shore and then they recede.

The Second-Life-for-Marketers debate feels like that. Waves of “second life is the new now thing” hit with the requisite response/undercurrent of “oh, it is SO not.”

It’s been fun, frequently amusing, sometimes irritating – and the vehemence is more than a little baffling.

A month ago Horace Clutterbuck’s real world persona wrote on the Churbuck.com blog 10 reasons why he didn’t like Second Life for marketing. It garnered its share of comments and blog responses. But, with every ounce of me, I hope you read Giff Constable’s blog post response to 9 of Horace’s ten points (one was about Horace’s dislike of being pitched – n.a.) “

Sorry if “vehemence” was detected in that first post — which actually was an internal email I wrote out of irritation as the umpteenth Second Life proposal crossed my desk for comment. I continue to point to that post internally as my position on SL, and it should not be taken as a blanket screed against metaverse models. I could, if I chose, to cite each and every embarassment and issue surrounding Second Life, but I have no axe to grind there. I continue to maintain an account, and I continue to invite people to discuss Second Life with me in Second Life. So far, only one person has, and that was sadly through an instant message forwarded to my email — again some sort of proof that SL is probably fine for real-time interaction, but inadequate for a time-shifted discussion.

Do check out Croquet. I intend to spend some time playing with it to determine if there are any signs of life there. From Wikipedia:

“The Croquet Project is an international effort to promote the continued development of Croquet, an open source software platform for developing and delivering deeply collaborative multi-user online applications. It features a network architecture that supports communication, collaboration, resource sharing, and synchronous computation among multiple users. Croquet provides a flexible framework in which most user interface concepts can be prototyped and deployed to create powerful and highly collaborative multi-user 2D and 3D applications and simulations. Croquet can be used to construct highly scalable collaborative data vizualizations, virtual learning and problem solving environments, 3D wikis, online gaming environments (MMORPGs), and privately maintained/interconnected multiuser virtual environments.”

Get ready to laugh. Here is my obligatory foray into the trite, predictable and erroneous.

1. 2007 will mark a return to analog media and face to face community.
2. The Web 2.0 bubble will deflate, not burst, stranding a few acquirers who paid outrageous amount for unprofitable services.
3. The IPO market will remain moribund, limiting the exposure of the Web 2.0 bubble popping to the few companies capable of making acquisitions.
4. Vista will not drive a significant hardware replacement cycle among small businesses and consumers.
5. Online advertising rates will rise at least 15% due to declines in page views, the inability of metrics solutions to track AJAX page refreshes, and a pending love affair by corporate advertisers with video advertising.
6. Yahoo will end the year up in terms of its share price thanks to improvements in its paid search model due to Panama and a new executive team.
7. Yahoo will acquire CNET or Ziff Davis, marking a deeper committment to a content model versus a search model in light of Google’s major lead and brand strength.
8. VOIP will double its consumer household penetration causing further agony with the Bells.
9. Online collaborative services will go mainstream following a terrorist threat or incident which significantly disrupts travel and makes work-at-home and remote meeting capabilities a must-have for uninterrupted business continuity.
10. AOL will be acquired. By whom I cannot say, but I’d put bets on Microsoft or  News Corp.

So I am trying to catch a nap and I hear the shrieks from the kitchen.

“It’s back. It’s back. The rat is back.”

Figures the little rodent would make a reappearance two weeks after I resumed bird feeding. So I get the weapon out, recharge it with a new CO2 cartridge, open an window, and immediately realize I have better things to do than sit in front of an open window in December on Cape Cod waiting for a rat.

So to the hardware store for a rat-sized Hav-A-Heart trap which has been robbed three times today by squirrels and is now loaded with a chunk of cheddar. I do not intend to have a heart when I finally nail the rodent. It’s Goodfella time into the trunk and down to the town pier for the ol’ cement overshoe treatment.

I don’t believe in New Year’s resolutions. But I do believe in long-term plans and wishlists. Here’s mine for the 12 months to come.

1. Get back on the bike: Yep, I miss cycling way too much to sit out another riding season. With some good economic luck I intend to purchase a dream machine and return to road biking in the spring of 2007, a year after the infamous bike-meets-car incident of last Memorial Day.

2. Finish a book: It’s time to focus my evenings on a book. I have two projects underway, I am about to park one on the sidelines and go whole-heartedly after the other. The topic will be the new principles of Interactive Marketing — the 1.0 to 2.0 transformation.

3. Take up Yoga: I know, I know. Yoga is the predictable fad du jour but I need to do something to limber up a once athletic body made hidebound by such repetitious sports as cycling and rowing. If I want to spare myself the agony I just went through for the past two months with a trashed lower back then I need to put on my Danskin and learn the Down Dog.

4.  Transform Interactive Marketing: it strikes me that a new model is begging to be born. The last time I felt like I actually innovated was in 1995 when I had the blindingly obvious insight that a vertical banner — aka the “tower” or “skyscraper” — stayed visible when a web page visitor scrolled down a page. I sense there is something similar and just as obvious begging to be born.

5. Get my Technorati Rank up 10,000 points: I started the year in the mid-80s, now I am teetering around 30,000. I want to end the year in the teens and I don’t plan on gaming the system to do it. I love organic growth and am in awe of people like Intuit’s Avinash Kaushik who rose to a four-digit ranking in less than six months.

6. Travel to India:  I went on a whim in 1991 with my wife when it looked like Pan Am would go bankrupt and strand me with a bazillion frequent flier miles. The one move we could do that would burn up the miles was First Class to Nairobi or First Class to New Delhi. Thanks to a boss who was an old India-hand (Jim Michaels, the legendary editor in chief of Forbes who won the Pulitzer for his coverage of Gandhi’s assassination) I found myself in India for an amazing month. Now I want to return to see the changes over the past 15 years.

7.  Perform one major home improvement: I am the ultimate un-handyman. But I have a rotting boat shop sagging off the backend of the house that is a living museum where my great-great-grandfather ran a sail loft and started the first Masonic Temple in Cotuit, and where my grandfather built Cotuit Skiffs. The roof is leaking, the shingles are blowing off, and I intend to fix it up myself.

8. Get one of my children into a Cotuit Skiff: I own two of the things, one of my three kids needs to step up, climb aboard, and start racing.

9. Come to terms with my commute: I need to figure out a better and more economical approach to a life divided between 750 miles of home and office.

10. In all my getting, get understanding: That’s a rip-off from Malcolm Forbes, who wrote: “In all your getting, get understanding.” Read into it what you will, but I need to take a deep breath and get a better grounding in the important stuff, and less distraction from the buzz and chaff.

Millions of Us » Blog Archive » Response to David Churbuck of Lenovo

“Just came across a highly critical post by David Churbuck, VP of Global Web Marketing at Lenovo. I thought it made sense to write a little response because his post represents feelings held by many in the business community who are reading about Second Life and wondering what all the fuss is about.”

I don’t want to become the poster-boy for a counter-Second Life backlash. I’ll let Clay Shirky assume that mantle over at Valleywag, but I am heartened to see two extremely qualified experts — both ex-Linden Labs executives — respond to my post from earlier in the month about why I, as a marketer, should or shouldn’t care about Second Life as a venue for building my brand or serving my customers and prospective customers.

For starters, no one responding to my post has gone shrill and started tossing flames my way, for which I am grateful. I should amend that first post with my follow-on thought about my perception that Second Life is too much of a walled-garden at present to justify the expense and difficulty of developing a presence there. I continue to be convinced of the common sense behind the wish that some latter-day Berners-Lee would create an open metaverse structure that was not dependent on a centralized server model but which permit the IBMs and Levi-Strausses, as well as individuals to build and own their own presence on their own terms, conforming to an open standard for interoperability. I am convinced such an open metaverse will come, and that in time, the hardware and bandwidth needed to make such a virtual world truly compelling will emerge. If the right standard is put in place, and if the construction tools are as simple as say FrontPage was in 1994, then the immersive web will be a fact of life within 5 years.

I am concerned that as companies like IBM begin to bless Second Life as a virtual briefing center, that more pressure will be brought to bear on me and others like me to open a Second Life beachhead as a 3D version of WebEx or someother collaborative tool. This may be the case, but there seems to be little opportunity for timeshifting in Second Life — one must arrive and participate in real-time — and just as WebEx and other real-time apps seem cumbersome to me as a participant to enter and configure, I fear Second Life will make it doubly hard for an organization to efficiently lure customers and partners into an environment with a fairly steep set up process.

I am not so concerned with the use of Second Life as a marketing medium — I am surprised that someone hasn’t started selling ad space to drive traffic to the often deserted marketing islands — as I am with its use as a communications and collaboration tool. Once the novel wears off and infatuation with one’s avatar appearance wanes, comes the big question of what to tangible do with it. That remains unanswered.

Oh, and for the commenter who told me I was wrong-headed in hailing World of Warcraft as an alternative — wait a sec, WoW is insanely popular for its own reasons, most of which come down to a decent graphical experience, a strong sense of communications and community, and a plot or story line built around quests and goal attainment. While WoW could, in theory, be used as a collaboration tool, I would never propose it as one. I think Blizzard Entertainment are true geniuses who know how to deliver an addictively compelling experience. Linden has provided a decent blank slate, and turned the experience over to the inhabitants with little more than a development protocol and a currency to glue them together. Good for them and good for those who find the experience to be a compelling one.

Today’s imbroglio in Blogistan over a certain software goliath giving away notebooks from a certain PC marker, sparks memories of being an utter review-unit-whore back in my tech journalism days at PC Week and Forbes.

If you want to make a tech journalist happy, send them a “review” unit and never ask for it back. This makes the journalist happy because a) they can use the thing for free and show it off to other people as an example that they are indeed a member of the inner circle of coolness, b) the thing will get some exposure, c) if you don’t ask for it back then the reporter doesn’t have to save the packaging and remember to get it in the mail to absolve their sense of pure journalistic ethics.

I used to get some over-the-top bling. Full PCs, notebooks, wireless modems, stuff that was fun to play with, sometimes resulted in a review, and more often than not ended up in the attic in the graveyard-of-dead-technology. I never resold the stuff (this was pre-Ebay) and often it would arrive, indeed, usually it would arrive without being requested. My philosophy was, if you send it without asking me, then it’s mine, fair game. If I requested it, then indeed, I was under full obligation to return it at the end of the review period.

There was a period in the early-90s when the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal began to focus on the conflicted ethics of the technology trade press — of which I was an alumnus from my stint at PC Week. While I had no first hand knowledge of ethical lapses by people I worked with, the opportunity to benefit from paid junkets to Taiwan and free “review” units abounded. The PC Week labs were a goldmine for spare hard drives, accelerator boards, and other detritus the lab’s people were too hassled to box up and return, but dipping into that trove was something I avoided.

My ethical rules were never to resell review equipment, make every effort to generate some copy out of my usage, and if I felt I would be inconvenienced by temporary ownership, to refuse delivery from the UPS or Fed Ex delivery. Book reviewers were apparently notorious for selling galleys and first editions after they were done with them, my approach to free lunch press benefits was cemented in place during the 1984 New Hampshire presidential primaries when I watched reporters from the Washington Post pay campaign staffers for “free” cups of coffee.
Lenovo has an excellent review program managed by Jeffrey Witt and indeed, we have to insist that all machines get returned due to rigorous accounting rules. We like to get our stuff in the hands of the right journalists and bloggers, we try to accommodate all requests, but we can’t give the things away.

Preview of the del.icio.us publisher api (Yahoo! Developer Network blog)
Matt McAllister at Yahoo has a nice screencast on an upcoming del.icio.us blog extension that shows what terms users are tagging posts with and drives the clickthru to the del.icio.us page showing all articles or pages tagged with that term. This is “more like this” on steroids.

Matt does good work.

“The del.icio.us team gave me a preview of a new service for publishers that is really interesting. We’ll post more details about it when they’re available, but I did a short screencast (7 minutes) explaining some of the ways it can be used and why it matters. Enjoy.”

Went to the neurologist earlier this week and was put on a seven-day course of steroids to try to knock down the pain issues that have plagued me since the middle of November. (I love it when physicians say “It’s time to break out the big guns.”)

Three days in and I am definitely feeling improvement, sleeping better, and otherwise coming out of the pain-lethargy cycle of the past six weeks.

Fred Wilson: 2007: The End Of The Page View

Om weighs in this morning with the resignation that the page-view model is what we have for a benchmark of web audiences and therefore it is the benchmark we have to live with. Knowing that Om’s GigaOm network is dependent on advertising revenue, he has to conform the prevailing metric in the market, which is the 1990’s Web 1.0 measurement of audience as expressed by page views and unique visitors.

Fred sparked Om’s defense of the PV with this:

“…there are changes afoot in the Internet measurement business. Everyone is recognizing that pageviews matter less now. Ajax and other more modern web technologies allow for new ads to be diisplayed without a page reload. Ad views can grow even as page views decline. I know that there have been a number of discussions about this at the highest levels of the leading Internet measurement firms and the leading Internet businesses. And we’ll be seeing the outcomes of those discussions at some point in 2007.”But it doesn’t even stop there. Web pages themselves are changing, moving from pages controlled by publishers to pages controlled by users.”

I’ll reiterate my position from the point of view of a buyer of traffic, which is ultimately the onus on the site I buy from is not gross tonnage of views, nor even clicks, but the end-of-funnel conversion that occurs on my site after the publisher delivers the traffic into it. This of course is further complicated by the reality that the “deal is everything”, no publisher can control the creative run on the page — AJAX or static — but in the end, when I operate the campaign, optimize the creative, retraffick the placements and optimize the backend landing page for A/B and multivariate possibilities, I will look at those sites or networks which sent in the best traffic conditioned to respond to me.

I don’t buy large numbers. I don’t buy CPMs. I look at publishers as providing me blunt approximations of an audience, and then it is up to me and my agency to put the right offer in front of that audience at the right time. If I believe a publisher’s pitch on gross tonnage, then I’d be buying into the fact that they are pushing forced page refreshes to hit their campaign guarantees (which I did in former lives) are needlessly chunking long stories into multi-jumps to force up their pages per session, and otherwise playing the games with the logs that I played myself.

It takes one to know one and I know that ad impression numbers are wholly unreliable and again, reiterate, that the burden is on the buyer — aka, let the buyer beware — and take responsibility for the user experience once they wind up on the destination site.

SECOND LIFE: A debunking, in five acts – Valleywag

“At Valleywag, we’d long had an inchoate irritation with Second Life and, more specifically, with the uncritical press coverage that the virtual world enjoyed. Often, a company’s publicity can get ahead of mundane reality; it’s often more the fault of a credulous press than an over-eager PR operation. But, when a virtual land baroness in Linden Lab’s online game claimed she was now a millionaire, it was clear that Second Life was begging for a takedown. The story arc, a recap of Valleywag’s more cynical reporting, after the jump.”

The anti-Second Life bandwagon grows more crowded. Last week yet another proposal to move into the virtual world crossed my desk, but I invoked the “I only discuss Second Life inside of Second Life” and of course that conversation hasn’t taken place yet as me and the other party send each other off-line instant messages and have yet to determine when and where the discussion will take place.

The proposal seems to focus on using Second Life as a more difficult version of WebEx — which I also thinks sucks — for internal briefings, training etc. I stand by my position that Second Life is solving a problem that doesn’t exist.

This “officially” a vacation week for me, the last of 2006, but I am of course staying close by email and the cellphone and working on a presentation for the first week of the New Year.

12.26: Cotuit, doctor’s appointment re: back

12.27: Boston, mother-in-law to Logan for flight back to San Francisco

12.28: local roadtrip, R&R

12.29-1.1: Cape Cod, New Year’s Eve

1.2: Massachusetts to RTP

1.3.-1.5 RTP for meetings, move into new office

1.6-1.7: weekend in Cotuit

No major international trips planned in January. Just business-as-usual back and forths from Massachusetts to North Carolina.

Two down, forty-eight to go in Eliot’s Xmas gift — The Essential Art House — 50 Years of Janus Films.

He started me off with Kon Ichikawa’s 1959 Fires on the Plain, (Nobi) a grueling Japanese war film about the horrors endured by a Japanese soldier trying to survive the final days on Leyte in the Phillipines. I have never seen a war picture as unflinching and brutal.

“It is the Philipines, 1945. The Japanese Imperial Army has been reduced to a ragtag mob hiding in the jungles. Among them is Pvt. Tamura. The situation goes from bad to worse and in the face of the brutal conditions facing the men, some go insane and resort to murder and cannibalism. In the midst of this, Pvt. Tamura tries to survive without giving up his principles.”

That was followed by a Technicolor antithesis — The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp – the 1943 story by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger of Clive Candy, the quintessential stiff-upper lipped British Army officer. The film follows the arc of his career from the Boer War to the Home Guard in WW II. The writing and wit was superb. Even though the film could be regarded as semi-propaganda coming as it did in the midst of the war, it paints a picture of service and devotion to country that is stereotypical today, but interesyting in the sense that this is the film that defined the cliche.
More films today, but with some moderation so I don’t completely go the way of the couch potato. I am still having serious back issues and have to restrict my sitting time, especially when I sprawl and let my posture go to hell. Off to the neurologist this afternoon for some more tests and consultations.

So Uncle Fester’s Wii was a huge hit today. The oldest, an ardent Sox fan, is into the baseball game, emulating Trot Nixon’s batting stance with a mixture of Ted Williams thrown in for good measure. The youngest is into boxing and takes it waay too seriously, proving why the controller straps break and the thing goes flying through windows and television sets. My wife is into tennis, but plays it sitting down which sort of defeats the purpose. Me, I played three games of golf and made par on the last game. No one is into bowling.
Pretty interesting console — the sheer physicality of it has already smoked the youngest and put him into a full sweat — with all asking for more games already.