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Web newspaper blog traffic triples in Dec: study – Yahoo! News

An interesting stat indicating the mainstreaming of blogs into the media stream. I wonder how many readers of newspaper blogs would identify them as blogs — or just more web content?

“The number of people reading Internet blogs on the top 10 U.S. newspaper sites more than tripled in December from a year ago and accounted for a larger percentage of overall traffic to those sites, according to data released on Wednesday.
Unique visitors to blog sites affiliated with the largest Internet newspapers rose to 3.8 million in December 2006 from 1.2 million viewers a year earlier, tracking firm Nielsen//NetRatings said.

U.S. news organizations are increasingly calling on their reporters and editors to write news blogs and compete with the expanding Internet format for informal analysis and opinion.”

Zen of Design»Blog Archive » When 10 Hours Is Not Enough To Appreciate True Awesomeness

I’ve been taken down at GigaGamez for slagging Second Life after a mere ten hours of usage. Guess I need to put in … what? …forty hours before I am permitted to ask questions about something being pushed on me. Guess twenty-five years as a tech journalist and countless software and online reviews don’t qualify me to express an opinion. Hey, at least I was frank in grading my “expertise” with the system as an F-minus. To follow the logic, I’m not permitted to say a meal sucks unless I’ve cooked the dish a certain number of times. Hey — like I said in my original critique: “your mileage may vary. Me: I don’t like it.”
Thanks to Damian Schubert for making my rebuttal for me at Zen of Design:

“James Wagner Au is incensed that people who have not played the game much are criticizing it. Which I suppose is would be a fair criticism, if it were true. But look at what he claims is not enough.Regarding proficiency with Second Life, [one reviewer] e-mailed back, “Mark me with an F. Make that an F minus.” He estimates his total visitations as ten hours or under, in which he more or less randomly explored a world the geographic size of an entire state, to form his assessment.

That’s right – 10 hours is not enough time to make an honest assessment of the Second Life experience. By comparison, my games rack is full of games that didn’t survive an HOUR of playtime. Electronic Arts (and most other companies) force their designers to obsess over the first FIVE MINUTES of gameplay, because most games don’t even survive THAT. Okay, someone reviewing the game should probably give it a tad more time than than but… 10 hours – not enough!”

I’ve wasted enough time on this topic as it is. I could return Mr. Wagner Au’s trashing with an in-kind slam at his methods and objectivity, but …. on to more important matters in my first life.

Just wondering. EVDO saves the day, but in general, wireless connectivity on the Amtrak like from Boston to NYC is terrible, with cell phone coverage spotty at best. But why can’t the train have a 802.1G signal?

Don’t get me going on the deplorable state of rail travel in the US. Two years of riding the Swiss train systems completely spoiled me to the possibilities.

Beautiful morning though, first true winter morning of the new year, with temperatures in the teens, but a bright orange sun flashing over Long Island Sound through the port-side windows of the Acela.

[update: four dropped calls on the train this morning. Yo, Sprint, build some towers along the tracks!]

My mission to get to a “zero inbox” is succeeding, with fewer than 100 emails sitting in my inbox this morning, and the hot ones being moved into one of four action folders. I have grown more merciless in deleting emails that have a questionable impact or “ask” of me. If I don’t have to reply, I don’t. If I don’t have to retain, I don’t. Delete is my friend.

But, I write to moan about the wrongness of Lotus Notes, the fact that it is the most isolated, stranded, proprietary, horrible email tool on the planet, one that offers its victims no options to migrate their calendars, their tasks, their contacts to a better alternative. Where do I want to be? Let’s start with the calendar — I want desperately to move to Google Calendar, Foldera or 30Boxes — but alas, the import/export functions of those tools don’t even acknowledge Notes, let alone support it. I am sure I could drop $75 on some third-party utility, but for now, Notes remains stuck to me like a low-level skin disease — always itchy, not quite disfiguring, a fact of life.

I know Notes is a favorite of IT administrators and I won’t slag it for that reason, but I wonder how many new hires have arrived at a new company only to discover, to their horror, that Notes is the central nervous system.

I first experienced the pain at McKinsey, where the firm depended on Notes like oxygen. Forbes was a cc:Mail shop — another Lotus product which had the weirdest icons on the planet. Then Forbes went to a strange off-brand Novell client — Groupwise — and life deteriorated until I figured out how to map the mail stream to Outlook.

I’d like to junk it all and move to POP3 run through GMAIL. But until the calendar coordination and scheduling tools get more sophisticated, Notes will remain my productivity psorasis.

Season of uncertainty for shellfishermen (January 15, 2007)

“Welcome to ”As the Oyster Turns,” the continuing saga of the beloved bivalve and the people who can’t live without them. When last we met, warm weather was flooding the flats, mostly a good thing. But could danger lurk behind the balmy days?”

Having hoped to do some clamming this weekend, but deciding not to out of laziness, I realize it’s been a while since this blog has held up its tagline’s promise of talking about clamming strategies. Today’s Cape Cod Times has an interesting article that talks about the practice of “pitting” oysters — removing them from their beds where they can be damaged by extremely low winter temperatures and the scouring action of winter ice — and parking them in a basement storage area where they can sit out the winter, dormant, out of water. I did not know that.

Not an issue this year, as this looks like the winter that isn’t.

Today is the one-year anniversary of me and Lenovo. As John Lennon sang, “..and what have you done? Another year over and a new one just begun.”

I tend to take start-date anniversaries seriously. October 11, 1988 was my start-date at Forbes and every year my editor, Bill Baldwin, would sit me down with all the stories I had written in the previous 26 issues, and let me know where I stood and what I should work on.

At McKinsey start-dates weren’t important. The entire firm went into introspection mode twice a year in July and December.

Anyway, if I had to list the ten professional milestones of 2006 for me, in roughly chronological order:

1. Assimilation: Lowell Bryan at McKinsey told me, “No one is fully effective for six months.” I don’t know when exactly I began to feel comfortable in my own skin, but the first few months were predictably confusing as I learned Lenovo’s acronyms and internal vocabulary.
2. Metrics: I brought in Omniture SiteCatalyst to measure our online marketing.
3. Blogs: I launched the first corporate blog. It would have been sooner, but I was out of action due to the Memorial Day Bicycle Incident.
4. Proactive Support: I started an informal blog monitoring and service/fulfillment support program with Mark Hopkins.
5. Interactive advertising: we shifted dramatically towards a “direct” model of advertising, using metrics to back up the expense to revenue ratios.
6. Viral: some good viral was produced (not by me), but I think I can take credit for changing some attitudes about the role of viral.
7. Quality of Life: recovering from the Bicycle Incident put the long-distance commute between Cape Cod and North Carolina to the test. I think I have achieved equilibrium.
8. Big Idea: not to jinx it, but I think I am succeeding in selling the big one for 2007.
9. IT: we’ve brought in some new thinking to the types of systems needed to support a world-class interactive marketing group. These should bear fruit this year.
10. Influence: slowly but surely I’ve built my network and have a much better idea today about who does what, etc. than I did in January 2006.

Bradford Washburn, father of modern Museum of Science, dies at 96

“Bradford Washburn, the founder of the modern Boston Museum of Science who transformed a modest collection into renowned institution, died last night at the age of 96.”

Walking the Berkshires alerted me to the passing of Henry Bradford Washburn — founder of Boston’s Museum of Science, the preeminent mountain cartographer in the world, and perhaps the best photographer of mountains since Ansel Adams. This man personified a lot of heroic attributes in my mind. Whenever I think about climbing Mount Washington and plan a route, I look at a Brad Washburn map. He mapped Everest in his 70s.

Washburn is the man who mapped Everest, McKinley and the White Mountains of New Hampshire. He was a pioneer climber of Alaska’s peaks. His maps are art. The photos are exquisite.

Rainy Saturday, son has a fistful of gift cards from Xmas to use up, so off to Borders to indulge in my favorite shopping experience — book buying.

Santa didn’t bring me Against the Day, the latest by Thomas Pynchon, so I bought it for myself.

Being a major Mark Helprin fan, I was embarrassed when recently asked if I had read Freddy and Fredericka, so that went into the cart.

Cormac McCarthy is one of the top ten American novelists working today (the others include Don DeLillo, Richard Ford, John Updike, David Foster Wallace, and Pynchon), and being a big fan of All the Pretty Horses I had to get The Road based on an awesome NYT book review.

Robert Stone — Hall of Mirrors, Damascus Gate, Outerbridge Reach, Flag for Sunrise, Dog Soldiers — has written a memoir of the 60s and his days with Kesey and the Merry Pranksters: Prime Green.

And finally, because you need a little poetry, another edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.

I need more book shelves. I have piles of books in closets, next to my bed, in the attic, in the kids’ rooms and my wife isn’t happy about it.

Everyone loves a good mud fight between two competitors. Pepsi and Coke sort of stuff is fun. People like conflict. Oracle used to do trade press ads showing a F16 (Oracle) shooting down a World War One bi-plane (dBase). I believe negative comparison ads are illegal in some countries. But …

Sure, it’s part of the sales process to compare one’s stuff with the competition’s stuff, but so far I haven’t seen any overt snarkiness in the corporate blogs of my counterparts in the other trenches at HP and Dell. We read each other, now we’re linking and commenting on each other.
What surprises is me is the state of relations between the three big PC companies bloggers. It’s actually civil, I think for the simple reason that all three of us are in tough customer service worlds, we’re facing the same problems, and there is no map to follow. In other words, I sense we’re all making it up as we go along.
I post a link to Eric Kintz’s blog at HP because the guy is so smart, and he invites me to participate in a group post with some other corporate bloggers, and then Richard at Dell shows up in the comments here on my post about losing a customer …..

And then we blog about Toshiba having a good tablet hinge design and the Inquirer notes it and gives us a gold star ….

“A lot of vendor blogs are just marketing with an ersatz ‘dear reader’ veneer so credit to Lenovo for making its site a useful read.”

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. I come from an ultra-competitive industry — journalism — where at PC Week it was InfoWorld that was the devil and at Forbes it was Fortune and so on and so forth. That kind of competition is actually fun and very motivational in terms of driving scoops and deadlines. Here the battle is for the hearts and minds of loyal customers while trying to differentiate our products on a basis other than price.

In any event, it’s kind of cool to be blogging with my competitors and not against them.

Eric Kintz actually observed the opposite phenomenon last fall — corporate blog fights. 

“What interested me was the blogging “war” that started after this announcement: it is to my knowledge the first time that all three of us – Dell, IBM and HP – have engaged in a competitive dialogue through blogs. Corporate blogging is clearly taking on a new dimension in 07. Companies are watching what their competitors are doing and commenting on blogs. Dell (Lionel) /IBM (Christopher) – if you pick this up in your blog monitoring, drop me a note. ”

Still in RTP today, to the Cape tonight

1.13-1.14: Cotuit

1.15-1.16: work from home Cotuit

1.17-1.18: NYC

1.19-21: Cotuit

Sure, the phone is what it is. And Cisco is suing. But what struck me on the day of El Jobso’s announcement was the massive shift away from the traditional tech press as a communications vehicle to the gadget blogs.

The Apple phone was to Engadget and Gizmodo what the explosion of TWA Flight 800 was to MSNBC.com in the mid-90s. The moment when the world abandoned one medium — the so-called mainstream press’s online presence — for blogged news.

Engadget and Gizmodo owned the week between the phone and CES. And I watched as lots of colleagues watched the play-by-play unfold in a blog format — no one was hitting refresh on the homepage of media outlets that ten years ago would have been, reflexively, the go-to source for a new product announcement.

MIT Advertising Lab: future of advertising and advertising technology: Burger King Sells 2 Million Game Copies in 4 Weeks

I loved the Burger King Xbox promotion and apparently so did 2 million other people. $3.99 games of The King doing his thing struck a chord.

“Burger King “announced that its trio of games for the Xbox and Xbox 360 had broken the 2 million mark in just four weeks” (GameSpot). That’s a cumulative number for the three titles — Sneak King (pictured), Pocketbike Racer, and Big Bumpin’– that sold for $3.99 each in BK restaurants. That’s more than the 2 million copies of the blockbuster Gears of War sold in 6 weeks worldwide.

The news illustrates three things. First, people don’t hate brands in games, at least not unequivocally. Second, branded entertainment is more than disposable advertising; it’s worth paying for.”

THINK Blog

“The best viral videos have, in most cases, not come from the brands themselves, but rather from the consumers, like the Diet Coke/Mentos videos. Therefore one strategy is to be watchful for consumer content and then have a plan to capitalize on that conversation.”

My son Eliot, the film student, is blogging once again at Cinemania.

He won’t honk his horn, so I will. He’s a sophmore at New York University, majoring in Cinema Studies at the Tisch School of the Performing Arts. He’s watched more movies than any human on the planet and can write beautifully about them to boot.

He was an intern on the set of Kill Bill. His essay on a Danish film, Ordet, is a masterpiece and I hope he posts it. Ordet is also my favorite movie of all time.

The first incarnation of Cinemania died due to spam (pre-Akismet) and database errors. I must try to recover the original posts and migrate them in here.

Digital Download By David M. Ewalt

Making fun of Second Life is so much fun. This is a classic screed Forbes.com-style; tip of the hat to Valleywag who have taken the flag and run with it.

“Here’s the ultimate problem with Second Life: unless you’re some kind of sexual deviant who gets off by pretending to be a diaper-wearing man-fox, it’s boring as hell. If I want to chat with people, I can do it in IM without having to deal with lag, annoying ambient music, and all manner of freaks of nature. If I want to see cool imaginary worlds, I’ll watch a movie. And if I want to really nerd out and pretend I’m some sort of fantastic creature, I’ll stick with my Night Elf rogue, thank you.”

I’m sticking with my Level 29 Dwarf Hunter.

While driving to the airport this morning at dark o’clock I listened to a rerun of a show I heard Friday night while driving home from the airport. It was a profile of Gordon Bell, senior researcher at Microsoft (and the man behind the VAX architecture at DEC as VP of R&D) and his efforts to log his life using a unique camera which hangs around his neck and snaps a shot of whatever he is looking at every minute. He calls the project MyLifeBits.

Here’s a link to his presentation on the subject.

Bell is working on software to help organize every photo, every conversation, every image from his life. This is more than blogging taken to an extreme, it has significant ramifications for Alzheimer’s victims and people who suffer from memory issues.

The big question is how to store and protect a life’s worth of digital artifacts. I grow more and more paranoid as I move my life into Flickr, my unstable WordPress blog, and other online assets and storage bins. Time to start looking at a broader scale backup plan.

I like On The Media very much.

Techcrunch » Blog Archive » Bubble, Bubble, Bubble

Good observation by Mike Arrington on the state of affairs in the web indy these days, what with a dead IPO market, and a lot of money chasing very few good ideas.

I particularly like his point that Web 2.0 principles (whatever they may be I leave to your imagination) can conspire to bash down barriers to entry for copycats and competitors. I  assume he is positing open standards, data portability, etc.

But even in this new reality, we’re seeing what looks like way too much money chasing too few good ideas. And when someone does have a good idea, all of the principles of Web 2.0 work to destroy competitive barriers companies try to put in place to protect their business (See Todd Dagres of Spark Capital make this argument recently in the Wall Street Journal).

So when we see a few companies fall, people run for the hills.

But I disagree that Web 2.0 companies cannot become sustainable businesses. The Network Effect is still the most powerful force driving Internet success today. People don’t, for example, go to Digg because it has great software. The original Digg, as launched, cost Kevin Rose less than $2,000 to create. Anyone can create a Digg clone, and many have. The reason Digg is, and will continue to be, successful is because of the community it has created. People go to Digg because everyone else goes to Digg, and every new user who submits stories and/or votes occasionally adds value to the whole network. The Network Effect is also driving Facebook’s success, and YouTube’s. None of these companies have interesting software. All of them have an incredibly valuable community. All of these companies have to work hard to keep their lead, but it is nearly impossible for new entrants to catch up.

I discovered a great new blog last month, Walking the Berkshires, by Tim Abbott, a conservationist writing from the northwestern corner of Connecticut in Litchfield County. He’s a great, elegaic writer, and I found him while googling on an invasive seaweek species called codium, aka “deadman’s fingers.”

Abbott captures in a post the sense of alarm I have this sunny January afternoon with temperatures more suited to the middle of May than the beginning of winter. He notes:

“Yesterday the temperatures in the Litchfield Hills hovered around 60 with a warm, soaking rain. Last night might have kicked off the spring amphibian migration. Today the sun is warm and the temperature on the shady side of my house is 66 degrees. These would be welcome signs of spring in late February, but this is the first week of January. Something is terribly wrong.

There are daffodils pushing up new growth in frost-free ground. These are not the new bulbs I planted last fall that shot up in November and have failed to die back. They are well established, and are responding to the unusual warmth and moisture in the soil as if Spring were just around the corner and not 11 weeks away. There are soft green buds on the lilacs. We have not had more than a brief dusting of snow all season.

Most ominously, the sugar maple in our back yard is weeping sap from the drill holes of a woodpecker and ants swarm at the openings. The sap is rising on 12th night. Last year the first run came unusually early in late January. This was my post at that time on what I feared was a sign of things to come. My fears seem to have been justified. This is no January thaw. In very significant ways, we have simply bypassed winter.”

While walking with my wife yesterday, I expressed my concern that the June-like weather would cause some specific issues. Like the spring amphibian migration — the spring peepers that are a harbinger of more clement weather, could, in theory, come out and start their songs only to get hit very hard by what inevitably will be a return to solid sub-freezing temperatures. My lilacs are budding. Snapdragons left in the flower beds are thriving. Sweet peas are climbing the trellis, and sure, while it is nice to sit in the kitchen on a January night with friends with the windows open, it is still very odd to step outside in shirt sleeves and look up at Orion’s Belt and feel something disconcerting — that constellation is usually viewed while bundled to the max with a cloud of breath fogging the night air.

I’m not going to wade into the global warming issue. I believe it is real, I get perturbed by those who dispute it, and I worry about the size of my “carbon footprint.” And as more and more people say, “If this is global warming, then I’m all for it,” I can’t help but agree and not miss 48″ blizzards, $600 a month heating oil bills, and clenching my teeth as I drive to the market for a bottle of milk while slipping on black ice.

Check out Abbott’s blog. I like his stuff.

Today: 1.7, Cotuit for some R&R and catchup on some projects. Spring-like weather makes outdoors the draw today

Monday 1.8: up at 3 am to make a 6 am flight to RTP via JFK. Meetings in and around RTP

Tuesday 1.9-1.11: RTP, meetings, meetings, meetings

Thursday 1.11: return to Cotuit

Friday 1.12: working from home

Saturday-Sunday 1.13-14: Cotuit