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Cape Cod Times: Breaking News Updates
Police track man by cell phone ring

EAST DENNIS – The second time Eric Nolan was arrested over the weekend, he was nabbed because police repeatedly rang his cell phone as he tried to hide in the woods …

SNCR

I found the link to this Jos. Jaffe survey on Conversational Marketing via Strumpette. It’s worth looking at, even completing.

“Purpose of the survey:
To assess the awareness and knowledge of senior marketers of conversational marketing and their priorities for including it in their marketing and communications strategies and measurement.Introduction:
New communications tools are changing the relationships between organizations, consumers, and employees. They’ve enabled the creation of virtual markets and new relationships between individuals and brands. Some organizations are initiating and participating in conversations with their customers, employees, partners and industries.

This is referred to in this survey as conversational marketing.”

Digital Influence Mapping Project: Hong Kong Bloggers Pt 1

Ogilvy PR’s John Bell is doing the China thing and blogging some interesting stuff about Chinese blogs. One interesting point is that Hong Kong bloggers sometimes run a mirror inside of the Great Firewall to insure uninterrupted readership within mainland China. Bell writes about the difficulty of identifying influential blogs through western measures such as Technorati. Good stuff.

“We are holding an Asia Pacific regional meeting of our Digital Influence team in the region. This is super-exciting due to the caliber of folks in the region. And the meetings are a lot more fun than they sound. We shared our videos from BlogHer and Vloggercon, as well as our really comprehensive approach to digital influence with each other. There are tremendous insights from each region.”

I’m definitely allergic to the New York Times. Anytime I read it (and some magazines) I sneeze at least once per page. The ink? Dust from the paper? Is it some sort of over-saturation allergy from spending my early years at a couple daily newspapers? Like doctors and nurses getting allergic to latex gloves?

Apparently, according to this discussion between allergy sufferers, it could be both combined in one.

For the past few months the household’s Internet connection has been very undependable, dropping for hours at time and necessitating a trip upstairs to the Westell DSL modem, which gets unplugged, recycled, and then spazzes for the rest of the day, gaining and losing its connection every few minutes.

The hysterics this engenders is amazing. The gamers upstairs can’t play Xbox Live and shoot virtual foes in Halo or Call of Duty. My wife can’t check her email from her downstairs desk, and me, I just use my EVDO connection to bypass the whole mess and ignore the howls for a better internet connection.

Being the household’s IT manager is the fact of my weekends and sorting out a bad Internet connection is always a predictable hell of Control Panel, Network Settings, 192.168.1.1 trips to the Westell’s admin console, and eventually, a long phone call with Verizon support.

If any other utility was as freaky — say if the electricity browned out a few hours every evening, or the satellite TV went snowy — there would be hell to pay, and last night, the household finally mutinied on me and demanded a “Better Internet.”

So I got on the phone with Verizon and spent 90 minutes as they ran diagnostics and I read back screens and did what they told me too. I stated, right from the beginning, that I suspected the modem was due to be replaced or upgraded, but of course they had to walk me through the scripts: “Are you sure it is plugged in? Are you using the Verizon supplied cable? Are there any other devices connection to the wall jack? Is there a 2.4 ghz wireless phone in the house. Are you running Windows XP? Is there a firewall active?”

The upshot was the modem is grabbing “too high of an internet address” — something in the 150 range — and I indeed need to buy a new modem.

All in all, it wasn’t a bad phone experience — they were able to run remote diagnostics on my line and device and spare me the usual hell of trying to play human modem between what was on my screen and their ears, and I never had to crawl under the desk, phone wedged between shoulder and ear, feeling blindly for ports and reset buttons.

Now, if only FIOS would come to town …. Or, if I could get Lenovo to foot the tab for a T1 to the house. Connectivity on Cape Cod is getting better. Ten years ago I had the first ISDN line installed on the Cape and drove the AT&T technicians insane.  That went away when Comcast offered cable modem connectivity, and then Comcast went away when the news that the new switch up the street by the Ropes Field had brought DSL within installation distance.

I want more. I want more speed, more stability, and a happy household of fully wired spouse and offspring so I can regain my precious downtime and not worry about viruses, low ink cartridges, and printers that won’t network.

2.12 – Cotuit

2.13-15 – RTP

2.16-19 – Cotuit

Switzerland bans some GPS devices for speed camera warnings – Engadget

Loyal reader Brian M. sends along this Engadget tidbit for the “Weird” “Swiss” tag. Nothing that happens in that bizarre country will ever surprise me. Still, I miss the place.

“On January 10th a law went into effect banning the use of a navigation device to warn of speed surveillance locations, and police now have the authority to stop drivers using their GPS units for such a purpose, confiscate and destroy the device and fine the driver — we hate to see what they do to people who read books and feel emotion. As far as we can tell, it’s not actually illegal to own such a device, just illegal to use it for such a nefarious purpose, but at the same time Swiss government has issued a list of “illegal” navigation systems for retailers to remove from their shelves, including devices from TomTom, Garmin, Mio, Navman, Medion, Route66, Packard Bell, Sony and ViaMichelin.”

Attention Gone Amuck? Time for a Wakeup Call!

Pete Blackshaw at Buzzmetrics in ClickZ — on the aftermath of the Boston Lite Brite Incident and the continuing destruction of the old advertising model. Taken in the context of Jaffe’s Life After the 30-Second Spot, I’d say the public is mad as hell and isn’t going to take it anymore. On the other hand, the new Chevy “take off all your clothes” ad and the Dorito winner are two examples of winning “consumer” submitted ads that are actually worth watching. I don’t. I Tivo and skip. I am on the Do Not Call list and I toss all junk mail. I also can’t remember a banner ad worth clicking on.

So what to spend our money on?

“We need more parameters in advertising. We need clarity regarding what’s reasonable and what’s not. We need more disclosure. We need to keep the chatterbacking in check.

Most important, we need to trust our own guts as consumers. Admit it, you hate advertising intrusion. It drives you crazy. We rarely answer the phone at home, and we relish the thrill of zapping ads.

Once we acknowledge that reality, we’ll find the right ad model that works for consumers and business alike. In the meantime, we must explain ourselves to an increasingly critical court of public opinion.”

About 9 o’clock last night the world went dark. Click. Total darkness except for the blue, tubercular glow of my notebook. The house went silent. No furnace, no television, no radio, no refrigerator — all the little motors and fans that fill a house with background noise went dead. A blackout — most likely some unfortunate soul drove into a utility pole — the kind that can last an hour or eight hours.
Outside, complete darkness. Street lights, neighborhood windows — all black.

So I threw some more logs in the woodstove, found my flashlight, lit a few candles and went outside to see how far down Main Street the darkness extended. The center of the village was lit up, so the power was out on the northern half of town.

Back inside, by the light of the candles and wood stove I mused about life in the same house 150 years ago, before electricity, when one room in the house was designated the “warming room” where people would dress and seek refuge from the winter. The rest of the place was basically unheated, so I imagine people slept in frigid rooms under a lot of blankets, used the chamber pots that are still in some of the rooms to spare themselves a trip to outhouse, and had a pretty miserable existence.

In the silence of the living room, huddled around the fire and wondering how long it would be before power was restored, I thought of opening a book and reading by candlelight, but the candles seemed too dim to make a difference.
So we sat, around the fire, in the silence, waiting for the lights to come back on. I began to think about Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, which I finished two weeks ago and which still has a sad affect on me, with its post-apocalypse view of a dead world, a world without lights, a horrible tale of survival, and wondered what if the lights never came back?

Across the street, in the other half of the former Chatfield Compound, Cousin Pete had fired up his Honda Generator and was thumbing his nose at the darkness, filling the silence with internal combustion, and I wondered, what happens when the gas is gone? What do you do when it is 15 degrees and February and the gas runs out? Where will the warm room be?

Then, click, the house lit up again, filled with the sound of boilers and fans, radios and televisions, and we all said “Yay” and that was that.

Thanks to Marta D.

NY Times publisher: Our goal is to manage the transition from print to internet – Haaretz – Israel News

I haven’t seen this interesting interview with NYT Publisher Arthur Sulzberger reported anywhere but this Israeli publication. Notable in that it is a very strong statement that the paper model is very, very shaky:

“Given the constant erosion of the printed press, do you see the New York Times still being printed in five years?

“I really don’t know whether we’ll be printing the Times in five years, and you know what? I don’t care either,” he says.

Sulzberger is focusing on how to best manage the transition from print to Internet.

“The Internet is a wonderful place to be, and we’re leading there,” he points out.

The Times, in fact, has doubled its online readership to 1.5 million a day to go along with its 1.1 million subscribers for the print edition.”

When Steve Jobs took out the equivalent of a full page ad in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal earlier this week to make his statement that Apple would drop DRM from iTunes when the Big Four in the music industry gave up the practice, news was made, but the more significant impact was how Jobs made the statement.

Heather Green at Businessweek’s blogs has an excellent post on the phenomenon of corporations taking their message direct on their own sites to the public and their customer base, eschewing the old practice of briefing select reporters and hoping the message made it through the reporters’ filters to the world as originally intended.

Green points to Dave Winer as the source of this insight, who wrote in a post entitled “Apple is now a media company”:

“Now the morning after it hits me how new this is, because Apple usually communicates through bigpub reporters like John Markoff at the NY Times and Steven Levy at Newsweek. This time he went direct, Markoff’s article appeared this morning, more than 12 hours after the essay was published, and makes clear how much better this system is than the old one.”

This all circles back to Sam Whitmore’s pronouncement to me a year ago when I declared I was leaving media for corporate life that everyone is media now and the traditional media’s role as a communicator for corporations is going away.

In the end, I appreciated the Fake Steve Jobs’ take on the “real” statement before Apple’s PR people edited it:

“It’s like the kids in college who lobby for making hemp legal and they say it’s because hemp makes such great clothing and strong rope. Riiiight. Just a coincidence that it’s always the stoners who are lobbying for this. No, come on. Let’s be honest. What this really is all about is that certain noisy scumbags are trying to decriminalize stealing. They want to make it legal to steal, as long as what’s being stolen is music. What comes next? Movies, probably. Then books. Then software. Who knows where it ends.”

globeandmail.com: Astronaut accused of flighty behaviour

“Ms. Nowak raced from Houston to Orlando wearing diapers in the car so she wouldn’t have to stop to go to the bathroom, authorities said. Astronauts wear diapers during launch and re-entry.”

Joseph Jaffe came onto my radar in December when he corrected me for terming his new venture crayon as a development firm in my now infamous screed asking why marketers should give a fig about SecondLife. crayon is not a dev firm, but a “new marketing company.”

Jaffe went back on my screen this morning as I was reading Lorne Hanley’s fascinating piece in this morning’s Sunday Times Magazine about Bud.tv. Jaffe was quoted there in the context of his authority earned by penning Life After the 30-Second Spot.

Jaffe, who co-founded crayon (emphasis on the lower-case “c”, ask me sometime about what happened when I tried to start a sentence in a Forbes story with the word “cisco”), is a former Madison Ave. exec (Ogilvy, TBWA/Chiat (what is the deal with the four-letter ad agency acronym fest?)) is the kind of change agent I’d love to drag into a interactive marketing meeting to knock some heads together.

The book came to me via a colleague, Gary Milner, who bought multiple copies to press into the hands of the marketing team. Last week I read it during the flights to and from RTP.

The first thing I did was look at the frontispiece to see what the publication date was. 2005. The problem with books about new media, or any trend pushed by technology is that books are inherently slow media and new media is inherently fast. Jaffe actually writes what I imagine in 2004 or early 2005 was a very strong and prescient polemic against business-as-usual marketing, mass media tactics, and a call to arms and revolution to Internet/Interactive marketing. A lot of what he predicts has come true, but I suspect for a more current state of the art perspective, you need to spend time on his blog, lifeafter30.com

CMOs should read it, people like me who own the function should read it, but it’s not an operations manual by a long shot. It’s stuffed with great stats and quantitative data that should help some interactive marketing change-agent inside of a “Brown-Suit” company to make their point via some strong Powerpoint slides (I saw one of Jaffe’s points or frameworks appear in a presentation I saw just last week).

So, good book, not a cookbook like an O’Reilly Press manual with a lemur on the cover, but a good cribsheet for making the big plea to the CMO to get with the program and ditch all the old tactics that used to work, but don’t any more.

2.5-2.6 NYC

2.7 Cotuit

2.8 Cotuit/Boston

2.9-2.11 Cotuit

All of this is conditional of my being able to walk upright after twanging my back yet again this morning while pushing a wheelbarrow full of firewood across the frozen yard. I am now out of it on cyclobenzaprine (muscle relaxant) and doing stretches on the floor inbetween calls to chiropractors looking for a Sunday “unlocking” before jumping on train tomorrow morn.

I have been advising a blogger on her negotiations with three publishers for the sponsorship of her blog which has, in a relatively short period of time, accrued about 250,000 page views a month. This blog has a lot of buzz and attention paid to it, and she finds herself in the enviable position of considering multiple offers.
She has not filtered her feeds through Feedburner yet, so she has no idea what her subscription stream looks like. All she has is a SiteMeter bug which gives her a rolling 30-day view of the traffic. Based on that traffic, the publishers are coming back with offers more suited to the existing page-view/CPM model, looking for fixed placement of their message, a subscribe-link for their print products, and promotions for their own RSS products.

She has tried AdSense and a CafePress store, but essentially isn’t making a dime from her efforts. The content of this blog is unique, and is not comparable to any other source. It also has a significant barrier to entry for a competitor to move in.

My theory on what places downward pressure on CPMs is the concept of “fungible” — a twenty-five cent word for anything that is easily replaced by something else. In media terms this could apply to stock quotes, wire news, anything that is commodity content which the consumer would be hard pressed to identify its origin based on its tone and substance. In other words, if I covered up the source of a story on Reuter’s website about Apple’s earnings and showed it to a reader next to a similarly disquised story from the Wall Street Journal on Apple’s earnings, would the reader be able to identify the source?

Assuming the answer to the rhetorical answer is “no,” then one can see how a CPM on such a site will always trend lower as more venues begin to produce and publish the content. In the end, the most unique content that a publisher can claim is probably the opinion side — hence the movement of the columnists behind a cost wall at the New York Times with the TimeSelect program.
The question is whether a page view of a blog should be treated on an apple-to-apples basis with a page view of a magazine’s website. One offer values my friend’s traffic at an $8 CPM — which translates to $2000 a month. Chump change in my opinion.

I believe she can, and should, do two things to get maximum value for her efforts. First, avoid any ad network like Federated Media like the plague. Federated acts as a rep for traffic, selling it and managing the insertion of ads based on a demographic algorithm, and then reporting the results on the back end to the advertiser. They take a significant chunk of the revenue in the process. Anyone who has participated in an online affiliate program — Amazon’s for instance — knows what thin beer such programs can be. Second, she may want to consider an auction system where she lets the potential sponsors bid for the placement. How she can accomplish this, well, it’s beyond me.
So, what’s the recommendation? I felt in 1995, and I still feel today, that some online content will have such high value, and be so unique, that their creators will be able to eschew the tyranny of metrics and pageview economics and offer their stuff on a flat sponsorship basis sold purely on the basis of time, selling a patronage model that essentially lets the sponsor bask in the glory of the content and perhaps receive some business on the side. This is the PBS Nova model. Is the General Motors sponsorship of a PBS show an ad or a statement of corporate social responsibility or both? Expecting a low-traffic, high value content site to incorporate the kind of metrics and accountability and ad ops that a traffic behemoth has is ridiculous.
The hard part for my blogger friend who is on the verge of making some serious money, is how to negotiate these deals. She has published several books and has a longstanding relationship with a great book agent … who hasn’t the faintest idea how to represent her online efforts. There must be some agents out there who are emerging as strong negotiators on the behalf of online artists and talent, the question I pose is who are they and what are their terms?

Am I being naive in believing some web content stars can and should expect a sponsorship model, and that their efforts and pageviews are vastly different than a standard site’s?

I’ve had my present notebook since the spring and it’s already showing signs of progressive software rot, that phenomenon which hits all PCs as they get gunked up with user inflicted garbage. I can’t help myself — I like experimenting with FireFox extensions and tweaking system settings — and the result over time is a weird laptop that exhibits little software zits and blackheads.
Here’s the annoyances which drive me insane:

1. Suspend. I can press and put the laptop to “sleep”, saving the state the machine is in — apps and data loaded — and keep the airplane stewards off my back. This works sometimes and other times (usually when the stewardess is really breathing down my neck), it doesn’t, forcing me to hit the poor machine with the “Finger of Doom” escape where I just lean on the power button and croak the thing entirely. Sure, I can hit the wireless switch under the front bottom edge, but the stewardess sees screen light and assumes I am going to mess up the plane’s internal guidance system and turn it into a ground auger.
2. Verizon EVDO Dialer: starting a WAN session with the built-in EVDO is like starting a 1973 Dodge Dart in New England in February. An art, not a science. Three, four attempts, shelling out to the Windows Task Manager to shut down the application, no-I-don’t-want-to-send-a-frigging-error-report to Microsoft, re-start, cross fingers, stare at start-up screen, hope the thing will turn over and catch, almost … blech. This always happens if you have like five minutes between flights to come out of suspend, turn on the wireless, invoke the VPN, fire up Notes, and replicate inboxes so the gazillion emails you just wrote on the first leg of the flight can go off into the ether. The more you need it, the less it cooperates. Still — best connectivity service in the world and my way of sticking it to the 802.1 bandits in airports and coffee shots.
3. Extended Display Settings: I have three ways to handle the extension of the notebooks screen onto an external LCD. I can right click on the desktop and get into Windows “properties” and attempt to do it there. Not fun. Or I can go into the system tray and find the Intel graphics adapter control (which is sometimes there and sometimes isn’t) or I can use the very good ThinkVantage Technology method via the Blue Button of a command and pull up the “Presentation Director.” I have profiles set for my desk in Raleigh and my desk in Cotuit, but for reason, no matter how many times I tell it the laptop is to the left of the monitor, the profile assumes it’s vicey-versa and grrrr, I have to go deal with it manually.
4. That’s it for now. I could give all sorts of applications and utilities grief for their conflicts and glitches, but who cares, right?

Let’s face it. These are the most complex devices in our lives, are in front of us more than any other object, and for the most part get the job done. But who has time to tweak and tune them to run perfectly?

And don’t tell me to get a fricking Mac. I hate them and they are every bit as weird as a Wintel box.

» The Great Vista/Mac Showdown: Unboxing the ThinkPad X60 and MacBook Pro | Rational rants | ZDNet.com

Mitch Ratcliffe at ZD-Net unboxes a new Mac and a new ThinkPad. Guess which ones comes in the prettier box?

“Lenovo’s ThinkPad comes in a brown corrugated cardboard box. If you purchase the multimedia base station for the ThinkPad, you get two brown boxes in a larger box that is an armful to carry. The irony here is that the ThinkPad is lighter than the MacBook, but you get several pounds of extraneous packaging with it that makes the ThinkPad appear clunkier when it’s not.”

Okay, I’ll concede that our packaging is not something one oohs and ahhs over. Keep in mind we ship pallets of these into Fortune 500 companies where the IT guys aren’t going to fondle the documentation.

I can’t wait to see how we fare as Mitch gets deeper into the comparison. I went to an Apple store on Sunday to check things out and started typing.  Blech. I’ll take the ThinkPad’s keyboard any day.

But the boxes? No, I throw them out.

Interference Inc. is a New York guerilla marketing firm. They are very good at what they do. They deliver buzz to their clients.

Given that they basically own the business sections and front pages of today’s newspapers (see the NYT) from the follow-ups to Wednesday’s “terrorist” shutdowns of Boston because a couple of guys put 30 little battery powered light boxes around the city, under bridges, on overpasses, to promote a Turner late night cartoon about fast food products …..

…One can declare that this is one of the most successful guerrilla campaigns in history.

The fact that one of the guys arrested for putting up the light boxes without permission looks like Rob Zombie, and held a mock press conference where he said the issue was “haircuts from the 1970s” makes this all the weirder. I can imagine Boston talk radio now, with the salt of the earth calling for capital punishment or at least hard labor for the pair of twenty-somethings who brought a city to its knees for one expensive afternoon.

Turner is in bunker mode, pointing the press at Interference. Interference’s website is hosed from the traffic. I would image viewership for Aqua Teen Hunger Force is also through the roof. Turner may be making restitution to the city, which actually blew up one of the offending light boxes to neutralize it, but Turner, the performance artists who did the deed for $300, Intereference are, in the end coming out ahead if one subscribes to the “any publicity is good publicity” school.