Churbuck.com

Date: 05-31-2007
Distance: 5000 meters
Time: 21:22.00
Split: 2:08.20
Comments: blech
Tags:

Anyone who wants to catch up on unread blog feeds during a flight have been pretty much SOL. My method was to open up Firefox tabs and open the feed for a big stream such as Engadget, and another tab for Gizmodo, and so on. Then, when on the plane, I could read the feed, but only those that I had opened.

Today I noticed a new icon on my Google Reader (I’ve been a Google Reader user for more than six months after years of faithful Bloglines use). It downloaded “Google Gears” which in turn makes offline reading of all my feeds possible. This is big. This is good.

For the second time this year I am about to be quoted in the national business press based on what I’ve blogged, not what I said in an interview with a reporter. Apparently the blog quote was better than anything from the interview, so the reporter told our press guy today that she was going to use something from this blog and not the interview. I can’t blame the reporter, I’d do the same thing if the better quote had been found elsewhere.

But, here’s the challenge and the importance of the lesson learned — every blogged word is, by its act of publication (with an emphasis on the “public” in publication) — an on-the-record utterance.

Hence, if I continue to blog in the same voice and tone, I can expect to get quoted saying that things bluntly suck or rock, or that  the best use of Second Life is trying to get virtually “laid”, or that X is a moron, Y a frigtard, and Z a knuckle-dragging mouth breather.

This gives me pause, particularly since I tend to put a different filter on my spoken utterances in the presence of a reporting reporter, very conscious of the Jedi mind tricks I used to use on my sources back in the day when my career depended on my ability to get people to say interesting stuff which in turn would make my stories more interesting. Gone are the days when I would try to get a politician to repeat, on the record, a hysterically biting comment about a rival’s misdeeds. No, now I just need find their blog and pick the right line to stick in between the quote marks.
Corporate goons like me get media training all the time from ex-hacks, who tell execs how to turn questions to their advantage and turn interview to their own agenda. How long before corporate bloggers get blog-media training?

Moral of the story — if you blog, you are talking to the press. Happened to me earlier this year when a reporter wanted me to talk about my participation as beta tester of a blog monitoring service. I passed on the request so he quoted the blog and got what he needed without any heavy lifting. Yesterday, did 15 minutes with a reporter, a press person on the other line, dodged some questions I didn’t really want to answer by being serpentine, and today the reporter told our press guy that she was going to quote my blog.

This is what it is. I wrote what I wrote. I stand by my words. But I didn’t blog what I did thinking it would be published in a national magazine.

Anyway, there it is. Takes one to know one.

Free Article – WSJ.com

“The next big Internet race might turn the buying and selling of advertising space on Web sites into the online equivalent of the pork-bellies pit.”

I wrote a few weeks ago, following the Google and Microsoft acquisitions of DoubleClick and Aquantive, that the disintermediation trend of Web 1.0 — e.g. Travelocity killing travel agents — would extend to the advertising industry by cutting traditional agencies out of the planning and buying model. Indeed, now that an exchange model for bidding on open ad slots is beginning to emerge, the skill set needed may be more attuned to the CBOT pork bellies pit than the old Nielsen/Comscore driven model of ad trafficking used in the past. What certainly will occur is an end to campaigns and the rise of real-time trafficking, with ads flowing to properties that perform the best, and away from dog sites that under perform.

Date: 05-29-2007
Distance: 7010 meters
Time: 30:00.00
Split: 2:08.39
Comments: Long, low and slow. Trying to keep my heartrate down below 130 bpm to focus my efforts on fat burning. The rule of thumb in heart rate monitoring is that fat burns under 50% of one’s maximum theoretical heart rate (220-age=max hr) which in my case is a ridiculous 85 bpm. I try to go at a pace that would allow me to carry a conversation without wheezing and sub 130 bpm does that.

My daughter graduated from Brooks yesterday. I think her face says it all.

Sacticket Front – Media savvy: Poised to Prosper

Former PCWeek and Forbes colleague Jeff Young gets profiled in the Sacramento Bee today:

“Around the office, they called him “The Man From Rescue.” It was as if he were some mythic figure, a John Wayne-type astride a white steed, ready to come down from the El Dorado County hills to heal the sick, save the crops and bring peace and prosperity to the townfolk.

“Or, at the very least, to have him retool the magazine they work for.

“Management at Prosper magazine, the 2-year-old business monthly, had looked long and hard for a new editor last fall. They had done a national search in all the usual places, winnowed candidates, pored over resumes, and still hadn’t found the right leader. But the one place managing editor Michelle Margetts had failed to look was in Rescue, the hamlet tucked away in the foothills.

“Fortunately, “The Man From Rescue” — as Margetts affectionately dubbed Jeffrey S. Young — happened to be surfing Craigslist one day last fall and read a job posting that intrigued him. In the time it took to click and drag an e-mail attachment, his résumé landed in the inbox at Prosper’s midtown Sacramento office.”

5.28 – North Andover

5.29-6.3 – Cotuit

Google Trends: ct mod, May 23, 2007

Google refreshed its Trends product to be more dynamic, assuming some of the daily characteristics of Zeitgeist. The relaunch happened on May 15th.
Check it out. The dominant search thread today is on World of Warcraft — probably due to a major Burning Crusade patch that was released last night. On Saturday (in the USA) it was the Preakness. On the 15th, Jerry Falwell.
This stuff is fascinating. I sense a big opportunity in here someplace.

Date: 05-22-2007
Distance: 6000 meters
Time: 24:20.00
Split: 2:01.67
Comments: More human than a human

Downloaded the plug in for Firefox. Thought nothing about it. Saw the logo, clicked it, and ta-da, opened up a composing window. So, here goes. Can I blog with this?

Powered by ScribeFire.

ThinkPad Reserve Edition

I can’t backup the blog contents, but I did turn off comments due to a massive spam attack which may be the reason the blog is getting hosed.

I won’t go into the hairy details, but my newest imprecation to my enemies, the one that will replace the traditional Arab curse of “may the fleas of a thousand camels infest your armpits,” is this:

May your ISP of 10 years be acquired in a regional rollup.

I’ll get into the gory details later. Right now the priority, while I can see this blog, is to backup and FTP everything off of the servers. Alternative plans are being made.

Monday 5.22 – Friday 5.26 Cotuit

Saturday 5.27 – Worcester, NEIRA Championships

Sunday 5.28 – North Andover

Monday 5.29 – North Andover (daughter’s graduation)

… the grass gets rich. Microsoft takes on Aquantive — owners of the Atlas ad server and interactive agency Ave.A/Razorfish. Obvious that Billg is not conceding nothing to Google in the war for advertising. This, on the heels of 24/7 going, means the ad server industry just went away and has been consumed by the mammoths. I’ll predict MSFT next buys Yahoo — by December.

Then comes the Valleywag rumor that Google is looking at spending $100 million for Feedburner. Interesting move on their part — makes sense, and checks off the RSS advertising box in one neat swoop. Any blogger with half a brain launders their feeds through Feedburner — their stats are solid and they provide the strongest insight into RSS traffic of anyone. Add that to Google Analytics and … (I’m getting tired of being a Google Gusher)
 

.: BEHOLD THE POWER OF BLOG

“I have never experienced such a quick customer response and such integrated corporate communications. The fact that they found me, communicated with each other, and solved the problem immediately was impressive. I was so blown away, in fact, that I couldn’t help but repeat the story to everyone I saw on Monday. The way I told it, Lenovo had swept in from cyberspace to save the day. I told my professors, my classmates, my family, and even that random undergrad in the cafeteria who was behind me at the register.”

And that class, is how you build a brand online.

I was at Google’s 2nd CMO Summit today at the NYC Googleplex in Chelsea. What did I learn? There were no headlines to report, but a significant focus on video and off-line capabilities, some discussion of Google Analytics, no discussion of Doubleclick, and a variety of presentations ranging from the very academic to the very entertaining.

Brand was the macro topic — as in, yes, you can build a brand online. I remain a solid skeptic, but will concede that as Google opens their platform of offerings to include rich banners (Video enabled), assimilates DoubleClick, and pushes forward with their intent to traffic print, radio and TV through a bid system, that it is entirely conceivable that a brand campaign could be launched and thrive in the Google ecosystem.

Some discussion of Web 2-dot-whatever, user generated content, community, but none on customer satisfaction and reputation management. Google is, after all, a left-brained company who appeals to people like me for the reason that they are obsessively quantifiable. As they bring that engineer’s approach to media, especially traditional media, the stakes will change big time in the media world, with Google positioned to:

1. Cut the agencies out of buying and planning, wreaking havoc with the agency revenue model (agencies survive and thrive as creative production houses)
2. Disrupt the web metrics industry
3. Begin to leverage its clickstream knowledge and deliver very hardcore targeting.

Still a smart company that is poised to become the most formidable advertising platform of all. I wish I could quote some of the better lines, but I’m going to treat the session as an off the record affair (Google never said it was off-the-record, but I’ll make the assumption)

Revolt of the Page-Slaves? | The New York Observer

“In an e-mail to The Observer, one former staffer called Forbes.com “a page-view sweatshop.”

Should reporters be judged on traffic to their stories? Is the appropriate model one where the reporter does his or her job; audience-development worries about promotion and placement; and traffic falls on the shoulders of the editor, not the writer? Print is untrackable at a discrete level — newstand sales and circulation were the only numbers available, so for two hundred years reporters were essentially untracked. Now that they are tracked, I would imagine a very different dynamic at work in the profession.
If traffic were the gauge of quality, then we’d see a race to the salacious bottom … wait, isn’t that what celebrity journalism has already done to us?

Here’s some fun by way of David Berney at Ave.A/Razorfish

Go to Google Maps

Get Directions

New York to London

Look at step #24