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A fishing tradition keelhauled in Chatham – The Boston Globe

Dinghy Wars erupt in Chatham. We have a problem here in Cotuit – but it’s not dinghies per se — we’ve got knuckleheads parking full boats in the grass.

“Locals say it is about Chatham’s soul being eroded by newcomers with thick wallets, newcomers whom they refer to as “wash-ashores.”"The problem that I have with it is, these people come down here and say, ‘Oh, look. Isn’t it cute? Isn’t it wonderful? Look at that cute little fisherman out there working hard,’ ” said Sean Summers, a Chatham native and local selectman. “Then they buy in and say: ‘We’re going to do things my way now.’ “

Comes down to one flaw in the Commonwealth’s laws. Property owners own their beach all way way down to the water. Most states they own to the high tide mark. This makes for a massive pain in the neck and constant battle over rights. I predict — in my lifetime — a repeal of the low water ownership and a rollback to the highwater mark. Until then, watch the washashores break out the bolt cutters and start putting the dinghies on their beach some place else.

Me? I chain mine to a chainlink fence on a public beach and get there in the middle of March to stake out my spot. Sooner or later I guess I’ll have to get a permit for that too.

Jimmy G — he of PC Week alumnism — all around droll rock and roll man — is blogging, and posts this indisputable best mis-heard rock lyric video of all time.

And Jimmy mis-remembers the past — I did not “erase” his Tetris score in 1987 at PC Week, I modified it.

Ah yes, the joys of a happy customer, a digital camera, and a blog. (Thanks to Jeremiah O. for the pointer.)

I just took Jeremiah Owyang to task for publishing thumbsucking advice on corporate blogging — “Ask for feedback!” “Admit it when you are wrong!” — and challenged the growing legions of social media pundits to kick it up a notch with some news I could use. (and my apologies to Jeremiah for ambushing him like the asshat I am)
So, henceforth, with no book in the works on the next evolution in the Super Transparent Corporate Social Conversational Marketing Revolution, I can declare I have no commercial ax to grind and simply want to charitably share the wealth from someone who walks the walk of corporate blogging day in and day out.

If the books are publishing “101″ level advice, let this be the first in a “201″ series – the next level in the curriculum, the class you take your sophomore year. Jeremiah posted this post on his site – Web Strategy by Jeremiah. And being the thrifty Yankee I am, I figured I’d recycle the words here as well. Please comment over there and not here. (And no comments about my ongoing life a typographical error. I am petitioning the court to change my name is DahChuck Charbuck)

In partly pedantic jest, I suggested to Jeremiah that the type of topic I’d like to discuss is: contravening corporate policy by privately resolving a blogged customer support issue and having the blogger publically state the solution and thereby set a precedent for all future complaints

Let’s look at the scenario in less pedantic terms. The risk of a no-questions-asked (NQA) blogger appeasement policy.

Let’s say you are the corporate blogger at Newco and among your responsibilities is monitoring the blogosphere for expressions of customer joy and unhappiness. You hire a service, or you do it yourself, but eventually you are going to find a person who writes something like this:

“I just bought a new widget from Newco and it has three dead dingbats. I am a graphic designer and I must have a flawless product to do my job. I called Newco and they said their policy is only to replace widgets with five contiguous dead dingbats. This is bullshit. I am going to write a letter to the Better Business Bureau and Jeff Jarvis.”

You, the corporate blog person, check on the corporate website, and yep, there is the dead dingbat policy plain as day. This policy is essentially the same one that everyone else in the industry follows. Do you:

• Acknowledge the unhappy dingbat person with a comment? (Thank you for writing about Newco. I’m sorry you aren’t happy. Have a nice day.)
• Debate the blogger and cite the fact that Newco is following the rest of the industry with its dead dingbat policy (Sorry; suck it up)?
• Invite the blogger to talk about it privately? (Hey, give me a call or drop me a line.)
• Ignore the blogger?
• Do you let customer service know that you have found a complaint about the dead dingbat policy in the expectation they will communicate with the blogger? Do you let PR know?
• Do you arrange to have a widget with a pristine display over-nighted to the blogger in the hope it will shut him up?
• Do you propose a new strategy to the business unit where users can pay more for a zero-defect widget?

Let’s say the blogger gets really upset and continues to post about the dead dingbats. Let’s say the blogger takes the case to The Consumerist or the Ripoff Report and the forums, and tells people to join him in a campaign against your company’s dumb policy. The comments on the post begin to fill with other people who hate dead dingbats. The noise level is rising. Someone in PR notices it in a Google news alert. You get an email asking if you know about this. The blogger posts your CEO’s home phone number. And calls it.

As you look for a way to make the blogger happy, you discuss the policy internally and learn that dead dingbats are a fact of life, and that due to the vagaries of manufacturing there is no such thing as a flawless, dingbat-free widget, and to identify one means hours and hours of combing through thousand of widgets to find a clean one. The bottom line is this: making flawless widgets would destroy the bottom line which is why no one in the industry guarantees it.

But the blogger doesn’t care about that. The blogger is mad and nothing is going to make him happy other than a pristine system. So you find one. You arrange to have it hand delivered by your regional manager. With a Tickler Bouquet and a box of chocolates.

And you ask the blogger to please keep the new machine to himself, this is a one-time special exception, so please don’t blog about it. Okay?

Ha. The blogger declares victory, tells the world that the campaign has paid off, that Newco has caved, and indeed you just insured that every person who Googles: “Newco Dead Dingbat Policy” is going to hear the story of how you made an exception.

Except now that exception is now the rule, in public, for everyone to see.

So, fellow corporate bloggers and customer service professionals. This is a question of pure situation ethics. When do you make an extraordinary gesture of customer satisfaction and when do you stick to your guns?

• Have you ever stuck to your guns and regretted it (if only we had given the customer their money back ….)?
• Have you ever made a concession and kept it secret?
• Have you ever made a concession and changed your organization’s policy in the process?
• Is No Questions Asked customer service (the kind that LL Bean and Craftsmen Tools and Nordstrom practice) a figment of some marketing consultant’s imagination?
• When do you tell a blogger to pound sand?

Please comment over at Jeremiah’s blog.

Author, conservative commentator William F. Buckley Jr. dies at 82 – Local News Updates – The Boston Globe

A moment of silence for the king of sesquipedalians everywhere. Bill Buckley has passed away, ending a marvelous career as pundit and author.

I learned celestrial navigation from Bill’s account of sailing, Airborne, in 1980, the year I decided to deliver a 60-foot plywood catamaran from Cape Cod to Florida. I sank the catamaran in Georgia, and horrified the crew when I plotted our first position somewhere west of Troy, New York when in fact we were 50 miles southeast of Manhattan. Guess Bill’s claim he could teach a caveman to use a sextant in two pages didn’t quite work in my case.
I interviewed Bill in 1988 when I was a cub reporter at Forbes. I forget the topic of the story, but I think it was about his early use of word processing technology. One thing Bill B. was — he was a PC geek from the very beginning. He also used the word “retromingent” in my interview with him, which remains one of the best words in the English language.
I worked with his son Chris at Forbes, putting Forbes FYI online in the mid-90s. Chris turned me onto pink argyle socks and is one of the best humorists writing today (Thank You For Smoking).

My sympathies to the Buckley family, conservatives, Yalies, and word freaks everywhere.
William F. Buckley Jr., who as author, journalist, and polysyllabic television personality did more to popularize conservatism in post-New Deal America than anyone other than Barry Goldwater or Ronald Reagan, died early today at his home in Stamford, Conn. He was 82 and had been ill with emphysema, said his assistant, Linda Bridges.

Jeremiah Owyang is a smart guy at a smart company (Forrester), and he posts a lot about social media and marketing and fun stuff like that. He’s not in the trenches, but I guess he talks to people in the trenches, and he just posted three of the most fundamentally annoying provocations that I’ve read in a long time … I need to either shut up and un-sub from his RSS, or take the time to act all annoyed about it. The fact that he is riffing off of Shel Israel is proof of further distance from the trenches and reality of social media management. Shel is a smart guy and he wrote the book, but guys, let’s step up the analysis and look at the hard questions, not the thumbsuckers.
He provoked me by saying the following three actions are “impossible conversations for corporations.”

#1: Asking for Feedback
#2: Saying positive things about your competitors
#3: Admitting you were wrong

Let’s start with the first. Feedback. Any company that posts a phone number, heck, even a street address is asking for feedback. What Jeremiah says is “how many `corporate’ blogs ask for raw, unfiltered product feedback?”

Ask? C’mon. Opening a corporate blog is, unto itself, a request for feedback. Some Pollyanna statement: “We’d love to know what you think …” isn’t what is needed. What is needed is a commitment to act and respond to feedback. Asking is easy. Acknowledging is hard.

Second, say positive things about the competition. I am very proud that Matt Kohut, one of Lenovo’s bloggers, did just that a year ago coming out of CES. He praised Toshiba for their tablet hinge. There were some people inside the company who couldn’t believe that. Then the press noticed and praised Matt: “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.

Third. Admitting you were wrong. I get the provocation school of blogging, and the Kawasakian list model. Make a list, provoke some dummy like me to react, and voila, instant audience. Anyway, I fell for it. It so easy to make this all a black and white polarized view of the world and throw corporate blogmeisters to the wolves for being insincere, comments-disabled, PR flaks who whitewash the company and do the see-no-evil thing. I know a couple companies that went that route. But when was the last time you read a dumbass corporate blog that did the ostrich move? Cmon. And don’t say, “well Dave, you and Dell and HP and the rest of the tech bloggers are ahead of the curve.” I don’t believe it. This corporate blogging stuff isn’t a two headed chicken in the freak tent anymore. This is mainstream baby. Anyone writing posts about “impossible” corporate conversations has to step it up – talk about the serious stuff, like – contravening corporate policy by privately resolving a blogged customer support issue and having the blogger publically state the solution and thereby set a precedent for all future complaints. Let’s get into that one and you’ll earn my respect.

Two-year pier ban proposed – News – The Barnstable Patriot – Cape Cod & Islands
David Still at the Barnstable Patriot reports the Barnstable Association of Recreational Shellfishermen and Cotuit town councilor Rick Barry are trying again on the pier ban that was defeated by a minority vote of the town council in January.

“A more limited pier and dock ban with a two-year sunset provision will be considered as a compromise to a more extensive proposal that failed to gain the support of the town council last month.

Under the latest proposal, a two-year ban on new docks would cover portions of the three bays area only. The idea is to would allow time to develop a harbor management plan for the area.”

Life’s little annoyances — two hours invested in understanding why my FlipCam isn’t recognized by my X61′s USB ports. Have tried uninstalling the driver in device manager, get recognition –audible — that the thing is connected. The screen on the camera says it is connected, but it doesn’t show up in the file manager and doesn’t autoplay to display the driver installation.

Monday-Sunday: 2.25-3.3: Cotuit (potential for fast NYC trip)

The classic Arab imprecation: May the fleas of a thousand camels infest your armpits comes to mind today as I migrate my corporate email from one system to another and regard this notice from corporate IT — “You will have to maintain two inboxes until further notice” — with the kind of migraine that one can’t knock down with mere Advil.

Anyway — if you need me, you know how to find me. My first name at my last name dot com always works. The new corporate address is davidchurbuck AT lenovo dot com.
And given my mood, and pounding headache, I thought it appropriate to acknowledge this band, Mission of Burma, who dominated the raucous Boston music scene in the early 80s (Spinal Tap: “So the Boston gig got cancelled, who cares? Not much of a college town….“) but faded away when their lead guitarist, Roger Miller, developed hearing problems because they were that loud.

Check out this video and you’ll see Miller wearing ear-muffs to try to save his ears. It was a shame — this band was beloved by critics and held up as being as influential in their own way as Sonic Youth and the Pixies (another Boston classic indie band). Moby covered this tune and gave it wide notice, but here’s the original.

Personal Technology – WSJ.com
“…the thin and rugged X300 is a great choice. It’s a notable engineering accomplishment.”

Walt Mossberg delivers his verdict in today’s WSJ. The video is here.

“The Connection Has Been Reset”
I get asked from time to time what the deal is with the “Great Firewall of China.” I’ve personally observed some blockages — primarily blog networks (blogger, wordpress.com) and intermittent outages of things like Flickr and YouTube. When I’ve beefed the China hands tell me it is no big deal, everyone knows how to get around it. Using proxies I imagine. James Fallows, the preeminent American journalism working out of China, has a good piece in the current Atlantic Monthly about Internet censorship. I am not surprised to see him report — through anonymous sources — that visitors will experience no issues during the Summer Games.

“In reality, what the Olympic-era visitors will be discovering is not the absence of China’s electronic control but its new refinement—and a special Potemkin-style unfettered access that will be set up just for them, and just for the length of their stay. According to engineers I have spoken with at two tech organizations in China, the government bodies in charge of censoring the Internet have told them to get ready to unblock access from a list of specific Internet Protocol (IP) addresses—certain Internet cafés, access jacks in hotel rooms and conference centers where foreigners are expected to work or stay during the Olympic Games. (I am not giving names or identifying details of any Chinese citizens with whom I have discussed this topic, because they risk financial or criminal punishment for criticizing the system or even disclosing how it works. Also, I have not gone to Chinese government agencies for their side of the story, because the very existence of Internet controls is almost never discussed in public here, apart from vague statements about the importance of keeping online information “wholesome.”)”

From Your Councilor Precinct 7 Richard Barry – Cotuit – The Barnstable Patriot – Cape Cod & Islands

I am the sworn enemy of all docks and piers built by private waterfront landowners over public waters. The law is clear. Waterfront property rights end at the low water mark and a pier over anything beyond that is a private taking of public property. Piers obscure access, impede navigation, permanently shade the bottom, and involve the pounding of pressure-treated (chemically treated) pilings into the bottom of the harbor.

Piers suck, and a recent effort to zone the coastal waters as shellfish habitat just failed to pass thanks to five boneheaded town councilors, some of whom represent districts in the town of Barnstable that don’t have any waterfront property.

The real villian is the “Ostervillian” – Osterville’s town councilor James Crocker, who’s district shares the three-bays system with Cotuit. Cotuit’s town councilor, Richard Barry, wrote in the Barnstable Patriot:

“On January 17, the Town Council conducted a public hearing on whether or not to adopt a zoning ordinance that would preserve 114 acres of our coast for the benefit of the recreational and commercial shellfisherpersons.These defined areas represents 2.61 percent of our total shoreline and have been designated by the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries as significant shellfish habitat. This allows the town to propagate shellfish for the 2,206 families that hold a family shellfish permit and the 48 people that make a living from their commercial license.

The number of properties affected by this ordinance is 53. The Town’s proposed comprehensive plan on natural resources calls for protection of significant shellfish habitat and zoning of our waters. That is exactly what this ordinance does. The planning board voted unanimously in favor of the ordinance. The public weighed in and approximately 20 people spoke in favor of the ordinance and only one in opposition citing diminution in value of the effected properties from not being allowed to construct a dock or pier.

The town assessor had previously refuted this argument. The law is clear. Property owners own to the mean low water mark and the waters of the Commonwealth are held for the benefit of the general public. After the initial vote five councilors voted against the adoption of this ordinance. Because a zoning ordinance needs a 2/3 majority the ordinance did not pass.”

Councilors Tobey, Munafo, Chirigiotis, Tinsely and Crocker: you all blew it. Councilor Barry: keep up the good work.

2.17.18: Cotuit

2.18: Cotuit-RTP

2.19: RTP

2.20: RTP-Cotuit

2.21-2.23: Cotuit

New York perhaps the following week

As I packed for this week’s journey to New York (with a 24-hour swing into North Carolina), I went browsing through the bookshelves for something to feed my head and found a book I had bought over the Christmas holidays but forgot about. Nothing is better than the discovery of a new book among old ones, so into the knapsack it went, lasting me a scant three days before it was consumed and returned to the shelves.

The Big Oyster, by Mark Kurlansky, author of the wonderful food histories Cod and Salt, is an account of the role the oyster played in the development and culture of New York City. This being the world’s preeminent clamming blog (as measured In my own mind and by Clamorati, the clam blog search engine), I thought it proper to discuss Kurlansky’s contribution to the oeuvre of bivalve literature and how it may indeed inspire me to initiate the 2008 shellfishing season this weekend on Cotuit Bay.

Kurlansky is a good researcher, exhaustive in fact, and the danger of being an exhaustive researcher is that one stand the risk of turning into an insufferable pedant, but Kurlansky avoids tedium by maintaining a steady barrage of facts and miscellanies ranging from the science of aquaculture to the biology of the oyster drill, to historical nuggets such as from the Civil War Draft Riots to Diamond Jim Brady’s fabled gluttony (the man could suck down 72 oysters before tucking into a meal, I draw the line at 12).

Wednesday night, while dining with the good folks from Google and Neo, I saw oysters on the menu and ordered up a dozen, raising some eyebrows around the table as it seems more rare these days to kick off a meal with a plate of raw clams than a sad green salad. The waiter was excited by the order and seemed happy to describe the choices from the raw bar. A fellow stalker of the living rock? He offered a choice of the American mainstay, the Long Island Blue Point, a Maine belon (French style but not as tasty) or Pacific Northwest Olympias. We settled on a half-and-half order of the Blue Points and the belons, passed on the littlenecks (raw quahogs). I offered them on my tablemates and delivered my own pedantic discourse on the pleasures of the oyster, imparting to their great dismay such pearls as:

1. There is only one species of American oyster, Crassostrea virginica, but great variations in their taste depending on where they are raised (few wild oysters are sold and indeed, oysters are one of the few things that when cultivated by man are actually improved over their wild counterparts).
2. Southerners prefer larger, blander oysters than northerners. Cold water oysters grow more slowly than warm water oysters because of a combination of available nutrients and the fact that oysters stop growing when water temperature drop below a certain level. Northerners think Southern oysters taste mushy. Southeners think northern oysters taste harsh.
3. [At this point the gentleman sitting to my left and the lady to my right are displaying signs of narcolepsy.]
4. The old admonition not eat oysters in months with an “R” in them is an ancient warning more associated with the fact that warm months without “r’s” (July, August, etc.) are when oysters have sex and when oysters have sex their meat becomes less tasty than when they are celibate. Not because they will make you sick, though a bad oyster will make you sicker than the Black Death.
5. Oysters are prodigious filter feeders and can turn an aquarium full of green nasty water clean in a matter of hours.

And on and on. Just read The Big Oyster for more fun oyster facts, but also for a very good history of New York City from the days of Verrazano to modern times when General Electric dumped a few hundred thousand pounds of PCBs into the Hudson and signed the death warrant for a lot of marine life in New York City (to be fair GE was only one of a gazillion sources of pollution).

Recreational oystering – as part of this blog’s mandate to cover clamming strategy – is not easily performed in the waters of Cotuit, despite the bay’s former reputation for producing some of the most desired oysters in the world. Those oysters are farmed by the Cotuit Oyster Company, which plants seed from elsewhere and raises it to market size – permitting the oysters to take on the unique flavor brought about by Cotuit’s sweet semi-brackish, spring fed water (don’t get me going). Wild oysters, the ones that probably littered the bottom and shores of the harbor 200 years ago and led to the construction of big shell piles (middens) by the Wampanoags, aren’t so abundant anymore, and Cousin Pete and I manage to eke a bushel out of the harbor before the other clamheads get to them. It’s hard work for a few clams, not nearly as easy to find as quahogs and steamers.

In closing: my tablemate at dinner asked me if I was still a big fisherman. “Not so much anymore,” I replied. She asked why I fished, was it for food? The sport? Communing with nature? I thought for a second, not quite sure, and realized the answer was too weird to say out loud and that is this: I think people are happiest standing in knee-deep water with a fishing rod or clam rake in their hand, because it’s there, half-in-and-out of the brine, that a few million years ago something strange crawled out of the depths and began the process of standing on dry land, on its own hind legs, with something tasty to eat in its claws. It is the place where we started, on that edge between water and land, and the place we’re compelled to return. This, according to my thinking, is why people like to coat themselves with sunblock and lie on the beach reading Grisham novels.

Instead I said, “I like to eat fish.”

Building the Perfect Laptop

Businessweek has put us on the cover of their latest issue; Steve Hamm writes about the development of our forthcoming ThinkPad, the X300. This is the first notebook I’ve had serious lust for since I coveted my first T1000 Toshiba (the Intel 8088 with a floppy drive and a handle like a suitcase) back in 1988. It may well be, indeed, the “perfect laptop.” This is a computer that has to be held to be understood. A remarkable piece of engineering. Congratulations to the ThinkPad team and its designer, David Hill, who is also the first Lenovo blogger.

“At Lenovo, Hill and his colleagues have a lot riding on the X300, part of its ThinkPad line of computers. The Chinese company bought IBM’s (IBM) money-losing, $10 billion PC business in 2005 with hopes of using it to build a prominent global brand. IBM’s ThinkPad had long been a favorite of executives and business travelers, but it lost cachet over the years. The goal now with the X300 is to deliver a machine that will burnish Lenovo’s reputation worldwide. “We want to send the message that if there’s a company in the industry that can continuously develop the most inventive and best-quality products with efficiency, it will be Lenovo,” says Chairman Yang Yuanqing.”

The podcast is worth a listen.

About: GrowingYourNewsWebsite.com

Steve Outing has launched an blog focused on launching, managing, and tending a news site. Being an ex-newsie, this is a good thing, and Steve’s reputation as an online news guru is top notch.

Google’s Data Asset | Union Square Ventures: A New York Venture Capital Fund Focused on Early Stage & Startup Investing

Brad Burnham, partner at Union Square with Fred Wilson, blogs about the impact of Google’s data driven services. In discussions over dinner last week with Dan Gertsacov from GoogleTV, we got onto the topic of data as differentiator in advertising. Brad nails the same point in this post (which is about the impact of marginal data collection on services)

“Each incremental point of data adds value to the ones you all ready have. It is easy to see this in the context of an advertising network. If the ad network knows that a user is female it can show more relevant ads. But, If the ad network knows that female’s age, it can do even better, and data about location, household income, and recent web sites visited all add value to the existing data points, making it possible to show more and more relevant ads. Google’s services all benefit from additional data albeit in different ways.

“So what does all this mean about the market for web services. It means that we all need to begin to think about the degree to which Google’s enormous data asset will allow it to dominate this important sector.” [emphasis mine]

The hot buttons in the last paragraph are “think” and “dominate.” Data driven ad services (or cloud computing) are squarely in the sights of the privacy stewards and the federal government. Anyone who had to answer reader mail in 1995 when a web user freaked out about a cookie being placed on their harddrive knows never to underestimate the public and government’s paranoia about data.

As an advertiser, Google’s data store and processing capability is extremely valuable in transforming next-marketing-dollar allocation. The other networks don’t possess the same analytical and data driven rigor. It could, if I take Brad’s post to the paranoid extreme, be a harbinger of Google’s future focus on persuading the world that a) their data is anonymous and b) safe with Google.

I’m a Feedburner fan and run this blog’s RSS through the service so I can gain some sense of traffic trends. Per Peter Kim’s M20 measurement criteria, I made my RSS subs visible with this badge that tallies my feed subscribers.

Every weekend about ten percent of my subscribers seem to unsubscribe or vanish. By Tuesday, they return.

So what happened to the 43 mystery subs? And why do they go away every Saturday?

13 degrees at 6 am, northwest wind gusting 30 right down from Hudson Bay. Bundle up, walk the dogs, grab the paper,  and light a fire.

I’ll take an office with a fireplace over a view any day. Though the view isn’t too bad.