Churbuck.com

Google Docs getting offline access | Webware : Cool Web apps for everyone
Rafe reports: “Using the free Google Gears extension, users will soon be able to read and edit their files even when they have no internet connection.”

This is good. I hope it comes to Google Notebook soon as I am very very addicted to that little app like no other, in fact it has displaced OneNote as my adhoc note pad.

Ouch! Newspaper revenues take biggest plunge on record | Tech news blog – CNET News.com

Uncle Fester points us at this grim news:

“Total print advertising revenue last year dropped 9.4 percent to $42 billion from the year before, according to the Newspaper Association of America. That’s the biggest decrease since the NAA began measuring ad expenditures in 1950.

“Total advertising revenue, including online revenue, decreased 7.9 percent in 2007 from the year before.”

I want to see the percentage state of online revenue in the newspaper industry — that last paragraph infers a decline in online revenue for newspapers, which I know is not the case in the UK at least.

Monday 3.31 – Wed 4.2: Cotuit

Thursday 4.3: NYC

Friday-Sunday 4.4-4.6: Cotuit

Another week of working from home, RTP next week.

Today’s word is “demonym” – which is the word you use to describe the inhabitant of a country or city. Hence, a citizen of Croatia is a Croat, a person who lives in Boston is a Bostonian, Thais from Thailand. There is actually a semi-formula for working out a demonym, but note that there is some confusion on how to develop an demonym for a New World term, for example a native place name such as “Cotuit” – evidently a Wampanoag word meaning “wide meadow” which in Latin would be, of course Agros Latos, which might make residents of the village “Agroslatinos” if Caesar Augustus had managed to cross the Atlantic in that submarine he was building before the Ides of March.

That not being the case, I defer to the Sage, John Peck, he of Peck’s Boats – who has bestowed us with the demonym, “Cotusion.”

Titcomb’s Bookshop – Upcoming Events

Tomorrow- Sunday 3.30 @ 2 pm

David Churbuck Book Signing
The Book of Rowing
Sunday March 30th, 2pm
David Churbuck is the author of The Book Of Rowing. The book was originally printed in 1988 and has been updated and re-released. The book details the complete history of the sport of rowing, includes instructions on how to improve from a novice rower to a confident expert and is filled with black and white photos and line drawings. It is the perfect book for anyone who has an interest in this classic and elegant sport.Members of the Barnstable Rowing Club will be on hand to tell you all about their Learn To Row programs for adults and juniors.

I have my shiny new family shellfish permit and that means the clams are scared. One of these years I am going to get a single digit license, maybe camp out in a lawn chair at the Department of Natural Resources and be first in line like a teenager trying to cop some Hannah Montana tickets.

The boat is launched. The waders need patching and tomorrow on the tide I intend to go in search of some serious mercenaria mercenaria, aka the Mighty Quahog, and make me a mess of chowder.  The shellfish warden asked me, as she handed over the newly laminated license: “Where’s your favorite place to clam?”

That’s like asking me what my bank balance is.

But I told her and in return she pulled out the map and showed me some good spots where the volunteers have been broadcasting seed and and transplanting dirty clams to clean water. They were all shore spots — the kind for people who don’t have boats — and therefore the ones I tend to leave to the guys who trudge down the sand to find their bivalves. I have a boat, so I go to the places where clammers with boats can only go.

And I’m not talking about them, in fact, I am turning into one of those wiseasses who when asked at the dock, “Where did you catch that fish?” say, “In the lip.”

The single scariest thing in my childhood, scarier than the Wicked Witch of the East’s winged monkeys, was the Cotuit Fire Department fire horn, especially when it sounded in the middle of the night.

It was the trumpet of Satan himself: a horrible, low blast followed by a shrieking siren: an air raid horn powered by a blast of compressed air somewhere on the roof of the Fire Department on High Street.

When it went off every day at noon, it wasn’t so scary. It was expected. It was a nice noise. A reminder of lunch. And when you were on the water, furling the sail on your skiff after the Wednesday morning junior series, you would hear the fire horns all along the southside of Cape Cod go off in a weird rolling synchronization like time rolling to the west – first Hyannis, then Hyannisport, then Centerville, then Osterville, Waquoit ….all seeming to call to each other to say, “Yep. Cotuit is reporting in for lunch.”

The bullrakers in the quahog scows would set their rakes in the bottom mud, tie off to the handle and sit on their culling boards to eat a PBJ and drink soup from a thermos.

But when that horn went off at 2 am, me and every kid in town would slam awake, stare wildly into the darkness, and start to count.

Two signals meant a rescue emergency. An ambulance was needed. Someone was hurt. A car had crashed. When two signals sounded during the day, the rule was every kid had to book home as soon as possible to report in. The sirens would light up in the garage of the fire department and we’d go out into the yard to watch the intersection of Main and School Streets to see which way the fire trucks and ambulance turned. To the south, towards the Highground meant someone was in trouble on the beaches. Straight ahead to the town dock meant a boating accident, to the north meant a car accident on Route 28.

Five blasts meant a fire and the volunteers would get in their pickup trucks and stick the red bubble light on the roof and drive like maniacs to the fire house.

It isn’t a volunteer fire department anymore.

There isn’t a horn anymore.

I want the horn to come back.

In a closet in my house is an old “guide to the horn” published in 1960, right during the heart of the Cold War. Otis Airforce base is five miles to the northwest and my house is right on the landing path. Back in those days there was a ton of air force traffic as the Otis squadron were the pilots who challenged the Russian Bear bombers testing our DEW line defenses off the Atlantic Coast. I fully expected to be incinerated in a flash of light at any second as there was no doubt in anyone’s mind that Otis was an A-1 priority target. The last line of the guide freaked me out in the mid-60s. An air raid would be signaled by a “wailing” (my own, no doubt) followed by a series of short sharp blasts (and one really big one).

I hate browsers. FireFox is just fine for me, but lo, somehow iTunes snuck a copy of Apple’s Safari browser onto my desktop and so ….

Churbuck.com looks actually better in Safari — but alas, in the write mode in WordPress none of the Wysiwig editing functions appear. Which means I need to save this in draft, kill Safari, open FireFox and get to a functional window so I can post this screen grab:

So now I know what Mac people see all the time. Clear. Sorta slick. But I’ll stick with me FireFox — on both XP and Ubuntu. Life is too short for too many browsers.

Web Worker Daily » Archive Open Thread: Does Your Company Have a Blogging Policy? «
I know it is in vogue to say “feh” to blog policies and focus more on blog strategies, but this post on GigaOm’s WebWorkerDaily provokes a $64,000 question:

“What comprises an effective blogging policy? How do you go about developing such a policy? Do employers have authority in dictating what an employee blogs about, given the company’s name is never mentioned? [emphasis mine] Do you know if your company has a blogging policy? If so, is it too restrictive?”

The question is more accurately stated as: do employers have authority in dictating what an employee blogs about on a personal blog, given the company’s name is never mentioned?”

I say no way. No authority. If an employee wants to blog about some heinous activity or state some very radical opinions that is entirely their free right to express those opinions as their own. I do believe a company has a right to request that an employee blogger not blog about work on a personal platform, or, if they do, to insure that the Golden Rule of Cross Examination applies, to wit: “Would you want what you said or wrote read back to you by the plaintiff’s attorney when you were sitting in the witness stand.” I would imagine most confidentiality agreements and intellectual property covenants that are de rigeur for new employees would be binding.
In other words, blogging about work on a personal blog and saying, “Man, working like a dog on a big project. Sucks the vending machine is out of Cheetos” is a lot different than saying, “I think the new Gonkalator project is going down the tubes fast. It’s a shame, we invested so much money in that and to see it die is really sad.”

I mentioned Lenovo here from time to time. I actually blog about the company to give it some link love. I try to be a good corporate citizen here. But, I always go back to the late Tony Churbuck’s advice after I was caught mooning the M/V East Chop one summer afternoon in 1976 from the deck of my sailboat somewhere near Horseshoe Shoal (the captain recognized my boat, and I worked for the same company, I was not known then, as now, for my good discretion). The old gent said: “Buddy: Never $*%& where you eat.”

Mooning Amtrak

Customers Should Avoid Community Software Vendor Lock In: Own your data

Jeremiah is right — a company entering into SMM should be very wary of outsourced relationships. If you do go outside for support, make sure you are in a portable format so when and if you decided to bring the operation in house, you can easily import the data accumulated under the outsourced relationship:

“I’ve been talking to more and more companies that are creating their own corporate communities around their brand. For the most part, they lean on the SaaS models that the white label social network, collaboration, or even insight community vendors provide. While it certainly makes sense for marketers to lean on application service providers (it’s all setup, ready to roll, without the hassle of dealing with internal IT) and a decent to moderate price.”

We used Ogilvy Digital Influence to launch our first corporate blogs, but insisted it be build atop WordPress so we could migrate the archives onto our own boxes when we hit the tipping point that justified a self-serve. Photos are all in Flickr and easily exported and migrated (well, not exactly “easy”), videos are moving to YouTube.

In case you were wondering why I am more abnormal than usual, I am definitely out of my mind on over-the-counter cold medications this week. I find a blend of DayQuil, TheraFlu Severe Cold (“Severe,” mind you), Cold-Eeze lozenges, Advil, Rolaids and Kleen-ex puts me into Timothy Leary territory.

And here I was thinking I was going to dodge the 2008 bug. Apparently there is a flu — a two week version — right out of Steven King’s The Stand. I cannot afford a case of it and have become agoraphobic as a result.

Jason Calacanis tossed a grenade into the burgeoning field of online ad networks in a guest post on Silicon Alley Insider.

The question comes down to Long Tail economics in a mass audience world. How can a small, but strong “niche” site, get paid for its pageviews without assuming the massive cost structure of its own salesforce and ad ops team?

How can a mass site move its unsold remainder inventory without devaluing itself?

The answer is ad networks, but Calacanis writes:

“I’ve never liked the ad network business. They’re a very short term solution and they are very damaging to high-end publishers because they create massive channel conflicts (i.e. many people selling your inventory confusing advertisers), they run horrible ads that people hate (think punch the monkey), and the space is filled with dishonest players (i.e. they promise to not run certain types of ads… but they do).”

Calacanis points to ESPN.com’s decision to drop the network model. And this morning, my colleague Gary Milner points out:
MediaPost Publications – Forbes Joins Ad Network Fray – 03/25/2008

“THE GROWING CROWD OF VERTICAL ad networks got bigger Monday, with Forbes announcing plans to launch a network spanning more than 400 business and financial blogs.Forbes is among the latest media companies trying to squeeze ad dollars from the Internet’s long tail by aggregating niche blogs and Web sites around specific categories and selling targeting advertising across the sites.”

From an advertiser’s point of view, networks are convenient touch points for achieving broad reach with a low “relationship task” — it is unwieldy to negotiate and deal with insertion orders on a site by site basis. Sure, I like dealing directly with the publisher, but it simply isn’t feasible with a tight staff to develop and own relationships with dozens of media properties.

On the other hand (a weasel world I despise), I don’t want to see my brand in the company of Lowermybill’s roof dancers, the punchable monkey, and the other bottom feeders that dominate the display/banner advertising space. There’s a reason one doesn’t find those ads on the higher quality sites, and that’s because those sites have invested in their own sales teams and have the traffic and audience to justify the relationship cost.

Evolution of Security: Meet Our Bloggers

I’ve wondered what it would be like running a blogging program for a generally despised industry or organization. Imagine what online customer service is like at a health insurer? At an airline? One organization that needs all the goodwill it can get is the Transportation Safety Administration, or TSA. Colleague Lisa S. sent along a link to their blog. I think I knew it existed by I never visited it until this morning.

It’s pretty candid, makes fun of itself in all the right places, puts a human face on some of the bloggers who are actual screeners and managers, and in general provides some good insights into what is happening when you line up in the cattle chute, unshod, jacket off, your one-quart ZipLoc of private toiletries dangling in your hand.

As a guy who clears security at least twice every week, sometimes six times, here’s my drill and recommendations.

1. Be fast and be smart. Don’t be the mouth breather who goes through carrying an anvil in your pants. “Duh, how did that change get in my pocket.”
2. Two bins is all it takes. I approach the bins and start the disrobe before it is my turn to unload. Change, pens, phone, blackberry, etc. all go into the jacket/blazer. Boarding pass in shirt pocket,
3. Laptop in its own bin.
4. Shoes (always loafers, laces slow you down), then coat, then bag o’shaving gear on top of that.
5. Bin with shoes, coat, bag does first on the belt. Then carry on. Then laptop. Then backpack.
6. Look the screen in the eye, wait for the signal, pass through, hand over boarding pass.
7. Collect gear. Get dressed, repack.

It’s not that bad. In fact, all things considered, it’s down right tolerable. The only time I start to smolder is during school vacations when a ton of families are flying and the lines get longer and less experienced. I would love a priority line for frequent travelers, but so far the concept hasn’t really taken off.

Cotuit for the duration. NYC week after (thursday the 3), and RTP the week of 4.7

I impulsively got the boat in the water today. Didn’t wait to paint the bottom. Just gave the battery a quick charge, screwed a skid plate into the skeg of the dinghy, spliced on a new paintaer, hooked it all up to the back of the car and ten minutes later discovered my new Stearns waders had a leak in the right boot.

Boat started right up, slick as could be, so I towed the dinghy out to the mooring (still in summer mode without a winter stick because I stayed in the water so late last December the mooring guy could’nt service it), tied it off with a bowline on a bight, then tightened down my hat, zipped up snug and floored the Honda for a quick tour of the three bays.

I brought the Flip cam and even tried some narrated tour for those faithful readers who have no clue what Cape Cod looks like in late March. The wind noise is wicked and the image is all over the place.

Jumping eagle ray kills boater off Florida Keys | U.S. | Reuters
Wild. But this happens more often than you’d think A barracuda killed a lady by flying through the air and into her sternum a few years ago. And the houndfish is another people killer.

GM Shifting 50% Of Ad Spending Online – Silicon Alley Insider
Think about it. Half the spend goes online.  What percentage of a PC marker’s ad budget should be online?

“Here’s the reason so many Web publishers are optimistic about the future, even if the ad model isn’t clear yet: GM, the nation’s 3rd-largest advertiser, will move half of its ad spending–$3 billion in 2007–online within three years, reports AdAge, citing unnamed GM executives.

GM spent $197 million on online advertising in 2007 according to TNS, a figure that includes gaming, search and interactive appilcations.”

A year ago I presented a plan in Beijing for how Lenovo would support its sponsorship of the 2008 Summer Olympic Games online. I started with the premise that no one in their right mind would seek out and visit the web site of an Olympic sponsor unless they were teased there with the promise of winning something such as a trip to the Games themselves, some Olympic-themed product or souvenir, or the typical contest or sweepstakes. If you look at the Web history of the Olympics, you’d have to declare the first web Games was probably Atlanta, when IBM launched a pretty awesome web presence in light of the technical state of the art in Web 1.0 (sure, IBM took grief for its IT hiccups, but the web site was great). Since then, all the major sponsors have launched sites or microsites for the Games, but no offense, the bar never has really been raised that high.

With that contrarian approach – “who in their right mind would go to a sponsor’s website during the Olympics” – I needed something beyond the strategy of building an interactive program around a public relations story, a sweepstakes, a contest … Lenovo already does that sort of thing, every sponsor does in one form or another. That’s a checklist item, not a strategy. Lenovo needs a strong catalyst for a young brand seeking recognition as a global technology innovator on a global scale. Yes, there will be television advertisements running, and the Olympic rings will appear on our magazine ads and on Lenovo products, but I think we need more.

I’ve been nagged for a year by the question of not so much “who” or “how many” would come to a sponsor’s site, but “why.”

Let me set forth some beliefs that have been lighthouses in plotting the course:

1. These are the first fully Web 2.0 Olympics: however you define “2.0″, these are the Games where social media, tagging, blogging, vlogging … are all well established and part of the mainstream. Not only for the spectators, but for the athletes.
2. Athens struck me as the first example of Long Tail media – crude as it was – in that NBC flooded all of its properties, not just the flagship Peacock Network, but CNBC, MSNBC, USA, etc. with a lot of sports, sports I had never seen. I found myself, for the first time, watching badminton and cycling, rowing and sailing, long tail sports the old media model never could support, focusing instead on the marquee events like gymnastics, swimming, basketball, etc.. Beijing, with its time zone differential, and the ubiquity of digital video recorders (Tivo), has even more potential to bring attention to more sports and exposure to more athletes.
3. What is the Olympic ideal? The idea that propels the Games? In the end, in my opinion, it’s about the athletes. Some 12,000 extraordinarily talented and driven individuals and teams who are literally the best in the world. For me, the consummate athlete is not necessarily the champion who comes away with the gold, but the 11,000 athletes who won’t win a medal, the athletes who don’t have an agent, an endorsement deal, indeed, for some, even a glimmer of hope of standing on the podium hearing their national anthem. I want to know their story. My good friend Luis Felipe Gonzalez III, MD, skied for Puerto Rico in the freestyle mogul competition. He didn’t do very well, but the fans loved his enthusiasm. My old boss at 21i.net, Fritz Kaiser, represented Liechtenstein in the Montreal Games in judo. He didn’t win, but he is the consummate competitor.

So it struck me, in working to develop an online strategy for the Lenovo Champions – our team of superstar athletes – that if I were to provide them with blogs and video capabilities … why not offer it to a lot of athletes. Not just the Champions, but the “spares”, the everyman athlete, the person who competes for the love of the game, not the medal, and the potential medalists in the sports that don’t get a lot of television coverage: the kayakers, the archers, the scullers. And it dawned on me that this is a Games of unrestricted abundance. That with the right partner I could scale an idea for 12 people into 12,000 (in theory.)

That partner was Google.

Starting in August we began discussions at the highest levels about using Google’s iGoogle platform to build a sophisticated Olympic platform of our own. It is live, it is http://2008.lenovo.com. It, like iGoogle, is a collection of gadgets – content modules that draw on feeds to present a dynamic stream of customized information. We call it the Lenovo Olympic Podium and thanks to Google’s devoted engineers and passion for these sorts of things, we gained the capability to not only build and host this Podium, but also to develop the most important content stream in the history of the modern Olympic Games.

Here’s my big idea:

What is the main event were the athletes themselves? What if, using Google’s Blogger platform and YouTube capabilities, Lenovo could offer any athlete a way to share their Olympic experience with their fans, family, friends, even the world?

These are not Lenovo blogs. They are not intended to be advertisements for Lenovo or Google. I want to enable athletes in three ways.

1. Hardware. Over 100 IdeaPads, our new consumer notebook computers, will be given to 100 qualified athletes. The qualification? Must be passionate, be a credible contender, and willing to communicate their story within the International Olympic Committee’s guidelines on Athlete Blogs (these are the first Games in which athletes are really permitted to blog during the Games). We’re also looking into giving them video capabilities through the built in web cam and other devices.
2. Software. Google will power the blogs with Blogger (if it’s good enough for the Fake Steve Jobs …) and YouTube. Google is all about platforms. They have data centers with cooling towers (I think). These guys can provide infrastructure and innovation, a rare combination.
3. Support: I’m going to aggregate all these blogs into one big OPML-Blog Roll, aggregated Olympic site. I want to drive the best of the network of what I like to refer to internally as “the IdeaAthletes” and get these athlete bloggers the connection with their fans that the mass media can’t. Ogilvy’s Digital Influence Project – in the form of uber bloggers John Bell and Rohit Bhargava are going to help me support the bloggers in the months leading up to the Games and during the competition.

What is the ideal scenario in my mind? The chain of events that will lead someone to declare success and not say “stupid idea, Dave.”

I want to see some valid give and take between athletes and fans. Period and full Stop. I don’t want to see ghost written homilies and comment strings that go unanswered. I certainly don’t want to see Lenovo emblazoned on these blogs or YouTube streams. I won’t expect any blogger to write a sentence like: “I love my IdeaPad and couldn’t have done this without the brilliant Mister Churbuck.” Nope, what I want for Lenovo out of all this is one simple piece of authentic, non-promotional recognition: “We were the PC supplier and sponsor to the Games who first enabled the connection between the fans and the athletes.”

The first athlete to enter the program is Drew Ginn, the Australian rower (okay, I confess to a bias towards rowing, after all, I did write the book), and Olympic gold medalist who is training now to represent Australia in the pair – a two man boat where each rower has a single or sweep oar. This is a devilishly hard boat to row and demands a level of synchronization and bonding between the two rowers that is impossible for non-rowers to imagine. Drew and his partner, Duncan Free, won the World’s in Munich last summer, making them the boat to beat this August in Beijing.

Drew has been our internal example of exactly what we’re seeking in an IdeaAthlete blogger. He uses Google’s Blogger, he posts videos on YouTube. He understands del.icio.us and Skype – in short, he’s very much the embodiment of a Web 2.0 Olympian. I am really psyched that he’s the first to come aboard.

So, if you’re an Olympian and you want to blog – ping me. If you already blog about the Olympics but want to do it with an IdeaPad – ping me. If you want to follow an Olympic blog – visit http://2008.lenovo.com and .. ping me.

Cape Cod TODAY and WBUR

One of the better destinations in my daily rounds of the virtual landmarks is Cape Cod Today, an aggregation of blogs covering local news and opinion around Cape Cod and the islands. (Walter Brooks, the  ex-New York Post founder extended an invite to me to contribute, but I am far happier on my own server covering non-Cape Cod stuff as well as the occasional clam rant.)
Cape Cod Today is significant for a number of reasons. First, if a network of bloggers such as the Huffington Post can be said to be the future of national media, then Cape Cod Today is driving home the impact of blogs on local coverage, bringing life to the local “news hole” in a way that a budget challenged daily paper cannot. I don’t see CCT as a replacement for the Cape Cod Times — but as a bit of an anarchy laden, opinion-filled news that brings tired staples of the local press — the police log for example, to vivid life. Cape Cod Today broke the Wampanoag casino scandal last summer, through the reporting of Peter Kenney — aka the Gadfly — a fixture of the local cable-talk radio circuit. That scoop focused a lot of attention on CCT and sealed its reputation as a credible daily news source.
As always, the action is in the comments. Gauging from the ad count, the site is doing pretty well. Here is a transcript of a recent NPR profile of the network.

“He is known as the Blogfather of Cape Cod, Walter Brooks. Since 2003, Brooks has recruited 150 Cape bloggers to cover Cape news from tip to toe. All but five of the bloggers write for free. Most of them turn out opinion pieces. But most of them are also retirees, or are still working in their current professions. Their backgrounds are varied: ex-politicians, ex-policemen, ex-teachers, current teachers, current harbormasters, current artists. Not a pimple-faced pajama wearing basement blogger among them.

Brooks admits many of the blogs on Cape Cod Today are hit or miss. Many of them are nothing more than a daily rant. Nevertheless, he believes they are changing the way news is covered on the Cape, and that they’re breaking news.”