Churbuck.com

Feedburner displays my feed subscribers in the left column. I keep an eye on as a casual reference to growth in readership and declare little victories everytime the odometer clocks another 100 readers.

Typically it hovers around 600 subscribers but in the last few days it has spiked to 900 plus. Why? No clue. The number fluctuates up and down, but a 30% spike means either Feedburner has burped or … (update, Nathan Gilliatt said FriendFeed subs are added)

Some undetected thing spiked inbound traffic.

Look at the green bar just go nuts in the last week.

I’m not a collector of stat counts — I have to worry about followers and ranks too much in the real world of Lenovo — but it is an ego-stroke to know someone reads this stuff.

Then again some don’t ….. Stefan Constantinescu, a great commentor on all things related to ThinkPads, had to unsub when he realized that my professional title doesn’t mean this blog follows in my career’s footsteps. (No hard feelings Stefan, just citing your decision as example of blog identity crisis).

1. Churbuck: David Churbuck works for Lenovo (OTCPK: LNVGY), a company that makes a line of laptops known as the ThinkPad. Why do I know this? I’m a huge ThinkPad nerd. Practically every laptop I’ve ever owned has been a ThinkPad. I love the design, the dependability, the battery life, but do I love David? This is his personal blog more or less. He constantly writes about getting back into shape and fishing. I’m sorry, but I just don’t care. Decision: Unsubscribe.

Coming into the summer season this weekend, the traffic has tripled, the sidewalks of Cotuit are alive with joggers and bikers and baby carriages, and I am trying to stay close to the home fires.

I have a boat to paint, another to launch, lawns to mow, in-laws to entertain, family arriving from Florida, China ….

So — no travel for the next two weeks. Focus on some work stuff, then hit the road in mid-July for some Lenovo partnership meetings on the west coast.

Monday-Sunday: Cotuit. You know where to find me.

What could be better than knocking off work at 5 pm, walking half a mile down Main Street to a little ball field tucked into the pines, and watching the best college baseball players in the country play nine strong innings in the June sunshine?

Welcome to Cape Cod Baseball League baseball, arguably the best summer college baseball league on the planet. Where wooden bats reign, and little girls sing “Take Me Out To the Ball Game” during the seventh inning stretch. Where admission is free, kids run wild, and you can pick up a cup of clam chowder and a couple dogs for dinner. Cute girls in their summer clothes flirting with the boys in the dugouts. Old timers parked by the third base line fence in their lawn chairs. Families tucking into boxes of pizza on picnic tables.

This is the real deal. No lights. No rock music. No mascot running the baselines.

This is where I:

• smoked my first cigarette (in the pit in the woods behind the visitors stand)
• had my first (of several)  fights with a townie (I was and always will be just a summer kid)
• had my bike stolen something like three times

Cotuit is where major leaguers like the Met’s  Ron Darling played.  The Yankee’s GM, Joe Girardi, was a Kettleer. The team was started in 1947 and has won the Cape championship more than 12 times. The current list of Kettleer alumni in the pros is here.

Great aerial of the Cotuit park here.

Public Affairs Section Stockholm – Press Release.

Fingers crossed for my Cotuit friend and fellow Cotuit Skiff sailor, Matthew Barzun:

“On June 19, President Barack Obama announced his intent to submit to the U.S. Senate for approval the nomination of Mr. Matthew Barzun to be the next U.S. Ambassador to Sweden.In reference to the nomination of Mr. Barzun and several others for ambassadorial posts President Obama said, “I am grateful that these fine individuals will serve in my administration and I am confident that they will well represent our nation abroad and help strengthen our relationships within the international community. I look forward to working with them in the months and years ahead.””
The Senate will do well by confirming Matteo.

“I will tell you this about iLiver 2.0: It’s nanoengineered, and it kicks ass. I wake up every morning feeling like Shaft, Superfly, James Bond and Kung Fu all put together. I’m bench-pressing twice my body weight”

Life is better again. Dan Lyons brought back Steve Jobs, this time with half of David Pogue’s liver.

via The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs.

Okay, so I get grief for talking about fishing and shaving the dog’s butt on this blog by people who for some resason think that the guy who does digital marketing for the company that makes ThinkPads is going to blog about ThinkPads. No way! Ok, so sure, I try not to get all spammy and promotional for the company that pays my paychecks, but every so often we do something that reminds me why I here and glad to not be there, and that’s my simple love for classic stuff that works, is designed by people who care about what they are making, and carries a kind of craftsmanship that I sure as heck didn’t get from my rental car this week.

For the last year I’ve had a serious love affair with my ThinkPad X200S — a bad ass little ultraportable with a 12 inch screen. I love it so much that I just juiced the hard drive to 320 gigs and am tempted to go buy some more memory to make it fly …

But then this came along. Just another ThinkPad?

This is the T400s. The T-series is our bread and butter ThinkPad — the one our corporate users roll out to their employees. If you are reading this post on a ThinkPad your IT department gave you then you are probably reading it on a T60 or a T61. It’s what I was given at IDG in 2005. If you bought it yourself, or are a big traveller, then you may be on an X200 like me, or an X60-61.

So why am I getting all spammy and in your face about just another black laptop?

Ah ….. This thing took all the glory of our X300 — the notebook Businessweek called the Perfect PC — and puts it into a serious heatseeker of a laptop. You can, if you are inclined to spend the big dollars, make this thing behave like a serious workstation. Configure it with a big SSD drive, max the RAM and you’re talking one of the most powerful laptops ever conceived. Super thin, and loaded. I could see toting this around for the next two years with never a regret.

I’d dumping the X200 for this. Listening to my buddy David Hill go on about the design enhancements– the interior design — not the skin, the bling, the crud that our competitors seem to think makes idiots buy PCs, but the internal genius… in this. I personally love the consistency of our design, I just need to figure out how to show you the inside genius.

Want one? Send me an email for my employee purchase code.  dchurbuck AT lenovo.com. Here’s David on the keyboard.

Matt Jones at Jack Morton says what need to be said — it’s not the plumbing, but the water in the pipes when it comes to social marketing.

“At the risk of being branded a heretic or perhaps just being shown the door by my agency HR director, I have to say it: I hate social media. Why? Because it’s just media. And since when was media ever interesting?”

via Why I Hate Social Media – Advertising Age – DigitalNext.

“Get on the Boat Campaign”: Three Bays Preservation works to raise awareness of fragility of Barnstable’s bays.

Cape Cod Today on Three Bays’ tour of the Cotuit Bays last weekend. I saw them on the water Saturday — there was a little sun and break from the incessant rain. It’s good to see public awareness building about the water quality issues.

As I grow old I start to look at life’s potential opportunities differently, chafing at hours spent wasted in front of the television or laptop, fretting over powerpoints that don’t get read, emails that don’t get answered, Dancing With the Celebrity Housewives in Intervention … and realize, that at any given time, there is something I could be doing that I have never done before.

Last night I did something I’ve been meaning to do for the last four years — and that was go see a Durham Bulls game. I tried once the first summer I worked in North Carolina but was rained out before the first pitch.

Goodmon Park is what the connoisseurs of the sport would call a “bandbox” of a park — a nice new  (1995) AAA league ballpark that sits like an emerald of grass in the late afternoon sun and gave me that wonderful revelatory thrill as I walked through the tunnel to the stands and saw in front of me that big green field (I get kind of religious when I emerge from the bowels of Fenway, but still, the comparisons between churches and ballparks are one of sport’s writings most tired but true cliches.)

Big bag of peanuts, four — count em — four hotdogs; a big Yuengling beer and a nice night in the Carolina summer on the third base line by the Red Sox bullpen.

Clay Bucholtz on the mound for the Pawtucket Red Sox — my home team’s AAA feeder. And Scot Kazmir rehabbing for the Tampa Bay Rays — last season’s arch rivals (we had an epic bench clearing brawl).

Bucholtz left the game early, falling behind, and by the end of the nine innings the Bulls had won, 3-1, breaking a long losing streak.

Just  a nice night, well spent, with a good friend, a lot better than four hours weeding emails in a hotel room.

Monday-Tuesday 6.22-23 : North Carolina

Wednesday-Sunday: Cotuit

Can you imagine living in the oxymoronic hell of being a corporate web designer? I mean, you start life as a sensitive aesthete who can draw a decent picture. You go to art school, you master the Adobe Creative Suite, you worship at the altar of Milton Glaser and Christopher Alexander, can quote Tog on Design, and play a mean round of the Jakob Nielsen drinking game. You took a seminar with Edward Tufte. Your motto is “don’t make me think.”

You get a job at a big online publication or company and get the dream assignment: “Build us a kick ass web site. Engage the user. Tell a story. Distinguish us from the competition.”

The wireframes and the information architecture begin to emerge. You sell your vision to managers who think art is embodied in the oeuvre of Thomas Kinkade, painter of light; those managers who’s taste is only in their mouths. You get a green light. Go execute. People trust you and your vision.

And then, as T.S. Eliot wrote in his poem about your life – The Hollow Men – “…between the conception and the creation … falls the shadow.”

Enter the most dreaded people in the world of design: the “stakeholders.” Legal wants their boilerplate, PR wants a link. Marketing wants a star burst and swoosh around the promo. “Can you make the logo bigger?”

And so the old NASCAR race to deface your work begins. Suddenly everybody hates you. You get the feedback in your performance review that you’re too negative, you don’t collaborate. You seem very defensive about your work. You’re too emotional. You don’t understand the realities of the business.

You are accused of being a gatekeeper, a temple priest, an impediment. You listen to yourself argue in one design review after another and your own voice makes you sick. You try to take the side of the user, but that sounds so lame ….. Screw the user. Real men make money. We’re a business. Screw the user. Spam ‘em. Whack em with a popup. Make that rich media ad autoplay – loudly. Use the <blink> tag. A lot. What do they expect for free? We gotta sell stuff.

Then the metrics geeks arrive. They proclaim that no one at Google is allowed to make a qualitative design decision without metrics. They want to A/B test everything. What the hell is the Taguchi Multivariate Methodology? Do you think Picasso left his Blue Period because of fricking metrics? Suddenly the web site becomes a lab for testing everything from palettes to pictures.

Last month a web designer named Dustin Curtis wrote a nasty open note to American Airlines and declared that AA.com sucked. I use AA.com. Pretty much every week. It isn’t pretty. But heck, it lets me print my boarding passes. Dustin thought it sucked badly enough to declare he would not use American any more, and to back up his critique, he presented a lovely alternative.

A user experience designer responded. A person a lot like the one I just described I imagine.

Over at Fast Company, a blog post pointing to Curtis’ work spawned a fascinating series of comments. Read them. Then tell me … why do corporate web sites suck? (except for Apple’s, which somehow has some holy status among the design world).

The interesting thing is committee design versus centralized “dictator” design. Can a design dictator be trusted to understand the business exigencies of a company? Or do committees build towers of design babble?

I don’t know. I declared after my fourth redesign at Forbes.com that:

1. Never trust a designer
2. Web sites are screwed without designers
3. I am not a designer
4. Neither are you

Now I basically figure the Marissa Mayer process at Google is the only one worth following, but damned if I have seen it at work. HIPPO seems to dominate all design eventually and I am also guilty.

This has to be the oldest need in the world, but I would love to put my contacts into the cloud and keep them there, free from the incompatibilities of Lotus Notes, Microsoft Outlook, Gmail, Blackberry, and whatever piece of crap device or software lies over the horizon.

1980s – newspaper reporter – I had a true rolodex. Stapling business cards onto the notched tabs.

1984 – PC Week. I move my contacts into AskSam, a flat file database. I start to print out huge snakes of sheetfeed dot matrix printer paper and pin to the wall of my cube.

1987 – I get sucked into a period of contact manager shiny-objectitis — GoldMine, ACT!, Lotus Agenda, Borland Sidekick ….. all fail

1988-1994: the email era commences. Starting with enterprise mail, external on MCI Mail, then CompuServe, The WELL. My personal contacts are all over the place by this point. I begin to lose portions of my “network” to entropy.

1995: Outlook. I start to declare MS Outlook is it. Despite the fact that the IT goons use some dumbass Novell email client as a follow on to CC:Mail. Opensource does not exist.

1995-2000: I rely on Outlook synching to a Palm Pilot. Forget synching to a Motorola cell phone. Not going to happen. Synch tools become a big buzz in the business.

2000: Lotus Notes enters my life at McKinsey. I give up on contact management. The Notes contact manager feels like something Franz Kakfa would write about.

2002-2004: back to Outlook, synching to a Windows Mobile device, a little HP thing ala the Palm.

2005: Back to Notes at IDG. I give up and refuse to manage contacts in Notes.

2006: Lenovo. Still on Notes. Not entering any contacts into Notes. Putting business cards into a binder with plastic sleeves.

2009: About to declare contact bankruptcy. My contacts are scattered to the winds.  I have IM contacts, internal Lenovo directories, backed up ancient CSV, PST and comma delimited Outlook files — gmail accounts, Thunderbird as my desktop email client pulling down pop3 mail for churbuck.com and my david.churbuck@gmail mail ……

Going forward: I want to stick this all in the cloud. How do I do this and balance my personal network with my professional? Suggestions please.

Monday – Sunday June 8-14 Cotuit
First week of full work@home in a while. Need to focus on some organizational/strategy work and prep for a big China trip the week of the 22nd.

Give every passenger a one time freebie in exchange for setting up an account for crying out loud. First session is on us. Try it. We hope you like it.

I flew home on Delta from NYC on Tuesday night and the plane happened to have the new GoGo Wifi service. I’ve tried them all in the past, and in the interest of testing I went through a 15 minute sign up on my BlackBerry bold, paid about $7.95 for privilege, used it for 15 successful minutes, and wondered the entire time why there is a seperate $9.95 rate of laptop users.

Bad marketing though. Give me a freebie on first use, a taste to get me addicted, and subsequent flights should see the dollars flow. I know the service costs like $100,000 per plane to install, but asking me to pay for the proverbial pig in a poke? Get me to log in, create an account, give you an email address, then spam the snot out of me. Sloppy acquisition marketing drives me nuts.

Wifi didn’t work for Boeing and its Connexion service.  It was too expensive and too early. Paying for connectivity just pisses me off to no end, but squandering a sign up opportunity drives me even nuttier.

Geno in the comments brings to my attention another Cape Cod-based maker of clam rakes — K.B. White. He even has a blog to spread the news.

http://shellfishing.blogspot.com/

K.B. White is based in Falmouth and sells online. I can’t testify to their quality as I am a Ribb Rake guy at present, but I will check out their stuff the next time my rake needs put me in the market.

via Bill Simmons – It’s hard to say goodbye to David Ortiz – ESPN The Magazine.

I admit it, I have spread the Ortiz-misses-the-steroid theory to explain why Boston’s clutch hitter has struck out in Mudville this season. I am ashamed as Bill Simmons eloquently points out that Boston’s fans owe the man an eternal debt of gratitude for delivering two World Series. His theory is the guy is older than he says he is. Whatever, it’s sad to see a legend fade.

It’s been a sports experience unlike anything I can remember. Red Sox fans refuse to turn against Ortiz. They just can’t. They owe him too much for 2004 and 2007. It’s like turning on Santa Claus or happy hour. Every Ortiz appearance is greeted with supportive cheers, every Ortiz failure is greeted with awkward silence. The fans are suffering just like he is. Only when he left 12 men on base against Anaheim on May 14 did I receive a slew of angry e-mails from back home, but even those tirades centered more around Terry Francona’s steadfast refusal to drop Ortiz in the order. I cannot remember another Boston athlete stinking this long, and this fragrantly, without getting dumped on.

Really, that’s a tribute to what he means to his fans and how delightful it was to watch him play. His career might be over (notice I left the door open; I’m such a sap), but Ortiz has reached the highest level an athlete can reach: unequivocal devotion. Sox fans love him the same way you love an ailing family member. In the end, at his bleakest point, he’s brought out the best of an entire fan base. He has inspired dignity and emotion and loyalty. The fans could have sped his demise (and saved a few games) by booing until Francona benched him. They didn’t. How often does that happen?

David Armano at Dachis (still in stealthy mode with ex-Forrester analyst Peter Kim) and the author of the Logic & Emotion blog coined a winner when he describes stuff like web banners and paid search as “tradigital” tactics. Brilliant. Close to two decades of digital marketing, the banner ad is nearly 15 years old, and now it is time to segregate the traditional from the new. I was in a pitch from a major business site last week and found myself citing “tradigital” tactics – not scoffing at them, they still have a big place in demand generation for ecommerce – but grasping at the next big thing in digital marketing, which I suppose some marketing futurists are going to label “social commerce.”

Tradigital hit a saturation point of sorts in 2007-2008 – especially in bare knuckles segments such as commodity paid search on generic keywords like “digital camera” and “cheap laptop” where the battle to recruit traffic is fierce. Click-through yields always head south over time in a tactic, never up; and after a few years search campaigns have started to show diminishing returns as more cash is stuffed into keyword arbitrage but less of the traffic converts, driving expense-to-revenue ratios lower. Blended tradigital and the rise of new metric and analytics approaches has given a new life to old tactics – retargeting/remarketing, look-alike modeling, behavioral techniques, follow-along, campaign stacking … it’s awesome to watch tradigital get revived by analytic ninjas.

Given that the only successful path in digital is perpetual beta, innovation seeking is a core component of a digital marketers’ job description these days, with the race to get into a new tactic, master it, and add it to the arsenal driven by the inevitable fade-away of the tried and true. Has any digital ad unit held its own over time? I’d argue email/spam will always have legs – why else does it continue to appear in nearly every marketing plan? – and display advertising is a “buttress” tactic that run in context with keyword buys will help the search terms convert a bit better than they would in the absence of banners. There are tradigital extensions that try to teach old dogs new tricks, such as Tumri multivariate ads and some of the intrusive page takeover units that live on like bad boomerangs.

The next wave of digital – the things I am keeping an eye on include:

• RSS fed display: We messed around with this stuff during the Olympics, driving some banner content off of blogs into fixed ad units on the Federated Media network.
• WOM catalysts: how do you arm fans with coupons to lay on their friends? Ecoupons – single use spot offers are coming into their own. The current model of ecoupon codes is messy and cumbersome.
• Detection of desire: watch social media monitoring turn from detection of the next Jeff Jarvis to detection of people in love with products and brands. See WOM catalyst. I see an even cooler thing coming, but I want to keep it to myself for now.
• Facebook apps: I’m not a believer in soc-net advertising and buy into the P&G marketing dude’s opinion that people are on those properties to connect with friends, not shop or peruse. But, there’s got to be some creativity in marketing apps for FB. I dunno. I’m grateful I have smart Facebook people on our teams. Someone is going to crack Facebook, not me.
• Payperpost: I hate it, but even with the FTC coming down on blogola, it’s gonna thrive. Read the comments of the defenders – people are hurting for cash in this economy and this is easy cash. It sucks, but ethics are a luxury that don’t pay people’s bills. All you can do is boycott dipshit marketers who pay for it and leave the bloggers alone.
• More dynamic multivariate units. Tumri is pretty awesome. This is display advertising that can teach you something.
• Cable TV: GoogleTV delivered for us in beta. Now the cable industry is looking at a response.

Anyway, enough sci-fi. The next biggie is going to be an utterly huge rethinking of the shopping experience. Think about it. Web 2.0 brought content management systems to the people. We can all manage a site/blog without big tools. We can measure with free analytics. We can promote with free megaphones like Twitter. But what about commerce? Of all the user experiences, ecomm remains stuck in a bad model. eBay makes anybody a merchant – but I’m thinking we need a massive rethink on shopping engine flow and get to commerce 2.0.