I had a great time presenting at OpenCamp this weekend. It was an amazing crowd for a first outing, numbering more than 600 registrants. And from where I sat, everything went without a hitch.
Below is my preso. For some reason, SlideShare isn’t picking up my notes, so I have them placed below. It’s not ideal, as the list doesn’t sync with the slides as well. I hope to get the version with notes on SS ASAP. Read the rest of this entry »
On Monday, I had the privilege of speaking to The Shorthorn (University of Texas – Arlington) newsroom and web staff as they kicked off the new school year.
Knowing how the kids are all digi-fied these days, I was at first surprised that I was asked to come talk to them about how to get more focused on their web presence. But, as I discovered, we may have erred in calling this generation “digital natives.” Instead, I might call them the “bridge generation.” For while their lives are imbued with technology in a way my parents will never understand, they have been raised in a world where the entrenched media business still operated on old-media models, even while experimenting in the New Media World.
While I was duly impressed with these students’ journalism chops and work ethic, I initially was surprised to find them, in some ways, to have more in common with the stereotypical ink-stained curmudgeons than with the bleeding edge digitalfolk. Then, on reflection, it made perfect sense: Read the rest of this entry »
Sometimes I should learn to keep my big yap shut. The other day, in a fit of pique brought on by undeserved hype for the newest “hyperlocal” business du jour, I responded to a tweet from someone who should have known better raving about the product. My criticism was that this “hyperlocal” zip-code specific Twitter product was a load of junk. I knew so anecdotally by looking at my zip code’s results. After some further discussion with folks on Twitter, I generated the following analysis for the past month of this service, as relates to my metropolitan zip code: Read the rest of this entry »
Despite the heat, the summer doldrums must be giving way, as I’m staring down a really busy spate of talks and appearances:
* – Would-be burglars and harassers note that April will be home for most of that and my three big, toothy dogs will be home for all of it.
I’ve only bought one Groupon, as a test before we launched our own direct commerce services. If you want to see their downside for the merchant, just follow the comment thread.
I wound up calling in for a refund, which I got, albeit in “Groupon-bucks.”
There are lots of anecdotes about these sorts of things happening. I found it interesting that it happened on the only one I’d bought.
150 Million (Source: Engadget)
So I imagine, like me, many of you are buying your new iPhones today or at least waiting with bated breath for the New World of the iOS 4.0.
Last week, I followed the WWDC keynote, and despite all the gadget and gizmo talk, there was one thing that stuck in my head. In fact, it haunted me as nothing has since I first wrote the business plan for Pegasus News in 2004:
150 million credit cards on file from people using iTunes and/or the App Store (and now the iBooks Store). 150 Million.
As Steve Jobs said, “We have 150 million accounts — we think it’s the biggest on the web. We’re number one.”
Interestingly, he then segued into a discussion of iAds, but there was no connection.
As someone who has been obsessed with transactional ad models for the better part of this decade, this presented both a tragedy and an opportunity. That night, after mulling the problem while floating in the pool with the pups, I toddled inside and fired off an email to sjobs@apple.com: Read the rest of this entry »
Preso I gave yesterday to the faculty of The Schieffer School of Journalism at TCU and a couple weeks ago to the Texas Associated Press Managing Editors:
Occasionally I have an idea that I think is worthwile but that I have no clue how to execute. I’m going to start posting them here, free for the taking. All I ask is that you buy me a nice bottle of scotch if you strike it rich.
A couple weeks ago, I went to the Sweet-Sixteen / Elite Eight games in at Reliant Stadium in Houston to cheer on my beloved Blue Devils. It struck me that someone could create some value with a seat-swapper application.
I’m not talking about a marketplace for buying and selling tickets, but a mechanism to enable fans of a team to sit in closer proximity. In the Sweet Sixteen games you had people from four different teams more or less jumbled through the arena, save for a couple small sections for students. Then at the Elite Eight game, you had probably 40,000 Baylor fans with 5,000 Duke fans scattered across the arena.
I would have happily paid an additional fee to enable a seat shuffle such that I got seats roughly equivalent to what I had, pricewise, but in a cluster with other Duke folk.
Surely there is a way to programatically shuffle seats around while generally maintaining row and position. It’s a feature I think a lot of sports fans would pay for — and not unique to basketball playoffs. And it would make the stadium experience even better and more exciting. Read the rest of this entry »
For those who saw my talk at Ignite Dallas, here are the resource links I promised:
I took my Level 1 Improv class at Dallas Comedy House and am now in their Level 2 class. I wrote about my experience on Pegasus News. The story also includes a listing of other good improv programs around town. There is also a nascent community site: DFW Improv Forum.
For more on using improv in business, see The Applied Improvisation Network or Second City Communications. There was a recent article about the rise of improv in the workplace on CareerBuilder.
Info on London’s Yes And Club, which would be a cool idea in Dallas too.
Improv books:
The Second City book is better than Truth in Comedy, despite the latter’s pedigree. The Improv Handbook is next on my reading list.
For those who saw my talk at Ignite Dallas, here are the resource links I promised:
I took my Level 1 Improv class at Dallas Comedy House and am now in their Level 2 class. I wrote about my experience on Pegasus News. The story also includes a listing of other good improv programs around town. There is also a nascent community site: DFW Improv Forum.
For more on using improv in business, see The Applied Improvisation Network or Second City Communications. There was a recent article about the rise of improv in the workplace on CareerBuilder.
Info on London’s Yes And Club, which would be a cool idea in Dallas too.
Improv books:
The Second City book is better than Truth in Comedy, despite the latter’s pedigree. The Improv Handbook is next on my reading list.
It keeps getting smaller.
There’s a pissing match today among several InterWebs iconoclasts about Comscore‘s traffic counting methods and business models. Actually, to be more accurate, it’s a bunch of bitch-slapping about unrelated issues, but web traffic is the jumping-off point.
You can read it for yourself — be sure to follow the comment thread too, in which all the principals rebut. (Or, as one commenter deems it, “three poodles fighting over a piece of raw meat”).
But for me, the whole thing is sad because it reminds me of another “scandal” almost six years ago now. Several newspaper chains had been caught overstating their circulation. There was all sorts of hand-wringing over it, but in the midst of the mea culpas, I read one simple line in a column by Ed Wasserman that changed my way of thinking and in large part led me to create The Daily You as a major feature of Pegasus News:
“Still, there is an absurdity to the whole scam. Counting copies is a dopey way to gauge impact. The explosion of information channels necessarily means erosion of audience share held by dominant media. There is still nothing that can rivet the attention of a community the way its daily paper does.”
…
Lindsey Buckingham
While working my way through the New Year’s week, I watched a lot of concerts I’d recorded on TV, including Lindsey Buckingham’s HDNET show at Bass Hall a couple of years ago. There was one tune that hadn’t made an impression on me at the time — nor in repeated listenings to the album version. But when I heard Lindsey’s preamble this time it struck a chord. Without the backstory, you might think the song a downer. But as Lindsey described it, it was about how when you have many dreams, they’re never all going to come to fruition. That’s something to deal with, but nothing to mourn — the burial of those dreams makes room for others. Sometimes you need to put “cast away dreams” to rest in a celebratory fashion, even by dancing upon them. That’s something I’ve been thinking about lately, especially as I’m contributing to some efforts to provide support and inspiration to entrepreneurs on the rougher side of the adventure. Not every mission is a success — and that’s a good thing to be celebrated. Let’s dance: Read the rest of this entry »
If I’ve had a little extra bliss in recent weeks, it’s because I finally feel like I’ve mastered control of the ridiculous amounts of information I choose to and not to ingest on a daily basis. I Tweeted about it a while back and instantly got numerous responses from folks wanting to know the secret. I said:
16 yr working, 15 yr InterWebs/email, 7 yr smartphone, 5 yr RSS, 3 yr social networks – finally have info mgmt system that works for me.
First, some context. On average, I:
And somehow, I finally feel like I have control of it all. I trust my system and nothing seems to slip through the cracks.
Peter Krasilovsky continues to be inexplicably kind to me and has again included me on a panel for this year’s Interactive Local Media conference in LA. I’m on Friday morning (December 11) with Neil Budde of DailyMe (formerly of Yahoo! News):
9:30 am – 10:00 am
Personalization and Local
Personalization has been synonymous with “local” from day one—in theory. Recently, several cutting edge platforms make the tie more of a reality. We’ll get deep insight into how to make personalization/local work from two of the industry’s leading thinkers and doers—Internet media pioneer Neil Budde, the founding publisher of WSJ.com and leader of Yahoo News, and Mike Orren, the founder of Pegasus News.
Neil Budde, President and Chief Product Officer, DailyMe
Mike Orren, Founder and President, Pegasus News
Funny related story: We at Pegasus News have a flagship technology called “The Daily You.” The first conference I went to after we launched that, I randomly wound up sitting next to Eduardo Hauser, the founder of DailyMe. That was my first proof that this local behavioral thing had gone mainstream.
Also, as a speaker, it turns out I can offer you (my dear friend and loyal reader) a $200 registration discount for the conference. Just click the banner below to download the coupon:
ILM is consistently the best industry conference I attend. It’s no BS; the moderators don’t pull punches; and everybody in the room is a decision-maker who is doing something interesting. Hope to see you there.
If these trends continue, heeeyy...
I went on a mini-rant on Twitter last week that I thought I’d synthesize / clarify here: The media is ridiculously obsessed with identifying trends, particularly when those trends relate to media.
So every time someone sneezes, there are a flurry of trend stories opining that everyone will sneeze soon, presumably with the same intensity and viscosity as the sneezer immediately prior.
In the market space in which I presumably operate, there were great examples at both ends of the spectrum last week. My pals at Everyblock sold their company to MSNBC, and instantly, Hyperlocal is a Business Now. Seemingly moments later, the Washington Post shuttered its “hyperlocal” site for Loudon County, VA — and voila, Hyperlocal is Dead. My friend, Greg Sterling, quickly saw the fallacies flying.
It’s not just in the hyperlocal media space, though: It can be music websites; search engines; sellers of 12th century Tahitian antiquities — if a start-up in the space is born, dies, sells or raises a nickel of capital, a trend is born. Read the rest of this entry »
Clyde, in Alpha mode
This is the first in a (potential) series of posts in which I examine natural phenomena with perceived lessons for the business world. If I manage to string together more than a couple of these, I’ll circle back and address the premise that behaviors in nature should actually be taken as business advice. In the meantime, consider it a theme on which to hang a random thought I had o’er the weekend…
Most are familiar with the concept of a lead animal in a pack being “Alpha,” meaning that they are the natural and largely accepted leader of a group. In the business world, we call these people “boss,” “President,” “Head honcho,” etc. While the process of determining Alpha may differ in skyscrapers as opposed to Serengeti, the operational upshot is similar. Read the rest of this entry »
Whole Foods in Lakewood, Dallas
While doing the weekly-ish grocery shopping at the Lakewood Whole Foods this morning, I realized that I am totally over Central Market, which used to be my favorite grocer.
First, a bit of context: Because we live in an area of town where grocers fear to tread, we have to drive a minimum of five miles to get to anything north of a dollar store. And, as demi-foodies, we figure that if you’re going to drive, you might as well go to one of the better stores — and in this gerrymandered burg of dry areas, part of that relates to the ability to buy hooch. We never much cared for the Greenville Avenue Whole Foods, so until it moved to the new store in Lakewood, that meant a drive to the Central Market on Lovers.
At first I thought we were going to the new WF more often just out of laziness because it was closer. But during today’s shopping expedition, I realized that I really am enjoying the shopping experience more. Here’s why: Read the rest of this entry »
Yeah, you may have a great big battle station, but if you waste the opportunity to shore it up, a rebeliion's gonna come. (Image from The Daily Yeah.)
I’m going to resist the temptation to turn this post into a therapy session over the myriad problems I’ve had with AT&T over the past month. Specific situations will crop up organically in the descriptions below, but instead of a chronological chapter-and-verse story, I’m going to focus on the lessons I’ve learned about AT&T and its processes. Read the rest of this entry »
business, comments, journalism, news, notthatfreakinhard
Commentary on comment
In Bidness, Media on August 13, 2009 at 3:55 pmPatrick Thornton of BeatBlogging.org was doing a good job of bringing in best practices in a Twitter conversation that turned into a great article on Poynter today. As part of that, I sent him a lengthy missive on our comment practices that was way too much to fit in a roundup piece. So, for posterity, I thought I’d share it here: Read the rest of this entry »