business, Comedy, dallascomedyhouse, ignite, Improvisational theatre
In Bidness, PopCult, me, Me, ME! on March 3, 2010
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.
advertising, apocalypse, Audience measurement, Media, news, sales, Web traffic
In Bidness, Media on January 24, 2010
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.”
Read the rest of this entry »
dancing, Dreams, entrepreneur, failure, Lindsey Buckingham, success
In Bidness, Music, me, Me, ME! on January 6, 2010
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 »
calendar, gtd, informationoverload, iphone, mac, mail, socialnetworks, tools
In Bidness, Gadgets, Media, PopCult on December 6, 2009
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:
- Read and react to more than a thousand emails a week
- Send more than 300 emails a week
- Subscribe to a couple hundred RSS feeds, for around 400 posts per day
- Follow 700 Twitter users
- Manage four Twitter accounts
- Keep up with 350 Facebook friends
- Manage a Facebook page
- Have 15 meetings a week that have to be coordinated with other people
- Take 20 phone calls per week
- Have about a dozen topics that I feel like I have to be expert on at all times
- And run a large local website
And somehow, I finally feel like I have control of it all. I trust my system and nothing seems to slip through the cracks.
Read the rest of this entry »
conferences, coupon, ilm09, kelsey, local
In Bidness, Media, me, Me, ME! on October 19, 2009
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.
business, paloalto, peace, sanjose, Travel
In Bidness, me, Me, ME! on September 29, 2009
Ever have one of those unexpected flashbacks to a bad memory, so visceral that it gives you chills?
I just had one of those moments at the cab stand at Norman Y. Mineta San Jose Airport. In an instant I was transported back to March 19, 2007. I had scraped together the last fragment of credit our business had to fly to California for the Kelsey Drilling Down on Local Conference. I had used that excuse of proximity to bulldoze my way into some meetings with VC’s with whom I’d had promising phone conversations, but who couldn’t get too excited over a Texas start-up whose founder wasn’t standing in their office.
I got on the plane that day resolved that if I didn’t come back with at least five promising investment leads, I was going to shut the thing down and walk away. Four months past the launch of our flagship product, we were broke. Our angel investors had probably gone as far as they could. We were going to miss payroll from here forward. I spent equal time on the plane honing my pitch and making a shortlist of companies that might hire me the next week.
As I walked to the cabstand, where there was a considerable line, I turned my cellphone back on. Before I could even check for messages, it started ringing incessantly:
- Read the rest of this entry »
hyperlocal, journalism, local, start-ups, trends
In Bidness, Media on August 24, 2009
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 »
alpha, bonnieandclyde, dogs, natureofbusiness
In Bidness, Sailing on August 17, 2009
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 »
centralmarket, food, grocery, wholefoods
In Bidness, Locavore / locaholic on August 2, 2009
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 »
apple, at&t, business, customerservice, FAIL, getaclue, insincerity, iphone
In Bidness, Gadgets on June 29, 2009
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, 2009Patrick 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 »