October 24th, 2007, No Comments »
James Mirtle points to this story in the Washington Times about the Washington Capitals’ aggressive blogger relations program. The team has struggled on the ice, and that’s been reflected in poor attendance over the past few years (holy crap–you can see six games for as little as US $99). In the face of diminishing coverage from the mainstream media, they’ve been inviting bloggers into the press box:
“I was watching the traditional coverage, both broadcast and print, and was remarkably underwhelmed,” Keeley said of his decision to begin blogging last year. “The first thing I wrote was a general sense of being frustrated — well, really more than frustrated. Really angry. I started from this premise that Washington is not a sports town, but there’s nothing innate that says it can’t be. But the old media don’t do anything to change that perception. In fact, they perpetuate, in my opinion. So we started this blog, the idea that if you’re interested in hockey and want more coverage, come here.”
Capitals owner and AOL magnate Ted Leonsis is really drinking the Koolaid. He’s got his own blog, and posted a thoughtful response to the article yesterday:
Also, I do question some of the mainstream media and its programming choices and how it creates self-fulfilling prophecies in how it allocates its dwindling resources on some matters and ignores others. I also wonder - if you are programming one traditional way and you are shrinking, then why don’t you try something different? What do you have to lose as an enterprise if what you are doing today isn’t working? Embrace change. The NHL has and so have the Washington Capitals. Change is good.
Few CEOs blog, and fewer still would include an emoticon in their post. I’ll forgive him that idiosyncrasy, but I can’t forgive him for not accurately citing the Great One’s most famous quote (or, possibly, the Great One’s dad).
I hope the Caps get better. I saw them play Vancouver last year, and Alexander Ovechkin was an incredible joy to watch. He reminded me of a bigger Pavel Bure. Plus their new uniforms are definitely an improvement.
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June 11th, 2007, 11 Comments »
That’s the agonized scream of half a million web designers around the globe. Why? Because Apple just added another browser plus operating system combination to their test suite.
I’ll let the trouser-rubbing Apple cultists distill the rest of the keynote news, but I read about this on Digg and needed to get my underwhelmed two cents in.
Like iTunes and Quicktime, this is clearly another probing attack into vast Windows frontier. As more and more applications move from the desktop to the Web, the browser becomes the operating system, the ‘last mile’ where users spend more and more of their time.
So, Apple’s move makes sense for the company, but it’s going to be a pain in the ass for everybody building applications for the web. Assuming Safari gets a toe hold on Windows machines, isn’t this going to cost the industry literally thousands of extra hours of compatability testing? Hopefully people won’t switch browsers, they’ll switch operating systems.
Apple’s messaging on the Safari beta page is telling. There’s no killer app here, no “better by a factor of ten” differentiator. It’s just another browser, with bar graphs claiming somewhat better performance. The message: “we’ve got the same features as the browsers you know, and we’re slightly faster”. This move feels about two years too late.
11 Comments »
April 30th, 2007, 4 Comments »
Dear Dopplr,
I just read about you on Tara Hunt’s blog (the screenshot was the kicker), and you sound cool. As somebody who travels a lot and is smoking the Web 2.0 devilgrass, I think your service might come in really handy.
Unfortunately, I hear you’re being really frugal with your invitations. What’s with that? Exclusivity is so Orkut, and inclusiveness is the new black. Throw those doors wide open, and let the masses come piling in. If that happens, it’ll be a nice problem to have. If not, then just send me an invitation because I want to become a passionate user of Dopplr.
Your Webby Friend,
Darren Barefoot
4 Comments »
April 29th, 2007, 13 Comments »
For the past couple of months, everybody’s been remarking on the crazy adoption of Facebook. It’s like all those MySpace kids graduated from high school, went off to college, and out-grew the social network that looks like their bedroom.
Out of a growing sense of obligation, I joined Facebook a couple of weeks ago (my meagre profile). Since then, I’ve received about 30 friend requests from people who found me. What surprised me about these was that a decent portion of them weren’t necessarily Web 2.0, alpha Web users, drinking-the-Koolaid folks. Some of them are just regular people using a tool they apparently like.
I’d deferred those requests until tonight, which was a mistake. There’s no apparent way to approve friends in bulk (what an odd phrase). You have to affirm each request one at a time.
Here’s the difficulty I have with all these generic social networks. I don’t want them to be my central point of presence–that’s what I’ve got this site for. I’m happy to have a network of loosely-joined small pieces (Flickr, YouTube, LinkedIn, Last.fm and so forth). However, I want them to orbit the planet that is darrenbarefoot.com, not http://www.facebook.com/p/Darren_Barefoot/570290599.
Essentially, I want sites like Facebook to be big detour signs pointing to this site. That’s obviously not what the makers of Facebook intended, so it’s a bit tricky.
Regardless, mine is an outlying use case. Most Facebook users probably want it to be their central node of web presence or (an awkward but apt phrase) ‘digital lifestyle aggregator’.
Alex has some more extensive and insightful things to say about the social networking tool du jour.
13 Comments »
March 19th, 2007, 6 Comments »
The tech world is all excited about Twitter. I’ve managed to avoid the rage thus far, and am not very interested in hopping on board this particular train. I like what Kathy Sierra has to say about Twitter, and how we’ve possibly crossed a kind of attention event horizon.
Chris Pirillo solicited and recorded some reader feedback (MP3), which includes a mini-rant from me (just after the halfway mark, more or less) about the pridefulness of blogging, and the sheer hubris of Twitter.
Listening to it again, I sound like a Twitter hater, when really I’m currently Twitter ambiguous:
Twitter, it seems to me, is hubris of the highest order. Why would I think that anybody, even my friends and family, would want to read an unedited stream of the pitiful minutiae of my life? Isn’t that self-indulgence on a grand scale?
Beth has also gathered a bunch of opinions on Twitter, and its potential applications for non-profits.
Twitter is a Performance Medium
Today Tara Hunt drew some erudite connections between Twitter, Virginia Woolf and Shakespeare:
Many stories have been lost over the centuries because of assumptions, narrow ideals of what ‘genius’ is, and the very fact that ‘genius’, a relative term defined by a few, is the yard stick for recorded history.
She makes the case that a history of person’s Twitters is an important historical record. Kathy replies in the comments of Tara’s post, and Tara replies to that. They’re way more articulate than me, so go over there and read their debate. Regardless of whether or not we’ll ever have the technology to meaningfully sort through a lifetime of Twitter history, I do wonder whether we’ll have the brain capacity or interest to mull over the content.
The other aspect of Twitter that I haven’t seen discussed is that (like blogs) it’s not a diary, it’s a performance medium. We’re not recording our thoughts and feelings. We’re broadcasting the thoughts and feelings for others to hear. That’s a profound difference, and certainly changes the context for a schwack of historical Twitter data.
Shakespeare on Twitter
Tara’s post got me thinking about how that old dog Bill Shakespeare might have used Twitter:
4:47pm
Drinking Mead. Sweet, sweet mead.
5:03pm
Cavorting with maiden.
5:16pm
Methinks she doth protest too much.
5:34pm
Bollocks. Struck out with maiden.
6:01pm
Sketching out ending to R & J. Totally lifted ending from that cheeky Brooke.
6:03pm
Screw the sodding play. Checking out mop boy.
7:10pm
Making the beast with two back with the mop boy.
7:12pm
Done. Feeling guilty about Anne back in Stratford.
In truth, that’s one guy’s Twitter history that I’d really like to read.
6 Comments »
March 19th, 2007, 1 Comment »
Over at Work Industries, Monique has started Underwire, “full support for non-techies”:
Are you a non-techie in need of support?
Join Underwire and receive a free monthly newsletter:
- Keep up-to-date with what’s happening online
- Write better copy for your company website or blog
- Efficiently manage email newsletters
- Learn best practices for online marketing and publicity
- And get non-tech answers to your tech questions
Monique has the technical and writing chops to make such a newsletter work great. The inaugural issue offers a guide to understanding web stats, defines ning.com and invites you to send in your tech quandaries.
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