Borgy101 – Nothing to see here.
Todd Borglund, the acerbic wit of CXO Media, and manager of production services, has launched a blog. When we were trialing a new blog system at CXO in the 4th quarter, the Borgy Blog was a personal favorite, but since it was hidden in a sandbox, the world was spared such great posts as the guy who sued Home Depot because some glued his butt to a toilet seat.
So Cousin Pete text messaged the call to clamming this coming weekend, and so I texted back “Weather?” not really being of the mind to dig through the ice before digging in the mud. “60s” came the reply, so I’m in and this is what we will do.
1. Check the tides. An hour on each side of low tide is the time to be clamming. Low tide is late in the afternoon on Saturday, so that gives me the morning to put the boat battery on a trickle charger and to think about repacking the bearings on the trailer (the big procrastination point for me every spring).
2. Renew the clam license. It expired on March 1. This needs to happen Friday and I might as well renew my mooring permits at the same time, at the same office.
3. Buy beer.
4. Buy gas.
5. Launch the boat.
6. Shake the spiders out of my waders. Put them on, look like the Michelin Man.
7. Drive the boat to the secret clam flat.
8. Dig clams.
9. Return home, open the clams (while wife protests that I am making a mess out of the sink), fry them, stuff them, make Clams Casio out them. All while drinking more beer.
10. Eat clams.
In some circles of interactive marketing, there is an unhealthy obsession with the term “viral.” Essentially it is a synonym for cheap in my opinion, and completely misunderstood unless one takes it with the same rough definition that you’ll know it when you see it.
There’s pedestrian viral — the stuff that clogs your inbox from your brother-in-law. Today’s meme is the crazed guy in Brooklyn ranting about Starbucks into his webcam and dropping F-bombs every other word. Okay, sixty second video rant, delivered to me via video is not viral. The second time it gets forwarded to me, like the Numa Numa guy, the Star Wars Kid, or the Car-Sunroof-That-Decapitates-Cats, then it is a phenomenon, but is it “viral?”
Then there’s overcooked viral — the dumb crap that some ad agency bakes for a client and then buys advertising to promote. I won’t cite any examples because I don’t know any.
Let’s first look at the attributes of Internet viral.
1. It is spread by email. Mostly. Blogs can spread it too. Slashdot, Boing-Boing, they are the mass media of the medium.
2. It is generally video. Four year-olds shooting M-60s, Seth Godin at Google, the aforementioned ads. Text viral is stuff like the Darwin Awards or urban myth stuff. Jokes are not viral.
3. It is rarely a game. Viral games … I remember an animated quiz that asked guys to select which urinal they would use under several situations. A plastic surgeon friend was quite taken by a “Real or Fake” quiz (which I kicked his professional butt at).
4. Viral is often pornographic, involves obese people, and makes fun of rednecks.
5. Animation can go viral. Jib-jab, etc. and indeed is very viral when done right. PPS — or powerpoint slideshows are viral too. Paul Allen’s MegaYacht hit my inbox a lot. The Engrish Powerpoint was big in January. The world’s biggest piece of construction equipment. That British music cartoon hit thing around Christmas about the kid riding in his father’s “JCB”
6. The best product viral was the Subservient Chicken — and that proves the other attribute of viral, it must carry a high dementia factor. Burger King rules at dementia. I think I saw the Subservient Chicken get ridden in a rodeo last night on the tube, but the killer part of the ad was the set up so the singers could shout “Buckin’ Chicken” at the end. That will make anybody look up from the newspaper.
I worry that he who sets out to be viral is as doomed as a geek who sets out to be cool, or a bore who works at being funny. I regard good viral as a stubbed-toe opportunity. You go “aha!” and if you’re lucky it will pyramid faster than a get rich scheme in Albania.
cmurray.org » The Content Management Gap – Part II
Chris Murray throws down the challenge — why isn’t there a mid-tier CMS solution between the realm of opensource and the heights of enterprise CMS?
I say there needs to be an ASP model. There’s no justification for a company to consider CMS management a strategic IT investment. For those who do, they build their own and tune it to their model. For them’s that don’t, they need to treat it as a utility.
Stowe Boyd blogs on Foldera’s presentation at ETech, focusing on CEO Richard Lusk’s success in working Blogistan to build 1 million indications of interest in Foldera’s collaboration tool.
[usual disclosure, I sit on Foldera’s advisory board and hold shares]
Modern Mechanix » Camera Records “Eye Interest” of Reader for Items on Page
Next time a web usability bore starts droning on about the “Golden Triangle” and “Eye-Tracking” pull this baby out of your del.icio.us bookmarks.
Thomas Wolfe – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
My reading levels are at all time highs thanks to lonely-man evenings in the Triangle de Research, and having burnt out on CSS for Head Wound Victims, and being thoroughly disgusted by my genetic inability to learn Chinese in a week, I have been reverting to literature, specifically, being in Rome, southern literature.
At the Raleigh airport last week, on my way back to the land of ice and snow, I visited the little-book-store-that-could by the US Air gates, where the lady is extra-nice and complimentary about my book taste, and bought, against my better judgment, a fat volume of Thomas Wolfe’s You Can’t Go Home Again. This is a re-read. I loved the book in college when I was tuning my mental piano before writing my first execrable novel: Parallel Roundings. Wolfe is the Jack Kerouac of the Southern Depression, a UNC grad and Asheville native. I’m loving the book — great breathless purple prose and the kind of social nastiness that Sinclair Lewis was so great at.
Best Southern author in my mind (and shut up Faulkner fans) is Barry Hannah. Geronimo Rex remains the funniest book I have ever read.
Should Your Boss Be Blogging? – Forbes.com
Anil Dash at Forbes.com:
“If you’re an online retailer, there’s truth to the fact that blogging drives traffic. But if you’re another kind of company, the real return on investment comes from simple scenarios: You can collect community feedback, but surveys can be expensive and time-wasting; the expense associated with getting 100 comments back can be great. But with a blog, you can do it in 24 hours. You can also measure the success of delivering information. There’s an expense associated with e-mail that gets lost via spam filters or bounced-back. With a blog, you can insure delivery and then track metrics to see who read the information and clicked through. That’s a quantifiable improvement over the communication tools most companies are using today.”
I said to keep an eye on this story last week as an example of how a company can get Kryptonited (remember when the Kryptonite bike lock could be picked with a plastic pen and the company pulled an ostrich before issuing a recall?). Well, here’s the backstory. Boing-Boing readers (very popular group blog) started to notice they couldn’t get to the blog in certain Arab countries and Fortune 500 companies. The reason was some software, usually installed by clueless CIOs and IT departments, which blocks websites that display images of naked people. Seems Boing-Boing reviewed a coffee-table book about old men’s magazines and ran a thumbnail image of the cover, which, if you really, really squinted, would reveal some nudity.
Well, Secure Computing, the company that makes the software which blocks the websites, which annoys the users and sends the editors of Boing-Boing into fits, is now getting flamed royally.
Sunday New York Times last weekend gave prominent play to the incident:
“But a look back reveals that the January entry made reference to two new books from the graphic design imprint Taschen. Yes, the books are about adult magazines, but they are history books. And as for the thumbnail-size image that appeared alongside the original post, well, if you have to squint, is it really smut?
But that did not appear to be Secure Computing’s concern. According to the company’s definition, the Nudity classification applies to sites containing “nonpornographic images of the bare human body. Classic sculpture and paintings, artistic nude photographs, some naturism pictures and detailed medical illustrations” are included.
“We classify Internet content into over 73 different categories so that customers can chose, by category, what types of Web content they want available to their organization,” the company’s chief executive, John E. McNulty, said in an e-mailed statement, adding that Secure Computing “has no control over, or visibility into, how an organization implements their filtering policy.”
Then NPR had the story yesterday. Meanwhile, the editors at Boing Boing continue to hammer at the company, but the company ….
Go to the website and there’s nary a word. Not a peep. You can almost see the executive team hiding out, looking at the Times and listening to NPR, wondering, “what can we say to make this go away?”
E-mailed statements are worse than saying nothing at all.
