Guess who got a scanner today? This is Thomas Chatfield sometime in the early 20th Century (he passed away in July, 1922) in the dining room at Cotuit. The desk, known as a secretary, is still in use and bears his bootmarks on the desktop.
More photos to come.
I introduced my son to Sally’s Apizza in New Haven last night. This is, according to many pizza freaks, the best pizza on the planet, one of those subjective designations that will spark many a debate among food geeks and their sub-genus, pizza geeks, for the rest of time.
If you check out the wikipedia entry on Pizza, you will see that Sally’s and its Wooster Street neighbor, Frank Pepe’s, are not the original pizza parlors in America, but, being in operation since the 1920s and 30s, among the earliest in the nation. Sally’s followed Pepe’s — Sal Consiglio was a nephew of Pepe and started a dozen years later.
I prefer Sally’s because they burn the crust — black lips and fingers are the sign of a Sally’s dining experience — and the carbon-enhanced taste, while hard to imagine as a positive, is indeed the signature of a Sally’s pie. I also prefer Sally’s because it’s the place where my New Haven pizza experience began in 1977, with a bunch of classmate, crowded into the same booth. The large cheese pie came out on a big paper-lined pan — no plates — and the instant I bit into the first slice I was able to declare: “This is the best f—ing pizza I have ever eaten.” The hour-long lines one usually has to endure is testament to this fact.
We lucked out last night — we breezed right into a booth, no wait, probably because Yale is finished for the year and there aren’t any hungry students contending for seats.
We started with a medium pepperoni apizza (it’s “apizza” in New Haven and you have to specify mozzarella else you get a crust with tomato sauce), moved onto a classic cheese, an ordered another pepperoni to go. My son the skeptic, who told me the build up was a bit excessive on my part, agreed, one second into his first, bite, that it was indeed “the best f—ing pizza” in the world. When we arrived in Cotuit at 11 pm with the cold pie you’d of thought we were bringing the rarest delicacy in the world home with us.
As of 8 this morning the pie was gone, the victim of a cold pizza breakfast. (apologies for the sucky cameraphone pic)
BBC NEWS | Asia-Pacific | Site launches ‘Chinese Wikipedia’
Baidu launches a Chinese “Wikipedia.” The original is inaccessible in country.
Genuine VC: The Simple Online Inventory Equation
Great post by David Beisel at Masthead on online advertising and the transformation of CPM to “cost per reaching the right customer.” Developing this efficiency is not going to be fun, but expect the behavioral targeters like Tacoda to lead the charge. Online advertising is beginning to walk upright from its old posture of crawling on all fours and measuring CPM, CPC and other blunt “stupid” measures.
“The beauty of the interactive medium is the ability to more effectively target the right consumer for the advertiser’s message. Whether advertisers realize it or not, the right metric to view media buys isn’t CPM, but rather effective cost per reaching the right target customer. And while television and print advertisers have striven towards improving this measure though demo- and geo- targeted buys, the interactive medium allows for much more granular targeting. Witness e-mail marketing, contextual CPC campaigns, and search. Now with behaviorally-targeted networks like Tacoda, advertisers can reach consumers with even more precision (e.g. demonstrated car buyers who are surfing ROS news, weather, or sports pages). So while publishers are earning higher CPMs for their pages (thus raising the weighted-average CPM on the ‘net), the technology allows advertisers to more effectively reach who they want, which is the true goal in the first place.”
First look: Foldera shows great promise by ZDNet‘s Marc Orchant —
“I had an opportunity recently to get a first-hand look at Foldera in an online demo with founder and CEO Richard Lusk. For those of you unfamiliar with the as-yet-to-be-released online application, Foldera is an AJAX-rich information manager that combines e-mail, instant messaging, a calendar, task management, and a document repository to produce a browser-accessible collaboration space.”
Good first-look review of Foldera, the hot web-based collaboration tool I’ve been advising since 2003. As the product moves into beta and people start banging on it, I expect there will be a big uptake as people begin to challenge their preconceptions formed by a lifetime of bad personal information managers and clients such as Outlook and Notes.
Slice is a great pizza blog that has been in my blogroll for two months:
I’m a major pizza binge lately; both eating and cooking it. Trying to hit the best of the best and this blog tracks them. Going to college in New Haven spoiled me with Frank Pepe’s and Sally’s. Proximity to NYC, Providence and Boston’s Pizzaria Regina and Santarpios has me looking for more real temples to pie.
China Tech Stories: Summary of Search Market in China
Interesting report at China Tech Stories of tech.163.com’s report on the state of search in China. This graph shows — in green — Baidu’s current domination, but Google is coming on strong, contradicting the anecdotal trashing the company received at the hands of the Chinese users I spoke with last month in Beijing.
Google is even better when it comes to monetizing search. Maoxianjia’s analysis:
“First, Baidu has gained commanding lead in both usage and popularity reach. However, Baidu’s monetization on search is still very limited.
“Secondly, the data pretty much prove Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s remark that the China market is up for grabs. In such a short time, from Aug to Dec. 2005, Google has grabbed 14.4% of the market share in revenues in China which is quite remarkable.”
And in related China internet news, some squawking over the Chinese character domains — the censorship crowd is crying manipulation of traffic — me, it seems logical that you’d have domain names in the same character set as the users, no? Separate issue from who issues and controls the domains.
And finally, read somewhere yesterday that some pundit is predicting 60 million Chinese blogs within a year.
Sort of a rhetorical question, but this comes down to answering the age-old question asked by senior management everywhere: what are the key performance indicators that should be applied to a corporate blog to determine its success, failure, or general indifference from the audience?
I took a crack. There is the obvious “gross tonnage” statistics of visits to the blog itself, then there are RSS hits — filtering out the crawlers of course — and then there is the rankings — Technorati, etc. …
What else should and could be enumerated? Number of post comments? In-bound links? Bloglines subscriptions? Happy comments vs. angry comments? Google juice?
I need to dig more into blog metrics/analytics. It’s one thing to monitor external blog activity around a brand, but another to measure activity on one’s own blog. And again, I mean more than the old “hit” crap.
I did find some qualitative measures by Jeremiah Owyang from last November and I am too lazy to go dig out my copy of Naked Conversations to see what Scoble and Israel recommend — gauging from the b—h slapping they got from Amazon’s CTO earlier this spring, I don’t think they had an answer at the tip of their tongues either.
