Month: July 2006

Lost archives

I had dinner with Bob Carrigan, President of IDG Communications last night in Cary, NC. We caught up — Bob was my boss of bosses back in my brief IDG tenure at CXO last year — and he asked what I thought about AOL’s move to drop the garden walls and go free. Bob is ex-AOL and a keen follower of the company, so we got into a discussion about cost walls and ad inventory and eventually the discussion turned to Jason Calacanis’ move to revive the Netscape brand as a Digg-like news site.

This got me to thinking of old 1990s web brands and their potential for a second chance. Examples? Wired News getting reunited with Wired Mag after one of the dumber divorces in dot.com history. What about the archives of the Industry Standard? Matt McAllister at Yahoo — also ex-IDG, where he was the online GM at InfoWorld — and I talked years ago about reviving the Standard, which Matt managed. I was chatting with a colleague at lunch and recounted the famous “process is for people who step out of the shower to take a piss” line that I found in a great and hysterical column at the Standard in ’99. I’d love to link to it, but it is as if the entire archive has vanished, poof, into the dustbin.

Thanks to Bob for the iTunes gift of the Boston bluegrass band, Crooked Still. Bob is a mean banjo player, an instrument I flirted with in my youth but gave up due to incurable left-handedness.

The Department of Crimes against Humanity

Serving Budweiser as the official beer of the World Cup in the country known for the best beer on the planet. WTF? I’ve poured my share of Bud down my neck, but in Berlin? At the World Cup?

“”That can’t be,” complained Hermann Winkler, president of the state of Saxony Sports Federation, to the Sächsische Zeitung newspaper. “A lot of breweries support sports in Saxony, but the minute there’s a little money to be earned, they’re left standing out in the cold.”

However, Anheuser-Busch, maker of Budweiser and Michelob beers, appears to have scored a winning goal with this business deal. The U.S. multinational has tried for years to get a foothold in Germany, particularly with its Budweiser brand. But since that name is already taken in Europe by the original Czech Budweiser brand, the Americans have repeatedly hit a brick wall. That wall looks set to crumble in two years’ time.

Reinhard Zwanzig, who heads Saxony’s Brewers’ Federation, said the decision was regrettable, but he doesn’t think the American Budweiser is going to find many of its own fans among the soccer ones. Besides, he said aficionados should be concentrating on the game in the stadium, not the sudsy stuff.

“Afterwards, they’ll all go into town and toast the victors with the regional beer,” he said.

Making a spectacle

1:23 am in Berlin — Here’s the quick World Cup report with apologies to the conventions of structure and story telling as I have a 10 am flight out of here and need to sleep.

  • The World Cup is indeed the greatest sporting spectacle on earth. 1 billion people watched it on television. 69,000 were fortunate enough to see it in the Olympic stadium. I come from a sports-obsessed town (Boston) and nothing came close to this spectacle.
  • I was one of those 69,000 and can only say one thing tops it for me and that was winning the club championships of the Cotuit Mosquito Yacht Club at the age of 15. But I digress….
  • France should have won. The came out in the second-half in control and played masterfully after a back-and-forth game in the first 45 minutes. Zidane knocked in a penalty shot, but Matarazzi answered and the score stayed tied for regulation time before going into an extra half-hour.
  • Zidane seemed to get an undeserved red card and got bounced out of the game at minute 110. The crowd turned solidly against the Italians after that injustice and the place was one big booing whistle every time the Italians took possession. I recall that wars have been started over soccer matches, and for the finale, the “beautiful game” turned ugly.
  • When I saw the highlight film and discovered what it was that Zidane did to get the heave-ho, I agreed with the ref wholeheartedly. What a sad way to end an career.
  • The best part was watching the sea of French fans on one end of the stadium and the Italians on the other. They were astonishing. Songs. National anthems. They put the fan into fanatic.
  • I love sports without instant replay.
  • Jerry Yang is a face painter.

  • Soccer will never take off in the U.S. until the U.S. develops its first superstar. The game is way too slow for the average fan accustomed to the scoring frenzies of the NBA or the brute horsepower of the NFL. See the recent piece in the New Yorker for a better explanation of why the U.S. is an island in a global sea of Fussball. Plus, we wouldn’t put on Placido Domingo for our half-time show.
  • It was weird being in that stadium. I looked down at the track and thought of Jesse Owens.
  • Why did I keep thinking about how Hunter S. Thompson would have covered this?
  • Penalty kick endings are amazing. The entire crowd was holding its breath. I can only imagine the scenes in the bars and tavernas of France and Italy tonight. People must be rioting in the streets of Rome.


That’s it for now. Thanks to Yahoo! for the amazing opportunity to attend. Photo stream is here.

Apologies to IE (l)users

It appears this blog is completely befukticated in IE, as I discovered reading it in the Yahoo World Cup Lounge. All the sidebar nav is at the bottom instead of adjacent to the posts. Life is too short to fix. So please switch to Firefox. (Just kidding, I know the K2 forums are peppered with similar complaints, perhaps a fix is waiting for me implement.

T minus one hour before the big game. I just was handed my ticket and told it had a street value of 7,000 euros! Whoa. I could get a very nice new bike for that kind of change …. but it would be wrong. Seven thousand euros …. Do SuperBowl tickets scalp at that level? Insane.

Will post game photos late tonight, early evening EST.

Madness in Berlin – Germany 3 Portugal 1

No sleep for a while tonight. Berlin is one big honking car horn wrapped in red, orange and black. I’m glad for the Germans, they deserve something to celebrate and celebrating they are. The area around the hotel is choked with street parties. I’ve seen San Francisco after the 49ers won a SuperBowl, Boston after the World Series, Celtics, Patriots and Bruins — but nothing compares to this. I can only imagine the scene at the Brandenberg Gate where an estimated 1 million showed up to watch the game on the Jumbotrons. Tomorrow night should be an epic party.
Had dinner at an amazing exotic car “museum” where everything was for sale. Some serious four-wheeled bling. Got to meet Jerry Yang, co-founder of Yahoo, which was nice.

My favorite car was this three-wheeled Messerschmitt. There was a can of oil in the door pocket, leading me to believe it was a two-stroke.

The bus back to the hotel from the dinner got completely grid-locked in the post-game insanity. Finally the driver gave up and let us walk.

World Cup Fan Fest – Day II

I completely overslept this morning, crawling out of bed at 10:30 and feeling so absolutely guilt-stricken that I compulsively cleaned the room and myself before skulking into the lounge for a double espresso and some advice from the Yahoo hostesses on how to best punish myself with a march around Berlin. They handed me a better map than the one I had, told me my aspiration of making it to the Brandenberg Gate was insane, and suggested I secure the services of a tour bus instead.

Bah, real men walk. So I packed a couple bottles of Evian (naive backwards) in my backpack and trooped out into the sunshine looking for Berlin.

I found it.

This is a sad city I think, the first I’ve been to that was the scene of so much misery such a relatively short time ago. The Kaiser Wilhelm Gedachtniskirche on Kurfurstenstrasse is a shocker — preserved in its bombed sadness, steeple truncated — in the midst of so many wurst and beer tent and partying World Cuppers.

I tried to get into the Tiergarten, the “Central Park” of Berlin through the Zoologischer Garden, but balked at the 12 euro admission, being down on caged animals as a matter of principle. I walked into the park off of a canal and crossed into a dark, dank forest that was all the danker from last night’s and this morning’s thunderstorms. I expected to get relieved of my wallet at every bush, the canals were brown and stagnant, the squirrels surly and red. I nearly wiped out in a mud puddle, but recovered nicely and continued marching through the amazonian glades and glens until I came out on a massive boulevard that had been blocked off to traffic. Down that I walked, thinking thoughts of Nazi rallies that doubtlessly once rolled down the same massive avenue in some show of force (I do wish I had Thomas Wolfe’s “You Can’t Go Home Again” so I could quote his excellent descriptions of pre-war Berlin). That avenue lead to an impressive monument, the Siegessaule, which I rounded to find another blocked off avenue filled with people, bier gardens, ferris wheels, and all sorts of branded fun — Fan Fest.

After being patted down and having my knapsack searched I walked through the Germanic equivalent of the parking lot outside of a Grateful Dead show, only substitute half-meter sausages for falafel and steins of beer for nitrous oxide balloons. Tons and tons of souveniers — it seems the big thing in soccer is a scarf. Nevermind the temperatures were around 95 degrees today — scarves and national flags worn as sarongs are the fashion statement to make.

At the end of Fan Fest was the Brandenberg Gate, obscured by a gigantic Jumbotron and doubtlessly the place to be on Sunday night during the finals if one doesn’t have a ticket to the real deal. The place was lightly crowded at 1 in the afternoon — the only language I overheard was German, and there were some good scenes of quasi-hooliganism consisting of packs of drunks dressed in German flags singing that weird soccer song that all soccer fans like to sing, a song I think has no lyrics, but is a guttural bellowing noise.

The music system was blaring what seemed to be Bob Marley’s “Jammin'” (I won’t attempt to quote the lyrics, but the version I head today seemed to say, in Deutsch “We’re German. We’re German. We hope you like Germans too …” This was bad craziness, so I ducked behind the gate and crossed into the former East Belin, and immediately felt all cold-warlike and wondered where Checkpoint Charlie and the Freedom Bridge and all those relics of my youthful fears of imminent nuclear annihilation had gone.

I made it to the banks of the river Spree and strolled back, feeling starved and in need of fluid. Back into the park, past some hunting statues and to a biergarten off of Lichtenstein Allee where I realized I spoke my first words of the day, in German, which were, in translation:

“Excuse me. My german isn’t very good. Do you speak English?”

“Yes.”

“Ein bier, bitte.”

So I drank a beer, on an empty stomach, which turned me into an utter noodle in even more need of a sausage. So out of the park, back to the city, and I walk by a beer stand showing the Tour de France time trial to Rennes on a big flat panel. “Must watch cycling,” so I bought another beer and watched the time trial for half an hour before deciding I truly must eat or suffer the consequences. I found a Germanic looking cafe, ordered Berliner soup — potato soup with bacon — and the kase/cheese platter, revived myself, and came back to the hotel for the end of the TdF time trial, some photo uploading to Flickr (Berlin collection here ) and a little blogging.

More tomorrow. And as for soccer, what I know about soccer comes from playing goalie in high school — an adventure that ended when I dove headlong into a goal post, rendering me silly. I strongly recommend Luca Penati’s World Cup Blog (I know Luca from Ogilvy PR), Fuorigioco.

My cycling buddy Marta is racing up this tomorrow …

Washburn Gallery

Good luck to Marta on her ride in “Newton’s Revenge” up New Hampshire’s Mount Washington. The photo is by one of my heroes, Brad Washburn, mountain cartographer (he did the definitive maps of the Alps, the Himalayas, and the White Mountains), photographer, and naturalist.

This ride Marta is doing is an adjunct to the famous “Mount Washington Hill Climb” purportedly the toughest cycling climb. Period. This is where Tyler Hamilton made his name, and the new kid on Lance’s team, Tom Danielson made his. 7.2 miles of nothing but grueling uphill. Marta is shooting for a time under an hour and a half.

Update: Marta made it up the hill a little over an hour and half – Said she had the wrong gearing for the ascent and that is was too “easy”

In Berlin

I loaded my phone with a SIM card, so the number for the next few days is +49-151-59062305. I’ve been Skyping back to the States to keep charges on the 10 Euro card to a minimum, but if you need me, ring that number.

Easy flight on Air France, made my connection at Charles DeGaulle with plenty of time to spare, and landed in Berlin around 9 am. Yahoo has taken over the Hotel Concorde on Kurfustendamm and after getting badged and tagged, I hung out in their hospitality lounge and did email off of their wi-fi before finding a T-Mobile store for the SIM. It was too hot to do any serious hiking around the city, so I did a few passes around the immediate vicinity, got a feel for the neighborhood, then turned into a hotel rat and did Skype and email all day while watching the Tour de France with the sound turned off. Even in German (which I can barely understand), the Tour is better covered in Europe than in the States, where OLN seems to believe that no cyclist should be shown for more than eight seconds. Here it is just hours of French scenery and 150 skinny guys pedaling for all they are worth.

Just when I roused myself to get some fresh air and resist the urge to nap off the jet lag, a big thunderstorm rolled through the city. Perhaps after dinner.

Tomorrow I’ll check out Tiergarten and the Schlosspark for a stroll by the River Spree and then see the big tourista sights like the Brandenberg Gate and the former Wall. Very, very weird to be in a city so identified with the horrors of war. Tom Peters points to A Woman In Berlin which I will attempt to track down in English translation tonight after my next conference call.

Yahoo has some Trabants parked out front. Wonder if I can take one for a spin to see if they really are the worst car ever built?

Off to Yerp – Where the history comes from

So, shutting down the laptop and getting ready for the ride to Boston for a 5:30 pm flight to Berlin for the World Cup Finals. Dang I’m lucky!

Plane reading will be Don DeLillo’s White Noise and Conrad’s Nostromo. iPod is loaded with Tour de France podcasts so I can catch up on the first six days’ action. Also some Gillmor Gang in case I need to fall asleep or learn something from the most awesomely smart Jon Udell.

Paris by 7 am, tight connection to Berlin, and then off to explore, camera in hand. Any shameless tourism tips for Berlin would be most appreciated. I’ve never been before — having confined my Germanic travels to Frankfurt and Munich with a day trip into the Black Forest once upon a time.

The game is Sunday evening … so I’ll have lots and lots of time on my hands. I tried to change flights to get there on game day, but alas, everything is booked solid. Back to the States on Monday, into RTP on Monday night for a week in the office.

I will try to light up my new Lenovo smart phone with a SIM card in Berlin and will post that number once I know it. Till then ….