Month: September 2006

Build a Sundae – Online Co-Creation

John Bell at Ogilvy points at this build-an-ice-cream-sundae app at Friendlys.com. This is a chain of restaurants that started in Massachusetts but has gone semi-national. Anyway, I spent some time building an ice-cream sundae, named it the “Cape Cod Catastrophe”, gave way too much personal information, and moved on.

Is this a harbinger of customer creation tools? Design-a-laptop? I dunno, but John and I are working a cool project to figure it out. The man to check out on the topic is Navi Radjou at Forrester. Back in the days when Jimmy Guterman was editing the now defunct Forrester Magazine I did a feature on “innovation networks” based on Radjou’s research. I think his time has come.

Tom Freston gets sacked for not getting the Internet joke

I guess there is some moral to the story to the news that octagenarian boss Sumner Redstone gave Viacom CEO Tom Freston the heave-ho for not moving aggressively enough into the Internet. Sheesh. Take any media company (with the exception of News Corp. which is blessed with Fox Interactive chief Ross Levinsohn) and you’ll see an org chart still dominated by dodos who don’t get the online joke.

I don’t think Freston, per se, was anti-Internet. Heck, MTV.com has done great work in that regard but got its ass handed to it by AOL during that big charity concert a year or so ago. But now it’s Bubble 2.0 time and corporate boards are demanding that their executives be on the acquisiton prowl for social network plays, tagged content services, and rich media sites.

There are days when I really miss the big online media game, but for the time being I need to sharpen my chops on the buyside — going back into production would be a step backwards — before yearning for the biz dev end of the business.

Winter projects under consideration

Okay, I have a book to write (two actually) and tuitions to pay. But I’m looking for some weekend projects to keep me sane over the next eight months. Three come to mind, all are nautical in nature, all require some new skills to be learned.

1. A strip built kayak. I want to build a cedar strip kayak using the WEST epoxy system. This has been proposed before to Mrs. Churbuck with a negative reaction. This will tax the patience of my woodworking capable friends, whose tools I will need to borrow. Plus — the final product is pretty. Minus — time, cost, smell, and space.

2. New spars and rudder for my Cotuit Skiffs. I need two new masts, new gaffs and new booms. Good buddy Dr. Del Vecchio has some experience here. This involves gluing long strips of spruce together and then planing it down into a nice round spar. Upside — seems simple. Downside, time, expense, lack of woodworking expertise.

3. Rebuild an old Churbuck Cotuit Skiff.

I have an offer from the Lowell family to take #28 and rebuild it. This is a massive, multi-year job. Pros: my grandfather built it. Cons: I have no idea what I am doing. As Cousin Pete says, “A Churbuck with a tool in his hand is a dangerous thing.”

Here’s the boat in question. I will go visit it on Friday. So many things to do, so little time. I can’t wait until I can retire.

Standardization of Publishing Platforms

SPECIAL: “Winning Online” — A Manifesto

Mark Cahill (one of the smartest guys on the topic of publishing technologies) points to this Editor & Publisher manifesto by Tom Mohr – formerly head of KR Digital on newspaper websites. Mohr posits that if newspapers want to get their acts together online, they need to converge on a common standard and set of tools. Mark and I kicked around a business plan two years ago on this very model — there is no viable reason in the world, aside from sheer hubris, for a publication to own its own CMS, metrics, and ad servers.

“Newspaper online infrastructures dot the United States like a thousand points of light. It is a massive waste of financial and intellectual capital. As Knight Ridder proved, multiple newspaper websites of all sizes (from the Biloxi Sun Herald to the Philadelphia Inquirer) can sit on common platforms and deliver Pulitzer Prize-winning quality.”What, specifically, is meant by common platforms?

“They include a common content management system, common classified marketplace solution, common ad serving capabilities, a common ad network, shared content and feature functionality within key channels, a common underlying technical infrastructure and common supporting financial systems, metrics and analytics.”

In a book I ghost-authored with some Gartner experts — Multisourcing — the panoply of IT enabled systems was stacked up against their impact on competitive and strategic advantage … a riff on Nick Carr’s polemic against the value of IT. Only the most rarified, business-transforming, bet the company initiatives deserve internal development, most, if not all systems from lowly lights-on, cost of doing business IT system such as email, can be outsourced or managed against cost.

That the publishing industries insist on building their own web infrastructures is ludicrious. It’s time for a major systems provider like IBM Global Services to step in with a common platform and let the publishers focus on what their true business is — incisive journalism.

Thank Mark for the pointer.

When is a click not a click? – Fortune

When is a click not a click? – September 4, 2006

Devin Leonard at Fortune writes a good piece on the lack of audited metrics in interactive advertising. See my earlier post on Forbes.com getting grief from the NYT last week. Again, to restate my opinion, the issue is not whether or not the IAB or the third-party ad servers, or the ad networks can come to agreement on what constitutes a valid click or unique, but what the buyers determine is qualified leads and conversions. The onus on measurement is on the buyer, not the seller. The buyers have the only perfect clarity on bottom line actions and will “train” the market accordingly. I spend my day in front of dashboards that no one but me and my team have insight into and those dashboards, in the end, are what the ads are being measured against.

“Although the Internet may be the most measurable of advertising media, advertisers and Web sites are actually having huge battles because they can’t agree on what they should be counting.”

Standards gone wrong

In researching my project on the history of technology standards I came across two interesting random standards disasters.

The first is the 1904 Baltimore fire. A massive conflagration in the downtown district forced the call for backup fire fighters to go out to Washington D.C. and surrounding communities. A special train was made up in Washington to rush assistance to the overwhelmed Baltimore fire department. Upon arrival the out-of-town firefighters learned their hose couplings wouldn’t fit on the Baltimore hydrants. Lots of capacity, but no connections. This lead to the national standardization of fire hydrant couplings.

The other random disaster was the loss of the $125 million Mars orbiter in 1999 when one group of engineers used the English standard of measurement and the other groups used the Metric system. When navigational commands were transmitted to the spacecraft it spazzed and was lost forever.

Anyone know of any other significant SNAFUs due to incompatibilities where loss of life, property or sanity ensued because of plugs that didn’t fit, rulers that didn’t measure, or IT systems that couldn’t communicate? I bet there are some amazing tales of corporate mergers that foundered on the rocks because of the latter.

The Complete Mozart — 170 CDs for $150

The NYT Arts Section points to a Dutch music label’s shoebox full of CDs containing the complete works of Mozart on 170 CDs. At $150 this sounds like the bargain of the century. Here’s the Amazon link.

I’ll put this one of the wish list along with the complete unabridged Oxford English Dictionary and the complete archives of the New Yorker on an external hard drive.

Flip turn

Rainy weekend on Cape Cod thanks to Tropical Storm Ernesto, so, figuring I’d rather be remembered as a loving, caring father than hang around Cotuit cleaning out garages, I am about to drive my eldest to New York City to start his sophmore year at NYU.

And come straight back.

That’s 250 miles door-to-door and back again. Nine hours on the road. Fun. Well, time to play Labor Day Traffic Roulette, turn on the radar detector, charge the cell phone, fill up the tank and load the CD player.