Month: January 2007

Bradford Washburn dies at 96

Bradford Washburn, father of modern Museum of Science, dies at 96

“Bradford Washburn, the founder of the modern Boston Museum of Science who transformed a modest collection into renowned institution, died last night at the age of 96.”

Walking the Berkshires alerted me to the passing of Henry Bradford Washburn — founder of Boston’s Museum of Science, the preeminent mountain cartographer in the world, and perhaps the best photographer of mountains since Ansel Adams. This man personified a lot of heroic attributes in my mind. Whenever I think about climbing Mount Washington and plan a route, I look at a Brad Washburn map. He mapped Everest in his 70s.


Washburn is the man who mapped Everest, McKinley and the White Mountains of New Hampshire. He was a pioneer climber of Alaska’s peaks. His maps are art. The photos are exquisite.

What I’m Reading – Big Book Store Run

Rainy Saturday, son has a fistful of gift cards from Xmas to use up, so off to Borders to indulge in my favorite shopping experience — book buying.

Santa didn’t bring me Against the Day, the latest by Thomas Pynchon, so I bought it for myself.

Being a major Mark Helprin fan, I was embarrassed when recently asked if I had read Freddy and Fredericka, so that went into the cart.

Cormac McCarthy is one of the top ten American novelists working today (the others include Don DeLillo, Richard Ford, John Updike, David Foster Wallace, and Pynchon), and being a big fan of All the Pretty Horses I had to get The Road based on an awesome NYT book review.

Robert Stone — Hall of Mirrors, Damascus Gate, Outerbridge Reach, Flag for Sunrise, Dog Soldiers — has written a memoir of the 60s and his days with Kesey and the Merry Pranksters: Prime Green.

And finally, because you need a little poetry, another edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.

I need more book shelves. I have piles of books in closets, next to my bed, in the attic, in the kids’ rooms and my wife isn’t happy about it.

Is Blogistan the Switzerland of Corporate Competition?

Everyone loves a good mud fight between two competitors. Pepsi and Coke sort of stuff is fun. People like conflict. Oracle used to do trade press ads showing a F16 (Oracle) shooting down a World War One bi-plane (dBase). I believe negative comparison ads are illegal in some countries. But …

Sure, it’s part of the sales process to compare one’s stuff with the competition’s stuff, but so far I haven’t seen any overt snarkiness in the corporate blogs of my counterparts in the other trenches at HP and Dell. We read each other, now we’re linking and commenting on each other.
What surprises is me is the state of relations between the three big PC companies bloggers. It’s actually civil, I think for the simple reason that all three of us are in tough customer service worlds, we’re facing the same problems, and there is no map to follow. In other words, I sense we’re all making it up as we go along.
I post a link to Eric Kintz’s blog at HP because the guy is so smart, and he invites me to participate in a group post with some other corporate bloggers, and then Richard at Dell shows up in the comments here on my post about losing a customer …..

And then we blog about Toshiba having a good tablet hinge design and the Inquirer notes it and gives us a gold star ….

“A lot of vendor blogs are just marketing with an ersatz ‘dear reader’ veneer so credit to Lenovo for making its site a useful read.”

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. I come from an ultra-competitive industry — journalism — where at PC Week it was InfoWorld that was the devil and at Forbes it was Fortune and so on and so forth. That kind of competition is actually fun and very motivational in terms of driving scoops and deadlines. Here the battle is for the hearts and minds of loyal customers while trying to differentiate our products on a basis other than price.

In any event, it’s kind of cool to be blogging with my competitors and not against them.

Eric Kintz actually observed the opposite phenomenon last fall — corporate blog fights. 

“What interested me was the blogging “war” that started after this announcement: it is to my knowledge the first time that all three of us – Dell, IBM and HP – have engaged in a competitive dialogue through blogs. Corporate blogging is clearly taking on a new dimension in 07. Companies are watching what their competitors are doing and commenting on blogs. Dell (Lionel) /IBM (Christopher) – if you pick this up in your blog monitoring, drop me a note. :)”

The interesting thing about the Apple phone …

Sure, the phone is what it is. And Cisco is suing. But what struck me on the day of El Jobso’s announcement was the massive shift away from the traditional tech press as a communications vehicle to the gadget blogs.

The Apple phone was to Engadget and Gizmodo what the explosion of TWA Flight 800 was to MSNBC.com in the mid-90s. The moment when the world abandoned one medium — the so-called mainstream press’s online presence — for blogged news.

Engadget and Gizmodo owned the week between the phone and CES. And I watched as lots of colleagues watched the play-by-play unfold in a blog format — no one was hitting refresh on the homepage of media outlets that ten years ago would have been, reflexively, the go-to source for a new product announcement.

MIT Advertising Lab: Burger King Sells 2 Million Game Copies in 4 Weeks

MIT Advertising Lab: future of advertising and advertising technology: Burger King Sells 2 Million Game Copies in 4 Weeks

I loved the Burger King Xbox promotion and apparently so did 2 million other people. $3.99 games of The King doing his thing struck a chord.

“Burger King “announced that its trio of games for the Xbox and Xbox 360 had broken the 2 million mark in just four weeks” (GameSpot). That’s a cumulative number for the three titles — Sneak King (pictured), Pocketbike Racer, and Big Bumpin’– that sold for $3.99 each in BK restaurants. That’s more than the 2 million copies of the blockbuster Gears of War sold in 6 weeks worldwide.

The news illustrates three things. First, people don’t hate brands in games, at least not unequivocally. Second, branded entertainment is more than disposable advertising; it’s worth paying for.”

THINK – A smart insight on viral campaigns

THINK Blog

“The best viral videos have, in most cases, not come from the brands themselves, but rather from the consumers, like the Diet Coke/Mentos videos. Therefore one strategy is to be watchful for consumer content and then have a plan to capitalize on that conversation.”

Cinemania lives again

My son Eliot, the film student, is blogging once again at Cinemania.

He won’t honk his horn, so I will. He’s a sophmore at New York University, majoring in Cinema Studies at the Tisch School of the Performing Arts. He’s watched more movies than any human on the planet and can write beautifully about them to boot.

He was an intern on the set of Kill Bill. His essay on a Danish film, Ordet, is a masterpiece and I hope he posts it. Ordet is also my favorite movie of all time.

The first incarnation of Cinemania died due to spam (pre-Akismet) and database errors. I must try to recover the original posts and migrate them in here.

Digital Download By David M. Ewalt

Digital Download By David M. Ewalt

Making fun of Second Life is so much fun. This is a classic screed Forbes.com-style; tip of the hat to Valleywag who have taken the flag and run with it.

“Here’s the ultimate problem with Second Life: unless you’re some kind of sexual deviant who gets off by pretending to be a diaper-wearing man-fox, it’s boring as hell. If I want to chat with people, I can do it in IM without having to deal with lag, annoying ambient music, and all manner of freaks of nature. If I want to see cool imaginary worlds, I’ll watch a movie. And if I want to really nerd out and pretend I’m some sort of fantastic creature, I’ll stick with my Night Elf rogue, thank you.”

I’m sticking with my Level 29 Dwarf Hunter.