Month: May 2007

PC World – Editor in Chief Harry McCracken Returns to PC World

PC World – Editor in Chief Harry McCracken Returns to PC World

“In a surprise announcement, Robert Carrigan, president of IDG Communications, told PC World’s staff today that “Harry McCracken has decided to remain with PC World as vice-president, editor in chief.”

“[CEO] Colin Crawford will be rejoining the IDG management team as executive vice president, online. In this role, he will be responsible for driving IDG’s online strategy and initiatives in support of our Web-centric business focus,” Carrigan said. “We will conduct a search for a new CEO to lead PC World and Macworld.”

This is a big deal for the PC press because none of the major tech publishers can withstand any reduction in their audience, and certainly no aspersions on their ethics. The trade press had a terrible rep back in the 80s when I was at PC Week — I was grilled by a Wall Street Journal reporter in ’89 about rumored excesses and whispers of graft, advertiser pressure, etc.. Truth is, I never saw it happen, or was to naive to notice.
I never had a story outright croaked by a publisher or someone on the ad side. I caused some massive pain to the sales side, especially at Forbes, and that was fun, and the late Malcolm Forbes took some grief for allegedly stifling stories, but I never ever saw evidence of that in my 13 years. In fact, Malcolm’s son, Tim, my boss during the dot.com days, said something that has hung with me and that was to the effect that journalistic integrity takes years to earn and seconds to squander.

Lenovo ThinkPad T61 Widescreen: PC Magazine’s Editors’ Choice

Inside Intel’s New Centrino Duo and Centrino Pro (Santa Rosa) – Lenovo ThinkPad T61 Widescreen: Full Review – Review by PC Magazine

Nice to the lead the pack with this week’s new Santa Rosa announcements. Thanks PC Mag:

“Another year, another Intel launch, and another Editors’ Choice awarded to the Lenovo ThinkPad T61 Widescreen. Its main appeal is the outstanding performance ThinkPad users have come to expect (just be sure to upgrade your battery when you order a system). Overall performance and this laptop’s usability will keep businesses coming back for a long time.”

A brief history of my next door neighbors

Cotuit has one church — the Federated Church. I think it’s a merger of two faiths from back in the days when the population was too small to support two parishes and it was decided to “federate” or create one church shared by two faiths: Methodist and Congregationalist. Even though I was confirmed as an Episcopalian, I was married there and my father’s funeral was conducted there, and many other significant events have taken place there over the years. So it’s a important thing to the Churbucks, but more in a convenient than a pious way.

 

Every day at 6 pm, the PA system in the belfry plays a recording of bells, which is nice to hear on a quiet evening. In the 50s my father swapped the recording with an early rock-and-roll record.

But I digress.

The main thing about me and the church is that the Parsonage — the house owned by the Church for the use of the minister — is next door to my house to the south. I could shoot a bottle rocket and hit it (which I have done).

When I was a little boy the minister was Reverend Kraft. He and my grandfather were friends, and our yard sort of morphed into his yard, and the Krafts were held in high regard by the family as Reverend Kraft had been there for a very long time.

Then there were a series of different ministers starting in the late 1960s — one transcribed my Great-Great-Grandfather’s Civil War letters. Another was an avid gardener. One — Reverend Wilson — was from The Cameroon and had two wonderful little girls, Hannah and Olyenka. It’s been an interesting experience living next door to the minister, sort of like a built-in governor for excessive behavior. Which never stopped any excessive behavior from occurring, but the fact that the minister lived right across the yard always gave one pause before calling a sibling a bad word or lighting an M-80 at 2 am..

For the past few years there has been a lapse in ministerial occupancy of the parsonage. The house was dark and quiet for a couple years, then the church began to rent the parsonage to random tenants. But no ministerial presence.

Then the news came that a new minister is on her way.

In the spirit of being a good neighbor I provide you this link. Scroll down. My new neighbor is there. She is not the cheerleader.

If They Write It, Will They Come?

If They Write It, Will They Come? – Forbes.com

Lincoln Millstein — head interactive honcho at Hearst, founder of the Boston Globe’s, Boston.com, on getting rid of the ink-stained wretches and doing the old Tom Sawyer move with the readers.

“Hand over their features sections to readers, Millstein said.“You don’t need professional journalists to put out a travel section,’’ he said. “You don’t need professional journalists to put out a food section, in my opinion. I had a hundred journalists reporting to me. I don’t believe that model works, I don’t believe it needs to work. I believe the user is actually better served by having user-generated, high-quality content in all those ‘back of the book’ sections.”

No erg blogging for a while

No erg for a while. My back collapsed on Saturday while I was rummaging in the garage for fishing gear. One mis-step and … twang. I was walking like an S-curve, lying on the floor trying to pop my sacrum back into place, doing weird stretches, and making everyone around me wince. Better today, but no erg for a few days I think.

Sacroiliitis sucks. 

When to engage?

What is the threshold for a person in charge of blog monitoring to step into a comment string and try to contact an aggrieved customer?

The notion of influence and “rank” has been used in the past to differentiate between bloggers, but for some online marketers, any negative comment from an upset customer can represent a permanent scar in the search index, something which, if left unanswered can linger, or, if ignored, flare into something more significant than the initial detection might predict based on the user’s Technorati rank or known influence.
Yet, what are the rules of thumb for engaging or ignoring?  If one takes the approach that all expressions of unhappiness – be it from a blogger on their blog, or from a commenter on another blog, or a commenter on an official corporate blog — are bad, then one can quickly project an extremely busy, extremely challenged operation trying to respond to all inquiries or complaints. Extend that to a multi-language operation and the challenge compounds quickly.

Triage, that emergency room cliche, carries a huge amount of risk. Some incidents, left untended, will flare into something dramatic. And, there is the Heisenberg principle of measurement — that detection and measurement of online community sentiment leads to a change in the nature of that sentiment, and indeed, encourages it to bloom as users quickly understand that a blogged comment can expedite resolution faster than the anonymity of a service phone call.

Just some random challenges I’m wrestling with these days.

Fish Weirs and Squid Jigs

The fish weir is working off of the Wianno Club in Osterville, inshore of Collier’s Ledge. Fisher, Pete and me motored up to it on Saturday afternoon, keeping clear of the mooring lines that angled away from the fyke to temporary anchors. A flapping little American flag was tied to the sapling branch that held up its corner of the netted pen.

The weir goes up every May, right when the squid are spawning off the 20 foot line in Nantucker Sound. It catches scup, squid, mackerel and sea bass for a few weeks, but stops when the voracious bluefish arrive around May 13th.

“Think they have to fly that flag by law?” asked Pete as we motored past the 50×100 foot oval pen or fyke. There was a line of grey saplings — pounded into the sandy bottom in 15 feet of water — running off to the north for a quarter-mile, a black rope tied with turk’s heads running like a phone wire from tree to tree. I guess there was another net below the surface, making the weir look like lollipop with the end about a mile off the beach, and the fyke, or fish pen, directly south like the candy.

By Christina Allen Painting by Christina Allen

This is probably the most, if not one of the most ancient forms of fishing. Archaeologists have found vestiges of river weirs, generally made of stone with reeds woven between poles to deflect the fish to a pen where they could be harvested by hand.

There are only a few weirs left on the Cape, one near me in Wianno, the others past Point Gammon towards Harwich and Chatham. I’ve never seen one emptied, but they are very temporary looking affairs that go up for a few weeks every spring and come down long before the summer folk arrive.

We jigged up a dozen squid in the middle of a huge fleet of fellow squidders. Every boat’s hull was mottled black from the squirting ink. Pete and I fried the squid into calamari. They sucked.

In 1867 the Barnstable Patriot reported:

“(Advt.) NOTICE. The Centerville Fish Weir Co. having completed their Weir at Squaw’s island near Hyannis Port, are now able to supply Fishermen with FRESH BAIT. The signals, when they have Bait, is a White Flag on the Weir, and an American Flag hoisted on the shore. Apply at the weir.”

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