Tony Hendra knocks one out of the park with his Tax Day parody of the Wall Street Journal. Advance copies have vanished, indicating, as Charles Barthold at The Firm, put it in a Tweet: There’s no better way to promote a parody than to try to kill it. The ad parodies are brilliant for Charles Shwab (“Talk to Chuck. Chuck is Dead. Talk to Vinnie”) Bare Stearns, and Minimum Securities ….
Day: April 14, 2008
Favorite things: “volunteers”
Gardeners know them as stray plants — flowers or vegetables — that magically pop up where they weren’t planted. This morning, as I walked the dog around the yard, I saw this splash of color in the brown monotony of the April lawn, a Pansy from some past planting. “Volunteers” seem like nice little miracles, better than a sneeze, up there with finding money in the pockets of some old pants.
Blog Aggregation Pages — best practices?
The challenge is to tie together 100+ blogs authored by Olympic athletes, coaches, friends and family into a single page.
Purpose of the page is:
- Highlight the “post of the day” as determined by a blogger-in-chief
- Permit the reader to scan the latest posts from the bloggers
- Permit the reader to manage subscriptions to the RSS of those blogs to their preferred aggregator (Google Reader, Bloglines, etc.)
- Publish Tweets
- Publish latest shared media
- Flickr/Picasa Photos
- YouTube Videos
- del.icio.us tags
Esteban Panzeri is on the job, and I suggested Alltop as one example of an interface example, but no one (Bhargava and Bell) seemed overly excited. And having visited Alltop a total of two times, I was stupid to reference something I don’t even use.
The ideal would be a shared Google Reader interface — all the functionality but constrained to a managed blogroll/OPML file. Public Google Reader. Possible? Second question is how to incorporate reader inputs. Third question: is it still too early to present a consumer web user with a call to action to click on an orange RSS button to subscribe to a feed? Are most consumers accustomed to a direct blog visit? I must dust off aggregator and feed reader adoption statistics.
Know of any good examples of blog network homepages? Should we be looking at HuffPo? CapeCodToday? Mark Cahill and I tried to tackle this with a community of saltwater fly fishing bloggers in 2003-2004, but it was too early to get much traction.
Whereabouts: week of April 14
Cape Cod for the week. NYC the following.
Very heads down on Olympics project and various media plans for the spring quarter. Looks like I have an extended stint ahead in Beijing for August — that will be cool — and the realtor on Martha’s Vineyard sent pictures of a cottage overlooking Menemsha Harbor, so already I am thinking about vacation standing in my boat, anchored off the Menemsha jetty, flyrod in my hand, heart beating about 190 as a school of ferocious false albacore come cruising at me along Lobsterville Beach …..
Tilled in the flowerbed this weekend (in between rain showers), turning in 400 pounds of cow poo, peat moss and lime pellets. Too windy to scull. Too busy to clam. Three days of Red Sox. Next weekend ….
