Month: April 2008

The Mashpee Herring Run

I stopped by the run on Route 131 this afternoon on my way to Logan. There was a few kids waving nets at fish that weren’t there. Indeed, with the usual harbingers in full force — dandelions and forsythia — I expected to see some alewives making their anadromous way into Mashpee-Wakeby Pond on their way inland on the Mashpee River from Popponesset Bay and Nantucket Sound beyond.

Alas. There were none. They’ll be here in a few days. Temps hit the 70s tomorrow and the squid are right on their heels along with the stripers. Here’s a link to my herring post from last year, one of my favorites. And here’s a quick video of what a herring run looks like today. (All the state’s runs are closed until further notice so these fish can start to recover. They are getting the snot kicked out of them by pair trawlers working offshore.)

Consider this my Earth Day Post.

Deborah Fallows: Few in China Complain About Internet Controls

Deborah Fallows: Few in China Complain About Internet Controls

Kaiser Kuo posts at Ogilvy’s China DigitalWatch Blog this very intriguing news on a relatively old survey:

“Research fellow Deborah Fallows of the Pew Internet & American Life project has written an excellent summary of an eyebrow-raising survey commissioned by the Markle Foundation and carried out by Guo Liang of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

“The report is actually a few months old: it was published in November 2007. I hadn’t heard anything about its interesting (though to me not altogether surprising) findings until I was alerted to Ms. Fallows’ summary and comments on the Pew website — by a Twitter from Fons Tuinstra last night, I believe. Commentators will doubtless zero in on the survey’s findings regarding Internet censorship, to wit, almost 84% of urban Chinese believe that the Internet should be managed or controlled (read: censored), and more than 85 listed the government in response to the question of who should be doing this managing and controlling.”

The first “real” weekend of spring (whereabouts this week)

This weekend:

  1. Walked Dead Neck with my wife late Friday afternoon. I found no lures but did see a piping plover and some coyote tracks.
  2. Got some serious quahogging in on Saturday afternoon.
  3. Finished preparing the flower beds – three weeks early this year – planted the fancy dahlias I mail ordered in February, and put in the herb bed for the kitchen.
  4. Watched the Sox sweep Texas.
  5. Avoided my PC until now.
  6. G0t in some good workouts (alas none on the water) in preparation for Speedo Season.
  7. Made this awesome (soon to be posted) documentary with Fisher on how to (or how not to) open a wily clam.

Whereabouts this week:

April 21-22: Cotuit (Olympic Bloggers, budget, TV ads)

April 23-24: RTP (workshops)

April 25-27: Cotuit

“Our ecosystem rocks ….”

The perils of corporate video:

This officially dislodges this classic from the cheesy-internal-video-gone-wrong hall of fame:

Digital Influence Mapping Project: Lenovo’s Social Score

Digital Influence Mapping Project: Corporate Blogging Grown Up

My Wall Street Journal: Total Brilliance

My Wall Street Journal

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 ….

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:

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 ….

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