Month: May 2008

Lenovo’s Web Marketer: Twittering’s Not for Twits

Lenovo’s Web Marketer: Twittering’s Not for Twits

Warning, Raging Ego alert. Brandweek piece is live. Need a new headshot.

“Another big component in the strategy is online, where the effort is being headed by David Churbuck, vp-global Web marketing. Churbuck is an award-winning journalist who formerly worked at Forbes magazine, where he founded Forbes.com and helped develop the company’s digital strategy before joining Lenovo in 2006. At his new post, Churbuck gets to flex his journalistic muscles with an independent blog, churbuck.com/wordpress that covers various issues in marketing and media and rarely even mentions Lenovo. Churbuck is also an outspoken critic of some new media and a fairly avid user of Twitter, the social networking site that consists of short messages called “Tweets” from people in the community. Churbuck corresponded with Brandweek editor Todd Wasserman, who shot Churbuck the following questions via e-mail.”

Whereabouts 5.12-5.18

Monday: 5-12, Cotuit

Tuesday-Thursday: 5-13 to 5-15: RTP

Friday-Sunday: 5-16 to 5-18: Cotuit

First Bluefish of 2008

This morning Mom said she’d take a bluefish if I happened to catch one, so Fisher and I finished up the yard work around five on Sunday afternoon, dug out a couple rods, tied on some wire leaders and poppers, and headed down to Hooper’s Landing for a short row out to the boat.

We zipped out of the harbor and to the end of the channel to Last Red, the final channel marker. The wind was kind of snotty out of the Southeast (“wind east, fish bite least”) and the waves were tough enough to make the going wet and footing difficult, but I passed a couple slicks, smelled melons, and said, “I smell bluefish.”

The slicks are caused by the bluefish (pomatomus saltatrix) feeding on bait: the bluefish bite the bait, the bait releases oil, the oil makes smooth patches on the surface. That oil smells like melons (according to some noses). We cast a few times, optimism was low, but we stuck with it and I saw a fish dart under the boat, spooked off of the lure by the sight of the hull.

I finally hooked up, landed the fish, gave it a kiss, and threw it back for good luck. The second fish wasn’t so lucky, and went into the bucket. I fileted and skinned it, and Fisher and I took it to my mom to finish her Mother’s Day with a fish and some flowers (we planted morning glories around the lamppost).

All is well in my world when there are bluefish in Cotuit.

Mothers’ Day Proclamation

I have always written off Mother’s Day as a manufactured holiday promoted by the greeting card companies to plague me into an annual bout of May guilt. This is indeed, is not the case, as the day originated in 1870 through the efforts of one of the most remarkable woman in the history of the United States, Julia Ward Howe, renowned for penning the Battle Hymn of the Republic, but also for her diligent efforts as a social reformer, suffragist and bearer of the New England Transcendentalist tradition.

She was an amazing woman given the span of her accomplishments and interests and this day should be dedicated to her. Here is her proclamation, written in response to the horror of the Civil and Franco-Prussian Wars:

“Arise, then, women of this day!
Arise, all women who have hearts,
Whether our baptism be of water or of tears!
Say firmly:
“We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies,
Our husbands will not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause.
Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn
All that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience.
We, the women of one country, will be too tender of those of another country
To allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.”
From the bosom of the devastated Earth a voice goes up with our own.
It says: “Disarm! Disarm! The sword of murder is not the balance of justice.”
Blood does not wipe out dishonor, nor violence indicate possession.
As men have often forsaken the plough and the anvil at the summons of war,
Let women now leave all that may be left of home for a great and earnest day of counsel.
Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead.
Let them solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means
Whereby the great human family can live in peace,
Each bearing after his own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar,
But of God.
In the name of womanhood and humanity, I earnestly ask
That a general congress of women without limit of nationality
May be appointed and held at someplace deemed most convenient
And at the earliest period consistent with its objects,
To promote the alliance of the different nationalities,
The amicable settlement of international questions,
The great and general interests of peace.

Second Life — like a bad boomerang it comes back at me

Just when I thought I was done with 2L, Brandweek asks me to do a Q&A with them and one of the questions was:

“As Web-marketing vp for Lenovo, you have been a vocal critic of Second Life, writing on your blog: “There is nothing to do in Second Life except, pardon my bluntness, try to get laid.” Why are you so down on it?””

If I ever make it into Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations I’m going to go down in history because of that stupid dildonics quote. Forbes nailed me with it a year ago, now back it comes.

The reality is this: I haven’t logged into Second Life for months. Definitely not this year. I don’t think about it, I don’t care about it, and I certainly never read about it anymore now that the media has moved on to something more lurid to hype. I see the former CEO of Organic left that agency to become CEO of Linden Labs — he certainly must see signs of life. Businessweek hasn’t put 2L back on its cover. Indeed, not much news at all has come out of the land of Furries and Griefers.

Whatever, I have moved on. Stay tuned for the Brandweek Q&A next week.

Congratulations to IDG on achieving the cross-over

Today’s NYT has a piece by Steve Lohr on the occasion of IDG (publisher of InfoWorld, PCWorld, CIO, etc.) achieving the vaunted print/online revenue crossover.

“In 2002, 86 percent of the revenue from I.D.G.’s publications came from print and 14 percent online. These days, 52 percent of the revenue is from online ads, while 48 percent is from the print side.”

I joined IDG for a brief period in 2005 to help with that transition, ultimately leaving at the end of the year to come to Lenovo. What I saw was a company in the throes of a difficult transition from decades of print excellence to the more ephemeral but pressing world of online news. Print and online dichotomies were tough, but in the end it was the red ink that pushed the print legacy to one side (InfoWorld went online only) and broke down the old artificial barriers between print and online editorial staffs.

Mike Friedenberg and Bob Carrigan were the two guys I worked most closely with, and both are prominently and deservedly called out in Lohr’s piece.

While publishing is not the profit engine of Pat McGovern’s empire (that honor falls to his venture capital operations), it is the flagship of the global brand, and seeing the transition occur, sooner than most traditional publishers, is a good sign for the future of a pretty beleaguered profession.

A marriage best unconsummated

Smart move by Microsoft to walk away from Yahoo. The gap in price was probably the least of the stumbling blocks in front of the deal occurring. There was just too much unhappiness evident on both sides down in the rank and file.

As a customer and partner of  both, I couldn’t see how media buyers, ecomm advertisers, application developers, or content creators would have benefited. The acquisition would have created Time-Warner/AOL redux, been a clusterf%$k of the first order, and done little more than accelerate Google.

In my opinion:

1. Microsoft needs to focus on the OS for a while and get Vista to where it needs to be for the sake of the PC industry. I went to their media upfront last month in NYC — no disrespect intended — but MSFT and content has never been a match in my mind.
2. Yahoo needs to look inside at its best apps — Flickr, del.icio.us, etc. — and figure out how to move from the Semel-Braun days of content network to a SaaS powerhouse. The old portal aggregation play is toast, just not working, and further programming investments will be a disaster.

3. Microsoft needs to pin the future on Mesh and persuade users there’s a benefit to Office on the hard disk versus Google apps in the cloud. Right off — let me say the offline  blog post integration in Word is a damn good precursor to the way local and cloud applications should work.

VOD forays – connecting a DVR to a home network

My wife is a tad obsessive about television, and sank some money into a big flat panel two years ago. With the advice and counsel of Uncle Fester — he-who-knows-all-about-AV — she decked the sucker out with a massive DVR (Tivo to us mortals), HD tuners, Dolby 5.1 surround sound, etc. etc. etc.

The result is a far cry from the black and white Zenith I grew up with, watching one of four channels (NBC, CBS, ABC and PBS), and messing with rooftop antennas, rabbit ears, and then considering things like color and remote controls to be as astonishing as a butane lighter is to a Stone Age cannibal in the forests of New Guinea. We were easily amused in the 1960s.
Unfortunately DirectTV recently dropped Tivo — which seemed to me to be an exemplary great example of user interface design — in favor of its own retarded, brain-dead interface. But, since the wife needs to have the latest HD signals, out went the nice Tivo which she bought hacked and juiced from Weak Knees (one of the best company names ever!), and in came the  stupid DirectTV unit with no capacity and an on screen guide designed by bureaucrats.
A few weeks ago she noticed “VOD” on the menu of options — video on demand — and had to have it. I took a look and sure enough, the DVR has an ethernet jack and wants to be connected to the home network. The simple but ugly solution would have been to run an ethernet cable from the cable modem/wireless router (Westell), but she’s severely allergic to wires so that was the topic of a short but brutal discussion one rainy Sunday back in March.

Then I went to the most brain dead of solutuions — an A/C network extension — which is the networking equivalent of the pink/green/blue transparent acetate filters sold in the back of comic books in the sixties for people too poor to afford a color TV. They just don’t work.

The only solution was to get the DVR — which lives in a closet — to connect wirelessly to the home network. Off to Best Buy I went in search of a Linksys WGA54G — a wireless gaming adapter — a dee-vice for connecting an XBox or Playstation to one’s network. Not in stock. Nor at Radio Shack. So online I go (where I should have gone in the first place) and I order the sucker for $74 from B&H in Brooklyn.

It arrived yesterday. So, while watching the Blue Jays spank the Red Sox last night, I tried to configure the adapter to connect the DVR to the network. Of course the Linksys installation wizard didn’t work. Does it ever work?
Here’s the punchline: all the recurring bullshit we’ve heard from the tech industry about the digital home is going to remain bullshit until our devices connect to each other as easily as kitchen appliances connect to wall sockets.

I am not an engineer. But I did work as a tech reporter for twenty years and I do work for a PC company, and if I need to get on the 800 help line with Linksys, and both me and a tech get completely confounded in IPCONFIG, firewall, 64-bit key encryption … then Aunt Edna in Peoria ain’t gonna be experiencing VOD anytime soon.

I told the Linksys guy no thanks when we started down the command line path. I know how that story ends and it always ends badly. So I dragged the game adapter right up to the router, plugged it in, surfed into it through the browser on a notebook (good old 192.168.1.1), manually configured it to ignore the neighbor’s WAN (named Corehealth of all things), gave it the hexidecimal so it would get through the WEP security on my WAN, burned the EEPROM with the right info, ran down stairs, plugged it into the DVR, and …. to quote the engineer at McKinsey who insisted I didn’t know how to spell — “Wah-lah” — connected the TV to the network.

Of such small victories is one’s prowess proven in this world.

So, now I can download old South Park episodes at a snail’s pace. And, here’s the killer. The old pay per view model of purchase and view and store ostensibly forever on the DVR’s harddrive? The one I’ve enjoyed for a decade?
Those days are over. Hollywood, those masters of pissing off their customers by being brain dead when it comes to intellectual property, has decided that PPV will become Video on Demand (at a cost of course) but that the video will only be available for a day or two. At which point it goes poof.

#$%^%^#$%^&&!!!!!!

Anyway, I sat down at my PC after this scintillating hour of home tech support hell, and saw that Microsoft Media Player had detected a DVR on the network, and wanted to know if I wanted to share my library of PC videos with it.

Sure. Why not? I’m a sucker for a gadget. Except it doesn’t work.

Random things

  1. I haven’t been posting a lot lately because I haven’t had anything to say.
  2. Twitter is bugging me personally but intriguing me professionally.
  3. There were no squid to be had last night in Nantucket Sound.
  4. Honda Lawnmowers continue to suck.
  5. Budgets suck.
  6. Metric for the sake of metrics suck.
  7. I did not post this video so stop asking if I did.
  8. Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy is one very disturbing book
  9. My wife went to France without me. Nice. So I guess that means I get to go bonefishing by myself someday.
  10. I am definitely going to see Iron Man tomorrow. 
  11. CrossFit has changed my life. I met Pukey the Clown yesterday for the first time.