This might be the most important music video ever.
I wish David Chase had ended The Sopranos with this movie.
The movie never ends. It goes on and on and on and on.
Brian Alvey
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Streetlight people. Living just to find emotion.
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What can Brown do for your wife?
Niki and I were in the kitchen one morning and she told me she had a dream the night before where she was married to someone famous. Knowing she didn't mean me, I had three guesses to figure out who it was.
My first guess was Derek Jeter. Nope.
My second guess was that hot guy Danny from the CSI show about missing people (Without a Trace). Nope. It wasn't Enrique Murciano.
My third guess was Alton Brown and I was right. She had no idea how I did that. My correct guess might have had something to do with us both being in the kitchen -- or maybe I just know my wife really well.
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A scattershot of brands
When we were working on the Netscape social news site, I figured we might be doing something that would save one of the Internet's most legendary brands. After all, if you're the second or third best portal at a big portal company, what kind of future do you have? A smart company would ultimately put all of its money and promotional efforts into its main portal.
Sadly, the Netscape domain is back to being a portal again, but I was thinking about that "competing portals" dilemma a bunch while I was looking through some pages I'd bookmarked from Styledash over the past few weeks. Sometimes offering multiple products in the same space like detergent is a shrewd corporate strategy designed to maximize your overall sales. Sometimes it just comes from a lack of communication or planning.
Spending some time on Styledash recently I wondered why AOL's similarly-named competing style blog Stylelist -- which launched a few days after StyleDash on the same Blogsmith blogging platform -- gets a link right above Styledash's logo. Surely this must be some kind of traffic-swapping arrangement between the sibling blogs, right? So I followed that prominent link over to Stylelist and looked for the reciprocal StyleDash link. There isn't one. They didn't even bury the Weblogs, Inc. blog alphabetically in an industry blogroll. They do have videos that auto-play, rollover ads and a link to their Cat Stevens music page. Lame.
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The dialogues of Play-Doh
StyleDash had another interesting post on that same September day. It was about a new range of colognes by Demeter which included fragrances that smell like dirt and Play-Doh. None of them were things I'd want to smell like, but they were interesting. Okay, maybe the Cannabis Flower or Waffle Cone scents.
Anyway, Jonathon didn't warn people that National Play-Doh Day was coming up twelve days later, but you can't expect a blogger to tell you everything. If he spends an hour researching each post, then it's no longer StyleDash -- it's Stylecrawl.
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Too much flip and not enough flop
I don't like wearing sandals. I'm a sneaker guy. Niki got me some nice Reef sandals this summer and I did the best I could with them. Alex commented that I should try Rainbow sandals.
Now that the summer is pretty much over, I found a post on Styledash featuring sandals that are built a little differently. They're called Swamisz and they don't make that flopping motion while you walk. As the lone commenter says they're not good looking, but maybe I'll try them out next summer.
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Propeller envy
TechCrunch reported that Propeller.com has been doing better than Netscape.com since AOL took the Netscape domain away from the social news team and turned it back into a portal.
The conclusions they found included:
- the audience must have been really loyal to the social news site
- that Jason and the entire Netscape social news team were vindicated for their efforts
- AOL's latest move destroyed the Netscape brand by another 50%
I think they're missing the story here. The real conclusion a savvy reporter should draw is that the Propeller team needs to be careful to stay under the radar or a middle manager at AOL is going to take their new domain name away. Just look at all the built-in traffic it has!
I'm betting that the social news site will live at either Compuserve.com or Switched.com by Christmas and Propeller.com will be an instant messenger client.
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Contextual ads can be your enemy
I was testing an online project management application last night and didn't feel like signing up for the paid version, so I signed up for the free trial. Their free trial is advertiser supported with Google Ad Sense ads at the bottom of the screen.
Ad Sense works by looking at the page you are on and determining which of Google's advertisers to show based on the page contents. The trouble with these ads here is that they are all for this app's competitors. To Google, that is the correct context of this page. It is a site about online project management, so the four ads were for "Simple Project Management", "New Project Mgmt Solution", "Project Management" and "Web Based Project Mgmt".
I tried all four links and found I liked three of them even better than the site I was testing. So those ads probably made them 20 cents, but they would have been better off letting me poke around a little more. I was considering subscribing.
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Building a great online comic book reader
Joey Manley, who knows a lot about publishing web comics, wrote a great article covering the ComicMix Phase Two launch and focused on the quality of our online comic book reader.
Overall he was really kind to us. Being that he's a guy who has obsessed over the problem of reading comic books online, his positive review means a lot. He said that there was nothing wrong with the interface, but added that there were a few extra things he'd like to see -- some missed opportunities.
First, Joey asked for permalinks to individual comic pages. His commenter Bill said "Comments per page are a must for webcomics." Commenter Gerhard Bahnsen said "permalinks are a total must" and likes it when each page is commentable. Are you sensing a theme here?
Continue reading Building a great online comic book reader ›
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Mr. Choketober
Earlier today I twittered this:
Not a big fan of Mr. Choketober right now. Some offense from our regular season MVP could have meant a win. That and no plague of insects...
Niki asked me if people were actually calling A-Rod "Mr. Choketober" and I told her I hadn't seen it anywhere. I just figured that Reggie Jackson was "Mr. October" in 1977, Derek Jeter was "Mr. November" in 2001 and that makes Alex Rodriguez "Mr. Choketober" until he proves otherwise.
A Google search for the term finds a total of 74 pages with the word "choketober" in them. The top result is for a guy who used it as his own nickname in forums, but couple of them are people in message boards applying it to A-Rod like I did.
So I'm not the first, but I'm pretty early on this one. Not like that whole press button, receive bacon thing.
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BoingBoing TV on Castfire
BoingBoing launched their new daily under-5-minutes TV show today with the amazing Xeni Jardin as its co-host.
BoingBoing is lucky it isn't owned by a big slow Internet company. They get to use a top-notch video and podcast hosting service like Castfire.
The LA Times had the big announcement. Many sites blogged that the Times got Cory Doctorow's base of operations wrong. The Times originally said he was Tokyo-based and later changed their article to say he reports from London. They're all wrong. Cory Doctorow is reporting from the future.
GrimJack
EZ Street
Jon Sable, Freelance