Brian Alvey

A long, long time ago I saw the Chevy Chase and Goldie Hawn’s Foul Play in a Virginia movie theater with my sister Jennifer and my cousin Kimberly. To this day I vividly remember the car chase scene over the hills of San Francisco. Chevy had stolen a cab and it turned out there was a Japanese couple in the back. They didn’t speak any English, but Goldie explained they were police, you know, like Kojak. Bang bang. Then the tourists went from scared hostages to thrilled participants. I’ve never seen the movie since that first time, but I can tell you all of those details from that scene.

A cab ride in SF prompted this tweet:

My evening cab ride through SF was insane! Cab left the ground 3 times going over hills and screeched to a stop once. #foulplay

Over on Facebook, my sister sent me the YouTube video for that scene. The first thing I noticed was that they were playing music from The Mikado. Wow! Then they were cutting to scenes of the actual Mikado being performed. It’s where they were racing to, to prevent a murder or something.

I was turned on to The Mikado by an issue of The Question I read in high school. Written by Denny O’Neil and edited by my ComicMix partner Mike Gold. In college I bought the double disc musical and many years later Niki and I saw The Mikado live in New York City.

My object all sublime
I shall achieve in time
To let the punishment fit the crime
The punishment fit the crime.
And make each prisoner pent
Unwillingly represent
A source of innocent merriment
Of innocent merriment!

I often love Fred Wilson‘s blog, A VC, but sometimes it’s not so easy to love. A few days ago Fred posted a dismissal of marketing. He said marketing is only for companies with lousy products or companies like Zynga, Budweiser or Viagra who can only grow their businesses marginally through customer acquisition. I’ve been on the road for LAUNCH and let it go after he admitted his first post had many bugs, but then I saw one of Fred’s commenters on his third post on marketing dropping Peter Drucker into the fray. James Harradence, said:

Peter Drucker, I am paraphrasing, basically said that every oganization needs to recruit and retain customers (although that is not always what they call them). Anyone who faced a customer was in marketing. He also said that anyone who was not directly related to that function, who was below the C-level, could be outsourced.

Interesting. I can’t imagine that this “outsource everyone below C-level” strategy has ever worked, but I had to add my own Drucker-infused take on the importance of marketing:

The Drucker quote that always sticks with me (paraphrased here from memory) is that “companies have only two functions: innovation and marketing. All the rest are costs.”

“Innovate and market” means “create something amazing and then go tell people about it.”

Fred Wilson is smart, but his original post that said “marketing is for companies with terrible products or companies that need to squeeze profits out of new customers” is flawed. I’m sure he has seen plenty of startups who believe that marketing spending will make up for failing to innovate, but marketing simply means telling a story to an audience.

I market to customers. I market to investors. I market to talent. I market to partners. I don’t just throw a budget line at marketing after failing to create something attention worthy. There is a difference.

After a little digging, I found that the actual quote is:

Because the purpose of business is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two—and only two—basic functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are costs. Marketing is the distinguishing, unique function of the business.

It’s not so easy to dismiss the importance of marketing — even in startups!

Rand Fishkin has a great, longer rebuttal to Fred’s flawed post on marketing over on SEOmoz. He points out that marketing is for companies that have great products. Some of this was referenced in Fred’s third marketing post.

My best friend in Texas, Chris Nottingham, asked me about an old computer wargame we used to play in college. He said his mother just got an iMac and he wanted to put that old game on there.

A quick Google search for “old mac game destroyer tank island” uncovered Strategic Conquest.

I spent so many days playing that game in college, sending airplanes on patrol, building factories and conquering cities. Chris and I were even co-generals for an epic war that lasted more than a weekend. We played the computer on its highest difficulty level and while we seemed like we were going to lose early on, we stuck it out and won. I think we took turns sleeping.

According to Wikipedia, Strategic Conquest wasn’t updated after 1998 and stopped working on the Mac OS a few years ago. It was amazing to read all about this long-gone game on Wikipedia. I’d never heard the phrase “fog of war” until now, but that’s exactly how it worked. Every location was dark and hidden until you explored it yourself — revealing land, sea and maybe an enemy unit.

Lots of people are complaining about how everyone worked on The Huffington Post for free and how they should get paid now that AOL has paid $315 million for their work. Some have suggested $50 per post. Comedian Andy Borowitz tweeted:

My share of the Huffington Post sale, zero dollars, was a little disappointing.

This is nuts.

First, everyone who blogged for free on Huffington Post understood that they were being paid in exposure. Plus many of the famous people who blogged on it — like Larry David, Madonna, Harry Shearer, Robert Redford and Craig Newmark — don’t need the money. When Blog Maverick was at Weblogs, Inc., no one paid Mark Cuban to blog. In fact, we never considered running ads on his blog because readers would think, “Does Mark Cuban the billionaire really need to make a nickel when I buy a DVD he links to?” Very tacky.

Second, the Huffington Post has a large paid staff. All of that viral, aggregated content on their site isn’t being cranked out by Bill Maher and Neil Young.

Third, Jason and I should apologize to Arianna for setting a bad precedent. When we sold our own blogging company to AOL back in 2005, we gave hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash bonuses to all of our active bloggers — and none of them had contracts for that.

For one simple reason: I was sick of being the guy who runs the second hottest company in Greycroft’s portfolio.

Recently, Greycroft partner Ian Sigalow wrote a blog post comparing VC exits to baseball hits. He said an exit of 2-3x is a double. 5x is a triple. I asked Ian if the AOL/Huffington Post deal was a double, triple or home run — knowing it was at least a home run. I’m surprised he even sent me a serious reply.

Friends of ours bought us tickets to see Prince at Madison Square Garden. It was my first Prince show ever and now I’m wondering how I waited so long to see him.

Prince’s stage was shaped like that symbol he changed his name to years ago. After an opening act by the comedian Sinbad, legendary bass player Larry Graham took the stage with his band Graham Central Station after wading through the crowd like a marching band. Larry Graham invented the bass slapping technique used by Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Bootsy Collins from Parliament-Funkadelic and too many other great bass players. After a couple of songs and a bass solo he sang his 1980 hit ballad “One in a Million” and then told us that last time he was on stage at MSG was with his old band Sly and the Family Stone.

They played Sly’s Family Affair, Dance to the Music and Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin). During Everyday People they started marching out like they were leaving, but Prince and his entire band came up through the stage and joined in. Niki worked in radio and between us we have been to hundreds of concerts and we’ve never seen a headlining act come out and jam with the opening act during their set. The crowd was in a frenzy. It was amazing. They ended with I Want to Take You Higher and both bands left the stage.

With the lights still off, Prince began with Welcome 2 America.

Next he covered Sylvester’s Dance (Disco Heat). The crowd went nuts when he did three straight songs from Purple Rain: Baby I’m a Star, The Beautiful Ones (with a gorgeous ballet dancer) and Let’s Go Crazy. After that he played Delirious, 1999, Shhh, Uptown, Raspberry Beret, Cream, The Time’s song Cool and Let’s Work. A couple of times he smiled and remarked “Too many hits.” No kidding. Prince seemed more like a 25-year-old than 52.

During U Got the Look, Sheila E. joined him on stage. She stood at a drum set for her hit The Glamorous Life. Prince came back out for Nothing Compares 2 U and ended the main set with Purple Rain.

Some of the set lists for shows in Europe list as many as four encores. We got two. The first one was Kiss, with an extended instrumental introduction. For the final encore song, Prince invited a bunch of celebrities up from the audience. Our show ended with thirty people on stage dancing to Sheila E’s A Love Bizarre — including Questlove from the Roots, Whoopi Goldberg, Jamie Foxx, Spike Lee, Sherri Shepherd, John Leguizamo, Sinbad and Graham Central Station.

Unreal.

Via Hollywood Reporter:

In a career filled with idiosyncratic twists and turns, Prince made one of his more baffling choices at Madison Square Garden Saturday night, the first NYC date of his Welcome 2 America tour — he actually gave the people what they wanted.

While many of the prolific star’s past shows have veered into unfamiliar territory filled with obscurities and lengthy funk instrumental jams, this one was a crowd-pleasing compendium of hits that were mostly decades old, many of them culled from his landmark Purple Rain and 1999 discs. And while the headliner comically groused at one point by muttering, “Too many hits,” he played them with a freshness and ferocity that resulted in a galvanizing show that thrilled the sold-out crowd.

And by machine, I mean he is a powerhouse, not that his writing is stiff and robotic. Good grief people!

Yesterday I saw that Darren Murph’s 17,212 Engadget-related blog posts had snagged him a Guinness World Record. My first thought was, “Now that is a staggering number of blog posts.” Between this blog, Blogstakes (from back in 2003) and a bunch of Weblogs, Inc. blogs like The RSS Weblog and TV Squad I have done roughly 900 blog posts. I don’t think I’ll ever even reach 17,000 tweets, much less blog posts.

So do these blog post count numbers matter? Yes they do.

Back in the pre-AOL Weblogs, Inc. days we had special reporting screens in my Blogsmith CMS that would show how many posts our bloggers had done in the last 24 hours, 7 days and 30 days. If a blogger had failed to do a blog post in the last 30 days — and that blogger was not named Mark Cuban — we would lock them out of the system and even have our editorial director Judith Meskill re-interview them before allowing them back in. So blogger post counts have always been a critical business metric.

When we sold our company to AOL, Jason and I gave all of our active bloggers bonuses. I created a spreadsheet with all of the total blog post counts and we divided up a large pile of cash based on who had done the most blogging. Even a blogger who had just joined us and had only done 4 blog posts got a check for the minimum $500 bonus. So again, post counts mean a lot.

The Engadget post mentioned Darren Murph passing Ryan Block’s Engadget post count. I did some searching in Gmail and in my bonus spreadsheet Ryan Block was 6th on our list after Deidre Woollard, Brad Hill, Erik Olsen, Michael Sciannamea and Barb Dybwad. Peter Rojas had more posts than all of them, but he wasn’t in my money list since he was a co-owner.

My second thought was, “Those Guinness people just wanted to get on Digg.” So I tweeted:

They say: Engadget’s @DarrenMurph has done the most blog posts ever! I hear: Guinness World Records is link pandering: http://j.mp/94uY4t

Why did I think that? Well, I’m pretty suspicious of companies that try to get attention from the blogosphere. When a dictionary chooses “tweet,” “unfriend,” “woot,” or “blog” as its Word Of The Year, I think they’re link pandering.

When Jimmy Fallon has Joshua Topolsky on his Late Night show, part of me is thrilled he picked Engadget over Gizmodo and part of me thinks Jimmy Fallon just guaranteed himself a blog post about his new show on one of the most popular websites on earth. But what do I know? Maybe Jimmy truly loves cell phones and he and Joshua are close friends who text each other all day long.

When someone on MySpace does a 20 Hottest Geeks list, you know they just want Jolie O’Dell, Ashton Kutcher, Shira Lazar, Kevin Rose and Veronica Belmont to link to it from their massive Twitter accounts. And — oh look over there — it has 20,000 Digg votes. Mission accomplished. Yeah, that bothers me.

Current Engadget leader Joshua Topolsky asked if I was being serious:

@brianalvey What is the point of this tweet? I mean, are you serious?

My reply:

@joshuatopolsky Totally serious. I’m thrilled for Darren/Engadget. I just think someone at Guinness created this category to get on Digg.

A few tweets later I found out from Justin Glow and Joshua that Darren was the one who reached out to Guinness to see if such an award existed. Guinness checked around and couldn’t find anyone with more blog posts and created the award. No link pandering this time. Good for them.

Congratulations, Darren Murph. Thanks for inspiring my little trip into Weblogs history — and my first blog post since July. It was wild to see that spreadsheet again and reread a lot of the email conversations with many of the bloggers as we made our transition into AOL.

Back in 2001 when Niki and I were having tons of fertility trouble — before we had our three kids — we did what fertility-challenged couples are not supposed to do. We got a puppy.

Barkley was the first of our three Cavaliers, but she wasn’t the first Cavalier we tried to get. Our breeder chatted with me while we were looking at his dogs and I didn’t realize I was being tested and I failed. Niki was shocked that I could be so clueless about the “adoption” process. I didn’t fail my second test and we got Barkley.

In college, Niki had a high-jumping cat that she named Jordan after Michael Jordan. She had been an MJ fan since his UNC days. Now we had a dog to name and we both enjoyed watching Charles Barkley on TNT, so Barkley it was.

Barkley was the first dog I ever had from a puppy and she was the best.

She was the first dog I ever took to be trained. After a few lessons I figured out how dogs learn, so I decided to skip ahead and I taught Barkley how to shake. The next lesson after I did that, the instructor went on a rant about how laying down and heeling are useful skills but shaking hands is just a circus trick with no practical value. Hah!

Cavaliers commonly have a heart valve defect. Recently that meant Barkley would get fluid in her lungs and in spite of medication she often had trouble breathing. This weekend when we boarded our other two dogs for a July 4th trip to see my family, we took Barkley upstate with us. We knew the outdoor exercise would be less harmful for her than the stress of a lonely weekend at the kennel. Yesterday she had another crisis requiring a doctor visit. Today when she wouldn’t even lift her head to eat a treat we knew it was time for her to go.

I miss my circus dog so much.

Last fall at TechCrunch 50 (video here) professional Internet celebrity judge Robert Scoble asked me why I didn’t spend time talking about all of the big successful content management systems I’d built in the past. I answered that I only had 6 minutes on stage, so I focused on the product. But at NY Tech Meetup in March I decided to address his question again and tell one of the stories of Crowd Fusion — how I had built all these other great CMSes that no one in the audience had ever used. There was never going to be an O’Reilly book on the Capgemini CMS or a Blogsmith for Dummies, but maybe we’ll see books like that for Crowd Fusion and people everywhere will have the chance to try our platform out.

I talked about some of my experiences partnering up with Jeffrey Zeldman and Jason Calacanis and showed off two book covers I made for the presentation.

About a month ago, I heard a beer commercial in my car and decided Crowd Fusion should have a more beer slogany slogan. Our current tagline is “It serves you right.” So I tweeted a few new slogan ideas:

I’m thinking about rewriting @crowdfusion‘s site to sound more like a beer commercial. People like beer commercials.
9:07 AM Apr 7th

Crowd Fusion is brewed with only the finest PHPs and cold-filtered using a node query language that has been in our family for generations.
9:12 AM Apr 7th

@MikeTRose added his own as well as the #cmsbeerads hash tag I forgot:

@frankensite “Straight from the code foothills of the Rockies, delivered ice cold to your browser.” #cmsbeerads
9:18 AM Apr 7th

I never think of adding a hashtag when I’m doing a series of tweets. @Baratunde does this. He expects his stuff to go viral. Oh well. Live and learn.

Next, I made fun of Drupal.

More for our site: “Please code responsibly. Friends don’t let friends use Drupal.” #cmsbeerads
10:06 AM Apr 7th

Then I ended it with my favorite slogan. It still seems like a great fit when you consider that Crowd Fusion does so much more than a blogging platform.

“I don’t always blog, but when I do I use Crowd Fusion. Stay snarky, my friends.” — The Most Interesting Blogger In The World #cmsbeerads
10:50 AM Apr 7th