Like I said, I’m glad the new Autoblog logo is a new take on my old one and not something radical. I am considering snagging the old “tire tracks” background I drew in Illustrator and slapping it on my own blog. We’ll see.
My old logo:
Matt’s Dennis’ new one:
UPDATE: Matt did all of the site’s design work, but the logo came from a reader contest. I vaguely remember that. It was a long time ago.
I read a story about Bono and The Edge writing the music for a Spider-Man musical about a month ago and I have had trouble getting it out of my mind.
When I saw Spider-Man 3 I thought to myself, “Wow, I hope Spidey has better luck on Broadway than Mary Jane had.”
Just like with Cork’d, I am pretty sure that they should at least hire me as an advisor for this project. My big contribution to the show will be an insistence that all of the songs are taken directly from ones that U2 has already recorded. Why write something new that might not be a hit with audiences when people already know and love your old stuff?
Remember, you heard these here first:
Act One
Act Two
Mr. Bono? Mr. Edge? Call me!
Last night, Gwen Stefani kicked off the summer concert series at the Nikon Theater at Jones Beach. I half expected someone in the tour’s marketing team to place little stickers over those signs changing it to the “Akon Theater at Jones Beach” for the night since he was one of her opening acts, but that didn’t happen.
She began with The Sweet Escape and Akon came out and sang his essential “woo hoo, yee hoo” lines. Then she spent about 90 minutes doing song after song from her two solo albums and talking about her baby Kingston who turns one this Friday.
I liked the show. I liked everything she did. It was probably similar to going to a Madonna concert. I’m just a little disappointed that it wasn’t the “Gwen Stefani Greatest Hits” show with eight or ten No Doubt songs and Moby’s South Side thrown in.
If she came out and did three No Doubt songs in her encore I would have been thrilled. Spiderwebs, Just a Girl, Hey Baby, Don’t Speak, New, Ex-Girlfriend, It’s My Life, Hella Good, Underneath It All, Excuse Me Mr. — anything.
She did repeatedly thank the crowd for indulging her dance album phase and told us that the next album she was doing would be with No Doubt — which was answered with insane cheering. To be fair, many solo artists don’t play their band’s material. Phil Collins figured that if you wanted to hear Genesis songs you’d go to a Genesis show.
Oh well. It was still a ton of fun to see the wardrobe changes and watch all of the solo Gwen songs, but now I’ll know to not miss the next No Doubt tour.
Some of my favorite Dans — one I worked with and one I haven’t yet — made a clever little social wine site called Cork’d about a year ago. Just a few days ago they sold it to a new company run by Gary Vaynerchuk of Wine Library TV.
When they launched I had a ton of great ideas for Cork’d, but I waited so long that I guess I’ll have to get in touch with Gary to share my killer ideas.
The ones I can recall most clearly were that Cork’d should create a sister site called Hungov’r for user submitted videos and hire Sammy Sosa as a celebrity spokesperson.
If drinking wine didn’t give me instant headaches, I could have been a huge asset to that team.
I’ve been a big fan of Squeeze for a long time, seeing many of their line ups over the years and turning my sister on to them as well as individual members like Glenn Tilbrook, Chris Difford, Paul Carrack and Jools Holland.
This year after an eight year break they’re doing a short reunion tour. Their reunion isn’t getting the press that The Police are getting, but I’m psyched about seeing Squeeze again even if I don’t get to sing with them this time.
Will they even recognize me with hair?
After more than six weeks of me not drinking any Diet Coke, Niki’s cousin is visiting and we have a case of very attractive cans in our kitchen.
I’ll let you know how it goes…
Update: There are like four frosty cold cans of Diet Coke in our refrigerator this morning. None in the basement where I work. So far I’m winning the battle of wills, but it has only been 12 hours since they arrived. I don’t know when her cousin is leaving, but I’m afraid she won’t be able to drink all of them before she goes. I want to give a shout out to Gavin for the positive words of support and to Dave for dropping off those motivational audio tapes.
Before I turned four, I spent a bunch of time at Virginia Tech and have lots of memories of Blacksburg. My mom used to take me for sundaes in nearby Roanoke. I remember a little girl named Tabitha who lived in our neighborhood who had the same birthday as me. I have a pretty vivid memory of me, my grandfather and my dad trading hats at my dad’s graduation.
After Virginia Tech, my dad got his law degree at American University in D.C. When I was seven, we moved to Brooklyn, but long before I was a Yankees fan I was a Virginia Tech Hokie.
A few days after the shootings, my dad emailed me with some facts I didn’t know about his days at Virginia Tech.
In the spring of 1970 when I was born, my dad was living at Ambler Johnston Hall, the same dormitory where the killing began.
When my dad was a freshman, most of his classes were in Norris Hall, the main engineering administration and classroom building — a building which might never be used again.
He told me about an experience he had which made him decide to transfer out of engineering at the end of his freshman year. He went from his professor’s office to the engineering dean’s office in Norris Hall to request his transfer. He expected that he would get an appointment with someone who would try to talk him out of it and instead the woman behind the counter pulled out an IBM punch card with his name on it and asked what department he wanted to transfer to. He thought for a minute and said math.
She filled out some department codes and he walked out in disbelief. It was like they were expecting him to not tough it out. They had lost a top engineering student and didn’t even care.
Later he realized that all freshman engineering students were effectively “undeclared” and all of them had to choose a more specific engineering major at the end of the year: electrical, civil, aero, mechanical or even math.
So two major changes in my dad’s life were connected those two Virginia Tech buildings: Ambler Johnston Hall and Norris Hall.
As he put it, “Got here from there.”
Our Weblogs GM Judith Meskill is leaving. Today we’re having some Weblogs sales meetings in NYC and tonight we’re taking her out for a farewell dinner.
It has been a roller coaster ride recently for me at AOL. Losing Judith is definitely a low. Meetings with the new AOL Platforms boss Ted Cahall and the new “owner” of Weblogs Marty Moe have been the highlights. Even Ron Grant seems like he knows what he’s doing, so I guess you can’t believe everything you read in Valleywag.
Between the three of them, my AOL optimism tank is no longer on empty.
That tank is a long way from being topped off, but at least I am seeing signs that AOL could be turning around.
If you work at AOL and believe that AOL doesn’t need any turning around, I’d like to point you to a hot web 2.0 resume service some friends of mine built. You’ll thank me a couple of months from now. An updated resume is your friend.
Here’s part of a note I sent out to our blogger mailing list last Friday about Judith:
Imagining Weblogs without Jason is easy, but I can hardly imagine Weblogs without Judith.
Judith hasn’t said what she plans to do next, but I wish her the all the best and I can’t wait to see what she does.
Working with her has been a pleasure and we were lucky to have her. She was overqualified for every role Weblogs ever used her in, including the top spot.
That makes this an even bigger loss for AOL than it is for us.
Engadget’s Ryan Block also talks about Judith leaving on his blog.
The Boston Marathon takes place today and one of the official participants will be running the marathon from space, astronaut Suni Williams.
I’m sure it’s a lot of work to run a marathon even when you’re weightless and I am happy to report that they are not counting the space station’s own orbiting into her distance. I can’t wait to see the video of this woman trying to spill a cup of water on herself as she runs — only to have it float upward.
It reminds me of a Seth Meyers Saturday Night Live rant during the 2001 World Series that was being played in November.
He noted that The Yankees were struggling against Arizona because Red Sox fans were taking post-9/11 pity on the Yankees and rooting for them. He complained that “everyone and everything Boston roots for loses. If Boston rooted for gravity, we’d all be floating three inches off the ground.”
And now we’ve got someone running the Boston Marathon in zero gravity.
Wicked.
Some of you have known for a while that I’m on my way out, but to others it’s likely to be a surprise.
Is it because they are prepping the company so they can sell it to Microsoft? No.
Is it because all of the management who paid attention to you and respected your business and your team was fired or has quit? No. If I was leaving over that, I would have done it when it happened at the end of last year.
Is it because AOL is where brands go to die? No. Some brands survive and some people are reporting that AOL is a breeding ground for hot new web 2.0 startup sites like Cindy Li’s Ficlets, which was a huge hit at SxSW among AOLers.
Here’s the deal: In 2003, Jason and I saw the future of publishing in blogs. Now in 2007, I have seen the future of publishing and it is Twitter.
With some funding of my own and some outside funding to be announced later this week, I snagged a hot domain name for it — twittersinc.com. I paid low six figures for the domain, but I think it really gets to the heart of the matter, like we did with Weblogs, Inc. This is professional twitting on a variety of consumer and trade topics. Our tagline will be “This is not your daughter’s Twitter!”
I was torn between that one and “To twitfinity and beyond!” Let me know what you think. I’m trying to be transparent here.
We are launching later on in April with eight twitter publications:
Engatwit: obsessively covering gadgets
Autotwit: what we’re driving, what the guy in front of us is driving
Twitfood: what we’re eating right this minute
Twitter Fanboy: constant updates on the Twitter phenomenon
Joytwit: can we twit and play Xbox at the same time?
Cinematwitical: what movies we’re watching right now
Twitting Baby: all about parenting
That’s Twit: healthy living while twitting
I am so excited about the potential for my next venture that I can barely contain myself!
If you are already twitting about any of these topics and want to do it for money or if you have a Twitter account with more than 500 followers and you’re looking for an acquisition, fill out the short survey form after the jump.
Brian Alvey