“…we’ve had a little corporation run by Dick Cheney living at the White House for 6 years, running an agressive oil company bonus program for his friends and family. The White House is just a fancy corporate headquarters. Bush reports to Cheney and gets to take trips on big planes and have fun.” — Halley Suitt
Yearly Archives: 2005
Rocheport sunset
Dinner with Orlando and Laura last night in beautiful Rocheport, overlooking the Missouri River. We got there just in time to catch this view (from the A-Frame) of the river. The light was just this pink, no touch up.
Ten years of streaming
Finally got around to going through the last box of files that came along with the recent office move. Found a file with notes and correspondence with Mark Cuban (PDF) (November and December, 1995). Cuban was cutting lots of content deals back in those days and he was hot to stream our football and basketball broadcasts. Almost nobody knew what streaming was and it was damned hard to imagine that anyone would ever listen to “the radio” on their computers. His company was called AudioNet back then and became Broadcast.com before he sold to Yahoo! How could that have been 10 years ago? And what will this all look like 10 years from now?
Update: First contact from Cuban was on September 9, 1995.
Cliff Birklund
I’ve been thinking a lot about advertising these days. Radio advertising in particular. I have met hundreds of radio sales people during the past 30+ years. My father sold for many years.
Cliff Birklund (I don’t remember how Cliff spelled his name) was hired to do news at KBOA but eventually moved into sales. In a previous life, he was a commercial artist and I’ll never forgive myself for not saving more of his doodles. This one is a classic (have I posted this before?) but I’ve always liked this self-portrait.
Update: Bob Heater asks how Cliff could have –in 1978– doodled something on a 1989 calendar page. I left KBOA in 1984 so I must have salvaged the drawing on a later visit to Kennett.
iPod Nano
Walt Mossberg calls the iPod Nano “the best combination of beauty and functionality of any music player I’ve tested — including the iconic original white iPod. And it sounds great. I plan to buy one for myself this weekend.”
I’ve tried three or four cheap little MP3 players and they work, sorta okay… but I’ve had iPod lust since I saw the first one. And the new Nano is just too much temptation. And, yes, I know I can get more gigs for less money blah, blah blah. I’m paying extra for the cool.
Every day there’s more and more interesting new podcasts out there so it’s time to gear up. Review to follow.
Incomplete Guide to Blogs and the New Web
Seth Godin’s latest ebook, Who’s There? Seth Godin’s Incomplete Guide to Blogs and the New Web, is just a little 46 page PDF file but it’s packed with lots of small but profound insights. The kind of stuff you read and think, “You know, he’s right.” Some of my favorites:
We’ve become astonishingly picky. Picky about what we buy and picky about what we watch and picky about what we read. In a world where there’s a lot of clutter and where everything is good enough, most of the time we just pick the stuff that’s close or cheap or familiar. But when it’s something we care about, we go to enormous lengths to find the very best.
Radio is officially dead, especially when wireless internet access comes to your car.
The stuff you’re putting on your marketing site or in your blog or even in your brochures or in your business letters is too long. Too much inside baseball. Too many unasked questions getting answered too soon. The stuff you’re sending out in your email and your memos is too vague.
It used to matter a lot where an idea came from. When an idea came from a mainstream media company (MSM) or from a Fortune 500 company, it was a lot more likely to spread. That’s because media companies had free airwaves or paid for newsprint, while big corporations had the money to buy interruptions. Today, all printing presses are created equal. And everyone owns one. Which means that a good idea on a little blog has a very good chance of spreading. In fact, an idea from outside the mainstream might have an even better chance of spreading.
If you write something great, and do it over and over and over again, then you’ll be unstoppable. Whether or not someone helps you.
The problem is that the very things big companies, public companies, stable companies and established companies are good at are the things that make a blog boring.
Small means you can tell the truth on your blog.
If you care about your personal brand and career and impact, you need a blog. And you should start the cycle of getting better at blogging.
Phone photo of phone
Photo of a woman playing with her phone taken by a woman playing with her phone. Barb snapped (clicked?) this with her Treo 650. Would have been much better with my Casio but I left home without it. How wonderful it would have been to be able to call that woman and whisper, “Don’t turn around.”
Best Album Name: A Ass Pocket of Whiskey
Terry McVey recently pointed us to the Best Album (CD?) Cover Art, and now has a nominee for Best Album Name: A Ass Pocket of Whiskey (Fat Possum Records) by R. L. Burnside. Sadly, R. L. died on September 1, 2005, in a Memphis hospital.
“A Ass Pocket of Whiskey is a collaborative effort between well-known artists R.L. Burnside and Jon Spencer Blues Explosion. Recorded in a rented out hunters cabin near Holly Springs, Mississippi, both acts bring their best to the table with amps turned all the way up, drums pounding and R.L. and Jon Spencer screaming with their charismatic voices back and forth at one another.”
Based solely on track names, my favorites are: Snake Drive and Tojo Told Hitler.
Podcasting Next Big Thing?
“An executive at Disney will be in a meeting and ask the staff how many people knew this was going on, and three geeks in the back will raise their hands. Then slowly two-thirds of the room will raise their hands. None of these people will have known that everyone already knew. It’s about then that podcasting will suddenly become the rage. It’ll be a Time magazine cover. That will be by the middle of next year. Then the money will start flying around like crazy.”
— PC Magazine columnist John C. Dvorak thinks podcasting will be the Next Big Thing:
Lance Armstrong to come out of retirement?
Lance Armstrong says he could come out of retirement to try for an eighth straight Tour de France victory.
“I’m thinking it’s the best way to piss [the French] off. I’m not willing to put a percentage on the chances but I will no longer rule it out.”
Armstrong believes he is the target of a “witch hunt” by the French media. French sports daily L’Equipe reported in August that urine samples taken from Armstrong during his first Tour victory in 1999 tested positive for the banned substance EPO.