Summer Interns

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Our summer interns are packing up and heading back to school. One of their final tasks was to prepare a presentation on what they learned working for Learfield. The interns working in our Dallas office created a Powerpoint presentation which was, I’m sure, very… nice.

The Jeff City crew asked my advice and I told them Powerpoint is for losers. I suggested they produce a video and loned them my camcorder. I forgot to give them a mic so the sound is not all that it might be but their creativity and humor comes through loud and clear. Ladies and gentlemen… Coleman, Corey and Tyler.

Cassette tapes and overnight DVD’s

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The news division of our company is in the process of launching a new radio network called Living the Country Life. It’s part of a joint venture with Meredith Publishing, which created the magazine and TV show (of the same name).

We’re producing a series of daily radio features and our affiliate relations guys will attempt to get the new programs on as many stations as possible. Toward that end, we’ve produced demos, so radio stations can hear what the programs sound like. I’m getting to the point, hang on.

One of the producers popped in this morning and asked how quickly I could create a web page where they could post the demos (MP3 files) for stations to download/listen?

A few years ago, I would have parked the files on an FTP server or cobbled together something in FrontPage. A few more years ago, and we would have been mailing out CD’s (or cassette tapes!).

This morning it took about 15 minutes to pull together a nice little blog on Typepad. Our affiliate relations folks can now just email  a link to a prospective affiliate. Such a site could easily become a cornerstone of our affiliate clearance effort. Fast, inexpensive, and no programming skills necessary.

I found a similar application for one our clients.

Children’s Trust Fund of Missouri has a 10 minute video on Shaken Baby Syndrome. You can order the DVD (for free, I believe) from their website, but what can you do with it then? Show it to your club or organization, I suppose. But why not make it easy for anyone with a web browser to watch the video.

So I put it up on Google Video and embedded the Flash player on their website and a world-wide audience is now just a click away.

This kind of stuff was damned hard or impossible, just a few years ago. And now, anyone can do this stuff. This is the real power of the web.

Gnomedex 2007

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This year’s Gnomedex is billed as "The Blogosphere’s Conference." Speakers include: Guy Kawasaki, Cali Lewis, one of the JibJab guys, Justin Kan (Justin.tv), Jason Calcanis, and others. If you don’t recognize these names, it’s unlikely you’d enjoy the conference. But I look forward to it all year. This is my Indy 500/Super Bowl/World Series, minus the crowds (It’s a small conference, limited to about 300 attendees.)

For the first four or five years of the conference, I took vacation and paid my own expenses. But the Enlightened Management of Learfield now sees the value of this conference, so it’s work related and reimbursed.

Oooh, look! Goosebumps!

Vacations not for everyone

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I don’t much care for what most people would call a “vacation.” And –once upon a time– felt a bit of guilt about it. Barb likes to travel so she and her sister frequently vacation together, so it works.

I discovered last week that I am not alone. The story (Yahoo! News) quoted a couple of people who share my lack of enthusiasm for The Vacation.

Nancy Kirk doesn’t consider them worth the effort. So instead of taking vacations, Kirk, 60, who owns an antique quilt and fabric business in Omaha, Neb., works down time into her everyday life — from taking an afternoon nap if she feels like it to occasionally tacking a day onto a business trip for sightseeing.

Jared Wadley, a senior public relations specialist at the University of Michigan news service in Ann Arbor, said he wasn’t interested in vacations even as a child. He not a workaholic, he says, but instead paces himself so that leisure is part of his day-to-day life.

“You have to look at why people take vacations. They want to get away from the office, but I enjoy my work so I don’t want to get away from it.”

There you go. I have three weeks of paid vacation but struggle to take it all. I think I would much prefer stretching those 21 days out into long weekends. If you add in the naturally occurring three-day-weekends… almost every other week would be a short one. Sound good?

Hide your iPod in a gutted Zune case

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Hideapod“You made a smart choice in choosing an iPod. And now you can protect it from theft and still enjoy using it in public with the new Hide-a-Pod anti-theft case.

It’s really very simple. Just tell us what iPod model you want to protect and we provide a gutted and hinged Zune with our custom molded iPod casing adapter.”

And they “only use brown Zunes for the maximum anti-theft protection.” Ouch.

10th anniversary of blogging

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“We are approaching a decade since the first blogger — regarded by many to be Jorn Barger — began his business of hunting and gathering links to items that tickled his fancy, to which he appended some of his own commentary. On Dec. 23, 1997, on his site, Robot Wisdom, Mr. Barger wrote: “I decided to start my own webpage logging the best stuff I find as I surf, on a daily basis,” and the Oxford English Dictionary regards this as the primordial root of the word “weblog.”

[WSJ Online Thanks, Henry]

Back to land lines?

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UplinkIn 1981 our company began distributing our (news and ag) programs to radio stations via satellite. It was a big deal at the time because we were the first of the smaller, regional networks to “go satellite.” Uplink hardware was damned expensive. Downlink hardware at the radio stations was pretty pricey, too. But much cheaper (in the long run) than all of those point-to-point land lines.

For many years, having a satellite distribution system was a competitive edge. You had to have some way of getting the programming to the radio stations (and their listeners). No FedEx in those days.

In a few weeks, football season will get underway and we’ll be distributing play-by-play audio to affiliates of 35 collegiate sports radio networks around the country. Most of those via satellite. But for the first time, we’ll use live web streaming to deliver audio to the affiliates of two of our networks (Maine and Montana State).

This is possible because of increased bandwidth; better audio encoding; and a growing acceptance of audio (and video) online. If all goes according to plan, listeners won’t even be aware of how the audio gets from the stadium to their radios (or computers).

We could sort of see this coming but it was/is difficult to imagine a time when satellite distribution of audio and video could be replaced by the Internet (or even some Super Internet of the future). But it’s getting easier.

So what’s it all mean? It seems unlikely your “competitive edge” will be distribution. That’s probably been true for some time now. Having the good content will always be important. But if you are not the only source for the content… or the best source for the content… (to be continued).

Children’s Trust Fund relaunches website on Typepad

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ctf4kids.orgChildren’s Trust Fund of Missouri is one of our clients and, for the last few months, I’ve been helping them with a make-over of their website.

Their previous site was classic Web 1.0. It was designed by a company in St. Louis and any changes or updates had to be emailed to the developer who would, in time, make the change. Most of the “current” content was PDF news releases that weren’t very “new. The site was hosted on state servers. The CTF guys just were not happy with their site.

I persuaded them to try Typepad and incorporate a blog as their primary content element.

They took the site public at the first of the month and, although still tweaking some of the content, it looks and works great. And the best part… they are now in control. Paula and Alicia know how to add pages, maintain links, and manage the site top to bottom.

Kirk, the executive director, is finding his blogging feet and posting regularly. From his fingers…to the world. Boom.

We’ve shown them how to use Flickr, Google Calendar and YouTube. And all of this for a fraction of what they paid for their previous site, which simply wasn’t meeting their needs.

Helping folks like Kirk, Paula and Alicia tell their story is extremely gratifying. If Web 1.0 was selling fish, Web 2.0 is using great new tools for helping people learn how to fish.

iPhone Confessions: George Kopp (Week One)

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George is a serious Techno Boy. He has a geek job with the state for his day job (all Windows) and moonlights on Macs (and some PC’s) for love (and a little money).

George knew he’d eventually own an iPhone but thought he could wait awhile. He made the mistake of stopping by the AT&T store (Day Two) for a look-see and wound up springing for the 8 gig model.

George’s love-of-all-things-Mac is tempered by his no-bullshit-geek-o-rocity. By that I mean, he expects much from his techno-toys. But once he got the iPhone in his sweaty little hands, it was prom night. I got caught up in that as we talked and had to edit our chat more than I intended. Sorry, George.

Listen/Download: 5:30 MP3

Creators, Critics, Collectors, Joiners, Spectators and Inactives

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A new Forrester report divides the U.S. online population into six groups according to their social participation on the Web.

More than one-fifth of those classified as Creators—those who blog, publish Web sites, upload videos, or participate in other content creation activities—own Macs, while only 12 percent own Dell computers.

The majority of Spectators (they read blogs, watch videos, and listen to podcasts) own Macs while the majority of Inactives (they don’t participate online) own Dells.