Get A Mac: Surgery, Sabotage, and Tech Support

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Get a Mac In the first new Mac ad, PC is getting surgery in order to receive all sorts of upgrades to run Windows Vista. Tech Support involves the PC receiving a camera upgrade (via masking tape to the head) so that he can do important business things like videoconference, only to find out that Macs come with built-in iSights now so they don’t need to upgrade. In Sabotage, the PC has decided to sabotage the commercial altogether and replace the Mac with another actor who says everything the PC wants him to say. [Infinite Loop]

The men and/or women responsible for writing these commercials are the very same people that played Keep-Away with the fat kid’s hat a lunch time in the 7th grade. Until he cried.

iPods no threat to radio?

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Mark Ramsey at Hear 2.0:

“Every so often someone in the radio industry trots out a study which says iPods really aren’t that threatening to the radio industry’s long-term health and welfare. ‘Folks get tired of maintaining them,’ they will say. ‘They’re just a new form of Walkman,’ say others.”

And the radio industry has (apparently) spent a bazillion dollars promoting HD radio. Check out the Google Trends graph posted as one of the comments.

Everything might turn out roses and sunshine for Radio but it won’t be because of HD.

Cabin Fever: Day Three

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Heeere's Johnny!We’ve been iced in since late Friday and even the dogs seem ready for us to get out of the house. We’re tapped at the top of our very steep hill which, like everything else, is covered in break-a-hip ice. No loss of power and net access has allowed both of us to work. I plan to rappel down the hill and hitch to work in the morning. This happens every four or five years, providing a horrifying glimpse of what retirement must be like (shudder). No thanks.

Making money with news web sites

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Graeme Newell –the president and founder of 602 communications– is a consultant “who shows cable and broadcast teams how to effectively market and tease their shows.” We’re talking TV here but his ideas for increasing revenue from news websites apply equally well to all media.

Most broadcast web sites are money pits. Still, there are a lot of companies making serious money on the web. These are entrepreneurial pirates who have a bloodhound’s ability to sniff out revenue models that actually work. All of these moneymaking sites share some common traits and business characteristics.

Lesson #1 – Web moneymakers are entrepreneurs, not businessmen.
Lesson #2 – Businesses making money on the web are typically small.
Lesson #3 – A 30 year old is considered ancient.
Lesson #4 – Moneymaking web sites focus on niche content.

If one of the Learfield Grownups called me in tomorrow and asked me for a strategy to make money with our news websites… I would point them to Mr. Newell’s lesson plan.

I searched (in vein) for his article on the 602 COMMUNICATIONS website. I hope Mr. Newell doesn’t mind me posting it (after the jump). Emphasis (bold) is mine. [Thanks, Bob Priddy]

Continue reading →

Bloggers take on talk radio hosts

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A San Francisco talk radio station pre-empted three hours of programming on Friday in response to a campaign by bloggers who have recorded extreme comments by several hosts and passed on digital copies to advertisers. This article at NYTimes.com explains and I posted on this when it first came up.

For a dozen years (a long time ago) I co-hosted a one-hour daily call-in show. We did silly shit and almost never got into politics. But we picked the topics for the most part and if the water had gotten too hot, we’d have just stopped taking calls.

That bloggers can now record what we say and send those recordings to our advertisers, urging them to stop advertising on our show… well, that just changes the rules of the game. Big time. Nothing gets a station manager’s attention like a cancellation from a sponsor. “We can always find a new talk show host. Sponsors? Not so easy.”

Your politics will dictate who’s “right” in the story above. But like it or not, yesterday’s “broadcast” is today’s “conversation.” And sometimes it’s all shouting.

Campus Ladies: Too funny for network

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Campus Ladies follows Joan & Barri, two middle-aged best friends who decide it’s better to be a freshman at 40 than unhappy housewives forever. Ditching the suburban life of minivans and malls for keg stands and co-ed dorms, Joan and Barri enroll in school in search of the wild college years they missed the first time around.

Campus Ladies is based on characters created by comediennes Carrie Aizley (Joan) and Christen Sussin (Barri) while performing with the famous comedy troupe, The Groundlings. The series is executive produced by Cheryl Hines (Curb Your Enthusiasm) and co-executive producer E. Brian Dobbins (Reno 911). Among others.

“Take a Blogger to Lunch”

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“If we are to survive as news organizations, survival will have to be charted by people who live in the new world, rather than by people who view the Web as either a threat or a tool to gain temporary power in a mortally wounded industry.”

“As news organizations, we inhabit a temporary existence while we wait for the full birth of this new medium. Traditional news organizations must not invest in transitioning people to this new world; we already live in it.

“Where is the innovation? Not in most of our newsrooms. What our newsrooms do have are decision-makers who have never built a Web page by hand, watched Rocketboom, or listened to a podcast. They don’t ‘get’ YouTube and have never heard of Flickr or del.icio.us or Boing Boing.”

— Keith W. Jenkins, the Picture Editor at The Washington Post. Jenkins –a blogger since 1999– was Photography Director at AOL from 1997-1999.