The River

by popular demand…

P.S. these pups (but not the nieces) are available for adoption for those in the E. Texas Piney Woods region.

Been kind of quiet as we’ve been visiting relatives in Texas for the holidays — got the week between Xmas and New Year’s off and have been relaxing, big time. Spent the first few days at my Dad’s ranch in E. Texas. Some of the highlights:

Congrats to Fredrick Marckini and the folks at iProspect, as they pocket $50 mill and join Aegis Group. It’s going to be really interesting to watch how an SEM agency is integrated into an agency group like that. Nice that iProspect will remain its own brand and entity rather than being mushed into another interactive agency.

The gap between blogs and journalism are closing fast. Bacon’s, which provides info on journalists and publications for PR pros, is developing a blog monitoring service to launch next year.

"The news cycle for a story sometimes originates from a blog and can on occasion find its way into the mainstream media," says Ruth McFarland, Senior Vice President and Publisher for Bacon’s.

"With today’s information overload from often irrelevant or dubious sources, our aim is to help our clients by filtering the communications clutter. Bacon’s will therefore focus on blogs run by reputable, credible professionals. Initially, these will be blogs of active journalists, but as our in-house researchers scrutinize and approve additional news-related blogs, we will add to the scope of our coverage," says McFarland.

Next, bring on the blog e-mail "press" lists. Aargh.

Just got a vacation reply message (though I don’t even recall sending an e-mail to this person):

“I will be out of the office starting 01/22/2004 and will not return until 01/03/2005.

I will be out of the office starting 1/22/04 and will return 1/3/05. I will
be checking e-mail periodically throughout the winter holiday.”

That’s something like an 11 month vacation! Nice gig if you can get it

I’m late reporting this, but I had a great time both at Google’s press party (loved the ice sculpture and meeting folks I’ve talked with on the phone for years) and at the Bay Area Interactive Group (BIG) get-together last week. It was quite a night, I must say. At the risk of sounding naive, I’ll say I was really surprised at how long it took to get to the Googleplex (and back). It’s shocking to me just how large this area called “the Bay Area” is. (Silicon Valley is the same thing as the South Bay, isn’t it?) It’s a little intimidating, but also exciting as there are plenty of different areas to explore. (It’ll keep me busy for years!)

BIG was really lovely. The City Club in downtown SF is beautiful, and before I’d even gotten out of the elevator I’d met two guys I ended up chatting with for quite a while. The whole room seemed abuzz with optimism. I ran into one old acquaintence, Doug Weaver of Upstream Group, who was visiting from Vermont.

I’m looking forward to future events and apologize to all the people I’d meant to look out for but didn’t touch base with. (By the time I showed up, around 8:30 or 9, the name tags were gone and I suspect quite a few people had already left.)

Blogger and strategist B.L. Ochman says she’s taken a post at “Whatsnextenmesh, a Parallel Universe Blog”. The appointment is part of the Triangle1911 promotion I wrote about a couple of weeks ago on ClickZ.

Hope to meet some more local folks tonight at The Bay Area Interactive Group (BIG)’s holiday get-together.

Well, according to the good folks at Intelliseek, Jon Stewart’s “Crossfire” appearance wins top honors. A well-deserved honor, too, I might add.

According to the press release:

Bloggers linked to the “Crossfire” transcript in their online commentaries 1,880 times in 2004, followed by 1,415 references to Slate.com’s “Unfairenheit 9/11: The Lies of Michael Moore” and 1,174 citations for the BBC’s obituary of radio DJ John Peel.

Meredith Roth is at it again, following up her “worst dressed list” with something a bit more positive. Let me just say I’m proud that five of my colleagues were mentioned (not bad, on a list of just 15).