Wow. 1600 paid attendees at SES New York. So sorry I’m not one of those 1600, but someone’s gotta man the fort. Hope everyone is having a good time and is finding the show as valuable as I always have. I know our roving ClickZ correspondents are soaking it all in.
Am I the only one who is annoyed that the ads we’ve been calling “floating ads” for years are suddenly being discovered by the mainstream — and dubbed “floater ads”? Note the incidence of the term “floating ad” (92 results) on ClickZ as opposed to “floater ad” (zero results). And ClickZ has a huge section authored by Internet marketing practitioners. Even the IAB has guidelines for “floating” — not “floater” — ads.
My annoyance began with the NYTimes.com piece this week and was amplified when sister site IHT recycled the same story with a different headline.
“Floater” just sounds somehow… scatological.
I’m with Watson…. My itchy trigger finger belies my deep desire for TiVo for my radio. We’ve had ReplayTV since May of 2002 (nearly 3 years). It’s been with us at 3 different residences, through 3 different cable companies and 1 satellite TV provider. It may not be TiVo, but I honestly have no complaints. In fact, because we have an early ReplayTV, we still have the auto-commercial-skipping the company abandoned in 2003.
When we have to use our cable system (Comcast) menu for choosing programming (rarely), it drives us crazy — the interface is so slow to respond. When we can’t pause or rewind — when traveling or with radio — it’s extremely frustrating. We’re spoiled, but it just feels so right. Needless to say, we’re not alone.
This is why I desperately want one for my radio. Podcasting really won’t do. I don’t want to be totally timeshifted away from the rest of the listening public. I like my NPR in the car on the way home, and I like knowing everyone else is out there listening to the same thing at the same time. I just want to rewind it a bit if I miss something… or pause if I’m hitting some gnarly traffic. Then, of course, I want to skip ahead (through the pledge breaks?) and catch back up to the rest of the world. Is that too much to ask?
Heard some interesting stories yesterday evening on Pacific Time (KQED program on Asia) about telemarketing in South Korea and Japan.
I wrote a piece today that raises some interesting questions. Have methods of viral distribution spread widely enough so that an online word-of-mouth campaign can bypass techie bloggers? The MSN Found campaign — slammed by Scoble and dissed by other bloggers — is aimed at mainstream consumers. It doesn’t have RSS distribution, it doesn’t allow videos to be downloaded, and the “blogs” are fake (though in their defense, they are designed to be fake, from characters in an ongoing narrative).
So if early-adopter techie bloggers find MSN Found uninteresting, is that it? Does the meme go no further? Or will e-mail “forward to a friend” and more mainstream (read: teen diary) blogging save the day for MSN? Time will tell, I suppose. MSN isn’t talking about it and they’ll probably only spill if it’s eventually successful, but one wonders whether this will become one of those cautionary tales of online marketing gone wrong (like Raging Cow).
UPDATE: MSN responds to the Found controversy via its blog, saying it’s going to add RSS feeds though “very few updates” to the campaign are planned. Kudos to the firm for acknowledging the discussion that’s been going on.
UPDATE2: Scoble apologizes.
BoingBoing offers a very cool link to a Flash version of the Infocom “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” game. I spent many hours playing this game with my little brother back in the ’80s — it was probably one of my most satisfying early computer experiences. I haven’t played the Flash version yet, but I’m checking it out.
Incidentally, with all of the geek interest in something like Hitchhiker’s Guide, why no creative Web marketing plan for the upcoming flick? Or is something in the works? (I DO see some paid search ads a so-called blog and some kind of contest.) Incidentally, I love that Arthur Dent is played by “Tim” from The Office.
Interesting piece at Knowlege@Wharton about the obesity epidemic and marketers’ responsibilities. It’s really a fascinating area to watch, as of late.
“This is a very difficult issue,” says Wharton marketing professor Patti Williams. “In some ways, companies are stuck between a rock and a hard place. Consumers say they want healthier foods, but if you look at consumer behavior, many people choose unhealthy foods over healthy ones.” Indeed, a restaurant chain that recently tried to reduce the size of its portions was soundly blasted by its customers and has now decided to reinstate the original serving size. “How do marketers navigate their way through [things like this]?” Williams asks. “I think companies in general are sincere about wanting to offer healthier alternatives,” in part because with all the dire warnings about obesity, “they don’t have many other choices.”
Spent the wet long weekend in Yosemite, so just heard late last night about the suicide of Hunter S. Thompson. He was one of my journalistic heroes — because he told it like it was and because he told it so well. An amazingly adept writer, his stylistic flourishes and lengthy sentences often had me in awe. I loved especially Proud Highway, Volume 1 — an epistolary work covering the writer’s youthful exploits, from growing up in Louisville, KY to serving in the U.S. Air Force to writing Hell’s Angels. It’s fascinating to see how much raw personality was evident so early, and to see him develop the writing style to express those intense energies. Farewell, Hunter S. Thompson.
Tom Foremski at SiliconValleyWatcher.com has a great post on the dinner salon I attended last evening at Fleur de Lys.
As Tom said, it was a table surrounded by passionate, interesting people with lots of ideas and plenty of questions. Many thanks to Melody Haller, founder and president of Antenna Group, for the invitation and the stimulating evening.
(The food was delicious, too. Yum.)
I’m not sure exactly how to say it, so I thought I’d borrow some of the words used by another individual who “came out” recently. Here goes…
Throughout the last several months, I have grappled with my own identity, who I am….At a point in every person’s life, one has to look deeply into the mirror of one’s soul and decide one’s unique truth in the world, not as we may want to see it or hope to see it, but as it is.
And so my truth is that I am a pregnant American….
I’ve felt like a sort of “dishonest blogger” the last few months — choosing not to write about the most fundamentally life-altering experience I’ve been going through. But I’ve been worried — and still am worried, as is the way with most parents-to-be probably — about things going wrong. But now I think it’s time to throw off the fear and embrace my future as the mother of a son. So if I seem a little erratic in my blogging, or if I show signs of “pregnancy brain,” just know the fog should lift (and the little one should make his appearance) in mid-July.
UPDATE: I’m feeling fine. Am pretty much over the morning sickness stage. Getting a little bit of a belly but others would probably just notice me looking fatter and wearing more tent-like clothing (and comfy shoes). Hopefully will start to really “show” in the next few weeks. (I’m halfway there — 20 weeks — as of this weekend.) Pretty exciting stuff!
