The River

Ok, so I was skeptical about podcasting. But the last two days I’ve done many hours of driving, back and forth to San Jose for the Kelsey Group “Drilling Down on Local” conference. Here’s what’s been on my podcast list (besides the Ricky Gervais podcast which remains a classic):

• Joseph Jaffe’s Across the Sound. This served as a great way to use former “down time” to think about issues related to interactive marketing. Also interesting for anyone considering getting into podcasting.
  
• Jason Chervokas’ Down in the Flood. Despite my great fondness for Chervokas, the general lack of podcasts in my diet meant I’d never listened to DITF in its entirety. Remedied this over the last couple of days with the “Best of 2005” episode. Excellent stuff on the origins of American music.
  
• Fred Wilson’s Positively 10th Street. A bit hokey at times, I’ll admit, but Fred and his family have good taste in music and I’ve gotten turned on to some stuff I’ve enjoyed. Both current and classic music is represented.
  
• Lostcasts (which turns out to be by some of the folks at interactive agency Click Here). For LOST addicts.
  

Next up… all the podcasts Pete Lerma mentioned in his recent ClickZ column including Search Engine Watch’s podcast.

Any other suggestions?

Ok, it’s finally reached the point where I am going to burst if I don’t post about this. I keep hearing people saying (the most recent being the person I’m overhearing behind me at this conference) that they are writing “a blog” about something, when what they really mean is that they are writing “a blog post” or “a blog entry.” The site itself, or the sum total of blog posts/entries, is called a blog, while each discrete content element is called an “entry” or a “post.” *Whew* Glad I got that off my chest. A sign of the mainstreaming of blogging?

My New Office Building
Originally uploaded by Pamela PC.

It’s times like this I love living in California. I’ve just moved to a new office building this week, finally separating myself from the Jupitermedia SF offices after Incisive Media’s acquisition of ClickZ and SEW in August. The new building’s called the Strawberry Creek Design Center, and it houses a variety of design-oriented businesses, along with a yoga studio and a sports-medicine chiropractic office. (Very Berkeley). Yes, I’m now in Berkeley. My shared office area has a lot of natural light, easy exposure to open space (the green in the picture is Strawberry Creek Park), and a nice conference room. Come visit.

UPDATE: Just checked JUPM’s page on the new Google Finance and this blog entry is included in “blog posts,” I guess because of my mention of the company. Wild. Henry Blodget says the “blog posts” feature is a “traffic firehose” so it’s interesting to see what turns up there. (Will we soon see Google Finance-specific spam?)

It feels just like the “good old days” in “Silicon Alley,” when Jason & Tom and Jason are scrapping, Fred’s weighing in, and commenters are jumping in with plenty of thoughts. All sparked by a NYT “Style” section story about the resurgence of the Alley. (Has it really been 10 years?)

I worked at @NY back in the day (beginning in 1998) and watched the @NY/SAR battle up close. At @NY, there was always the aim to burst the hype bubble, but we were also caught up in a generalized excitement about the revolution that was underway — the ideas, the energy, and, yes, the wealth creation. Tom and Jason were especially interested in pioneering a new digital publishing medium — not in chronicling the rise of a digital medium via a print magazine. Both Tom and Jason are very talented writers, journalists and thinkers — if you have any doubt, read their blogs — and I feel privileged to have worked with them at such an interesting time. Still, they certainly didn’t grow @NY at anything nearing SAR’s pace. (As others have said, they did cash out at the right time, though.)

It probably would have been smarter, business-wise, in those days, to go with print, as Calacanis did. Calacanis was and is a great promoter and he did some pioneering events. He did some things with the magazine, like the SAR 100, that really captured the zeitgeist. Some of his SAR reporters, notably Rafat Ali and Staci Kramer, now of paidcontent.org, have gone on to do some amazing work, which proves Calacanis has an eye for journalistic talent. He embodied Silicon Alley, for many, as a young enterpreneur with hustle. (The best moment I think was the New Yorker profile, featuring some beautiful black-and-white photos.) Even now, as CEO of Weblogs Inc under AOL, he’s an incredibly entertaining guy. But he’s not infallible either.

One of my friends, in the depths of the dot-com meltdown, asked me acidly if I still believed the Internet was going to “change the world.” “Hell, yes,” I said. Or something to that effect. Over the course of the past few years, we’ve seen media consumption habits shift dramatically. We’ve seen new businesses spring up to become successful with models that were “too early” back in the day.

As for the NYT piece, it doesn’t annoy me, as it does Jason Chervokas, that it appears in the “Style” section. Silicon Alley was about both style and substance, and perhaps the piece was more about the cultural aspects, rather than the business aspects, of the phenomenon. I think the Times does a decent job — though obviously a mainstream media job, and not a cutting-edge job — of covering Internet media business these days. (The “slivercasting” piece by Saul Hansell is a good example.)

Ok, enough rambling from me (I gotta get back to work covering this Internet media thing). Here are a few other posts on the subject:

• Jason Chervokas - Style over Substance in Silicon Alley
  
• Tom Watson: Bulletin: Silicon Alley is still Dead
  
• Jason Calacanis: 10 years later… lessons from the SAR/@NY Battle
  
• Fred Wilson: Alley Wag and Revisionist History, Calacanis Style
  
• Brouhaha: Back Alley Fighting
  
• Steve Gilliard: Warning, bullshit alert
  
• i-boy: Fight club, Silicon Alley Style
  
• The Daily Om: Silicon Alley vs Silicon Alley
  

UPDATE: My memory of Staci Kramer working at SAR was faulty (thanks, Staci!). Turns out she was a contributing editor at Inside.com, and not even based in NYC, during those days.

UPDATE2: Got “The Complete New Yorker” and updated with the black and white photo of Calacanis (with his bulldog) that I recalled and mentioned in this post. It was the October 18, 1999 issue. Another classic photo from the same issue: Courtney Pulitzer.

Y’know how I said I was hoping the INS (USCIS) would do something to change my perception of its brand? Well it did… somewhat. My husband finally got approval of his application to become a permanent resident of the U.S. That means he’s getting his green card! Yippee! And it only took 3.5 years, give or take a month.

Talk about changing brand perception. I had to steel myself yesterday before placing an important call… to the IRS. We’d gotten a notice from the post office that a certified letter from the much-feared agency had arrived for us, but by the time we went to pick it up, it had been sent back. Much as I longed to ignore it, I had to face up to the situation. So I called.

Surprisingly, I got to speak to a real person in not too long, after a reasonable amount of number-pressing. The matter related to our family business. We’d been late filing paperwork and owed a small penalty. So the woman I spoke with told me how to pay, but added that since we’d never had the problem in the past, we could simply write a note asking to have the penalty removed. “Really?” I asked, incredulous.

While she had me on the phone, I wrote up the note. She gave me her fax number; I faxed it over. She went to check her machine, and removed the penalty then and there. There was actually a moment when I doubted I’d called the right agency. Was this really the IRS?

Amazing how a bit of good customer service (and, I guess, a bribe in the form of penalty removal) has dramatically changed my perception of the IRS. Now if only the INS, or whatever it’s called now (USCIS) could do the same.

I bought the video iPod and have been regularly torturing people making them watch videos of my 8-month-old son. One question I’ve gotten regularly is how I got these videos to the device. And here’s the answer, for those of you who’d like to bring the same torturous experience to your friends and loved ones.

1. Capture video on our digital still camera. We use a Canon A95 Powershot. This results in an .avi file.
   
2. Use AVS Video Converter ($29.95) to convert the .avi file to iPod format. This has been a great tool in working with video, because it translates nearly every input to nearly any output you’d like. In the latest version, there are special outputs for iPod and PSP. You can also burn onto DVD — even in PAL format, which has been handy for sending videos of the kid to our family in Scotland.
   
3. Import the converted files into iTunes and sync.
   

Now all I need to do is figure out a way to translate my TiVo-To-Go files from my computer to the video iPod. There’s some “official” way to do it via some $60 software, but there’s got to be an easier (read: cheaper) method. Helpful hints much appreciated.

I’m in NYC at the Search Engine Strategies show seeing my ClickZ peeps and keeping my finger on the pulse of the ever-changing search marketing beast. It’s my first time away from the baby since he was born, which has been a little traumatic. But it’s also been great to be able to focus 100% on conference-related stuff, which I wouldn’t get to do at home. It’s been nice, too, to be back in New York, even if I’ve only stepped out of the hotel a couple of times. This trip, it feels like coming home again, in some ways, though with the kid in tow (like in December) it’s a completely different experience.

Meanwhile, got word that my ex-co-worker Susan Kuchinskas, a great writer and very smart person, has launched her latest project, The 360 Tech Blog. In only a handful of entries she’s covered an event in San Francisco and also posted on the AAAAs conference in Orlando. She’s off to an auspicious start. (Yes, she still needs to update the “about” page. Gotta give her a hard time about that.)