The River

I love the tone of Yahoo!’s response to Microsoft’s latest letter regarding the acquisition effort, which declines to up the ante, financially. It’s rare you see such personality in a corporate statement. My favorite graf:

We regret to say that your letter mischaracterizes the nature of our discussions with you. We have had constructive conversations together regarding a variety of topics, including integration and regulatory issues. Your comment that we have refused to enter into negotiations to conclude an agreement are particularly curious given we have already rejected your initial proposal, nominally $31 per share at the time, for substantially undervaluing Yahoo! and your suggestions in your letter and the media that you are considering lowering the value of your proposal. Moreover, Steve, you personally attended two of these meetings and could have advanced discussions in any way you saw fit.

I loved Kent Nichols’ (of Ask a Ninja) explanation of what we at FM — specifically our salespeople — do. Paraphrasing here, but the moderator asked how AAN has been successful courting brand advertisers. The secret, Kent said, is “sweaty people who drink” — aka hard work building real-life relationships with agencies and advertisers, sometimes with the lubricating influence of alcohol. It’s the non-engineerable aspect of advertising, he said, and it requires the sweat of people who do “voodoo bullshit” and “close deals.”

This panel has completely rocked — best of the SXSW interactive conference so far — and Kent Nichols is a great instigator. He totally gets it, and he expresses it in a laugh-out-loud hilarous way.

Reading one of my colleague’s blogs today (FM is rife with bloggers, wouldn’t you know it?), I got interested in checking out a podcast he mentioned: a lecture by Michael Pollan, of The Omnivore’s Dilemma fame. But, that’s as far as I could get.

To actually listen to this podcast, I have to remember — when I get home, after a busy day at work — to fire up iTunes, search for this podcast, and subscribe. Yeah, that’ll happen. Not.

One thing I love about my TiVo service is that I can go to the Web interface (still not as good as the ReplayTV service was, but pretty decent), and subscribe to a season pass of a new show that I recently heard about. On Netflix, I can go over and queue up the newest, hottest independent film reviewed in the NYT, months before it’s actually released on DVD. On Amazon, I can impulsively start a TiVo download of a movie or TV show that I suddenly remember I’d like to see.

In all these case, my entertainment is basically sent to me, after a few keystrokes, and it’s ready for me to enjoy whenever I find the time. Why can’t I do this on iTunes? Am I missing something?

So far, just what you’d expect — awesome stuff.

Just squared away the last loose ends in my travel arrangements. I’m thrilled to be going to Chicago at the end of the month for the BlogHer Conference. In true mommyblogging fashion, I’m taking along my kid, who will be availing himself of the reasonably-priced childcare opportunities (bless the organizers for arranging this!). One of my objectives will be to meet up with any of our FM authors that will be in attendance, but I’m also just keeping the eyes and ears open to what’s going on in the blogosphere as a whole.

Anyway, all this to say that if you’ll be there, too, drop me a line!

I got to visit my old conference-attending life today (without the responsibility of writing stories, thankfully), and am hanging out at the Web 2.0 Summit this afternoon. A few highlights…

* Google’s Marissa Mayer talking about the importance of speed, and nearly-instantaneous feedback.

* Digg’s Kevin Rose showing off an example of how the company is letting developers create innovative interfaces to the amazing amount of data that the site’s users are creating every minute.

* The teen/parent panel, masterfully moderated by Safa Rashtchy, in which ordinary people shared their personal experiences of the Internet. Surprises included how many of these folks are using Firefox. One was even using Opera. But, in other cases, I was surprised at the lack of sophistication. Only 2 had heard of, or used, Skype, for example. The kids spend an outrageous amount of time on MySpace (my teenage niece and nephew’s addiction is Bebo), but that’s not a huge surprise. But spending hours regularly updating your page, so the kids at school the next day will compliment you? Wow. (Like I should talk…. sitting here blogging.)

So, I’m hanging around this afternoon at the party FM is sponsoring. Hope to see folks I know there, including FM Authors. In contrast to other conferences I’ve been to, the attendance here still seems to be very strong, though it’s 5:20 p.m. on the last day of the show. Impressive.

Since one of the most popular ways people find this site is via a search for “Ricky Gervais Podcast” (which takes them to this post), I feel compelled to note that Fred’s discovered Ricky’s podcast is free again. Yippee!

The former Rocketboom star rises again, partnering with Pop Urls to host a daily videocast called PopHub focusing on, yes, popular URLs. (Full disclosure: Pop Urls is an FM site.)

Should be interesting to see if Amanda can command an audience in this venture. And it’s also noteable that, despite Hollywood ambitions, she’s not going all mainstream media. Is this by choice? Or by default?

UPDATE: Thomas of Pop Urls writes in and says (of an earlier version): “it’s not completely correct - her editorial selection of links on popurls is not ultimately connected with her video project and pophub.com is in fact the blog for popurls.com ;).” Ok, corrected.

Heading back to my car after grabbing my cup of coffee this morning, something on the sidewalk caught my eye. A child had drawn a picture of a scene featuring an animal of a sort. The caption? “Neopets.”

Talk about media affinity and brand love. Writ large. In chalk.

Further reading: Neopets profile, Viacom acquisition for $160M last summer.

Yes, it’s true (as if you doubted it). I’m joining FM Publishing as author services manager, to work with John Battelle and his team on developing this next-generation publishing company.

Why? One of my earliest experiences in the Internet ad world was as intern/writer/ad sales person at @NY. I got the ad sales part of the job (and all the rest) courtesy of Tom Watson, who I’d met while finishing up my masters in journalism at Columbia. One of the more important things I learned (besides that I was not cut out for selling) was how difficult it was for agencies to buy ads across niche Web sites. No matter how engaged and influential their audiences, it was just plain logistically difficult to buy across all those sites. And that was 1998, before the explosion in blogs, and their accompanying engaged, influential (but niche) audiences. That’s one of the issues FM is looking to address.

Why else? I’ve spent the years since that experience thinking and writing about interactive advertising, watching the boom, the flameout and the subsequent rise. Joining FM is an opportunity for me to apply everything I’ve learned over the years about advertising and about managing writers. It’s also a great chance to work with brilliant, dedicated people who have a strong vision of the future of publishing. Needless to say I’m especially looking forward to getting to know the authors, many of whom I feel I know already through reading their compelling writing. I’m really eager to start helping them realize their dreams for their sites.

One of the things I had to really look at when considering this opportunity was whether I’d miss writing. I’ve helped with writing news and authored a bi-weekly column since 2001. I looked back recently over the archives of what I’ve written for ClickZ, and the sheer volume is amazing. Thankfully, FM, as you might expect, is supportive of my blogging, so I’ll have The River as an outlet for my musings. Not sure exactly how often I’ll be posting or what shape it’ll take, but give me time to get my feet wet and together we’ll see what emerges. (Feedback is always welcome, of course.)

I’m still at ClickZ for the next week. Then I’ll take a whole day (!) off to do yoga and nap (or something equally relaxing), and I start at FM on August 1. To all you FM authors out there, I look forward to working with you!