The River

The personal professional blog of Pamela Parker -- musings on marketing, advertising, media and technology.

Media

Amanda Condon + Pop Urls

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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.

Brand Love

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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.

On Joining FM

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Fm_logo
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!

The Success of the Da Vinci Code

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I’m breaking my self-imposed (or busy-schedule-imposed) blog silence to link to an insightful post on the Da Vinci Code by David Galbraith. I totally agree when he says “The success of the Da Vinci Code has nothing to do with the writing, but the fact that it is a mutation of a very successful and ancient meme.” Indeed. There’s a reason why this book has managed to become such a blockbuster (and why the movie will also be huge if it lives up to the material’s potential). It’s because it’s tapping into an ancient, mysterious meme. It takes that idea and wraps it up in the trappings of a thriller, so discovering each new element of the meme is exciting. And who doesn’t want to know about an idea the Catholic church has been trying to suppress for centuries? Promise I’ll actually blog on interactive ad/marketing topics before too long.

Poi Dog Days

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Many thanks to Fred for the link and for the memories of a band that was a big part of my life back in my immediate post-college years. I think I must have discovered them via an NPR interview or via KTRU, Rice University’s radio station.

I pulled out my Poi Dog collection upon arriving home this evening, and find the tunes are perfect for a sunny (after so much rain!) California holiday-weekend Friday. The lyrics are happy, idealistic, sensuous and earthy. The music features varied instrumentation, with a generally acoustic-sounding vibe. Fred says he’s got two albums and a commenter on Fred’s blog mentions “U – Li – La – Lu” — definitely a fave of mine. To my surprise, I own five Poi Dog Pondering CDs. It’s honestly been a really long time since I’ve pulled them out, but I recall the eponymous debut and “Wishing Like a Mountain and Thinking Like the Sea” got many rotations in the CD player. Later records were good, but not quite to the same standards.

Again, thanks Fred, for reminding me of the band. Gotta burn the five albums and get them on the iPod for beautiful walks home like the one today.

Like the Old Days

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Calacanis
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:

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.