Zach is understandably pleased about a story we posted today on a virtual ad agency that has sprung up in the MMORPG Second Life. It’s a really fascinating phenomenon how we humans (or maybe I should just say Americans) have the urge to create complex societies and economies, even within the virtual game environment. And with commerce, naturally enough, comes advertising. After all, if you are selling clothing, food, or other virtual goods, how do you get the word out about it? Interesting stuff.
The Silicon Valley/Madison Avenue Divide
Joi Joi Ito has an interesting post about the much-talked-about Creative Commons and BzzAgent relationship. I thought this paragraph was particularly interesting, given I’m navigating the switch from East Coast to West:
One of the things that I notice more and more these days is the Madison Avenue/Silicon Valley divide. All Marketers Are Liars by Seth Godin (I blogged about this earlier) is sort of Cluetrain Manifesto written in Madison Avenue-ese. They use completely different language but are beginning to talk about very similar things. If we’re going to reach those people who aren’t in our current self-selected community, we’re going to have to reach out to the offline and main stream media world. CC has been surprisingly successful considering our lack of expertise in this area, but I think we could do a lot more. I think it’s time to bridge this divide between the main stream media types and bloggers and one of the things we are going to have to do is cut each other some slack and try to learn instead of fight.
Where California Cuisine Got its Start
So now that we’re East Bay-ites, it’s only appropriate that we patronize our local eateries. That’s why when my husband’s birthday came around yesterday, we went to the venerable Chez Panisse. I’d been told by a co-worker that she’d been somewhat disappointed by the place. After all the hype, she said, it just wasn’t that special. After all, the culinary tradition pioneered by Alice Waters at the Berkeley eatery has now spread across the country (and the world?). Still, we wanted to check it out and experience it for ourselves.
The menu for Tuesday, May 3 (it’s unique every night downstairs and is a prix fixe menu):
- Green asparagus salad with almond vinaigrette and house-cured ham.
- Fried local fish and shellfish with herb mayonnaise.
- Grilled rack and loin of Cattail Creek lamb with new garlic sauce, morel mushroom cake, Chino Ranch greens, and baked new potatoes.
- Lucero Farm strawberry and Marsala feuillete.
Hype or no hype, we really enjoyed ourselves. Keeping in mind that this might be our last big blowout before the baby comes, we really savored every moment and every bite. Mmm…
On Hugging and Blog Relationships
Following up on the Plaxo post from earlier, I’ll say that I started this blog primarily as a way to meet people and as a way to keep up relationships I’ve already established. It helps people get to know me a little before we meet face-to-face, and it lets those I know keep up with my latest areas of interest, coverage, etc. So, for me, blogging’s all about relationships.
So I was a little surprised by Tony Gentile’s post earlier this week. In it, he remarked that he thought he maybe went overboard in giving me a hug at first meeting me, since he felt he knew me from blogging. Tony, I feel like I know you, too. It’s not so weird to feel like you know me well enough to be personal. Maybe I was just a little slow to translate that online rapport into the real world, but that doesn’t mean the rapport isn’t there.
I actually wrote a big essay on this topic for the 100 Bloggers Project. Not sure when the book is expected to be out, but I look forward to reading the 99 other entries.
The “Rolodex”
Fred posts today on “the big Rolodex.” (Interesting how the brand name sticks around even when the products themselves don’t.)
Spent a bit of time recently myself (following Brad’s lead, actually) migrating things to Plaxo and trying to de-dupe an Outlook address book that’s been mangled by years of trying to synch with Palms, my phone’s Symbian OS, Yahoo! Mail, etc. It’s scary.
Anyway, Fred has some interesting thoughts, which echo my own, about the quality of contacts, the recency of contacts, etc. It’s been a really interesting experience to shift coasts recently and find that “local” contacts are now far away, and “distant” contacts are now right around the corner.
MSN/Mark Burnett
Looks like Yahoo! isn’t the only online player to go cross-media with Mark Burnett. My colleague, Zach Rodgers, breaks the story of a content/advertising deal between the TV production house and Microsoft’s MSN. It’ll be interesting to compare/contrast how Yahoo! and MSN differ in their approaches to a similar challenge/opportunity.