Archive for the 'Business' Category
I was just thinking this week - I don’t even like the NBA, I don’t like the way the game is played, I don’t have a team (other than the default hometown Sonics and my childhood team Boston Celtics who haven’t been worth watching for 15 years). Do I really care if the Sonics previous […]
I wasn’t going to say anything about Jason Calacanis’ announcement today that he was looking to buy Newsvine’s, Digg’s, and Reddit’s top link seeders for a thousand bucks a pop, but the fine folks at Reddit said it with zero words better than I ever could (note the logo): It’s an interesting experiment for sure: whether you can take a user base of 12 million that isn’t a community in any way, pull their aging…
The big news in the blogosphere/vlogosphere today is the apparent departure of Amanda Congdon from the popular video newscast Rocketboom. While this could easily be a publicity stunt or a situation that is quickly repaired by the two Rocketboom co-founders, things look pretty grim for the show right now. I’ll withhold most of my feelings about Rocketboom as a show because frankly, it’s never been my bag and almost everyone I’ve ever asked feels the same way. I’ve always been under the impression that Amanda’s hotness (see bad pun in article title) is the main reason why 250,000 people…
It seems like the question comes up at every conference, interview, or personal publishing powwow: Can you trust bloggers as much as you can trust journalists? I always answer the question the same way: If you look at it in terms of “averages”, then no, you cannot trust bloggers as much as you can trust journalists. Looking at the averages, however, is the wrong way to answer the question. That would be like trying to answer the question of whether Italy or France makes better wine by dumping all the wine from each country into a vat, stirring it up, and then taking a sip from each…
You remember 1996. You had e-mail. Your friends didn’t. You could Yahoo. Your friends couldn’t. It was a time when most of the world spent less time online than they did eating breakfast. Two of the standout successes during this early stage of internet adoption were America Online and Netscape Communications. America Online’s strategy was to sell dial-up internet access for a monthly fee and provide users with a walled garden of content they couldn’t get anywhere else at the time. Netscape’s strategy was to own the piece of software that sat between the consumer and the internet and ultimately make money from both sales of that software and other endeavors created by “browser lock-in”. Both companies saw tremendous initial success only to eventually see their fortunes turn sour as they were beaten down by competitors and the general move towards openness on the internet. It is with curious anticipation then that we watch today…
My current porfession falls within another quadrant of the marketing umbrella, but so far I am really enjoying this new site - Advertising Critic. Created by a fellow Zag, Aaron Sanchez, this site has an interesting place in the year of YouTube and the age of over consumption by consumers. I look forward to keeping […]
I rarely fill out surveys online, but given the ridiculous new password-prompting policy on Yahoo, I jumped at the chance to help them out when I saw their prominent “Help Us Improve Yahoo” ad on my Yahoo Finance page. Sweet fennel! A way for me to quickly and constructively voice my displeasure about Yahoo without having to interrupt Dustin from his Tetris experiment. Clicking on the survey link, however, led to one of the worst designed surveys I’ve ever tried to participate in. Here’s the screenshot:…
Two conferences, two vastly different crowds of people, and only two people I knew at both events combined. That’s the one sentence summary of my five days in New York and Las Vegas last week. It was a fun week, and definitely a personal highlight sitting next to Roger Black on stage, but I couldn’t help but notice how dissimilar the situations of the attendees at both conferences were…
Another day, another MySpace post. I don’t mean to keep picking on the wildly successful social networking site, but just now, I saw a banner ad which really made me wonder what’s going on over there. Five minutes ago, at the top of my MySpace profile page, I noticed a large ad for a site called “MySpaceBot.com”. The impressive collection of testimonials fading in and out across the bottom of the ad piqued my interest. A screenshot is below:…
I live in the ‘hood. I love it. Affordable housing, good bus service, and lots of useful businesses.
Some of the businesses aren’t just useful, they’re incredibly creative. One that I’ve wanted to highlight for a long time is Triple Cheap Junk Hauling and Barbershop. Yes, a combination junk hauling service and barbarshop. Now, you might […]