April 2007 Archives

Yahoo just announced that they're purchasing the remaining stake (above and beyond the 20% they already owned) in Right Media, an online ad marketplace company. The announcement is clearly tied to the big announcement a few weeks back on Google's acquisition of DoubleClick, whether or not it was timed purposefully or not.

This in interesting to me considering that I sat on a panel at SXSW earlier this year with the product managers for both the Yahoo Publisher Network and RMX Direct, Right Media's ad exchange tool. Who knew they would be such good friends so soon after. It'll be interested to see what Yahoo decides to do with the acquisition and if this is something they're going to work to integrate with their existing ad platform.

Yahoo to Buy Online Ad Company Right Media [NY Times]

Back at the end of February, Katie and I went to Maui for a week and enjoyed one of the most beautiful places I've ever visited on Earth. I tried to chronicle a lot of our little adventure and we took a million photos, so I wanted to get some of that posted over the next couple weeks. Hopefully it's something fun to look at for you because I get all giddy just thinking about the photos -- let alone the actual vibe you feel when you're on the islands there. It really is a special place for us and I'm really glad we got to go...

We're already planning our next trip there. Maybe you'll want to do the same once you're done checking out all of the photos and fun. More to come over the next couple days.

Given the fact that today's internet is slightly over-bloated from all of the social networking sites that really provide nothing useful but distractions from our day-to-day lives -- it's always worth highlighting when a company does something interesting to leverage the community that they worked so hard to build in the first place...

Flickr is doing something of the sort on May 5, or Cinco de Mayo as it's otherwise known to those of us that enjoy tortilla chips and mas cervesas...

To celebrate this global community, we invite you to join us in "24 Hours of Flickr" – a day-long global photo project. On May 5, 2007, grab your camera and whatever else you need, and chronicle your day in pictures. The group's photos will be featured at Flickr events around the world this summer and in a companion book, which will contain a selection of photographs chosen from the group (more about this soon!).

24 Hours of Flickr [FlickrBlog]

Who knows, maybe I'll take part.

Just caught this great link over at Seeking Alpha...

This is the latest in the Seeking Alpha series of interviews with leading companies of interest to our readers. These, however, are interviews with a twist: the executive has agreed to answer questions and respond to comments not from a single interviewer, but rather from our community of readers and contributors.

The interview is with Dick Costolo, CEO of FeedBurner. If you needed any insight from him above and beyond his Ask the Wizard blog, this would be a good thread to jump on.

Interactive Q&A: Dick Costolo, Co-Founder and CEO of FeedBurner [Seeking Alpha]

One of the first things I set out to do upon setting up my new Nintendo Wii was downloading the "Internet Channel" and setting up the system to show Live Music Blog on their in-console web browser (powered by Opera). I was amazing. Floored. Shocked. It actually shows up *okay* -- not the best presentation as there is clearly something in the stylesheet throwing off the display -- which is better than I actually expected.

I'm still completely in-love with this thing.

In light of yesterday's triumphant celebration of all things great about the Planet Earth -- otherwise known as Earth Day -- Yahoo announced that they were going to offset all of their carbon emissions this year.

Yahoo! has committed to going carbon neutral this year. Essentially, that means we’re going to invest in greenhouse gas reduction projects around the world to neutralize Yahoo!’s impact on the environment. While doing our homework on this, we measured our carbon footprint and discovered that Yahoo! going carbon neutral is equivalent to shutting off the electricity in all San Francisco homes for a month. Or, pulling nearly 25,000 cars off the road for a year.

It'd be great for more companies to begin stepping in this direction; kudos to Yahoo for leading the charge (and finding the obvious PR benefits of such a move).

Don’t even leave a footprint [Yodel Anecdotal]

Roy Rules [YouTube]

Last night's Saturday Night Live featured another hilarious digital short known as "Roy Rules." Check it.

I caught a fantastic show at the Vic Theater last night. Umphrey's McGee played to a sold-out hometown crowd and I just happened to luck out into some VIP-area tickets at the last minute (thank you MH Publicity).

I've seen this band more times than I've seen any other band...ever. And they seem to keep getting better and better with age (ala like a fine wine). One thing I always miss if I haven't seen a jamband show in a while is the crowd interactions and reactions. Jamband fans are friggin' ravenous, man...and while most would say, "it's probably because they're all druggies," I would immediately dispute that fact. I think they're just fans, and they're fans more and more when they're favorite band actually tries their best to rile everyone up.

In the clip below, you'll notice a very slow build-up by the band -- and notice the crowd reaction at the end. It makes me grin ear to ear every time.

Umphrey's McGee - "Nothing Too Fancy" intro (4/21/07)

People in Chicago woke up to an absolutely beautiful day today (as predicted) -- and it couldn't be any more relevant than a day before Earth Day. Go Green! Save the Environment! Go to see live music at the Green Apple Music Festival! Whatever you do or whatever you're not doing now -- find your motivation this weekend while others do their best to spread the message they learned so before anyone else.

The shift of our society from thinking about how to make production more efficient to a society that thinks about how to make production more energy efficient (while caring for the environment at the same time) -- I believe that future is nearly upon us.

And it's too bad that it's taken me so long to start implementing some environmentally friendly practices into my day-to-day life. I guess it took me a while to learn the importance of recycling -- but then further, to actually learn that it's recycling on the grand scale that we need to think about. Sure, grassroots can help to save the environment but the real change needs to come from the tone at the top. The "top" here being all those corporationy fat cats that I'd like to pretend I'm nothing like.

Hope everyone has a good weekend.

I got an email a few weeks back from my younger brother. He's been living out in Arizona for the past year or so, and he's gotten quite comfortable in his day-to-day out there. From what I gather, it's something to the tune of: go to work in the morning, go skateboard at night. Repeat every single day.

He told me he was on two pages in the new Skateboard Mag. He took part in a dawn photo shoot soon after he got out to Arizona -- him and a few other guys decided to after some party, or so the story goes -- and the photographer ended up getting to pitch the shoot to the magazine. If I'm correct -- this is my brother's first major photo coverage.

And I'm really proud of him -- way to go, bro!

I really miss skateboarding myself and part of me wants to try and pick up a board to tool around on. I have that idealized version of my agility from when I skated about seven years ago. (Wow -- has it really been that long?)

I can still do it, right?

Battles - "Atlas" [YouTube]

I've been oddly obsessed with this song since my brother-in-law tossed this my way. I can always count on him for finding something much more eclectic than I'm used to listening to. I love this video, though -- especially how it shows the guys grooving along to their own music. They've got a certain swagger with their instruments that I happen to find extremely appealing.

Top That! [YouTube]

The wisdom of crowds is usually in full effect at the FeedBurner office, especially when it comes to random, funny things on the internet to look at and laugh hysterically to while wearing your headphones. The person sitting next to you may have IM'd you the link, or they may have no friggin' clue what you're looking at.

Regardless, it's certainly fun to work at a company where most follow the "work hard play hard" mentality.

There's some more details emerging on the upcoming inaugural tech conference known as TechCrunch20, the brain child of Jason Calacanis and Michael Arrington.

The format of TechCrunch20 is simple: Twenty of the hottest new startups will announce and demo their products over a two day period. And they don’t pay a cent to do this. They will be selected to participate based on merit alone.

I'll be interested to see how this plays out.

On Sunday morning, I woke up around 7:30am only slightly hungover from my friend's birthday party the night before. I had set my hopes on waking up to find a Nintendo Wii at one of the national retail chains nearby, and I set out to the nearest Target to keep the dream alive.

Target didn't have any, but the Super Kmart right down the road had one left. I could have kissed the floor girl when she told me that. I spent the rest of the morning setting up the bad-boy and getting acquainted with the controls. And after a day or two of actually owning this new videogame console, I can say very confidently that Nintendo really struck a nerve with me on this system.

It's Nintendo for the generation that grew up on the original Nintendo. It's simple and yet still subject to a learning curve. It's addictive and yet just all around fun for everyone playing. I can't wait to get home from work to play it some more.

Every tech company has been dealt their share of setbacks.

Apple just announced that they will be delaying the release of their new operating system (codename Leopard) for another four months or so, with the new software planned for release by the end of the year. I had thought that I'd be looking ahead to purchase a Mac mini at some point in the not-too-distant but I'll have to reconsider that now.

It's particularly interesting how a company can be dealt a setback that is most likely one that could have been planned for -- setback occurs when an issue (or something) arises that was not originally forseen -- and how they throw a PR spin on it...

Apple Inc...said Thursday that the introduction of the new version of its flagship Macintosh OS X operating system would be delayed as much as four months because of quality issues.

Pointing to the time needed to shake out the errors from the software code for the program, called Leopard, the company said in a statement, “Life often presents trade-offs, and in this case we’re sure we’ve made the right ones.”

If you're going to spin it all, make sure you spin it at the right level -- the consumers. To me, this basically reads, "Hey, sorry about that -- but we're human which means we're allowed to make mistakes and then say that we're human, too." I'd say that's a pretty solid approach.

Apple Says It Will Delay OS X Release for 4 Months [NY Times]

Interesting news coming out at the office today: FeedBurner to Manage Feeds Across the AOL Network.

FeedBurner will be working with AOL to manage hundreds of the company's RSS, podcast and video feeds consisting of news, sports and entertainment content. Additionally, all Time Warner properties including HBO, New Line Cinema, Time Inc. and Warner Bros. Entertainment can take advantage of FeedBurner's services. We like open floodgates around here, so long as the servers stay dry.

The AOL Network is not your mom's AOL that you'd be used to either; their portfolio now includes all of the Weblogs, Inc. properties (thanks to the acquisition a few years back), and they've been expanding their media focus of late to compete with, well, all of the new online media giants (think YouTube).

Very cool, indeed...

The good 'ol days of skateboarding was all about deciding whether or not you'd surf before you skateboard for the day...

SKATEBOARD KINGS 1978 [Google Video]

"Skateboard Kings" is a news documentary that was made by a British program called "The World About Us."

The camera crew follows the Dogtown skate troupe and their day-to-day along with the actual manufacturing process of skateboards at the time. Good stuff.

(via Boing Boing)

Bjork - Triumph of the Heart [YouTube]

This Bjork video made the rounds at work yesterday and I just had to share. It's the video for "Triumph of the Heart" from her last release, Medúlla. The spirit of Toonces has finally been revived.

Lucas gave me his laser-beam eyes this morning when I told him that I had to go to work. Then he burrowed under his blanket...again.

I'm pleased to see that the Chicago postal delivery service is going to be vastly improved over the next couple years, thanks in part to the new man at the top, John E. Potter.

I don't really need to go into it in too much detail, but I will say that I've had more problems with my mail since moving to Chicago than anyone else before. It's probably half-related to the fact that I now manage all of my own mail whereas my parents took care of that for a large portion of my child life -- but still, Chicago mail delivery sucks. I'm glad to see that they're taking a step in the right direction...

This past weekend in between family events, I got to spend some time with one of my good friends, Rob. He recently moved back home to New York and he was back in Chicago to visit friends for the weekend.

On Saturday morning, we went and grabbed breakfast at Twisted Spoke on Clark Street. I was immediately reminded that the famous biker bar is not only a great place to get a bloody mary and some good, greasy breakfast -- it's also a place where you can eat breakfast and watch pornography at the same time.

They host an event on late Friday night (actually Saturday morning starting at midnight) called Smut & Eggs. The kitchen switches over to breakfast food and the TV screens begin playing some pornography movies. Hilarity ensues?

I've never attended this myself but I've always been interested in going -- you know, just to see what it's all about. The thought of watching pornography with a group of drunk bikers at 1:00am on a Saturday morning doesn't necessarily sound too sexy to me, and not that I'd be there to get my rocks off anyway -- I'm only curious. I swear.

Anyone ever go to this?

As you may have guessed from all the photos recently and these couple posts, I just got back from a super long trip down in Austin, Texas for the annual SXSW Conference and Festival.

This was my first year down there and I'm not fully familiar with what to expect at these sort of things. I pictured myself in a large auditorium room with a group of people on Apple computers, all feverishly working on whatever project they typically work on, while a bunch of smart and geeky looking people stood at the front of the room and pointed at the projector screen showing something really cool that no one had ever seen or heard of before. You know -- tech stuff.

In all seriousness, though -- all I really knew was that I was asked to speak on a panel called Online Publishers & Ad Networks and that I had a week down in Austin after that to soak it all up...

From the panel schedule page...

The decision has been made to have ads on your site, but before you place any ads, what should you consider; selling your own ad space, being part of a small ad network or teaming up with a search engine. Find out what each has to offer while learning what to look for in an advertising partner.

Given the nature of the panel, I knew I had some good experience to draw on from working at FeedBurner and working on Live Music Blog. Further, I knew I needed to present some facts on FeedBurner's advertising for publishers offering, otherwise known as the FeedBurner Ad Network (FAN). I also knew that I had to be willing and able to respond to direct questions on how FAN differs from other ad platforms and which one is most beneficial to web publishers of a certain nature. Whoa.

The panel was set for 10am on Saturday, the first real day of the Interactive conference, so I'll admit that I was slightly nervous given the fact that this was the first panel I would be attending ever. I arrived at the Green Room the earliest of my group, so I got time to try to cool myself off and collect my thoughts. The panel consisted of myself representing FeedBurner, Cody Simms representing Yahoo, Larry Allen representing Tacoda, Pat McCarthy representing Right Media, and Jonathan Weber moderating and representing NewWest.net. We exchanged pleasantries and began a very vibrant discussion on how we each spend a lot of time at our company working to teach advertisers about this new medium -- and off to the panel we went...

Rick recently got a nice quote in BusinessWeek Online regarding the rush to monetize podcasts. I think for the most part, the real rush has been driven by the fad of it all. Hell, even I started podcasting before I really knew what I want to accomplish with it -- and a lot publishers look for where the money could be before the proper jump is made feed first.

The question I kept getting down in Austin was -- "how can I monetize my video content on the web?" People are moving past podcasting and turning to videocasting as the real deal online, thanks in part to the explosion of YouTube and the money that came following. I imagine we'll see a lot of this really shake out by the end of the 2007...

Our cat, Lucas, is quite the stereotypical feline troublemaker. He's six years old but he still acts like a kitten in so many ways. For one, he's extremely vocal. I mean, loud -- we're not talking about no little "meow" here and there. He likes to scream at us. He likes to eat our plants, too. We find little piles of barf from time to time made solely out of plant leaves.

In response to years of such behavior, we've recently started calling him Monster. At first, he didn't really take too kindly to that nickname but I think he's finally come around. He now responds equally to the wife and I when we call his name, be it Lucas or Monster.

At any rate, this was a shot I snapped of the Monster right when I got back from Austin. He was hamming it up with me and playing with random items around the room, usually just to get some attention. He burrowed underneath this blanket and poked his head out, so it was clear that he won the attention battle and I grabbed a photo as quickly as I could.

He always wins the attention battle, anyway...