November 2006 Archives
The never-without-an-opinion Dallas Mavs owner Mark Cuban has some insightful ideas on how newspapers could strengthen their position of "owning the sale and delivery of advertising in your market."
... in a nutshell, its about making owning the sale and delivery of advertising in your market the primary core competency of your business.
He would make an interesting newspaper owner.
Update 12/2/06: I see Mark Potts finds Mark Cuban's post intriguing as well.
Tags: newspapers | Mark Cuban
Howard Owens is on target in a post on "Video killed the television star" on video strategies for online newspapers.
If innovation and disruption come from small startups (or startup-like operations) who come out of nowhere with a product that is good enough to meet a need, then operate like they do.
Two guys in a garage or dorm room didn't create a behemoth Internet portal with mail, maps, movies and more; they created a collection of links. It grew into a behemoth. Craig Newmark started with an email to friends and grew it into Craigslist. Start with what you can do and make it better. Just do.
Tags: video | newspapers | Howard Owens
Guy Kawaski is right. This is a good beginners guide to Digg.
If you're trying to explain Digg to someone who's never used it, it's a good resource to point them too.
Tags: Digg | Guy Kawasaki
Have you seen one of these?
I first read about the Sonice Impact T-amp (Sonic Impact 5066) in the Oct. 3, 2005, Forbes magazine (article in pay archives now).
The article raved about the sound quality of the $39 amp, which was introduced in 2003.
Other rave about it, too:
Warning: this has been the most thrilling and incredible experience I've had with a component in, say, 25 years of HiFi listening. This website has existed since 1995, I've reviewed hundreds of HiFi components, inexpensive and ridiculously overpriced ones. I never - repeat - NEVER came across such a stunning piece of gear in all of these years.
... the Sonic Impact T-amp is an absolutely brilliant piece of equipment that revolutionizes sound quality performance at a true budget price. Prior to the T-amp, a great-sounding $39 amplifier was unheard of. That makes the Sonic Impact unparalleled. Heck, even for $390, it would be unparalleled - it's simply a really great little amplifier.
-- sixmoons.com
I decided to get one last year. I'm not an audophile, but this thing is amazing. I went to Best Buy and bought set of bookshelf speakers. They sound great hooked up to this little battery-powered amp with one on/off volume knob and that's it.
Hook it up to yoru IPod. Hook it up to your TV. Hook it up to most anything.
Runs on eight AA batteries. My son has "adopted" it and is putting the "sold separately" AC adapter on his Christmas list.
It's small. It's simple. It works great. Meets all my requirements.
Search for prices for it. You can buy it from the manufacturer for $39, but it was selling for less at Parts-Express.com. I'm not sure why the Amazon vendor (Amazon doesn't sell it itself) is on the high side, but read the user comments on the item description page.
Tags: T-amp | Sonice Impact | stereo amplifier
Loved this quote from Dave Rand of Trend Micro in the story saying nine out of 10 emails are spam:
"It will only end when people stop buying diet pills, herbal highs and sexual performance enhancers
"The products they are selling by spam are exactly the same products that they sold in the Middle Ages. This really is a human problem, not a computer problem."
BBC News: Podcast numbers show 'few hooked'
The (San Jose) Mercury News: Podcasts beginning to reach non-geeks
Both were reporting on a Wednesday release from the
Pew Internet and American Life Project.
From the Mercury News article:
"We are at a crossroads of a major transition in the way media content is delivered," said Mary Madden, a senior research analyst who worked on the Pew survey.
From the BBC article:
But despite the growth, just 1% of respondents said that they would download a podcast on a typical day.
Here's a link to the actual report.
The report said the number of people who have downloaded to a podcast has grown since February from 7 to 12 percent, but the number of people listening to a podcast daily is just 1 percent.
Meanwhile, the number of podcasts produced is exploding. Is critical mass arriving or is content being put up that will just go unheard? Will video blogs overtake podcasting before it even begins? Where exactly does podcasting fit in?
It's hard to tell from these figures. It's like listening to a radio newscast being broken up by static just as the key sentence is spoken.
Tags: podcasting
This looks just like Thanksgiving. My wife, Amy, made this beautiful pie. Can you smell it?
More pumpkin cooking here and here
Tags: pumpkin pie | Thanksgiving
The newspaper/Yahoo deal has been officially announced.
The deal includes my employer, The Knoxville News Sentinel, a part of the E.W. Scripps group of newspapers.
The announcement early Monday morning comes on the heels of a busy weekend for Yahoo news.
Tags: Yahoo | newspapers | E.W. Scripps
Longtime newspaperman-turned-online-guy Mark Potts has his version of how to save newspapers at his Recovering Journalist blog.
Potts, currently a cofounder of the community news product, backfence.com, sums the current state of innovation in the business as:
The single biggest innovation in print newspaper journalism in the past decade or so is...Sudoku. Newspapers can and must do better than that to survive.
His 10 points are not radically new, but would be radically new for a newspaper that put them in place.
It's clear incremental improvements -- tweaking the product and tinkering with the internals -- will not be enough. But it's unclear when the radical change will occur. Newspapers are playing the same game as political parties of "not alienating the base." Drop a comic; the phone rings. Trim stocks; the phone rings. Drop the editorial page?
It's more than attracting new readers. The portion of the "base" for which newspapers no longer matter, is well down the road to moving on, leaving a base audience ever more resistant to change.
Give his prescription a read.
Tags: newspapers | Mark Potts
Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.
Sometimes said as:
Never assume malice when stupidity will suffice.
-- attributed to Robert J. Hanlon in a collection of jokes about Murphy's Law.
This is known as Hanlon's razor.
This is a Chronicle-themed post via Just an Online Minute and journlism.co.uk.
Peter Scheer, a lawyer, journalist and executive director of the nonprofit of California First Amendment Center suggests in a Sunday column in the San Francisco Chronicle that:
"Newspapers and wire services need to figure out a way, without running afoul of antitrust laws, to agree to embargo their news content from the free Internet for a brief period -- say, 24 hours -- after it is made available to paying customers. The point is not to remove content from the Internet, but to delay its free release in that venue.
"A temporary embargo, by depriving the Internet of free, trustworthy news in real-time, would, I believe, quickly establish the true value of that information. Imagine the major Web portals--Yahoo, Google, AOL and MSN -- with nothing to offer in the category of news except out of date articles from 'mainstream' media and blogosphere musings on yesterday's news. Digital fish wrap."
Tags: newspapers | Internet | Peter Scheer | Robert Cauthorn
Engine smoke forced a two-hour delay Friday in the charter jet flight of the Marshall football team to East Carolina.
No big deal, except ...
It happened on the game trip to Greenville where on Saturday East Carolina unveiled a plaque near the football stadium entrance honoring Marshall's 1970 team.
The 1970 team died in a plan crash returning from an ECU game 36 years ago.
That crash on Nov. 14, 1970, killed 75 people on a cold, rainy hillside in West Virginia.
A movie, "We Are Marshall," about the crash and the aftermath comes out this fall. Whew, what a soundtrack.
Here's a great little featurette
Tags: Marshall, East Carolina, We Are Marshall
Oh, wow, this book
And the "How-to-tell-an-asshole" rule on author Bob Sutton's blog Work Matters is classic (even if he found it elsewhere):
New Rule: The more complicated the Starbucks order, the bigger the asshole. If you walk into a Starbucks and order a "decaf grande half-soy, half-low fat, iced vanilla, double-shot, gingerbread cappuccino, extra dry, light ice, with one Sweet-n'-Low and one NutraSweet," ooh, you're a huge asshole.
I also love the list of things that assholes do? I'm sure you recognize someone(s) here on Guy Kawasaki's site.
Before I knew this was a "business trend" I had heard an executive often say that when starting up their new venture, the original management group had one rule: "No assholes." No matter how talented, no matter how many connections they had, no matter how much business they could generate, they wouldn't hire an asshole. It served that enterprise well. It was fabulously successful and on a daily basis, they didn't have to put up with ...
My Starbucks order: ah... Columbian black, please.
Tags: No asshole rule, Bob Sutton, Guy Kawasaki
Local blogger Rich Hailey is back in our newsroom observing and live blogging our coverage of the election. See it here.
It's sort of reminds me of a mirror within a mirror; he's covering how we're covering what we're covering (and now I'm covering his covering ...) and all in near real-time.
I hope he enjoys his visit. I don't know how exciting he'll find our newsroom before night's end, but it's certainly a historic election in Tennessee -- and one that has been a focal point for the nation.
Interesting take on the Google-newspaper ad deal.
In this day and age of declining newspaper fortunes one of the biggest agents of change AWAY from newspapers, that directly has a competitor to newspapers (news.google.com), and that steals away advertising away from newspapers (adwords), is now going BACK to newspapers to sell their ad space (and getting a cut of the deal as part of it)?
Your enemy is your friend!
Tags: newspapers | google
Some election eve frivolous fun.
If she's reading the New York Times, she's probably a Democrat.
If he's reading the Wall Street Journal, he's probably a Republican.
That's the upshot of a Neilsen//Netratings report on site traffic by party affiliation via the Center for Media Research.
Top five favs for Republicans:
- RushLimbaugh.com
- NewsMax.com
- Bill O'Reilly.com
- Drudge Report
- Salt Lake Tribune
Top five favs for Democrats:
- BlackAmericaWeb.com
- AOL BlackVoices
- BET.com
- Salon.com
- Village Voice
Tags: political parties | party affiliation
Nice seeing former ECU quarterback David Garrard getting some starts at Jacksonville -- and winning.
He's lead the Jags to two victories subbing for injured Bryon Leftwich, including today's 37-7 win over the Titans.
"I'm glad I'm not the coach," safety Deon Grant said. "It would be real hard to sit David down right now and real hard not to put Byron back in there. I guess that's the coach's fault for having two good quarterbacks."
-- Associated Press
And remember, Garrard went 4-1 when Leftwich went out last year with a broken ankle in the last five regular-season games.
Five years ago, when he was drafted by the Jags, Garrard must have thought he was the franchise's quarterback of the future after then-starting QB Mark Brunell, but there was a coaching change, Marshall's Bryon Leftwich was drafted and proclaimed the QB of the future for Jacksonville.
Now, coach Jack Del Rio may have a "quarterback controversy" on his hands with Garrard playing well in his two starts this year.
I hope it works out well for Garrard, who was the best East Carolina quarterback since Jeff Blake.
Tags: Jacksonville Jaguars | David Garrard | NFL
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Gannett's announcement of plans to rename newsrooms "information centers," realign editorial newspaper operations along seven radically different "desks" and to embrace 'crowdsourcing" should strike fear in anyone who works in a newsroom and believes their job is to "put out the paper."
Given the distressed nature of the newspaper business and the fact that the largest newspaper chain in America is embarking on a chain-wide sweeping reorg, a new urgency and higher profile for retooling and rethinking newsrooms at most every chain is a safe bet.
The best coverage of the announcement may be Jeff Howe's in Wired and CrowdSourcing. Read his reports to get the full scoop.
A lot of people are weighing in. Here's a sampling (updated):
Tags: Gannett Information Center | newspapers
This looked to me like Knoxville feels this morning after the loss Saturday night to LSU. This was taken around 7 a.m. from my front porch.
Tags: cloud photos | Knoxville
Nice article from the The Commercial Apeal's Jim Masilak on the East Carolina Pirates, who had a huge win last week (Oct. 28) against Southern Mississippi. Don't know if it'll last, but it's good to be leading the division this year.
Laughingtock, r-i-g-h-t.
Tags: East Carolina
I made the big switch yesterday from landline POTS telephone to cable digital phone service yesterday.
Comcast was cheaper than MCI, which I used for local and long distance, and both offer basically the same set of phone features: Caller ID, call waiting, call waiting Caller ID, three-way calling, web-based voice mail, and a lot of blab, blah stuff I never use plus free nationwide long distance.
Other than being over an hour past the 8 a.m. to noon "show up" window, the installer did a great job.
He knew what he was doing and quickly move through the process (I was upgrading to digital cable too so I had three cable boxes to get hooked up).
All was going well, until ...
The office desk had to be moved to access the phone jack that was nearest where I have my 'cable modem" and router.
The desk is close to 20 years old and was getting unstable, I knew.
"Wait, I said, I'll move it"
I took most of the books out to lighten it up a bit.
When I moved one end out from the wall, the other end collapsed sending papers, pens, paperclips, nnotebooks, speakers, a boulder of a tube computer monitor, dust and shelves flying. When the avalanche ended, the nonplused tech simply said:
"Yeah, I think I can get to it now."
Tags: comcast | cable | telephone service
Some good news on News Sentinel photographer Cathy Clarke is here.
Tags: Cathy Clarke | Knoxville News Sentinel
Search engine Compete.com has a new domain traffic comparison tool. Anybody got a clue if this any more accurate than the more-probably-than-not wrong Alexa?
The results, I guess, can only be considered relative to other sites. Instead of cookies, IP addresses, etc., they are using a "Consumer-based community." Here's how knoxnews stacks up against the big TV in town (WBIR).
The site does address how it and Alexa differ.
Worth watching ... maybe. Fun playing with ...definitely.
