Posts from February 2007

Most readers know I am biased on this topic by virtue of Flatiron’s investment in iBiquity, the developer of HD Radio.

But regardless of my vested interest, I think there are a bunch of good reasons to get an HD radio the next time you buy a radio:

– HD lets you get the free HD2 and HD3 channels where there is a ton of great programming, all currently advertising free. Here’s a listing of all the HD channels, including HD2 and HD3, in the NYC market.
– HD offers advanced data services on the radios, starting with things like artist, song, and title information, but over time including traffic, weather, and other real time data services.
– HD offers CD quality sound on the FM band and FM quality sound on the AM band.

But today, Don Imus talked on his show about another reason to get HD Radio. It turns out that there are places where you can’t get an analog signal, but you can get a great digital signal.

Here’s Don telling the story.

I can’t believe I agreed to do this and I can’t believe I lost. I mean I’ve been using a Blackberry (RIMM) for almost ten years!

I’ve had answertips on this blog for just over a week now.

The initial reaction was pretty good. But I’ve heard a bunch of comments like this recently:

Fred, I was selecting text in the comment editor to make changes and
the answers.com window kept popping up. I didn’t enjoy the experience.

I need to hear from all of you. How many of you have been frustrated leaving a comment on this blog by answertips? How many of you have found value out of it? Please leave me your answers in the comments.

Tom Watson‘s comment about "rats on the westside" prompted me to add Shattered to the end of my rat row post this morning. If yesterday was M Ward day on this blog, today is Some Girls day because I just got an email from Wolfgang’s Vault alerting me to a Rolling Stones show at Detroit’s Masonic Hall in July 1978 on the Some Girls tour.

Killer version of Miss You.

Check it out.

If you look at the previous post, at the bottom of the post in the "flare" is a link to other stories about the neighborhood around "rat row". It looks like this:

Outside.in is a service that takes in posts about places, geocodes them, and then builds a robust set of web services around them.

Union Square Ventures participated in a first round financing for Outside.in a couple weeks ago and the company is announcing it today along with some new features that were rolled out this morning.

Here’s the Union Square Ventures blog post about Outside.in where I explain why the service is so interesting to us.

Here’s the Company’s blog post announcing the financing.

I’d encourage you to read both posts if you are interested in placeblogging and/or local media on the web. But if you don’t have time for that, just go visit outside.in and you’ll hopefully see why we are so excited to be involved with the Company.

Josh and I were walking up sixth avenue last night on the way home from a friend’s house. When we got to the block between W 4th and Minetta Lane, I was tempted to cross the street toward the cages (one of the top street ball locations) but instead we kept going past the new IFC Theater, and then onto "rat row" the string of tattoo shops, sex shops, and the now infamous KFC/Taco Bell store.

I thought the opening of the IFC would be a positive for this block. But that hasn’t happened. I am now hoping the rat video uproar will have some effect. This block is a blight in an otherwise fantastic neighborhood. Let’s hope that "rat row" has now hit rock bottom and is headed for better times.

UPDATE: I just saw Tom W’s comment to this post and I loved it so much I am adding some audio entertainment to this post.

As my friend Steve and I were leaving The Tibet House Concert last night I got an email on my blackberry from my friend David.

R u at the Tibet House show — getting a Fred vibe.  Michael stipe, patti smith, ben harper, ray davies and lots more.  Very cool

Very cool indeed. Anytime you can listen to great music at Carnegie Hall, its a good thing.

But the lineup last night was really incredible.

Laurie Anderson
Ray Davies
Philip Glass
Deborah Harry
Lou Reed
Sigur Ros
Patti Smith
Michael Stipe

To be honest, Ray Davies stole the show. He was in a great mood, played more songs than anyone else, and the duet on Lola with Debbie Harry was a huge crowd pleaser. But my favorite moment was his rendition of Dedicated Follower Of Fashion. What fun that was.

The other highlight was Patti Smith. I’ve never seen her play live. She has an amazing voice and the finale with everyone on stage and Patti singing in the crowd had everyone buzzing into the streets. What a great night.

Bob Tedeschi has a story in today’s Times business section about how YouTube "celebrities" are being poached by other web video services.

First of all, I have no idea why anyone would want to leave a service that has 30mm unique visitors a month (YouTube) for a service that has 400k uniques a month (Revver).

But more importantly, nobody has to make this choice. Just put your videos everywhere.

There are no exclusives in web video. And even if there were, a web video is just one embed code away from being available everywhere.

That’s the whole point of web video.

What am I missing?

That’s a key question if you are a shareholder or employee of Yahoo (YHOO). comScore published the results of a study they did on click rates pre and post the launch of Panama and here are the results:

Certainly the trend is in the right direction. I have no idea if this order of magnitude gains are something to be excited about or not. I do know that Google’s click rates are significantly higher than Yahoo’s so a 9% gain is not going to get them parity with Google.

I also know that there are many people in the search marketing business who read this blog. Maybe they have some anecdotal data they can share in the comments.

Non Disclosure – I do not hold a position in YHOO at this time.