Posts from June 2007

So much to say about this video, I am not sure where to start.

It’s brilliant marketing. And Hill and Bill as Tony and Carmela explains so much. I think this is a winner for team Hillary. The video is viral, it’s gonna spread, she’s using it to introduce her campaign them song, which was picked via an internet vote. All good.

And I’ve got history with that diner, The Mount Kisco Diner. It was our family’s first meal the day we moved to Chappaqua in 1994. Emily puked all over the table. It’s a metaphor for our five years of purgatory in the suburbs.

And the songs. Ugh. You all know how I feel about Don’t Stop Believin’ but that sure would have been a much better choice than Celine Dion. That takes all the juice out of this for me. And it had a lot of juice.

I am sure scenes like this one are playing out all over the place as little league season comes to an end and the winners and losers are determined. This particular shot was taken by Jill Stern, a citizen journalist in the finest notion of the term, who is the mother of the Dodger’s star pitcher, and who had also volunteered to shoot the game for the local greenwich village paper, The Villager.

The specifics of the play are as follows. Dodgers vs Reds for the Greenwich Village Little League championship. Dodgers in control for the entire game until a 6th inning rally by the Reds puts them up 4-3 going into the bottom of the last inning. Avery, shown leading the pack of teammates out onto the field, walked, stole second, then third, and got home on a wild pitch setting up the dramatic ending.

David Heffernan, aka Hef, who is the kid sliding/kneeling at home, stepped up and proceeded to slam a walkoff homer deep over the center left field fence and onto Leroy Street. What an ending and what a photo. Congrats to the Dodgers, including my son Josh.

This record, Panic Prevention, has been in heavy rotation since I got it last week.

It’s had the same effect on me that the first Streets record, Original Pirate Material, had on me when I first got it. All I want to do is listen again and again, each listen revealing something new.

Amazon says Jamie T‘s inspirations are The Clash, Tom Waits, Billy Bragg, the Specials and Beastie Boys. That sounds about right.

Check it out.

Calm Down Dearest – Jamie T – Panic Prevention

So Lonely Was The Ballad – Jamie T – Panic Prevention

I just bought fakefredwilson.com. It’s pointing to this blog although it may take a few hours for the DNS records to update.

I think this fakeperson.com thing has legs. I love reading fake steve jobs and this Alexa chart shows that Fake Steve Jobs already has more traffic than Jeff Jarvis’ Buzzmachine, a top 100 weblog.

Like everyone else, I’ve been wondering who Fake Steve Jobs is. My money is on Nick Denton. It would be just like Nick to create a fake blogger and then engage in a hunt to find out the real identity. Or possibly
John Heilemann who clearly has Steve Jobs on his mind and this post almost outs John as FSJ.

But beyond the identity of Fake Steve Jobs, there lies a bigger question. Can this fake person dot com thing turn into a real media opportunity? I believe that Federated Media and FeedBurner together can make FSJ over $200k per year. But is there an even bigger opportunity?

I remember in th early days of Weblogs Inc, they had the Official Apple weblog, The Official Microsoft weblog, The Official Google weblog, etc. Those blogs had/have some readership but not anything like FSJ.

Would it be better to build a network of company specific weblogs with Fake Steve Jobs, Fake Steve Ballmer, Fake Sergey Brin, etc, etc. I suspect that would be a much more popular set of weblogs if they were written as well as FSJ. Of course, that is a big if.

So back to what I did this morning. I don’t think that fakefredwilson.com is a particularly interesting media opportunity but given that I was going to write this post, I figured it would be smart to own the domain.

Look at fakejasoncalacanis.com. Here’s the domain name record. Maybe Jason owns it. Maybe not.

Bottom line. fake person dot com is something to pay attention to. If you don’t want someone blogging as a fake you, buy the domain.

Yesterday afternoon, 5pm, I saw a email alert in the lower right of my laptop screen, a WSJ email alert, Yahoo was turning over the Company to Jerry Yang. We all knew that Semel was in trouble and that a leadership change was likely. The surprise was the choice of Jerry Yang. I stopped what I was doing and blogged my reaction to the news.

When you blog a news story, you need an anchor post. I went to the WSJ, but they didn’t have a story, just a "breaking news headline". Plus I always worry about linking to a WSJ story because its a paid site and my link could be dead. So I went looking for something more authentic. I went to Yahoo’s press release page, found the release, and linked to it. Seemed like the logical anchor. I also ganked the cool photo of the Yahoo! guy in the chair reading the paper from that page.

As I was hitting submit to my post, I saw Bradley Horowitz pop up on Twitterific with this:

  Jerry Yang new Yahoo CEO

I replied to all that I had just posted on the news. An interesting discussion ensued on Twitter.

Then I went to Techmeme to see what was going on there. I saw that Jerry Yang had a blog post on his new role. I figured that was the better anchor link for my post and I changed it to Jerry’s post. I also read  all the links to Jerry’s post and some of the links to the PR Newswire story. I went back to Techmeme a couple more times last night and read the WSJ’s story, the Times’ story, Valleywag’s take, and Arringtons’ take as well as a dozen or so interesting links.

By the time I went to bed last night, I’d read everything I wanted to read on that news.

This morning, I logged into Techmeme for my morning dose of tech news to find the Jerry Yang story still front and center. Here’s the top of Techmeme right now:

I know that Techmeme is not the sole arbiter of whose take on the story is the most important, but frankly it’s the arbiter that I pay the most attention to these days.

Gabe’s got Jerry’s post as the top take on the story. As it should be. He’s in the hot seat now. Let’s hear what he has to say first. Then the official release. Then the WSJ (still the paper of record for the business world even though they still refuse to play nice on the web). Then Valleywag followed by The NY Times. Has Valleywag taken over the Merc’s role as the Valley’s paper of record????

Below the fold on Techmeme, you’ve got Rafat, Om, Kedrosky, cnet, CNN, and a few more stories. All good reads for sure. And there’s literally close to 100 links to posts like mine you can read if you want to know everything the blog world is saying about this story.

That’s how news breaks and then takes in my world. I am sure most of you who read this blog do it the same way I do. I am equally sure that we are the minority and that most people are going to read the news for the first time this morning in their local paper. But I think the way it goes down in our world is the way of the future and services like Techmeme are going to be the new arbiters of how news takes.

That’s my take.

Read this.

I know this blog is dangerously close to a Marc Andreessen linkblog. But he’s just killing it right now.

Right around the corner from our office is a restaurant that has had more than its share of failures. Although it was home to Pesca many years ago (as in the early 80s) where Danny Meyer first got his taste of the hospitality business, it has been a bust for as many years as I’ve been working in the Flatiron district (the past 10+ years). It’s brightest moment was as Rocco’s home during his brief period of fame.

The latest brave souls to take a shot at this space are Jeffrey Chodorow and Zak Pelaccio. Zak is the genius behind Fatty Crab so you have to give him a decent shot at making this place work.

The place is called Borough and the concept is the "best of NYC". Hmm. Not exactly sure what that means but given that its around the corner from our offices I’m sure we’ll get a chance to tell you.

The reason for this post is on my way to the office earlier today, I snapped this photo (with my new Blackberry Curve oh yeah!) and emailed it to Flickr. And now I am blogging it. It’s an invitation to an open house tomorrow night. I won’t be in town, but the doors are open so go check it out.

I just saw the news that Terry Semel has stepped down and Jerry Yang is taking over as CEO of Yahoo!

As a longtime Yahoo! fan, I see this as good news. Jerry is smart and connected to the medium in the way that Terry never was. I think Terry did a good job turning Yahoo! around in the aftermath of the Internet bubble and making decisions like buying Overture and focusing on both search and display advertising.

The question is whether Jerry and Sue Decker, who was named President, will be focused on the long term or if the Jerry/Sue team is a caretaker management team focused on finding the right strategic partnership for the Company.

It’s clear that Yahoo! is seen as a value play by most Internet investors, particularly with its large holdings in Yahoo! Japan. It would be pretty easy for Jerry and Sue to focus on getting a deal at $40 to $50/share and claiming victory.

But if Jerry really wants to do a Steve Jobs and turn Yahoo! around and build something much bigger, I think he can do it. But that’s going to require making some hard decisions that won’t be easy to execute.

I really hope that the latter scenario plays out because right now Google is killing it (like Microsoft did in the late 80s/early 90s) and we really could use a counterweight and Yahoo! is the obvious choice.

John Heilemann’s big piece on Steve Jobs, Apple, and iPhone is in this week’s NY Magazine. I don’t know if Apple has peaked, that’s a tough call, but I do think John is raising the bear case on AAPL to a new level.

I’m quoted briefly, singing the praises of streaming music, which will be no surprise to anyone who reads this blog frequently.

I am also long AAPL and not yet convinced to sell the stock.