I apologize for the blatant self promotion here. But Spring Creek Group CEO Clay McDaniel was recently profiled in Smart Money Magazine’s Small Business site. I think it’s a nice achievement for our little team of 15 social mediaholics. Here’s the link to the story.
Category Archives: Media
The New Meme in Web Comedy
Remember Rick rolling? LOL Cats? Well here’s the next fad. Here are 3 already. Look for 1000 more…Just keep clicking thru…
Don’t Drink and Email
Finally, a tech product that is useful.
“Mail Goggles” is dubbed as a breathalyzer for your email. This Gmail add-on makes it harder to send email when you are, um, not thinking clearly, by asking a series of math problems during the times you specify. If you get any of the questions wrong, Mail Goggles will say, “Water and bed for you. Or try again.”
You can enable this tool for your Gmail for free from Google Labs.
Meanwhile, we think the athletes are real
So what have we learned about China so far thanks to year’s Olympics. Well, let’s start with some nuggets from a British paper, The Times of London, in this article.
Let’s set aside all the pre-Olympics Tom Foolery of throwing out journalists, censoring Internet sites, jailing a Japanese television crew in West China, shutting down factories, and trying to magically make the pollution go away.
But in the first week of this Games, we have:
- Fake fireworks so the TV audience thinks they are seeing something spectacular
- Lip-syncing of the opening song by a cute 7-year old Chinese girl, because the 7 year old girl who really sang it wans’t “cute” enough.
- Oscar-style “seat fillers” who sit and watch the preliminary rounds of events, then leave when the ticket holders show up, so it doesn’t look like there are any no-shows.
I’m not exactly sure this is what drove the spirit of the games more than 100 years ago. So if the games themselves can be fake and manufactured, tell me again why the athletes aren’t allowed to use drugs that enhance their own performance? Don’t sterioids seem to fit perfectly into this charade?
Bonanzle Review – “The Best eBay Alternative We’ve Seen”
Bonanzle, a young and exciting company we recently started working with, just received a fantastic review from Ecommerce-Guide.com.
An alternative to Craiglist and Ebay, Bonanzle is designed to make it easier for people to buy and sell products online. Given the state and direction of the economy today, any way to make it easier to move used merchandise is positioned to do well. Some choice quotes from the article:
“You get Bonanzle
— an eBay alternative that is quite simply, the best I’ve seen in my
four years of reviewing and writing about start-up marketplaces aimed
at taking sellers away from eBay.”
The Bonanzle platform was designed in-house from
the ground up, so not only does the site look very different from other
alternative sites, but this is the reason why the tools and features on
this site are so radically different.The best way to experience Bonanzle is simply to log
on and try it. What you will find is that Harding and his team of
self-titled “action-minded experts” have managed to offer sellers more
features in this one site than any alternative to date, yet keep the
entire site and selling process simple, compact and super-easy to use.
Check out the whole article, and please Digg it or add it to Delicious if you would be so kind.
Real Life Deal or No Deal for the Blogosphere
So how much are 2,200 women bloggers worth? According to NBC, about 5 Million Bucks in Series B investment, which nets out to close to $2300 per blogger.
The deal includes the following:
As part of the arrangement, iVillage, Oxygen.com and BravoTV.com will feature select BlogHer content, while BlogHer’s network is expected to return the favor to varying degrees.
Reaching out to the BlogHer Network has been a common strategy of start-ups who don’t have $5,000, much less $5,000,000 for marketing. The "Mommy Blogger," which as a term delights and disgusts different people, is an incredibly powerful evangelist for certain product groups. The process involved digging through the network, finding the right email address, crafting a perfect message, sending an email, and praying. If it works, you get free promotion. if it doesn’t, you burned a few hours.
But now it will be interesting to see what kind of influence the NBC buy-in will have on this network. For one thing, I don’t know how much each individual blogger gets from this deal, but I assume it’s a negligble %. It will also be interesting to see what happens to bloggers in the network if they rip on NBC programming, or promote programming of other networks.
Regardless, it’s a nice acknowledgment that the BlogHer network has become a powerful piece of the social media matrix. Congrats on the investment.
Rossi vs Gregoire Radio Ad War Begins
I love political season. Nothing better than a good old fashion radio ad war being waged by people who don’t normally write radio ads. Today on KJR, I heard what may have been the funniest 20 minutes of political radio the all-sports station has ever run.
1) At about 8:20am, Steve Sandmeyer interviews Dino Rossi. In the 10 minute interview, Rossi addresses the issue KJR listeners care about most, mainly the Legislature’s inability to make any kind of decision on the Sonics situation. Rossi restated his previous positions, that all Gregoire and the Legislature had to do was AUTHORIZE King County to extend the current tax that tourists pay on rental cars, hotels, etc…past 2011 when it currently expires. They didn’t have to vote to extend the tax, they had to vote to authorize King County to vote for the tax. Rossi continued by saying that he knew it was a political hot potato, so to make sure Gregoire wouldn’t take a fall, he publicly endorsed it before her. That way she could endorse it without him being able to use it against her. Then he got a nice jab in by calling Frank Chopp the “pseudo-governor” and that Gregoire is too afraid to do anything without his approval. Score multiple points for Rossi.
2) Interview ends at 8:30 or so, and in the next commercial break, you get a response ad from Team Gregoire. Basic text of the ad – “Rossi is like George Bush because he cut back on child protection services, is anti-abortion, votes against gay marriage and cut transportation funding. See, he’s just like George Bush. And did we mention he is like George Bush? So, you obviously don’t want George Bush. Paid for by friends of Gregoire.” Gay marriage and abortion rights? The Sonics have just been ripped from the city, fans blame you for this, and 8 days later you run an ad telling sports fans that Rossi is against abortion rights? Really? That’s the most compelling argument you have to make to sports fans feeling pain?
3) 10 minutes later, you hear a Rossi ad that has been playing a while. The ad quotes the Seattle Times, “Gregoire showed the leadership skills of a rookie Point Guard.” The ads also says that when Gregoire had a chance to do something extraordinary, she chose to sit on the bench. Ouch. Ouch again. Score more points for Rossi.
4) As if this wasn’t enough, the Gregoire campaign found it necessary to run the same ineffective ad a second time 10 minutes later. I guess they really wanted Sonics fans to know that Dino Rossi is anti-abortion. It’s like walking into Capitol Hill and talking about policy on shipping tariffs. Or going to the Apple farmers to discuss H1B visas.
The KJR vote is going to Rossi. So I’m not sure Gregoire’s play here. She either has to be loud and vocal about pushing through the new stadium legislation this session, or just ignore those voters and spend money somewhere else. But if I won ana election by 2,000 votes, and an entire segment of people who never vote just learned how to register, I’d be nervous.
What If…. Google Hadn’t Bought YouTube?
Adotas has a story today about Google’s problems monetizing YouTube.
If you remember, Google bought YouTube in 2006 for $1.7 Billion, which after complex calucaltions, came out to be a multiple of about $1.7 Billion. That’s not true, they made some money, but the valuation was shocking. Revenue this year is estimated to be $200 Million. A fine amount of money.
But, my goodness the costs must be enormous. How many trillion streams are they broadcasting at what processor and bandwidth cost? Wikipedia estimates $1 Million per day on Bandwidth alone.
So now imagine for a second that Google had not bought YouTube, and allowed it to lose money at an astonishing rate. If YouTube was currently running around the investor community asking people to pony up money to fund the TV watching habits of the next generation. At some point, the bleeding would have to stop. Imagine some new scenarios for owners of YouTube:
- Comcast: *Poof* All of a sudden it’s a paid subscription channel, and no copyrighted broadcasts would make it to air.
- Microsoft?: YouTube becomes MSN Video
- An "Orbitz-like" joint partnership between Disney, Viacom, and General Electric: YouTube meets Hulu.
- Fox: The new MySpace Videos?
I guess my point is that next time you are enjoying some free entertainment, be happy YouTube was bought by a company who thought it was a cool idea, and would figure out how to make money on it 5-10 years down the road.
In a related story, signups for rugby leagues rose 143%
You gotta wonder how a TV company can make this kind of blunder…According to the BBC:
New Zealand rugby fans watching a regular sports programme found themselves viewing hardcore pornography instead on Sunday afternoon.
Four minutes of pornography interrupted sports coverage on the Prime Television channel, after what a spokesman described as a distribution mix up.
The pornographic footage was meant for an adult pay-per-view channel. Instead, it found its way onto a regular free-to-air programme called "Grassroots Rugby".
Rival television channels reported that some viewers were angry about the broadcast, which may have been seen by children.
And yes, I am fully aware that when I run for public office someday, some crackpot reporter will Google my name and the word "pornography" and momentarily think he hit the jackpot…
Seattle Loses A Piece of Itself, What Does a Fan Do Next?
Well there you go.
A region with Microsoft, Amazon, Starbucks, Boeing, Washington Mutual, Safeco and Weyerhauser couldn’t find enough tax dollars to keep a piece of history intact. An international talent pool of software executives, engineers, bankers and real estate moguls, with more college graduates per capita than anywhere in the nation, couldn’t find a few people to hammer out a suitable solution.
So who do you blame? Sure, you want to blame Clay Bennett. While he may be a liar, he’s simply a guy who is going to be given a hero’s welcome and key to the city in his hometown. He never again has to fear taking a wrong turn and running into a homeless heroin addict drinking a latte on Broadway. Given the chance to take your two-bit town and and make it a major league city, wouldn’t you do the same thing?
So now try to blame Howard Shultz. He got snookerd into selling to Bennett. But he didn’t want to sell. He did everything but beg for some money to renovate Key Arena. The team was losing money like there was a hole in the bottom of its bank account. And here’s the dirty secret. It wasn’t Howard that was getting killed. His 50+ partners, the guys who retired from Microsoft and thought the stock market would never stop rising, were the ones who needed to stop writing checks every year to cover the losses. So they went to Olympia, and Olympia gave them the finger.
So is it Olympia’s fault? The City Council’s? Well of course, but there is a bigger culprit in all of this.
It’s the fault of the fans who live in and around Seattle. It’s at least partly our fault.
We did the famous passive-aggressive Seattle shuffle. We complained, but took no action. How many of us vote regularly, or ever, in a City Council election? How many of you know your District Rep or State Senator in Olympia? One day we all looked up and realized some pseudo communist named Nick Licata, who starts meetings about the Police budget with a poem, was in charge of the team’s fate. And even then, we relied on the Save Our Sonics guys. (Great effort guys. I exempt you from this. You really did all you could, and we should commend you.)
But scroll through the list of successful executives who live in Seattle, and then match it to the backgrounds of the people on OUR City Council. It’s a shame. It’s embarrassing. We voters have all been asleep at the switch.
Now let’s take it one step further. It’s just basketball. There are really WAY more important things than basketball. Like Schools and Transportation to name two. These are complex problems with many variables. The Sonics situation was a simple problem with a single variable – how do we creatively make a fiscally responsible decision that also helps the owners of the team? Simple problem. Give me and 10 friends a night at Dad Watson’s with all of the relevant data and we could come up with something.
But OUR elected officials couldn’t handle something this simple. Now, what makes you think they can handle Transportation or Education?
The team is gone. For most of us, it’s the first time we realized our leaders were so inept. But it’s our fault for not paying attention. We should have clued in after the Monorail debacle, and we all paid $500 for car tabs for a mode of transportation that didn’t exist. We should have clued in when our gas tax skyrocketed and the roads got worse. Now maybe we’ll get it. Do some research. Personally, I don’t know much about Drago, Godden, Licata, Curly, Larry and Moe, but I will certainly find out.
If the loss of basketball in Seattle pains you, then realize this Council, this Governor, and this Legislature, WILL hurt you again. Blame the first pain on your own naivety, but blame any upcoming pain on being inactive, and not working hard now to correct who is "representing" you.