quid.pro

Not my Yahoo anymore (or, beating a dead horse)

I’ve been a long-time My Yahoo user, in fact it is probably the only Yahoo property I use regularly. Sure, I Flickr occasionally but really nothing else at Yahoo is habit anymore. But I doubt I’ll keep that habit much longer. Here is why:

It is not because there are ads on the log-in screen, that has been common on Yahoo and many other sites for a while. But within the last few months, Yahoo has started to force me to log-in much more frequently. I don’t know exactly how often, but I would guess at least once every two weeks and maybe more. Given that I have 4 devices (two computers, iPad and iPhone) that I access this page from, I feel like I’m now logging into this page every other day or so.

Which is great for Yahoo — more ad views of that log-in page and I’m sure a very high CPM given the size of the ad — but a much less functional page for me. I’m not going out on a limb in saying that trading usefulness for business model is rarely a good way to build a business. But I can promise it’ll work beautifully for destroying one.

 

If the National Enquirer covered tech

I seriously love the Business Insider headline writers.

Blah blah blah Pando blah blah blah disclosure.

Mike Daisey’s reality distortion field

It’s been interesting reading all of the press around the outing of Mike Daisey’s “coverage” of Apple’s manufacturing issues and specifically the retraction by This American Life of the content behind its most popular episode. John Gruber did one of the better take downs of the hypocracy behind Daisey’s story. SF Weekly also stands out getting to the heart of the matter — Daisey has probably done more to make people doubt the veracity of any story about Foxconn going forward.

But I think Jeff Yang of Wall Street Journal’s Speakeasy blog has one of the most interesting points-0f-view, comparing Daisey’s fabrications to Steve Jobs’s own reality distortion field:

People want to believe in Daisey’s stories, because they want to have faith in the ability of individuals to change the path of history with their actions. They want to believe they can think different, act different, and — as crazy as it sounds — make the world a better place. It is, again quite ironically, exactly the same enchantment Steve Jobs always depended on to sell his magical devices — you may not believe me, but you want to believe in me, and what I’m saying is that this is changing the game, changing the industry, changing the world.

I’ve always had a hard time with the idea of journalism as Truth with a capital T. Everyone has a bias and pretending otherwise is just dishonest. Clearly, journalists have a higher standard to tilt at than a marketer — or a storyteller — and Mike Daisey’s problem as much as anything else is that he slipped from storyteller into journalist, even if by omission. But the idea that Daisey the storyteller was playing by no different rules than Jobs the marketer is an interesting angle that I think is being underplayed here.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think Daisey is equivalent in stature to Steve Jobs any more than he is to Mark Twain (whose quote Daisey led off his blog post with). But there is nothing inherently wrong with using a reality distortion field to make a point. Daisey’s only failing (and I realize it’s a whopper) was to let people think he was a journalist. Oh, and writing this post. Don’t pretend that it‘s about truth when it really isn’t.

Another mountain lion, this time with video (sort of)

We moved the camera that took these shots about 50 feet west to get a better view of the clearing where we’ve seen a lot of deer and more than a few mountain lions. Today, we collected a series of shots from around 7pm last week that I was able to turn into a video of sorts. The mountain lion walks in, plops down, gets up, lies down again and then walks away.

Our guess is that it’s a male about 30 inches tall or so (based on size comparisons to people in the same place) but we really have no idea. Update: a friend who knows better believes it’s the same female from the previous shots we got in this area.

 

Is getting ripped worth it?

I just love Quora.

The infomercial shoot came around and I spent 14 hours in an old warehouse in downtown Los Angeles doing all sorts of crunches as a background model while the spokespeople for the exercise videos read their lines. It was fun because two of the co-hosts were actresses from Baywatch. After probably 3,000 sit ups while maintaining a goofy grin on my face the shooting was over and I went home for about a week of recovery. I wanted to laugh at myself for agreeing to get lubed up in vegetable oil and participate in something so Hollywood-esque, but it hurt too much to laugh so I laid in bed motionless until my laughter no longer resulted in whimpering.

What I can say about “getting ripped” in the look-at-me-I’m-so-ripped-and-good-looking sense is that it isn’t worth it. It takes a ridiculous amount of work both in terms of adherence to a strict diet and a lot of exercise. Also, once you get to that point, then what? Stay ripped and miss out on eating a cookie every now and then? Screw that.

Indeed.

Gary Carter, 1954-2012

I’ve always been a baseball fan but nothing reinvorgated my love of the sport more than the 1986 World Series. And no one was more important to that Mets win than Gary Carter. He will always remain a favorite, may he rest in peace.

Respect my authoritah

“...I think there should be some more respect for capital.”

Janice Hester-Amey, CalSTRS Corporate Governance portfolio manager, lectures Mark Zuckerberg how to treat his new set of friends

I just love me them trees — the launch of PandoDaily

Earlier today, long-time friend Sarah Lacy launched her new site PandoDaily. As was covered in many places, I am one of the angel investors in the round Sarah raised to help start her company. In addition, I am going to join the board of parent company PandoMedia along with Michael Arrington and will be pretty actively involved in helping Sarah build her company. It is an exciting time in the web media space and Sarah is one of the most talented journalists I have known. The strength of the team she was able to bring together before even launching a site is a testament to her abilities and reputation. Her completely unsustainable output on day 1 a testament to her drive to make the site wonderful.

Thinking back to my earliest involvement with Wired magazine and then launching HotWired (amazingly, almost 20 and 18 years ago respectively), I am continually impressed with how much fun the business of media can be. Media sites make for inherently cyclical, constantly transforming businesses where you’re only as good as the last story you pushed out. The people who contribute are the ultimate product — the media are just the messages. If I’ve learned anything in my few decades of experience in media, the hard part is hitching yourself to the right star. Sarah is taking very seriously her goal of building the site of record for Silicon Valley and has the network, smarts and focus to reach that goal.

In other words, those who can launch web sites. The rest of us are happy to be involved. I’m very happy to be involved with Pando.

 

More mountain lion shots!

I set up more cameras on our property in the woods a few months ago and over Christmas weekend caught more shots of our local mountain lions. Unfortunately they walked a bit too close to the camera so I didn’t get the best shots (I’ve since moved this particular camera to a better vantage point) but still these are by far the best mountain lion shots we’ve gotten yet.

Best we can tell, this is a mother with two one-year or so old cubs. I’ve included a few shots from the series. 

Your company is a TV show

I’ve been watching and buying a lot of video on the Apple TV over the holidays and musing on the convergence of web company creation infrastructure with video production. An app on my iPhone and a video program on my AppleTV are increasingly looking like two sides of the same coin to me and as I worked my way upstream from that thought, incubators like Y Combinator quickly become the Endemols or Bad Robots of our web world. I’m just not sure that building a consumer internet company is too different from launching a video franchise anymore.

I don’t have any numerical proof of this but I will bet the total gross of an average video franchise over its lifetime is still significantly better than the total revenue of the average Silicon Valley start-up over its life. We can take out the statistical anomolies in both industries — Harry Potter and Google don’t count — but I think we could do worse as an industry than to aspire to building a similar scale of company building infrastructure as exists in video production. And vice versa I might add, I’m not sure video producers are iterating through business models as fast or creatively as internet incubators. We each have a lot to learn.

I realize the convergence of Silicon Valley and Hollywood isn’t even close to a new idea and am not professing to any huge novelty here. Plus, I can torture a metaphor with the best of them and won’t take this one any further. But I do think the two industries are learning from the other as technology, video distribution and platform wars change the dynamics of launching a consumer facing web company or a video franchise. And of course, increasingly Apple and Google are in the middle of both.

Lots of interesting reading on the subject recently, it’s a nascent subject for me that I’m just digging into (mostly trying to better understand the television production side of things). A few suggested links:

• PBS Takes On The Premium Channels - The success of shows like Downton Abbey along with the cuts in federal funding is causing PBS to increasingly fight against the premium networks for dollars. Needless to say, this is a good thing. And Downton Abbey is a wonderful show, watch it if you haven’t already.
• In Speaking for TLC, the Least Said Is Best - A fun look at the day-to-day grind of reality TV. We’ve known for awhile that editors have replaced writers as the creators of the story arc but I hadn’t realized to what extent you’re only as good as your PR person. Influence is the name of the game whether on the web or TV. And if your social media outreach folks have it hard, ask them to watch Sarah Palin’s kids while she camps with Kate Gosselin.
• Why the Winter TV Hiatus Makes No Sense - Jeff Alexander writes about the missed opportunity that continues to be the network television production schedule. Renée and I spent New Year’s Eve downloading and watching season 1 of Portlandia, which rocked a whole lot more than anything Dick Clark has done in decades. Yesterday we started watching Breaking Bad. I’m happy for the hiatus from my other television shows but my Apple TV has been seing a lot more use as a result.
• I am done with the Freemium Business Model - Yet another web developer realizing that free costs money. Free is just another cost of customer acquisition model that doesn’t make sense for everyone. I read this story through the eyes of a video content creator and wonder when we’ll hit a point that pay revenue can completely fund video programming. Would I pay more to see a less censored version of Breaking Bad? Easily, but there’s probably not enough of me yet to finance something like that. But I hope we’re not far off either.