Wednesday, May 02, 2007

"The greatest danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it." Michelangelo

Prom Queen
is the daily 90 second online soap targeting teens. The property launched by Vuguru, the Michael Eisner backed firm, is off to a good start. Averaging about 200K views a day the short has managed to capture more than five million views since its April 2 debut. MySpace, where the offering has gained 18,000 friends gets a sneak on each new show. Kudos to Michael and his team. MediaWeek's Mike Shields has more here. (Thanks to Cory for the tip).

Congrats & cheers: To all Webby Awards winners. Our favorite Ninja gets a Webby - Best Actor. Flickr picked up a bunch. Hometown heroes - The Onion - picked up the humor hardware. Our favorite film of last year, Pan's Labyrinth, takes the Movie and Film category. last.fm wins the music category. BBC tops News. NPR walks with the Podcast category. BBC's Radio One wins Radio. The gang at LinkedIn wins the Services and the Social Networking awards. CurrentTV voted best Television (The Office gets a People's Voice nod). Cute Overload wins the Weird award. Check out all of the winners here.

Counter-intuitive wins: Kudos and bravos to NBC News on hiring on Mark Whitaker as Senior VP. Steve Capus stands to gain some (needed) outside perspective. That Mark has solid news chops without the baggage of any experience in TV news makes this an enlightened hire. Bill Carter has the story at NYT here.

Lee Arnold on the state of rock radio: "As PPM rolls out market-by-market, Rock radio’s true ratings shares will finally be counted." Bravo Lee! Read his post here. (P.S. Should you own or operate a Rock station you'll benefit from getting Lee involved. If you are lucky enough to be in a market without a strong rocker consider inviting Lee in for a candid and confidential evaluation. You'll be glad you did.)

Rock review: The uber-cool Bruce Ravid checked in over the weekend to rave about the Arcade Fire performance at Coachella. "The big story will be tonight's Rage Against the Machine reunion but I think Arcade Fire showed last night that they have a chance to be relevant for the next couple of decades. Of all the 'indie' bands, I'd say they have the best chance of that." Thanks Bruce. Agree with your read. Us kids know those Phillips grads and their coconspirators are the goods.

Fine red wine for 10 bucks or less: My love affair with the grapes of Spain continues unabashed. Here are six red table wines we recently enjoyed most - exceptional values all. Luzon Jumilla Spain 2005, Protocolo 2004 Vino De La Tierra De Castilla, Sierra Cantabria Rioja Red Wine 2004, Codice 2004 Vino De La Tierra De Castilla, Vega Sindoa 2003 (a Cab & Tempranillo blend), Borsao 2005 (a Garnacha & Tempranillo blend). Cheers!

Thank you very much: Lots of great questions related to my series of posts on hiring. Thanks for the emails. My responses tomorrow along with my take on the latest round of Winter radio books.

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