"Oh, give us the man who sings at his work." Thomas Carlyle

"The right man is the one who seizes the moment." Goethe

"Know the true value of time; snatch, seize and enjoy every moment of it. No idleness, no laziness, no procrastination." Philip Dormer Stanhope

Today's image: Untitled by LJ. Great capture. Thank you very much for sharing.

Some good reads that deserve your attention.


This Scott Belsky book is a gem. The subtitle - "Overcoming obstacles between vision & reality" - sets the table for this good read.

Belsky offers solid insights and suggests a practical systematic approach for managing and directing the "creative psyche."

"...when we closely analyze how the most successful and productive executives, entrepreneurs, and businesspeople truly make ideas happen, it turns out that 'having the idea' is just a small part of the journey, perhaps only 1 percent of the journey." Amazon info, here.




The brothers who brought us Made to Stick and an interesting monthly read in Fast Company now have on offer Switch a story-driven narrative about that beast change. That they acknowledge, suggest Nudge, the fine writing of Richard Thaler & Cass Sunstein, as well as the Carol Dweck treasure Mindset, indicates these guys have done their homework.

"...we argue that successful changes share a common pattern. They require the leader of the change to do three things at once...Our goal is to teach you a framework, based upon decades of scientific research, that is simple enough to remember and flexible enough to use in many different situations..." Amazon info, here.


Jaron, a pioneer in virtual reality technology, has written a controversial "manifesto."

"...For millions of people, the internet means endless free copies of music, videos, and other forms of detached human expression. For a few brilliant and lucky people, the internet has meant an ability to spin financial schemes that were too complex to exist in the past, creating dangerous, temporary illusions of risk-free ways to create money out of thin air...there are obvious short-term benefits for some people, but ultimately a disaster for everyone in the long term." Amazon info, here.

Read a good book lately? Your suggestions are welcome. Please do share, leave a comment and suggest a read. Thank you very much.

We are all fortunate, blessed to be living in this very cool emerging world of hyper-connectivity. A new normal of always-on and nowness fueled by our access to and dependence on the network. Our handsets, boosted by that almost ubiquitous accelerant, wireless access, are driving totally new behaviors. Mobile is redefining the fundamentals, part of that is the very meaning of local, it's a whole new grammar and sense of place. Forget about DMA and census block code. The new local is defined in GPS terms - exactly where you are within three feet or less (think P.K. Dick). Time and space are obliterated in one click. Touch is the coming gesture, the new click. We are witness to a profound shift. A gradual fading of the desktop and its mouse. They're going the way of that fax machine handshake noise which is now merely years away from being pop culture trivia, and along with internet dial-up connection noise, an audio question on Jeopardy.

You've no doubt noticed, there's increasing chatter, buzz and discussion about all these early iterations of social networking and the social graph. YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn have captured respectable shares of mind.

Some perspective.

As a guy who was a dot com CMO back in the day, in what can reasonably be characterized as the first major wave of our digital networked society, the differences, compared to today, are indeed dramatic. In the first wave we all accepted the same operating mindset - spend your VC money as quickly as possible. The logic being you could get an equal, or greater, amount of cash in the next round. It was all about your "velocity" of spend, the rate at which you burned money. The table stakes included 20K a month for a PR firm, and at least one million dollars a month in advertising. You weren't considered to be in the game until that first full-page ad appeared in The Industry Standard (The Bible, "the newsmagazine of the Internet Economy"). At one point our CEO called me out during an off-site senior staff meeting for not spending enough money.

Today, the aggregate 2009 ad spend of YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn would fall short of what we spent in one year at that now long gone dot com. This is nothing short of revolutionary. But wait, there's more because we're just getting started.

Something's happening here
What it is ain't exactly clear

According to Tom Webster the awareness of Facebook and Twitter is now over 80%, among the 12+ population in the US (Edison Research: Twitter Usage in America 2010).

Twitter's 2009 earned media included a segment on Oprah. Be honest. When was the last time anything your company did was featured on Oprah? The new rules of engagement suggest that the smartest kids working at social networks are enjoying the significant and unique benefits of earned media while the majority of us continue using an increasingly dated playbook (we pay for media). Conversely, the lasting power of the prime time (and live sports) television spot is confirmed daily - it continues to lead the communications mix in Apple product introductions. TV sellers should be using this to make their case.

The time for merely talking about social networks is coming to an end. It's time you and your team get serious and actually get into the game. You must have a well-reasoned strategy. However, you can forget about any urgent need to be correct. Just jump in with purpose. At this point we're all making this stuff up as we go along and don't let anyone tell you any different. If you and your team have a social networking success story please get in touch. I would love to learn what's working for you and, with your permission, share your story here.

Back to the countdown. The great news is, according to Tom, Facebook and Twitter usage estimates are still under 50% of the 12+ US population. Think of it this way, it's late 1975. FM radio first reached a 50 share of American radio listening in 1976.

Cohort replacement is the pure essence of nature at work. The digital immigrants have the advantage of years behind them while the digital natives are living closer to the future, the advantage of significantly more years ahead. I'm reminded of those old white AM radio guys in 1975 telling us FM kids that "nobody has ever complained about the quality of music on our station, your 'music sounds better on FM' argument is just stupid, it's ridiculous."

We can do this. As Gary Hamel once wrote...

"All that matters
is whether you care enough
to start from where you are."

High signal, low noise: Are you reading BrandSavant, Tom Webster's personal blog? It's a serious conversation about "gaining insight from social media data." Jump there now, it's here. Put this one in your reader. You'll thank me later.

Bonus: Beyond the Information Revolution by Peter F. Drucker. The Atlantic, October 1999.

"It would be a great mistake to confine your imagination to the way things have always been done. In fact, it would consign you to the mediocrity of the marketplace." Harold Geneen

"The moment a person forms a theory his imagination sees in every object only the traits which favor that theory." Thomas Jefferson

"I dream for a living." Steven Spielberg

Today's image: If The Key Fits by pareeerica. Beautiful. Thank you for sharing.

Again, chasing those three tenets of new media for broadcasters. Ensure your assets are digital, discoverable and ready to share.

Today, we'll unpack discoverable.

Like it or don't Google is your home page (as previously suggested). Increasingly, your home page is becoming less relevant. Attention must be focused on making each web page stand out and stand alone. This is a shift in the conventional strategy, from optimization of the home page to the landing page.

Incoming! Analytics are your friend, they are very important to you. No matter what you are now running, please do add Google Analytics to your mix. Using this blog as an example, a consistent 50% of traffic is being directed via search engine to a specific post, rather than the main page. This seems to be, generally, a good representative average provided the available evidence including the metrics of our clients worldwide. Your mileage may vary - so do check it. Now, back to the countdown. Google is driving the largest share of SE traffic to this blog, followed by (a distant second) Yahoo!, then google.co.uk, blogsearch.google.com, google.ca, google.com.au, google.co.in, google.nl, google.fr, well, all those other Googles, you get the idea. To be fair, search.aol.com, bing.com and others do direct traffic this way but they are, at present, driving combined contributions that register a single digit percentage in total SE referrals. Now, and in the near future, it's safe to wager we are playing a game of Google.

So Google your brand. Google your talent. Google your key attributes. Google those words and combination of words that are important to you. Start with "I'm Feeling Lucky" and only then move to the SERP. Then, only the first page counts. Study. Take notes. Take action to improve your performance. Test, test, test. Measure. When "Lucky" produces your pages, you win (in that moment). Please do remember, the equation is dynamic. This is some new form of chess we are all playing and what it clearly is not is any simple game of checkers. In the brave new world of real-time, walk away time is collapsing. As a practical matter, incumbency is meaningless.

As the gifted Count Basie said "One more once."

It's not a game of getting better but one of getting different. The key for broadcasters, those in search of the most effective solution set, is to focus less on the numerator and more on the denominator. Game on.

Misc data: Month after month, the number one most-viewed page on this blog continues to be the amazing original writing of 2004 by the brilliant Bob Henabery, my creative godfather and mentor. Bob writes about media legends Bill Drake and Rick Sklar...Top 40, The Fox and the Hedgehog, it's a great read, here. The second most-viewed is my 2004 update of an earlier monograph on leadership, A Great General Manager, here.

Sidebar: Following Brent D Payne, SEO of Tribune, on Twitter I noticed his tweet about his new boss. Brent had been reporting to the CTO, and tweeted that his new boss was Trib's COO. When I asked him about it he said via email "It was mainly done to focus me more on monetization an (sic) product versus technical changes to the CMS." My take is this is one very savvy move. Tribune groks the notion, the true business value of search. My congrats to Brent who is doing a wonderful job for team Trib. They are lucky to have him and would be wise to ensure his continued contribution. Closed circuit to Randy: lock in this gentleman and thank me later.

Congrats and cheers: Regular readers of this humble blog are aware of my great love for FriendFeed. It remains my feeling that FriendFeed is one of the great killer apps in social media. It's not only a killer app but it is, as well, a wonderful community of folk like no other. While many in the community are suggesting that FriendFeed being acquired by Facebook will be the end of an era, my thought is we're gonna be just fine thank you very much. Facebook will be better as will FriendFeed. That's my story and I'm sticking to it until proven wrong. Congrats, cheers, bravos and kudos to the FriendFeed and Facebook gangs. Here's hoping you guys knock the cover clean off the ball.

Extra credit: The Flow Past Web: even better than the RealTime thing, here.

Bonus: Steven Wright killed on Letterman last night. He threw a bunch of classic stuff including...A lot of people are afraid of heights. Not me, I'm afraid of widths. - Enjoy, pages of some of his best, here.

"You know you've got a good piece of software when people use it for purposes for which the designers never intended or designed for." Clay Shirky

"Doing anything worthwhile takes forever. Ninety percent of what separates successful people and failed people is time, effort and stamina." Hugh MacLeod

"Don't tell people how to do things, tell them what to do and let them surprise you with their results." George S. Patton, Jr.

Today's image: The Passage of Time by ToniVC. Amazing shot. Thanks for sharing.

Three tenets of new media for broadcasters: Your assets must be digital, discoverable and ready to share.

Today, more on ready to share.

The great broadcast pioneer Gordon McLendon famously said to his managers "Get people to talk about your radio station." Few in media have understood and employed the power of "word of mouth" marketing more effectively than did McLendon. Moreover, he developed and practiced the radio stunt as performance art. I learned a bunch about McLendon thanks to the legendary Texas radio man Dickie Rosenfeld. Dickie once worked for The Old Scotchman as a seller, sales manager and general manager at KILT in Houston. As Dickie told me "Everything we did was designed to get people talking about KILT. Our goal was to be the talk of the town."

"Content isn't king. If I sent you to a desert island and gave you the choice of taking your friends or your movies, you'd choose your friends -- if you chose the movies, we'd call you a sociopath. Conversation is king. Content is just something to talk about." Cory Doctorow

The italics above are mine. Cory's observation is spot on. Getting into (and staying a credible part of) the conversation is the ball game. This is what McLendon and his managers had down cold.

Today we have the advantages of the web to help us spread the news, get the word out. As Hugh MacLeod writes...

..."Great Content" is only half the story. The other half is just as important, though a little more subtle. And what is that?

Short Answer: "Sociality".

It's not just that Boing Boing's content is fun to READ. It is. It's also that Boing Boing's content is fun to SHARE...Boing Boing has a lot of "Sociality" baked-in, i.e. its content makes for great "Social Objects" i.e. their blog posts are great "Sharing Devices". We are primates. We are social creatures. We like to socialize. And we socialize around objects. Boing Boing cranks out "social objects" by the ton, that we can effortlessly pass along to our friends.

Read Hugh's entire post, Boing Boing and baked-in sociality etc, here. Bravos to Hugh. He well makes this very important point.

Get into the conversation, ensure that your content is ready (and easy) to share. Think export.

Bonus: The (Not So) Final Word by Doug Zanger. Doug offers his take on the state of broadcast radio and the creative business, here. The Advertising Life podcast hosted by Doug Zanger...he invited me to guest on Episode 5, the audio is here. My thanks to Doug. It was fun getting to play on his stage.

A DJ speaks out: Guest Commentary: An Open Letter to Radio Programmers By Tara Dublin via Oregon Media Central, here

Today's big buzz is Facebook buying FriendFeed. More by Jason Kincaid via TechCrunch, here. I <3 FriendFeed.

"Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night." Edgar Allan Poe

"It's kind of fun to do the impossible." Walt Disney

"After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music." Aldous Huxley

Today's image: La mar by toalafoto. Great shot. Thank you for sharing.

What is your mission?

Homework: Above is the mission of Facebook. This is the slide used by Mark Zuckerberg during his f8 keynote. [Image credit: (CC) Brian Solis, www.briansolis.com and bub.blicio.us.]. How does your mission compare? What are you giving people? How is your organization helping to make the world more open and connected?

The show: Lennart Green holds a clinic on performance art, amazing close-up magic @ TED.

"I'm not finished, because I'm still curious." Barry Diller

"Nature is garrulous to the point of confusion; let the artist be truly taciturn." Paul Klee

"However much you knock at nature's door, she will never answer you in comprehensible words." Ivan Turgenev

Today's image: Claudia, lost in the Garage by Portrait and Fashion Photographer. Great shooting. Thank you for sharing.


Danger, Will Robinson: Thanks to Barron's scribe Alan Abelson we learn the updated report from those smart guys at hedge fund T2 Partners bears title language including "We are still in the early innings of the bursting of the housing and credit bubbles..."

Then there's the University of Michigan consumer confidence survey hitting a 28-year low, and that pesky $4-a-gallon gasoline. S&P 500 first-quarter earnings down 25.9% from the same quarter last year. [Up and Down Wall Street, 5/19]

The recent buzz about online rates is CPMs have headed south. My sense is online is still pacing up at 20 something percent. The danger for sellers is depending on the usual suspects to deliver their month. Sales leadership needs to be more focused on developing new business including new categories. While this environment is certainly challenging to sellers now is a great time for buyers to invest in advertising. Rates are attractive and you'll gain share of voice (especially valid should your competitors fail to spend). The most optimum time to advertise is when others are not. As baseball player Wee Willie Keeler famously said "...hit 'em where they ain't."

Buzz: Vegas odds say...Mr Softy buys Yahoo (at least Search now says Arrington) then Facebook (so say others). Stay tuned.

Pre-order: Outliers the new book by Malcolm Gladwell is now on offer at Amazon for $18.47 - info here. Related 800-CEO-READ

Say it ain't so: Firefox checks their own box. Do the custom install option and you can uncheck the box making Firefox your default browser. Shame on Mozilla. Opt-out, bad. Opt-in, good.

If I give you my business card, do I give you the right to publish it on the internet? The Comcast-Plaxo, CBS-CNET deals and the important data portability issue (think last week's Facebook smack down of Google) gets thrown around and the discussion is nothing less than informative, if not plainly and purely entertaining (thanks to Steve Gillmor, Sam Whitmore, Michael Arrington, Robert Scoble, Chris Saad, Marc Canter) in the latest Gillmor Gang podcast. Don't start tomorrow without it [Audio, MP3 Heads up, NSFW - language]. Bravos, guys. Good show! [Related: Marc Canter details his argument here]

Agenda item: The issues discussed in the Gillmor Gang podcast above are more important than one might first believe. We are at the beginning, the early days of a very real "data war." This amounts to nothing less than an arms race for some kind of control of user identity. Fair warning - get deep into this issue, now. What's in your ToS (and how well you play w/others) will play a role in the future of what's in your wallet.

Congrats & cheers: May sweeps winners, Fox leads 18-49, CBS leads in households and total viewers. The strike seems to have been the primary factor in 18-49 viewing being down almost 20% vs last year. The young guns of wireless being honored by Edison Media Research [names named here] Ken Fisher and team Ars Technica acquired by Conde Nast.[Ken's announcement]

Bonus x 3: 21 Accents + Ex-Boyfriend Jewelry + Ztail

Lost in space, the reality show: They call it "The Pioneer Anomaly." For reasons yet unknown something has dragged Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 a quarter-million miles off course. Robert Lee Hotz, WSJ's Science Journal editor chats about the anomaly in the following video. Could Newton and Einstein be wrong?

"There are but two roads that lead to an important goal and to the doing of great things: strength and perseverance. Strength is the lot of but a few privileged men; but austere perseverance, harsh and continuous, may be employed by the smallest of us and rarely fails of its purpose, for its silent power grows irresistibly greater with time." Goethe

"I know the price of success: dedication, hard work and an unremitting devotion to the things you want to see happen." Frank Lloyd Wright

"Art is a step from what is obvious and well-known toward what is arcane and concealed." Kahlil Gibran

Image: Step by Thomas Hawk. Great shot. Thank you very much.

"Is Facebook becoming the social operating system of the Internet, poised to support a whole new generation of businesses? Or is this new industry of applications leaning too heavily on the quixotic popularity of a single website? Industry leaders and Wharton experts see major opportunities ahead for those who can manage the risks." Scrabulous and the New Social Operating System: How Facebook Gave Birth to an Industry. Read the entire article via Knowledge @ Wharton here.

Grapes: Another good Spanish red. Mas Rabell 2005 (Torres). 50% Garnacha, 50% Carinea. Aged six months in American oak casks. A fine value at $10.

"I quote others only the better to express myself." Michel de Montaigne

"Creativity is the defeat of habit by originality." Arthur Koestler

"If you want to get lucky...it pays to be ready." Michael Bierut

Today's image: This Way by photosapience. Wonderful. Thank you for sharing!

Radio execs continue to have important and valuable missed opportunities at hand. More here (including comment by Mel Taylor).

Local, local, local: Google gets a dedicated GOOG-411 button on new phones. Release here.

Make it urgent

Fred Jacobs revisits last month's kerfuffle related to the new GSD&M creative from the HD Radio Alliance and suggests an industry dialogue. He's right. Fred's post here. What is obviously missing in all of this - so far - is any sense of urgency on the part of Peter Ferrara. Disclosure, transparency, creative collaboration, ongoing open and candid industry conversation are needed going forward. Needed now! This is becoming less about the new creative and more about leadership. Peter, do the right thing, take the lead, make 2008 the year of dramatic game-changing difference, of real progress for HD Radio. P.S. You'll find a great many of radio's best and brightest willing and ready to answer the call.

Face time, again: Free the Scoble 5,000!!! Kara's take here...

"All that information on Facebook is Robert Scoble’s. So, he should–even if he agreed to give away his rights to move it to use the service in the first place (he had no other choice if he wanted to join)–be allowed to move it wherever he wants."

Dave Winer lends his usual uncommon good sense to this...

"It's a big effin loop we're in. One of these times around one of the companies that feels (incorrectly) that they have a lock on their users, will voluntarily give it up and be a leader in Generation N+1. I've never seen it happen, but in theory I think it could...So Facebook has the opportunity to be a crossover company, part of the next generation -- or a last gasp of the generation that's about to run out of gas. It's their choice. And it's fitting somehow that Scoble is the poster child for users in this cycle."

More Dave w/comments here.

Robert writes Facebook disabled my account and weighs in here (hundreds of comments and counting - good show).

LATER: We learn Robert was alpha testing Plaxo Pulse.

The lesson here is not about ToU or portability of personal data or the myth called privacy. The lesson here is don't be messin with alpha-geeks. More on data portability here.

Bubble 2: Plaxo for sale? $100 mil? Timesman Andrew Ross Sorkin has the story here.

Resolution, Read More: Brad puts up a one page summary of the Thomas P.M. Barnett suggested reading list. Outstanding. Highly recommended list, here. Thanks Brad, and TPMB! Earlier comp on Tom's site here.

"The only interesting answers are those that destroy the questions." Susan Sontag

"If you give an audience a chance they will do half your acting for you." Katharine Hepburn

"Irresponsibility is part of the pleasure of all art; it is the part the schools cannot recognize." Pauline Kael

Here Comes Another Bubble: Won't you blog about this song? Done. The vid of the moment via YouTube here. Kudos to Matt Hempey.

The Myth of Contextual Advertising: Alex Iskold reviews the bidding on the Facebook ad play. Via Read/WriteWeb here. Bravos, Alex! Well done.

DIY entertainment: Research released by Nokia...

“From our research we predict that up to a quarter of the entertainment being consumed in five years will be what we call ‘Circular’. The trends we are seeing show us that people will have a genuine desire not only to create and share their own content, but also to remix it, mash it up and pass it on within their peer groups - a form of collaborative social media.” Mark Selby, Vice President, Multimedia, Nokia.

Read more via MobileCrunch here.

Secrets of success in 8 words, 3 minutes

Richard St. John presents at TED 05. Well worth your bandwidth.

Congrats & cheers: Media mogul, legendary gentleman, uber-mensch and pal Nick Verbitsky (and his United Stations' team) on their new radio venture with Lou Dobbs. Scott Moore, Yahoo! SVP, promoted to head media and entertainment operations (Santa Monica). The gang at Mixx, only days out in beta announcing a partnership with The Los Angeles Times - very cool! Bill Burton and crew on the web site relaunch by the ABC O&Os.

"No one who deserves confidence ever solicits it." John Lennon

"Most great men and women are not perfectly rounded in their personalities, but are instead people whose one driving enthusiasm is so great it makes their faults seem insignificant." Charles Cerami

"It's the friends you can call up at 4:00 a.m. that really matter." Marlene Dietrich

Bulletin from Fly-over Land: Hey NFL, we ain't gonna buy your network. Watching the Packers tonight at one of my brother-in-laws' restaurants. The NFL Network wants us to blame cable. That dog don't hunt.

Spots & dots: Net TV CPM $25, TV Broadband CPM $30+. Jon Lafayette at TV Week offers the back story here.

VOTE! IWM's 2007 Media Person of the Year, all the big kids are voting, join them and vote here.

Midtown buzz: News Corp & LinkedIn $1 billion, not enough? A billion dollars? Not a bad offer for a site that did 2782k in uniques last month (comScore - see yesterday's post). $359 a unique? The recent chatter about Facebook being valued at $15 billion plays out at over $455 a unique (using the same comScore data set). Smells like 1999.

Mad Ave buzz: You may expect to hear more and more about measures of attention and engagement. Here's one snap shot of an attention metric from Compete. My thanks to Max Freiert.


Others of note in the top 200: #28, Univision +129%, #33, Netflix (7%), #39 CartoonNetwork +14%, #45 BlackPlanet +3%, #57 ProjectPlaylist +610%, #67 Nick +7%, #68 PBSKids +6%, #76 USAToday (32%), #79 FoxNews +29%, #96 Hi5 (8%), #99 NYTimes (21%), #135 BBC (32%), #147 MarketWatch (18%), #188 TheStreet +216%, #196 DrudgeReport +21%. More here.

Not exactly correct, yet: Yes, I have been talking with a pub about doing a column. No, a deal has not been made (can't believe everything you read). This scribbling is free. I'm a known Creative Commons guy. Commercial pubs are and should be a different story. Not willing to write for free or almost free when the publisher is making a good buck. A deal might happen, or not. Honored, nonetheless. Thanks for all the emails and good words. Stay tuned.

Bravos! The Google Gmail gang (Seattle) debuts group chat and rich emoticons. Very cool. More here.

Bonus: ze jumping that gap between zero and one.


Congrats & cheers: Drew Horowitz named Best Manager in Radio by Radio Ink. Well deserved, Drew is a rock star playing at the top of his game. TiVo signs NBCU as first major broadcaster to purchase set-top box data. Emeril Lagasse marks 30 on Emeril Live!, the BAM! that first put Food Network on the national radar over ten years ago. Google AdWords team signing their first TV industry reseller covering 26 markets - Hearst-Argyle. Eddie Webb back, right where he belongs, in Chicago, afternoons at WLUP. Charlie Koones leaving Variety to lead a media/entertainment startup, he's shopping for money. ABC on their big win with Shrek, 21.2 million viewers, 7.2 rating 18-49, this should lockup their #1 finish. ABC also banked success with their Stars finale - 24.9 million viewers, 6.4 rating 18-49. The sweeps first place show honors remain with CBS, the CSI season opener posting 25.5 million viewers. Radio star Wendy Williams and Debmar-Mercury to co-pro the new Wendy Williams TV Show set to debut in the city next year, national launch to follow (Might be a great vehicle for one of the NBCU properties?). Anton Guitano named CFO at CBS Radio.

"If you're not prepared to be wrong, you'll never come up with anything original." Sir Ken Robinson

"If you're not failing, you're not doing something sufficiently difficult or creative." Scott Berkun

"As the spirit wanes, the form appears." Charles Bukowski

"...privacy is not just about information. It's all about the defaults." David Weinberger

Dr Dave has written a thoughtful piece about Facebook and privacy...

"Our privacy norms are changing rapidly. They have to because we've now invented so many new ways to be in public. That's why Facebook's move is especially disappointing. Although they are rigorously supporting informational privacy, they are setting the defaults based not on what's best for their users but on what's best for them. It's clearly and inarguably better for users to be able to opt out of the entire third-party system, but it's clearly more lucrative for Facebook to make it hard to opt out (not to mention making it an opt in system)."

Read the entire writing here. Kudos David! Perhaps this is another one of those cohort issues. The privacy norms of the Gen Y crowd are radically different than those of Boomers. Still, there is something fundamentally wrong in requiring someone to opt out before being automatically opted in. TOS and lawyers be damned. Transparency and disclosure should ever be plain and simple when it comes to personal elections. Facebook will get this right (or not). The issue will likely become which generation of users should decide? The deeper issue here concerns the myth of privacy. Sidebar: What would Jan Deverson and Charles Hamblett have named those Gen X teens provided advanced insight of the wide adoption of their convention? So, Gen Z is succeeded by?

John Battelle makes an excellent point...

"Pull to point" - I find that I read more things that have been pointed to by others, rather than only those which I pull down myself.

Agreed. Read John's post From Pull to Point: How to Save The Economist and The Journal from Irrelevance here. Deep links make it possible to export content, and help to make digital assets discoverable.

Bonus: The mad cool gift of this holiday season and the perfect early 08 buzz must-have.
Behold - chumby

Let the marketplace decide: Programming ace Dave Beasing of Jacobs Media blogs an open letter to the I-man wherein he suggests JD use his considerable talents to "everyone's benefit." I respectfully disagree with that notion. Read Dave's letter w/comments here. Some of my previous posts on the Imus mess here, here, and here.

"Never take counsel of your fears." Andrew Jackson

"Every great man is always being helped by everybody; for his gift is to get good out of all things and all persons." Ruskin

"The thoughts that come often unsought, and, as it were, drop into the mind, are commonly the most valuable of any we have, and therefore should be secured, because they seldom return again." Locke

Today's image: Dark pleasure by humbertoadriano. Very cool. Thank you!

The Almost-Impossible Rock & Roll Quiz

Bonus: How to tell if a web page sucks, here.

Congrats & cheers: Facebook. Ads info is now live here.

"Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm." Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Every job is a self-portrait of the person who did it. Autograph your work with excellence; go for greatness." Johnny Martin

"We would accomplish many more things if we did not think of them as impossible." Chretien Malesherbes

Mr Softy gets Face time: Kudos to Team Redmond on getting the deal done. Seems most folks were dead wrong when they gave the advantage, and best odds, to Google. Now Microsoft wins the day with $240 mil in equity and an exclusive third-party ad deal. The quick back of the envelope arithmetic says Facebook's evaluation is in the $15 billion range. My sense remains there are major three players in the ad space (and more to be named later). Google leads. Microsoft is the fast follower, as ever. Yahoo is the sleeper. What is your Mountain View strategy? You do have one, don't you? Your last meeting in Redmond was when exactly?

The wayback machine: It was way back in the winter of 1996 that my then employer purchased hundreds of copies of a hardcover book written by the founder of MIT's Media Lab. Among our professional staff the book was a big hit. Being Digital by Nicholas Negroponte is an edited version of eighteen articles first published in Wired. We sent the books to major players in the broadcast space our clients included. Over a lunch in his office I presented a copy to Dan Mason. The difference between Dan and others that were provided with the reading? Dan spent the time to read it. In fact, years later he told me he had studied it. Smart guy. Today, I noticed that Michael Rosenblum, another smart guy, is chasing Negroponte's writing with his latest post Internetski here. Kudos Michael, right on the money! Closed circuit to NAB staff: Book Rosenblum for the Spring show, now.

Doing the right thing: For eight years in a row, no less. Jeffrey P. Myers founder of PSP (also a pal and former CBS colleague), continues to do exceptional work. His firm helps organizations to improve their performance by developing their people. Great to hear that the RAB has again engaged Jeffrey. This time around he and his team will present materials from PSP's celebrated Media Sales Institute.

Congrats & cheers: Programming ace Tom Poleman signs again with CC and remains ops manager of Z100 and SVP, Programming for CC properties in the city. Beantown's Baron of wireless networks Gary Bernstein named programming prexy for Syndication One. Chicago entrepreneur and wireless whiz Chris Witting launches TalkZone.com a 24/7 online talk radio net. Programming ace Andy Bloom returns to the wireless dodge to helm product at WIP. Wunderkind Jamie Friedman named associate publisher for Pursuits, WSJ's new glossy book.

"My motto was always to keep swinging. Whether I was in a slump or feeling badly or having trouble off the field, the only thing to do was keep swinging." Hank Aaron

"You can't win until you learn how to lose." Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

"When you lose, you're more motivated. When you win, you fail to see your mistakes and probably no one can tell you anything." Venus Williams

Today's image: Late Fall Rose by Fred Winston. Great shot. Thanks for sharing.

Great Program Directors deliver numbers to the sales department: Kudos to programming ace Brian Kelly and his team on another exceptional performance. 103.7 KISS FM posted #1 Teens, #1 18-34 Women, #1 18-34 Men, and #1 18-34 Persons. The station delivered a 50.0 cume rating with Teens and a 40.5 cume rating with 18-34 Persons (so much for the continuing myth that the youth market ain't listening to any audio that's wireless). Moreover, Brian's two stations KISS and 99.1 WMYX were both in the top five 25-54 Women. CHR and Hot AC done right are winners, Brian and his team understand how to do just that (as too few others do). Brian Kelly delivers, again, he's the goods.

The unlimited (almost) bandwidth of youth is the answer: Doc writes about Facebook and time spent. My sense is this is a cohort issue. Doc goes on to suggest bringing down the wall. I agree. Further, as has been written here before, they need to get into the export business and out of the import business (as only access).

"The big challenge for Facebook, as it has been for AOL, Microsoft, Yahoo, Apple and everybody else who ever ran a walled garden, is to make their “platform” something that sits on the Net and the Web, not something that substitutes for it. Facebook’s mail, for example, is a substitute. If there’s a way I could get Facebook mail with my IMAP or POP client, I’d rather do that. (Can you, by the way? I doubt it, but I dunno.)" Read Doc's entire post here.

The play's the thing: Michael Rosenblum asks..."It's called The CBS Evening News with Katie Couric. But it's not called The New York Times with Tom Friedman. Why is that?" My thought is to quote PJ "In all of art it's the singer not the song." This is especially true with the first tribe of wireless. Talent-driven radio programs (and stations), generally, tend to be more successful, consistently, than those that offer up some bland generic brand. Steve Dahl provides a good exhibit that makes this case. Steve continues to deliver great numbers book after book and does so on an otherwise dead radio station. The audience is tuning in for Steve, they are loyal to Steve not to the station. Years of numbers have proven this to be a fact. Steve is a star, an artiste, he has developed a following that has little (and one could make the case - nothing at all) to do with the radio station around him. He remains a success against all odds and that is one definition of rock star talent. The play's the thing. Moreover, Steve has proven the efficacy of the format, he has confirmed the validity of spoken word on commercial FM. The problem at WCKG is not the format, the problem is execution combined with a massive failure of imagination. It's about casting, providing direction, creating a positive creative environment, setting a stage for greatness. It's a leadership problem.

There is a significant delta between personalities and disc jockeys and yet another between disc jockeys and announcers. Voice actors v. announcers, a grand canyon of difference. The same holds true with TV talent. The reader v the rock star. Almost identical story line-ups (excepting soft), one show wins, one shows loses. Like you I have sat in focus group sessions and watched as one reader gets dialed up and another dialed down delivering the same story. One weather guy wins another loses. At the end of the day, all other things being equal, people listen to and watch those they like (and in some cases those they love to hate). There is no logic to any of these decisions, these preferences and behaviors. People are not rational, they don't do things for any reason but their own.

Personally, I prefer working with rock star talent, they dramatically improve your chances of winning. When I hear that a certain talent is "difficult" it's music to my ears. Typically, it means they care about their work. "The rocks go with the farm" as my friend Larry Bentson is fond of saying. Great talent is a pleasure to work for. They can't be managed, they demand to be led. Read Michael's post The "Talent" Trap here. Bravos Michael for continuing to offer up interesting subject matter of merit.

Almost related: on the day job we have done a number of perceptual studies on the media sales process. One of the most interesting findings is that the highest "rated" media sales professionals are consistently those that are "most liked" without regard to any other single attribute, skill set or variable. All things being equal or even unequal media buyers buy from the people they like. This finding is consistent in market after market. You could say the same about bloggers. There are bloggers and then there are Bloggers. While I might not always agree with Dave Winer his blog is, consistently, a good and smart read. Same with Dr Dave and Michael Rosenblum. Agree with them, or not, they provoke you to think! Bandwidth well spent. I must admit to being one that enjoys Michael's "Burn it to the ground" thesis because he dares to question practice too far past the best-used by date. The bonus is he offers up an intellectually honest and practical alternative.

Kudos: Jess Lee, Google Maps Project Manager offers up Southern California fire maps here.

Congrats & cheers: Salman Ullah the Google corp dev ace leaves to found a venture firm, Copper River Partners. Scott Herman named EVP, Operations and Michael Weiss hires on as President of Sales, both for CBS Radio.

"Courage is a special kind of knowledge: the knowledge of how to fear what ought to be feared and how not to fear what ought not to be feared." David Ben-Gurion

"To lead the orchestra you must turn your back on the crowd." Johnny Martin

"Correction does much, but encouragement does more. Encouragement after censure is as the sun after a shower." Goethe

Required reading: Keen v Weinberger - thanks WSJ. This round - advantage Dr Dave, it was ever thus, kudos! "The mainstream media's business model does not aim at nurturing talent. It aims at moving units. It therefore does exactly what you complain the Web does: It panders to the market. If you want to see the 'democratization' of talent you fear, just look at a Top 40 chart. There are bright spots, but you seem to have confused the mainstream media's handling of artists with apprenticing in Michelangelo's studio."

Dave ends his argument..."Yes, Andrew, we are amateurs on the Web, although there's plenty of room for professionals as well. But we are not replicating the mainstream media. We're building something new. We're doing it together. Its fundamental elements are not bricks of content but the mortar of links, and links are connections of meaning and involvement. We're creating an infrastructure of meaning, miscellaneous but dripping with potential for finding and understanding what matters to us. We're building this for one another. We're doing it by and large for free, for the love of it, and for the joy of creating with others. That makes us amateurs. And that's also what makes the Web our culture's hope."

We are blessed to have Dave in this conversation. My sense is Andrew is playing agent provocateur a bit too much. He's saying things simply to get attention. His reference to self as a "wannabe Hitchens" is cause for him to offer Christopher a formal apology as he is no such thing. Again, bravos to Dave! No contest.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch: A target of Andrew's rant Boing, Boing says thanks.

Bonus: Certain to help further Andrew's case is this simple blog. The humanity.

Bonus 2: Susan Mernit Fads of the moment: Ten things we can learn from Facebook.

"8. Passive versus active still matters--but you can drive behavior. Remember those rules about people who watched TV rather than posted in online forums? It's still that case that most people are reluctant to write, slow to put themselves out there, and cautious about privacy and sharing. BUT--smart networks like FB model behavior and get that lagging 80% to do more that they ever did before, raising the bar on all network/community activity." Wonderful Susan, kudos! Thanks to Dave for the tip.

Congrats & cheers: Dave Edwards, GM of WUWM, Milwaukee named chair of the Radio Research Consortium. Laurel Touby sells Mediabistro.com for $23 mil. Peter Moore leaving Microsoft, named new EA Sports prexy. Seth Goldstein and David Henderson launch SocialMedia.

"Every valuable creative idea (concepts and perceptions, not artistic expression) must always be logical in hindsight. If it was not, we would never recognize the value of that idea. It could only seem a 'crazy idea'. We might catch up with it in twenty years time - or never, for it might truly be a crazy idea." Edward de Bono

"Life does not stand still. Where there is no progress there is disintegration. Today a thousand doors of enterprise are open to you, inviting you to useful work. To live at this time is an inestimable privilege, and a sacred obligation devolves upon you to make right use of your opportunities. Today is the day in which to attempt and achieve something worth while." Grenville Kleiser

"Men and women love inertia. And to my way of thinking, inertia is the silent killer of most businesses and, in some cases, entire industries as well. Inertia in business, both up and down the chain of decision making, is no different than inertia in other aspects of one's life; it has to do with protecting one's identity, immediate self interest and inter-personal relationships." Tom Asacker

The efficacy of out-thinking the competition to win is rarely, if ever, considered. First, thinking is hard work. As George Bernard Shaw famously said "Few people think more than two or three times a year. I have made an international reputation for myself by thinking once or twice a week." It is tempting to substitute analysis for thinking and it is wrong. Edward de Bono writes...

"We have always depended on analysis not only to solve problems but also for our source of new ideas. Most people in education, science, business and economics still believe that the analysis of data will give us all the new ideas that we need. Unfortunately, this is not so. The mind can see only what it is prepared to see. That is why after a breakthrough in science we look back and find that all the needed evidence was available a long time before but could be seen only through the old idea (Kuhn's paradigm shift). There is a desperate need for the sort of 'idea work' or conceptual effort that Einstein provided in his field and Keynes in his. We know this is important, but we are content to let it happen by chance or genius because our traditions of thinking hold that analysis is enough...The brain has to use existing patterns and catchments. When we believe that we are analysing (sic) data we are really only trying out our stock of existing ideas to see which one might fit. It is true that if our stock of possible ideas is rich then our analysis will be adequate. But the analysis of data will not by itself produce new ideas." (I Am Right, You Are Wrong)

Tom Asacker is correct when he says inertia is a silent killer. My suggestion is inertia and analysis are a very dangerous combination. They lead us to see reality not as it is but as it was or as we wish it to be. Again Edward de Bono...

"Perhaps the greatest dangers are those of arrogance, complacency and the ability to defend that arrogance and complacency. An acknowledgement (sic) of inadequacy is a prelude to change. A defence (sic) of arrogance is a denial of any need to change...The arrogance of logic means that if we have a logically impeccable argument then we must be right" (ibidem)

Congrats & cheers: Michael Walsh new Interep prexy and COO.

Buzz: Facebook to Mr Softy for $6 billion? John Battelle's take on why Mark and his team (after passing on Yahoo's $1 billion) ain't sellers, here. The Scobleizer pov here w/comments. Kudos to John and Robert.

Report card - video: Nielsen-Netratings June, uvs. YouTube 51 mil, Google Video 18 mil, AOL 16 mil, Yahoo 15 mil.



First day at school - CBS-FM: My friend Rick Sklar said it best about new stations "Listen in four weeks." While it is unfair to judge any format initiative on the first day there are almost as many opinions on the CBS-FM debut as there are about which is the best slice in the city, which is the true or best Original Ray's or whether one really need go to Brooklyn for the finest burned meat. Allan Sniffen has devoted a board to the flip here. The Sean Ross First Listen is now on offer here. Dan Kelley gives his pov including some tunes he would have included out on the first day here. The Daily News writer David Hinckley on the change and the first day.

Failing to take Sklar's wise counsel we punched up the stream and played it in the office all afternoon and into the evening. The tech errors were to be expected but early on someone put audition audio of the phone bus on the stream and we were able to listen to callers being coached on their shout outs. The duration of this error was such that one wonders if no one was monitoring the stream or those that were thought someone else was already on it. The stream returned with Jack. A cache clear and relaunching the player brought back the main channel stream.

Between phone calls and meetings I was able to get a good sense of the first hours and they were not bad. The production, advertised as some of "the best work from across the company" was disappointingly average. It was good to hear Ziggie back doing the vo. The drops with city celebs including Senator Clinton are a good idea and deserve better staging (there's a solid branding element in there). The music log was not as strong as it needed to be on the first day. My thought being the station should have played more to the core and featured the best testing tunes not now being heard on other stations. Era, tempo and construction (sound) balance needed work, the log could have been cooked much better. The station's music was different but not different enough as played. The talent sounded up and good. The web page and player were, again, ok. Top of the page banner art icons need work. Aretha and Bruce - ok. Doobies - maybe. Rick James - no. Paul and John without Ringo and George?. Missed opportunity. Kudos for having something up and bonus points for putting up the videos, a nice touch. Not playing Hit the road Jack? A significant missed opportunity, shame. Playing Jack for a chump in his last hours - "who is Bob Shannon?" - priceless.

Overall, I give the first day an A for concept and a C+ for execution. It is certain to get better each day. Congrats and cheers to all involved. I'll wait four weeks before listening again.

Bonus: A collection of quotations on creativity, lateral thinking and problem solving here.