"Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has got there first, and is waiting for it." Terry Pratchett

"I would rather entertain and hope that people learned something than educate people and hope they were entertained." Walt Disney

"Wisdom is the reward you get for a lifetime of listening when you'd have preferred to talk." Doug Larson

Today's image: Looking Downtown by James Neeley. Amazing. Thank you for sharing.

As I was saying...

The press of daily affairs has been such that there has simply been no time for blogging.

Please accept my apologies and my sincere thanks. Your emails and other contact have been encouraging. The conjecture, priceless (e.g., Maybe he's dead?). In answer to many, let me say all here is exceptionally good, never better.

On with the show.

Stuff the cool kids are talking about: In the spirit of Madtown hero Dave Winer (we locals claim he is only taking a really long extended holiday in Berkeley) let me provide some jumps. To connect the dots here, it was Dave who famously said "People come back to places that send them away."

Flogos - Promotion and NTR magic.

Michael Rosenblum - You need to be reading this guy. He's only reinventing video. One of the last big things he invented was for Al Gore, Current. Michael is brilliant and playing at the top of his game. Check out the writing and videos on his blog. Repeat, daily.

Yahoo! Jerry Yang stepping down creates one of the biggest potential game-changing moments in the online world. The big two could become the big three in the USA. The early buzz and Vegas odds say News Corp prexy Peter Chernin would be the ideal successor. As ever, Kara Swisher has the story covered, including review of the suspects, via ATD here.

Moms v Motrin: Over the weekend we witnessed an interesting real-time experiment in social media. Moms took on Big Pharma using Twitter, YouTube, blogs, other SM tools. Motrin never had a chance, the moms won. It's an object lesson. Grammer Girl offers a good overview, What People Forget About Twitter here. How Twittering Critics Brought Down Motrin Mom Campaign by Michael Learmonth and Rupal Parekh via AdAge here. Related videos, check other blog posts via BuzzFeed. #motrinmoms tag on Twitter search here. Here's proof positive the Motrin meme has achieved escape velocity, the parody has begun. Check out this video mashup, Getting a boob job seems to be in fashion, via YouTube here. Finally, what's your Twitter strategy?

Philly fresh: Mel Taylor, who makes his living by helping media create local online revenues, checks in to advise the new site devoted to live music and local bands is alive in beta. Check it out here. Congrats and cheers to Mel and all involved. Are you reading Mel's blog? Jump on over here.

My bookmarks - Not sure if you are aware but in the left column is my running collection of bookmarks (my del. icio. us). These are items I'm reading, sharing with clients and friends. Two stand outs this early morning: Steve Gillmor's timely piece on Microcasting merits your attention. Timesman David Carr knocks the cover clean off the ball with his writing on dead tree guys firing top talent. A very relevant and disturbing trend in media.

Back with more tomorrow. Thanks, appreciate you stopping by.

"All progress is initiated by challenging current conceptions, and executed by supplanting existing institutions." George Bernard Shaw

"What praise is implied in the simple epithet useful! What reproach in the contrary." David Hume

"Life is like a game of poker: If you don't put any in the pot, there won't be any to take out." Moms Mabley

Today's image: Edge of the Earth by Zack Schnepf. Amazing. Thank you for sharing.

Let me bring two items to your attention. A must-see video by Malcolm Gladwell on hiring, here. The outstanding must-read piece in yesterday's NYT Magazine by Clive Thompson. I'm So Totally, Digitally Close to You...

“The current generation is never unconnected. They’re never losing touch with their friends. So we’re going back to a more normal place, historically. If you look at human history, the idea that you would drift through life, going from new relation to new relation, that’s very new. It’s just the 20th century.”

Psychologists and sociologists spent years wondering how humanity would adjust to the anonymity of life in the city, the wrenching upheavals of mobile immigrant labor — a world of lonely people ripped from their social ties. We now have precisely the opposite problem. Indeed, our modern awareness tools reverse the original conceit of the Internet. When cyberspace came along in the early ’90s, it was celebrated as a place where you could reinvent your identity — become someone new.

“If anything, it’s identity-constraining now,” Tufekci told me. “You can’t play with your identity if your audience is always checking up on you...“You know that old cartoon? ‘On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog’? On the Internet today, everybody knows you’re a dog! If you don’t want people to know you’re a dog, you’d better stay away from a keyboard.”

Read the entire article here.

Super-sizing sellers: Mel Taylor blogs about online revenue strategy for local media and he brings a wealth of practical experience to the subject. In his latest post Mel proffers the notion that you are better off with a team of "Super Sellers"...

"Competitors like Google, niche sites, directories and others, are looking to grow their local online share at the expense of Broadcast and Newspaper. Traditional media must leverage the assets that these players do not have at the local level: dominant reach, client relationships, sales force, marketing muscle, and a trusted brand."

Mel goes on to suggest a four point plan of action. Read Separate Web Sales...Or Super Sellers, here. Kudos, Mel. Well done. My sense is the most important point you make is ensuring that managers have the knowledge needed to lead the charge. In perhaps too many cases the managers don't know what they don't know. Accordingly, the first step in getting serious about developing multi-platform revenue is a rather radical one, learning to accept our ignorance. The second step is to foster experimentation. Give Mel's concept a go keeping in mind your focus should be on getting different not on getting better. Properly, the mission would seem to be one of changing your selling strategy rather than tweaking your current tactics of best practice.

HR is broken: Giving Mel credit for his approach, however, what will be required for his strategy to work is an investment in HRD (i.e., human resources development). As blogged here previously, media is not doing a good job of investing in training or development. The paradox is at a time when there is a great abundance of resources available there is a scarcity of dollars chasing those resources. I know of a smart station exec who is paying their own way through the RAB Digital course. This type of self-improvement investment tends to be the uncommon and rare exception. It seems to me that until the CEO recognizes and respects the critical importance of reinventing or at least rebooting HR and HRD making progress at the local level will continue to be be very difficult. Did you watch the Malcolm Gladwell video? The one mentioned above, first in today's post. You should. It's about hiring and will get you thinking. You should revisit your hiring process. What's your new hire batting average? If you really want to gain a sustainable competitive advantage invest in your people, especially now when others are not. The ROI is exceptional.

The job market, a new definition: PaidInterviews, a new site in the employment space, launches later today. Sarah Perez provides an advance overview here. Bravos, Sarah! She makes an excellent point that sites in the job vertical are boring. Just checked Monster for the first time in years and they're playing the same old tunes. Good luck to the PaidInterviews team.

Stay tuned: Katalyst Media, the Ashton Kutcher + Jason Goldberg venture, bows blahgirls. In the words of the Joker, Why so serious? Should one of the girls be smiling?

Bonus: 280 Slides - Create and share presentations online. Free.

Have a great week. Making something amazing happen!

"Beware of what you do best; it's bound to be a trap." Paul Valery

"We protest against unjust criticism, but we accept unearned applause." Jose Narosky

"As soon as you find you can do something, do something you can't." Rudyard Kipling

Image: Walking... by Atilla1000. Wonderful. Thanks for sharing.

Mel Taylor blogs about local media, about developing revenues online (and off). He reviews the bidding, suggesting "more un-imaginable change" in 2008...

"Internet strategy and revenue generation is now a TOP priority for all media. Oh, and just dumping your offline content… online…. is not gonna be enough"

Read Mel's post here. Kudos, Mel. Well said.

Closed circuit to broadcast CEOs: Get into the export business, now. "The reality of it is that the future does not fit into the containers of the past" says Rishad Tobaccowala speaking at NATPE. More here via AdAge.

More later.

"What can be done with fewer assumptions is done in vain with more." Occam's Razor. William of Occam

"The fewer limitations the artist imposes on his work, the less chance he has for artistic success." Alexander Solzhenitsyn

"The art of the art, the glory of expression and the sunshine of the light of letters, is simplicity." Walt Whitman

Today's image: Paris - LeWeb3 by Doc Searls. Fine shot. Thanks for sharing!

Hearing that Doc rocked in Paris @ LeWeb3. Kudos, Doc! Disappointed (along with many others including colleagues in attendance) that Dr. Dave did not get to deliver his talk in Paris. Hey Dave, how about sharing your notes from that scheduled talk via JoHo or your newsletter? Consider this a Christmas wish.

Let me recommend a blog to you. Local Media in a Web 2.0 World by Mel Taylor. First and second tribes of wireless, dead tree guy, dot com stripes. Gotta appreciate a guy that has taken the scenic route. Well traveled in the Philly DMA (maybe he can get you a table at Vetri?). In fact, he's also one of those guys that's worked both sides of the isle, creative (arts & crafts) and commerce (sales). He's also a fellow member of the former major market radio music director dodge. Already added Mel's blog to my Other Voices, go ahead and check him out here. No, really, go ahead. I'll wait here.

Thanks for all of the emails on the posts about the HD Radio Alliance. Please give me a few days to get back to you. Getting everything closed for the year.

"Adornment is never anything except a reflection of the heart." Coco Chanel

"Delusion is the abandonment of outer reality in favour of inner wish." Alain de Botton

"It is the theory which decides what we can observe." Albert Einstein

Today's image: cold sunday morning by C a f r i n e. Amazing! Thank you very much.

Lost & Found: Back in the day it was a wonderment - to read, enjoy and discuss the latest Release 1.0 (thanks, usually, to the kindness of a friend or colleague that could afford those then expensive writings of the great Esther Dyson). Over the years the issues I did have were lost (if two moves = one fire, my six moves = ?). Now, Tim O'Reilly is offering the entire collection of Esther's R1.0 free online here. Very cool. Kudos to Tim and thanks to Dr Dave for the tip.

Your attention, please: Tom Asacker asks why we scan emails, save the ones we want to spend more time with and then never look at them again - with comments here. This mystery of media consumption must be related to the stacks of magazines and newspapers I'm not throwing out yet.

Internet radio is a DIFFERENT medium: Kurt Hanson gets it right, again...

"Webcasters who take advantage of the characteristics of the new medium — e.g., LAUNCHcast, Pandora, etc. — are, I believe, going to be the ones that see the greatest success in this medium. And right now, the Internet efforts of traditional radio broadcasters (AM/FM broadcast groups, satellite radio companies, etc.) are not playing in that game." More here.

Bravos, Kurt. My sense is the linear experience of broadcast is genetically hardwired.

Radio execs continue to have important and valuable missed opportunities at hand. Take streaming. The majority of stations are doing a terrible job of putting their over-the-air product online.

The simple test is how a station handles stop sets

Failing to simulcast, to insert the commercials as aired, means the streaming will not receive Arbitron credit, granted that's a business decision. However, given that election the result should not be a poorly executed stop set. You've heard them, chopped audio, the use of one boring music loop, repeating the same three, four Ad Council spots, the same one or two promos, or worst of all, dead air (is this thing still working?). Stuff you would never allow to happen on air is tolerated, accepted online. These stop sets are beyond the pale however they do serve to conclusively prove that no one is minding the store. What we have here is a massive failure of imagination for which there's simply no excuse. Online stop sets represent one of the greatest creative opportunities for radio in 2008. Moreover, smart operators will turn this unused inventory into real money. Aside: During my salad days with RKO Radio my mentor the legendary Dwight Case would say "Dave, what you programming people call a stop set, our sales people know, correctly, is a go set."

The cobbler's children have no shoes

That the recognized experts of consumer audio are not leading the online audio charge is, well, practically without any reasonable explanation. Instead we increasingly find the pro-am folks are in the front of that parade. Stay tuned, the whole world is going pro-am before our very ears. For radio to seriously get into the online game we need to, in the majority of cases, take the websites away from the clearly over-worked station folks. This is not to suggest that stations farm out the work, they would be better served by investment, bringing the work in-house and establishing dedicated online teams. With all respect to my friend Dan Mason making the program directors responsible for their websites is at best a temp solution.

PDs in charge will not get the job done, will not move forward the much needed creation of new competitive space, won't move the needle and jump start the revenues that are possible. By the way, our main channel sellers are exactly the wrong people needed to properly monetize our digital assets. One need only look at the job they're doing with the inventory they already have. Certainly there are those rare exceptions but too few to mention. Ok, I'll mention one. Bonneville, Chicago. Schnacke and Horowitz do get it.

While the website should be considered a stand alone business it too often remains an after thought, it should be a collection of prized digital assets. Some of us have been in this movie before. We have a history of doing this stuff. We are treating online assets in the same way an earlier generation of AM guys treated nascent FM. It actually took a change in federal regulation to birth FM (the non-duplication rules). The feds promoted the growth of FM by force of rule making, in the online battle space radio must save itself. This generation's FM guys need to stop treating online like their AM.

Closed circuit to Miller Kaplan: Could we please get current and change that catch all now labeled Network & Other. In the least we need a dedicated line measuring radio's online rev capture. If we can't measure it we can't manage it and we're not measuring it now. Radio has no real idea of where it stands in the growing online spend and we urgently need a performance metric.

Radio needs to get into the export business and out of the import game, that dated 1.0 mindset of attracting listeners to a walled garden. Radio folks continue to talk a good game and then put things on hold. As every good radio manager knows the best way to kill an idea is to find a way for it to cost money. Radio needs to get out of the dangerous sport, the circus side show of dodging bullets and get into the 21st century fight because the battle space is moving, the velocity of change accelerating. The swagger of "Yep, ain't nothing killed us so far" is sounding a wee bit anachronistic.

"There is nothing so exhilarating as being shot at without result" so said Churchill. Radio shouldn't count on that always being the case, it won't be. The good news is there are some bright folks out there, Kurt Hanson included, that can show the way. Game on.

LATER: Mel Taylor weighs in via comments...

"...not to name names....but some in Radio believe that streaming and page view growth equals success. it's a nice start, but will not be enough in a hyper-competitive onlne (sic) space"

Bravo, Mel. Well said. Read more in comments below and at Mel's blog here.

You remember last time

Previously, it was suggested here that it was time the HD Radio Alliance starting sharing receiver sales data (read that earlier post here). Let me now, respectfully, make a second suggestion to Peter Ferrara - please, show us your web site stats. In fact, please start posting them weekly, if not daily. Alliance members have invested about $400 million in promotional inventory and while we have no accounting for how much of that investment actually made mention of hdradio.com domain we do have at least one third party measure of web traffic thanks to Compete.

How would you like to invest some $400 million and get results like this?

33,000 something website visitors per month

$400 million invested, the second most tracked creative on commercial radio nationwide, according to monitors, and radio gets beaten by two dead tree guys including one metro daily?

USA Today ranks #68 (11,739,316), The Chicago Sun-Times ranks #1,101 (1,448,929) and HDRadio.com ranks #50,340 (33,103) Ouch!

A single radio station website can easily generate more uvs in a week than hdradio.com appears to be capturing in a month. And to put this into perspective, these hdradio.com results were produced with a major national campaign running.

As my Georgia relatives would say "Something bad wrong here."

These anemic traffic stats would seem to suggest one of two possible causes. Radio is not an effective media for driving web traffic or the messaging is wrong, it's not working. I vote the latter as I know the former to be plainly false.

Lets do the arithmetic. Again, as before with receiver sales data, absent the real numbers we'll make some up. Let's say only one-third of the $400 million mentioned the domain, the hdradio.com url, or $133 million in weight. Divide by twenty months = $6.65 million per month and provided 33,000 visitors per month = $201.51 per visitor. What's that CPM? With all that weight wouldn't it seem fair that at least one million or more people would have Googled it over a year? We can be certain $400 million generated some level of awareness, some consumer curiosity.

What's needed here is a measure of accountability. We need to know what was delivered, what was produced by the investment. Clearly, it's time to fix this. That process must start with transparency, a full disclosure of the any and all available metrics. We can do this, let's get started. Updates here and here.

Alfred I. duPont - Columbia University 2008 News Awards - congrats to the 13 winners, here. Thanks to Larry Shannon and RDN for the tip.

Bonus: NPR diva Susan Stamberg shares the Independent Booksellers' Picks here.

Congrats & cheers: RAB is now blogging RABBlog, kudos to George Hyde and welcome to the conversation. Also, bravos to George for inviting Amy Van Hook and Gordon Borrell to play at RAB 2008, smart moves both. Microsoft bows Stay At Home Servers, bravos!

"With money in your pocket, you are wise and you are handsome and you sing well too." Yiddish proverb

"I've never been poor, only broke. Being poor is a frame of mind. Being broke is only a temporary situation." Mike Todd

"If you want to know what a man is really like, notice how he acts when he loses money." Spanish proverb

Failing faster: Viva Laughlin canceled by CBS after two episodes. The VL premiere delivered 8.8 mil viewers (CSI gave the debut a 20+ mil viewer lead-in). Related: Which Critic Can Say the Meanest Thing About 'Viva Laughlin'? via Vulture here.

Nobody likes it but the viewers: Nielsen releases the 2006-2007 season numbers. The total average time a household had a TV set tuned was 8 hours and 14 minutes per day, the same amount as during the 2005-2006 season and a record high. More here.

Team NASA: Discovery launch successful; orbit altitude reached in less than ten minutes. What can your team achieve in less than one quarter-hour?

If Edison were alive today: Mel Taylor puts forward an interesting what if. He's chasing the innovative work of Michael Rosenblum. "While the many inventions of Edison are monumental, he also had a knack for skillfully working the system and strategically lobbying for change, no matter how engrained and powerful the incumbent players and mindsets were.

The similiarities (sic) of that situation, with the challenges of the evolving media landscape of today, were ‘over the top’ obvious." Read Mel's entire post here.