"Never cut what you can untie." Joseph Joubert

"Simplicity, of all things, is the hardest to be copied." Richard Steele

"The last thing one knows - is what to put first." Blaise Pascal

Today's image: Bing Ji Ling - Fire & Ice Cream by merkley. Wonderful. Thanks for sharing.

Congrats & cheers: Rafat Ali

"He who freely magnifies what hath been nobly done, and fears not to declare as freely what might be done better, gives ye the best covenant of his fidelity." John Milton

"A great business success was probably never attained by chasing the dollar, but is due to pride in one's work - the pride that makes business an art." Henry Doherty

"You are not very good if you are not better than your best friends imagine you to be." Lavater

Today's image: Sahara by raspootin. Amazing. Thank you for sharing!

Cramer vs Kramer: Thanks to paidContent for sharing video of a great insider discussion between Jimmy Cramer and Larry Kramer on business media. Some great takeaway: What's in a name? Larry tells us that the CBS name did not boost MarketWatch traffic, however, association with CBS delivered juice to reporters - they got their calls returned - and cred to sellers - they were able to get the attention of advertisers. Larry says "Radio going to the web means they need to be just like television...they need to build an audience for it." JC picks Disney as the media outfit that will most likely make it happen, LK's bet is CBS. Bravos to Jimmy and Larry! Very well done guys. Highly recommended. Three part video here.

The importance of your main page is in decline

Import vs Export: One of the issues we are dealing with on the day job is content distribution. The mindset of what we are calling Import vs Export. Case in point. Because he has decided to offer his cartoons via widget (upper left of this page) gapingvoid artiste Hugh MacLeod gains audience by orders of magnitude. His potential exposure, his reach, is now significantly greater than before the widget. Far more will view his widget than will likely ever visit his site. Broadcast and print alike are still driven by the dated notion that viewers, listeners and readers belong to them - the pov and the related pronoun are wrong. Our viewers, our listeners, our readers. This logic establishes a one dimensional strategy and the potentially flawed lens of single measurement. How much traffic are we getting? Broadcast and print are using resources to import visitors. The key to success, in our considered opinion, is an aggressive and complimentary strategy of export. It's understanding that the days of your main page are in decline. How are you allowing, encouraging and rewarding folks to export your content? What's your mobile strategy? What are you doing to ensure that your assets are discoverable? What are your factors of findability? These are issues of and rather than or; a continuing and radical shift away from the producer-centric mindset. Cohort replacement will dramatically accelerate this shift. You gotta be everywhere they wanna be.

Survey says: Zogby has released some key findings. 68% of conservatives never watch 60 Minutes. More from the national study on Politics and Entertainment here.

Congrats & cheers: Jay Rosen and team on the launch of Beat Blogging, very cool. NPR on their beta launch of NPR Music (Kudos too to Fred Jacobs and his uber-cool crew who played a part in the NPR initiative). Rafat Ali, Wenda Harris Millard, Paul Maidment, Roger Neil, Brian Quinn, Chuck Cordray honored by min magazine and among those named on the 2007 Digital Hot List. Complete list (including The 21 Most Intriguing People) of honorees here. Bob Wood on the debut of his latest venture The ComStar Network, good luck!

Bonus: The Impact of Recommender Systems on Sales Diversity. Fleder & Hosanagar, The Wharton School. A good read here.

Larry Lessig, the rock star Stanford professor and maven of all things copyright, presented at TED this year. The video here is a little over twenty minutes and well worth your bandwidth. As readers of this blog may be aware, I am a supporter of Creative Commons. Bravos to Larry!

How creativity is being strangled by the law

"You cannot save your way into a transition. You have to learn how to grow top line revenues." Ann Moore

The CEO of Time Inc gets it, Ann knows what she's talking about. Read the Rafat Ali interview with Ann here. Kudos Rafat, good job. Here's more of Moore...

"Here is the strategy. First, build the best of product. Differentiate it. Second, build the big audience and by that I mean you need partnerships with everyone. Then third, worry about monetizing it, but you got to have a big audience to make money on the web because the CPMs are low. I have said this publicly: The magazine models is a beautiful model because you got high margins; two revenue streams, the consumer pays and the advertiser pays; beautiful cash flow, you get the money up front. The average reader of Sports Illustrated delivers about $118 to the bottom line in Time Inc. The average very engaged user of SI.com can generate about $5 in advertising contribution. I need many more online viewers to equal one magazine reader. That is why you have to go for big volume and that is why you got to have partnerships. You do not do exclusives with anybody."

Enjoyed a very interesting conversation with some west coast colleagues yesterday. One of the subjects was "value added" and it brought to mind a story about a great promotion involving a Chicago retailer, a cookbook, and a quarter. Think you know what a great sales promotion is? My thought is you will enjoy reading this story about a sales call with my mentor the legendary Kevin Sweeney. It was the day I learned a valuable lesson about promotion, all the details are here in this previous post.

Congrats & cheers: Pat O'Neill and his Magic 98 team on making a difference. "The Concert for Gilda's Club" is on, more info here. Local, local, local.

Trade secret: Want to do something special on your breakfast show, something that will get listeners/viewers involved and really light up the phones? You should also feature this topic on your station breakfast show blog. Behold the response Eric Zorn got when he took a moment to engage his readers and struck the responsive cord...Gone but not (quite) forgotten. Note the first reader comment was from Sept 05, the last posted May 07. Local, local, local. Works 100% of the time. Works with all demos, all formats. One of our EU clients, a rocker, ran it as "Bring out your dead" to amazing result. Off the charts but still in our hearts. It's fun and it works!

Eric's list and the comments of his readers brought back a rush of memories from my Chicago days. A late night joint, Mel Markon's, was mentioned, it was special to me back in the day...Lee Harris, John Wetherbee and I had many a fun post-midnight dinner there, a place packed with character and characters.

Bonus: Marc Andreessen on How to hire the best people you've ever worked with. Marc makes the case for three key attributes: drive, curiosity, ethics. Recommended. Check out Marc's writing here.