Tuesday, January 22, 2008

"Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls, and looks like work." Thomas A. Edison

"Go and wake up your luck." Persian proverb

"I think the purpose of life is to be useful, to be responsible, to be honorable, to be compassionate. It is, after all, to matter: to count, to stand for something, to have made some difference that you lived at all." Leo Rosten


Image: Dreaming... by nicolas valentin. Great shot. Thank you very much.

Fixing Yahoo! - they have 500 million uniques, what they don't have is a good execution strategy. Sramana Mitra sets it right...

"What I’m suggesting is that Yahoo build up and/or acquire multiple strong online verticals, monetize them thoroughly, report on them separately, and create an organization structure that enables them to execute on them successfully."

Bravos to Sramana! Read Yahoo, Please Put Up A Fight via gigaom here. My sense is to agree with Sramana. Yahoo! is broken but it can be fixed. In the ad space Yahoo! lags far behind Google and Microsoft and that position permits, allows, (should encourage) the radical revolution needed to make innovative and game-changing plays. Yahoo! needs to stop wasting time trying to get better (in a match they've already lost). Get different. To succeed sooner, fail faster. Hey, Jerry, the first step is talent, hire some freaks, now.

Another Yahoo! pov: John Furrier suggests Yahoo Please Join OpenSocial here.

Timesman David Carr writes about the ex-newsman who writes about newspapering...

"The life of an editor now is no longer a matter of just following the story. It’s trying to follow the story while fighting against YouTube and the blogs for readers’ attention, fighting for enough ink and paper after Craigslist and Google have taken their bites out of the budget, and fighting to keep the best reporters who can make better money elsewhere (like television)."

Carr is writing about the take of David Simon the creator of that fine TV show The Wire on what happened to the dead tree trade here.

Just the facts, Mam: You would think when writing about black radio on the day we remember Martin Luther King, Jr that some mention would be made of Atlanta's legendary WERD. Yesterday Dana Hall wrote about black radio and praised WDIA failing to even mention WERD. John Pepper, Bert Ferguson, David James Mattis and Nat D. Williams certainly deserve credit for their pioneering work at Memphis' WDIA. By the fall of 1949 WDIA was programming entirely for the black audience. Ms Hall is wrong in her writing when she states that the station was the first "black-run" station. The owners and management were white folks. What's significant here is in that same fall of 1949 another station, WERD, became not only the nation's first black owned and operated radio station but a station with a very special connection to Dr King. The Masonic lodge that was (later) home to WERD also housed Dr. King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference. WERD owner Jesse B Blayton, Sr along with his family and others including Jockey Jack Gibson are equally deserving of credit and should have been at least mentioned in Ms Hall's writing. Especially in a piece offered on the day we remember Dr. King as he often spoke to the Atlanta community via WERD. More on WERD here. Hey, Dana, how about a piece on WERD! (FD: My dad, Johnny Martin, worked at WERD where he served as a talent and, at one point, station program director)

Congrats & cheers: Pownce is out of private beta and open for business. Kudos to Leah Culver, Kevin Rose and Daniel Burka. Upstart the cool new soon-to-be book from team Mansueto, headed by Adam Platzner and Scott Medintz. Erica Farber on her Publisher's Profile of radio legend Bill Drake.

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