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An update on Walter’s progress
This is Walter as I found him wandering alone in the Oakland hills.
The photo on the left was taken just minutes after I managed to coax him on leash.
Weight: 13.5 pounds
Two weeks later – neutered, eye surgery, haircut, two squares a day and a little love.
Weight: 15.1 pounds
How ’bout that?
I spent a little time the other day going through my LinkedIn connections and noticed that one of them, a deceased business school colleague, still had an active account. Tracy’s blog is a testament to how fast her illness went from bad to fatal: a long reasoned post asking for privacy on October 13, 2008 followed just 16 days later by a death announcement. But Tracy’s LinkedIn page still shows her as a Microsoft employee. Whether this is an oversight or a tribute, I’m sure I’ll never know. That’s fine, but I can’t help but be a bit spooked when I see Tracy’s name on my account.
I still stumble across the Contact entries of departed friends and family in my phone and my various electronic address books. To delete them feels disrespectful, but honestly when will I need these again? When is it OK to unfriend the dead?
Dolla was one of Twitter's hottest topics on May 19. "Hmmm, how can we monetize that?"
All of this unpleasantness brings me to this post’s real topic. Especially in the face of 8.9% unemployment, there has been considerable discussion lately over online reputation management. Sure, we know not to put up pictures of partying and other hijinks. (Hi, Max & Luke!) But the ultimate uncomfortable social network question faces all of us participants: blogging and micro-blogging our private lives and thoughts, registered and active on any number of social network sites, what happens to all this stuff when you die? (And remember, death never comes at a convenient time.)
This is no small problem for media companies and people actively involved in self-branding and promotion. The rapper Dolla, who was murdered earlier this week, had just opened a Twitter account and posted his first tweets. His MySpace page (56,000+ friends) has no mention of his passing except RIP notes from his fan base, while a couple of telephone promotions still feature his voice hyping his latest single. (Try dialing (678) 500-8475 to hear Dolla speak from beyond the grave.) This is no small problem for his record company, which is still presumably going to try to shift a few units of his upcoming album. The sheer volume of tweets after the news got out should be encouraging to those who still want to make dollas off Dolla.
Vote for Nick!
Major League Baseball has a terrific series of unified web sites packed with all the information you could ever want (assuming you’re not a Baseball Prospectus type). When Angels pitcher Nick Adenhart was suddenly killed earlier this season, the folks who run the MLB web sites were faced with the task of stripping all his information respectfully from the network. Unfortunately there were a couple of embarrassing cases where his name was missed and remained on the site – most egregiously, as of May 19 on MLB’s official news site, Adenhart was still touted as an up-and-coming pitching prospect.
(MLB also made the curious decision to cease selling Adenart’s name on customized jerseys. Possibly respectful, but also cutting off an avenue for fans to pay tribute. In fairness, this also prevents using Adenhart as a political statement, having been killed by a drunk driver. Imagine a ballpark MADD/Adenhart protest and you can (possibly) understand that MLB would not want its brands involved. Beer is a pretty big sponsor of all things MLB.)
So what about the rest of us? Looking over at my links over on the right-hand sidebar, I have nine social media sites that I actively use and there are several others that I’ve abandoned without pulling down my pages. If I were to disappear tomorrow, what would be my legacy? My tweets? My blog? I would hope not, but the reality is this is the best evidence of my existence, especially to friends and others that I don’t see on a regular basis (which is, what, 75%+ of most folks’ Facebook friends?) And what should I do about it?
One company believes it has the answer. Deathswitch promises to send out an E-mail upon your death, which could include your passwords, final wishes or (most tantalizingly) the last word in an argument. A premium account would prompt as many as 30 different mails sent to your friends, enemies and other interested parties.
The simplest thing is to do what you should do for all your interests: make sure that your loved ones know what you want done with this stuff. Recognizing that your reputation may be it when you leave – and that your reputation may be founded entirely on your public life – make taking care of your online presence an essential part of your tending to your legacy. And since the health of social media depends on pages of user-generated content creating advertising platforms – at least that’s what it is today – you may wish to consider if you want an ad on your electronic tombstone.
Further Reading
As it turned out, the Rockets-Lakers series did not turn out to be the art versus science showdown that I’d been hoping for. The key game turned out to be Game 2, in which the Lakers -- having lost its home court advantage in Game 1 -- simply decided to fight. As Ron Artest demonstrates here, it’s tough to stick to the plan with an elbow in your throat.
And then things get even tougher when you lose one of the second of your two best players to a broken foot, as Yao Ming did in Game 3. Although the Lakers lacked the killer instinct to put away the Rockets, even after a horrible 40-point beatdown in Game 5, the theories on offer in the Michael Lewis article did not seem possible to apply after that point.
One of the hottest topics in sports player management over the last decade has been whether the scientific approach to roster-building really creates competitive advantage. I had hoped this series would bring some light to its relative chances at success in the NBA. What it ultimately proved -- again -- is that the playoffs are still a crapshoot with any team having a 45% chance of winning on a given night, especially when emotions and injuries throw one team off its game.
Further reading: Why Don’t The A’s Win in October? (or “Why Doesn’t Billy Beane’s S*** Work in the Playoffs?”)
A recent Clay Shirky post, “Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable,” says that the newspaper as a business model is dead, killed by its reliance on industrial printing technology. The future, he tells us, will be based on experiments in journalistic form and not any particular form of media, new or old. Meanwhile, as I talked about in an earlier post, magazines are withering away from pressure on CPMs and reduced interest in advertisers.
My bet – or, as last as things move these days, this month’s bet – is that we’ll start to see a merging of the forms.
As Malcolm Gladwell writes in this week’s New Yorker, the biggest handicap that underdogs give themselves is engaging in competition on the terms of the stronger party. An underdog’s chance of victory nearly triples if it finds a way to not play the game. Right now newspapers – whether they admit it or not – find themselves the underdog for information distribution but still (so far) the best at obtaining information. So why do they insist on sharing the same distribution models as their potential destroyers?
The New York Times' new reader uses AIR capabilities to flow text and show video. (Credit: Rafe Needleman / CNET)
The New York Times is one of the best at this. To my knowledge, it was the first with a dedicated iPhone application, it looks great on a Kindle, and its new Adobe AIR format is simply spectacular. Still, as everyone knows, the Times is hurting and in talks with everyone from Google to Geffen to find a suitor.
So instead of wringing our hands about public trusts and eroding institutions, perhaps we should be asking of our Third Estate “What can you do to adapt? Something basic to your business model that doesn’t play to the other guys’ strength?” Here are a few I’ve thought about:
Here are today’s SF Chronicle leads:
* A stricter, drier Bay to Breakers
* Craigslist cuts ‘erotic services’ section
* If state cuts too deep, it loses stimulus funds
* Senate testimony sheds light on alleged torture
* Young boost diversity as population ages
Seriously, not a single one of these lines would sell a magazine at the checkstand. No editorial viewpoint expressed, no help offered… simply no answer to“Why buy?” Why not feature elements from throughout the paper? “Take your medicine, it’s good for you” doesn’t work for marketers in any other industry, including medicine. Why is it the norm here?
I’m curious for your thoughts on this since I know my few readers are newspaper lovers, too. Don’t forget to comment!
This doesn’t surprise me. He was not neutered, did not have any flea medication and had two “cherry eyes,” an ugly tear duct problem that requires a simple $500 surgery. My hunch – and that of everyone who’s met him – is that he was probably dumped up there because of the expense of taking care of him.
Walter will be a good dog for someone who is active, but not exceptionally so. He has a very mellow energy, but loves to be outside. When we return home from walks, he looks at our front stairs with disappointment; “what, here again?” But while we’re home he mostly sleeps and relaxes in our sunny backyard. Despite being a small guy, he’s pretty tough on the trail. We’ve done mostly-flat hikes as long as 2 miles and he enjoys it, though he’s pretty pooped at the end. I don’t think he’d be happy as a dog who stays in the house all day long every day.
I think his ideal situation would be with either an adult who is home a lot or with a family with small children.
He looks pretty scruffy now and he’s not allowed to have a bath for a week until his stitches heal. After he gets a haircut and shampoo, though, Walter’s going to be a handsome little boy!
He will definitely need to go to training class. He is polite, has learned that he has to be patient to get his food and is surprisingly not food-focused for a pup.
Walter gets along just fine with other dogs, including my adult female who outweighs him by 2x. I took him to the small dog park in Alameda on Monday and he did great. He seems to be fairly submissive, getting jumped on more than he jumps on others. He will take up challenges, though, and wrestle. And it should be noted that he is very much a Boy Dog, trying to mark every tree & bush on our walks.
He seems to get along well with small children. In fact, when I originally found him on the trail I then brought him back to the stables where he was immediately surrounded by four 8-year olds who surrounded him and all put his hands on him. He submitted to this.
I do not know how we would be with cats.
Although I’m not sure it’s correct to declare him officially ‘Housebroken,’ we have had no accidents in the house.
He is already a devotee of car rides. He doesn’t like getting in the car, but once that window is down, he is way into it!
If you would like to visit Walter to see if he’s the right dog for you, please E-mail back to arrange a visiting time. We have grown quite attached to him so we are going to try to be careful to place him in the best possible home. I expect that we will wind up with multiple interested parties, so please be prepared to tell us about your experience with dogs, how you expect to live with him and why your home could be a great fit. If we are unable to find a fit ourselves by May 21, we will have him registered with a local rescue group (though we will likely remain his foster home).
Sometimes the world demands you stop and help.
I found this guy alone by a shade tree in a not-so-remote area of Anthony Chabot Regional Park. Covered with bugs and filth, I took about 15 minutes to convince him that I could leash him. I brought him back to the horse stables where he was immediately surrounded by children. Patiently and tiredly, he let them pet him with hardly a trace of aggression. Now he’s here at my feet, a mellow slightly scared guy.
Thanks to the folks at Montclair Veterinary Hospital, he’ll be neutered on Tuesday and his cherry eyes will be repaired, all for free. I’ll be fostering him until I figure out the right rescue agency.
In celebration of my birthday today, I’m republishing this article that I previously posted on Facebook about six weeks ago. Birthdays are always a good time for summing up, thinking about the past and how it got you where you think you may be going – and as my friends know strong opinions about music have always been part of my personal journey. As a special bonus, where possible I’ve put links to the albums for download (none of these posted by me nor housed on my site; caveat emptor):
Think of 15 albums that had such a profound effect on you they changed your life or the way you looked at it. They sucked you in and took you over for days, weeks, months, years. These are the albums that you can use to identify time, places, people, emotions. These are the albums that no matter what they were thought of musically, shaped your world. When you finish, tag 15 others, including me. Make sure you copy and paste this part so they know the drill. Get the idea now? Good. Tag, you’re it!
When I sat down to write this, I thought in terms of the albums that helped me learn how to listen, to form a critical opinion, or opened new worlds avenues & possibilities and so forth. By its nature, then, these 15 albums may not necessarily represent desert island discs, favorite artists, or even the best of a particular artist. In a couple of cases, I don’t even particularly enjoy the album any more though I can still catch the whiff of thrill I felt when I first heard it.
I started with about 50 albums and ruthlessly edited until only 15 remained. Most of the late scratches were albums where I felt that the one that made the final list already epitomized something in common between those albums; examples include “Power Lies and Corruption” edging out “Seventeen Seconds” and “Remain In Light.” (I didn’t say it made sense, I just said it was.)
And so, in rough chronological order…
THE ROLLING STONES, Their Satanic Majesties Request – It’s absurd and in points unlistenable, but to a 4-year old with a close-n-play it’s mysterious and full of whimsy, from the playful idolatrous cover art to the nonsense psychedelia of the songs. I would listen closely, scrutinizing every note cough mumble; it seemed so important to decode it. Though just a curiosity today, it has some of the Stones’ loveliest pop songs before they went on to become the raw, bluesy world-beating band they were over the next 10 years.
PS The remaster sounds amazing.
THE WHO, Tommy – It’s full of filler and the story is absurd, grotesque and more than a little offensive. For me, though, it unlocked the idea that rock could tell a story and that the different instruments could be expressive of character and ideas. On that basis, it beat the hell out of the “Young People’s Guide To The Orchestra” or “Peter & The Wolf.” And the playing still knocks me out. I’ll put Underture up against anything as one of the great instrumental performances.
THE BEATLES, The White Album (for this is what it should be called) – This list would not be complete without any Beatles, a band that I devoured well into my teens. I don’t think is their best nor is it my favorite – it contains the very worst efforts by all four of them – but its very density makes it the one that I still find the most fascinating – a real songwriters’ battle royale. Oddly, I think my two favorite Beatles albums today may actually be solo albums: Ram and All Things Must Pass. (Bing! Snooty rock critic alert!)
PUBLIC IMAGE, LTD, Metal Box / Second Edition – How did we get there from here? Coming in a bit late for punk, this was my one of my first pick-ups of the genre. But really it couldn’t be further from punk; the trebly in-your-face pop-based guitars replaced by a dominant dubby danceable beats. It was scary and invigorating to hear something so released from pop form but still essentially fun to listen to. I’m sure this set me up for both techno and reggae as I discovered them later.
BRIAN ENO, Ambient 1: Music For Airports – I bought this off the in-store turntable at Leopold’s. (What strange self-absorbed 12-year old does that? [raises hand] That would be me.) But this album was freeing in so many ways. Free from composition & structure. Free from noise. Free from pop and conventional song structure. Yet it was peaceful and engaging. Plus it came with instructions for setting up your speakers properly.
As a Golden State Warriors fan – and admittedly a fair-weather one – I could not have found the 2008-09 NBA season much duller or depressing. The play of this uninspired, oft-injured squad and its possibly insane coach drove me well away from following the team despite a raft of discount ticket offers. My inner Assistant General Manager, though, is entirely intrigued by the playoff series opening tomorrow night: the clearly-best-in-the-league Los Angeles Lakers against the Houston Rockets.
Shane Battier defending Kobe Bryant
This story starts back in February when the New York Times Magazine published “The No-Stats All-Star” by Michael Lewis. One of my favorite writers for his ability to cross great business writing with incisive observation about sports and its hidden-in-plain-sight economy, Lewis had previously written on applying market theory in baseball (Moneyball: The Art of Winning An Unfair Game) and football (The Blind Side: The Evolution Of A Game – excerpt).
The NYT article centered on the Houston Rockets and in particular Shane Battier, who is used as an example of how basketball statistics are enormously deceptive by only depicting production with the ball. As he’d done so well in his previous books, Lewis makes the argument that glamor statistics like points per game, rebounds and so forth don’t necessarily show how much a player actually helps its team earn what really counts: wins. The Rockets have put together a team of statisticians to develop metrics for what truly produces wins. With those metrics in hand, they targeted Battier, a well-regarded player who had some tough seasons with the woeful Memphis Grizzlies, but had a record otherwise of always playing with winners. I’ll leave the statistical discussion to Lewis’s article, which I highly recommend, but suffice it to say that the Rockets’ stats-based defensive theory is to learn where opposing players become the least efficient on the floor.
The story was published in February. Before Los Angeles played Houston on March 11th, master motivator Laker Coach Phil Bradley showed Kobe this passage:
The reason the Rockets insist that Battier guard [Kobe] Bryant is his gift for encouraging him into his zones of lowest efficiency. The effect of doing this is astonishing: Bryant doesn’t merely help his team less when Battier guards him than when someone else does. When Bryant is in the game and Battier is on him, the Lakers’ offense is worse than if the N.B.A.’s best player had taken the night off. “The Lakers’ offense should obviously be better with Kobe in,” [Rockets General Manager] Morey says. “But if Shane is on him, it isn’t.” A player Morey describes as “a marginal N.B.A. athlete” not only guards one of the greatest — and smartest — offensive threats ever to play the game. He renders him a detriment to his team.
Sure enough, Kobe put up 37 points – lit up Battier and scored 16 in the fourth quarter alone (albeit with Ron Artest guarding him, not Battier) – to lead the Lakers to a 102-96 come-from-behind win.
So now we get a week or two of this matchup. Not to denigrate the Rockets, which fields two other great defenders in Artest and Yao Ming, but this should be an interesting test of schemes versus skills and of statistical gambits versus the NBA’s most successful coach. If this goes the Rockets’ way, expect a sea change in the way NBA franchises run their teams in the very near future.
Personally, I’m rooting for the Rockets – and selfishly. In reading Lewis’s article, it was apparent that my hometown Warriors are definitely not users of any kind of statistical theory in evaluating its talent or running a game. Warriors forward Stephen Jackson was spotlighted for his bizarre tendency: [he] “is statistically better going to his right, but he loves to go to his left — and goes to his left almost twice as often.”) Instead the Warriors rely on a well-loved ex-player to run its front office – with disastrous contracts thrown at players of ‘good character’ – and a coach who appears to run the team more on feeling, fear and witchcraft than good sense. Please, Warriors, take a note.
As an old print hand, the collapse of the magazine business model has been a sad thing to observe and play a small part in. The typical big US title – think something you’d pick up at the airport or (tellingly) from a waiting area –has staked its business for decades on printing & distributing tens of thousands of unprofitable copies with the assurance that an attractive audience would be worth CPMs of $30 and up to advertisers. The very largest titles could afford lower CPMs approaching television so long as there was enough demand for copies.
As anyone who follows media knows by now, magazines have been hit with a triple-witching the last few years: collapsing CPMs for even the most difficult-to-target audiences (in light of the targeting capabilities of the Internet) and plus collapsing advertising page sales; slackening demand; and rising distribution costs.
The big bellwether is now upon us. Conde Nast, really the last of the big-spending believers in magazine, first quietly packed off Domino and a few other titles and, more dramatically, this week closed Portfolio, for which the company had reportedly spent over $100mm to launch. (Portfolio was a poorly-timed entry – a well-written glamor magazine about business caught up in, well, now. But it was also schizophrenic. Despite being targeted at business elite, it was also weirdly basic; a column in the first issue, for example, explained how interest rates work[?!?!].)
While most attention has been paid to falling ad pages, it’s really the CPM problem that most fundamentally egs the question of whether the magazine industry will get anywhere close to its old business model ever again. Publishers formerly charged $30-100 to reach a hard-to-reach passionate target – say, ukulele players – while now that CPM on AdWords is not just catastrophically lower but also available by auction. In other words, not just the price is better; it’s the buying process, too, with better information creating a more efficient market.
So what for magazines to do? The most obvious choice is simply to start charging readers, which is what many of the newsweeklies are now trying to do. Any subscriber to Wired can see that they are getting their magazines at a steep unprofitable discount. ($12 for 12 issues written, designed, printed and mailed? Probably more like $30. Printing and postage alone is probably well more than $1.25 per copy. I’ve long said that Conde Nast magazines are one of the great bargains of American life, like home plumbing and the US mail.)
But the reality is that it’s going to be a very hard road to convince readers to pay after being trained into receiving content for free (the Internet) or near-free (magazines) for their entire lives, no matter how great the reporting or photography. In the face of low demand, we’ll see massive changes in how these magazines work in the next few years – maybe months.
Another possible answer could come from the manufacturing side. The biggest challenge with magazine business models as they stand stems from their battleship-turning nature. It takes a long time to build circulation to get to a saleable advertising proposition; it takes an equally long time to deflate that unprofitable circulation when the ads dry up. (This is why you’ll see big circ magazines like George suddenly disappear.)
HP recently debuted a service called MagCloud that could potentially democratize the industry by allowing easy creation of micro-targeted magazines – for example, not just for the ukulele player but for left-handed ukulele players living in the Midwest. A more nimble manufacturing process could allow more short-term plays; imagine for example “100 Days” magazine to follow the excitement around the new President, killing it just as readers start to tire of it. Magazines may survive in fact by forgetting about brand-building and going after hot content. In short, a return to the tabloid times of our Founding Fathers. More on this in a coming post.
Joba Chamberlain opens the second game ever at the new Yankee Stadium and empty seats outnumber full ones in the exclusive areas behind home plate and the dugouts. The Stadium was packed otherwise. (Flickr / Fansherpa)
With all the fuss over the empty luxury seats at the new Yankee Stadium, I was mildly surprised to find something similar – dramatically so – happening in my own backyard. We went to Sunday’s A’s-Rays game at the Oakland Coliseum. All the ingredients for a great day at the ballyard were in place: sunny April weather, last year’s AL champions in town and a Sunday afternoon. What we found instead was a micro-market in disarray. As the credit markets teetered last October, the market for sports tickets anecdotally seems to be following.
The first indication there was a problem was the total lack of online ticketing activity. There were practically no offers on CraigsList, even from brokers, and none at all on eBay. At the walk-up ticket booth, we found that we could buy any section in the house, including the Diamond Level. This should simply never be the case. The Diamond Level is a very limited “VIP” area, maybe 60 seats tops, right behind the plate on the playing field level. Seats go for $225 but also include free food and drink service for the whole game.
Weirdest of all was the scene inside the stadium. The A’s bifurcate each of the two seating levels – a minimum of two pricing levels in each deck. In both decks, there was a cluster of people behind the plate, practically nobody for several sections as the seating moved towards the outfield, another cluster in the sections starting the new pricing tier, again fading to nothing.
The mystery to me is why shouldn’t the people forced out to the outfield be able to sit in these empty “mezzo-sections.” The answer could come from a nimble dynamic pricing system at game time. As airlines like Virgin and JetBlue have discovered with exit rows sold at check-in, why not enable ask fans as they arriveto purchase a better seat for an extra few dollars? It would be an easy thing to equip ushers with Palm-style barcode and credit card machines like those carried by the clerks at The Apple Store. Everybody gets the opportunity to move closer (or elect not to), getting rid of the weird empty spaces and (I’m assuming) presenting a better, more invigorating environment for the home team. (I know they’re supposed to ignore the crowd, but ask any actor or musician if they’d rather play to a full orchestra than have the front rows empty and the crowd loosely dispersed.)
Meanwhile across the bay, the Giants are trying out a number of dynamic pricing policies. First, the team partnered up with a firm to build elastic pricing around its unsold inventory for the least attractive games. Last week, though, came the real reckoning – and a big indication that the team is running scared about its attendance. Ticket prices were dropped 40% for the Giants series this week against the Dodgers, traditionally the most attractive opponent. Granted the team is trying to stir up interest for later in the year – it appears they’ll be competitive in a moderately challenging division – but to have to do this so early and against the team’s best natural rivarly is surprising. One wonders how scared the Giants are about advance sales for the rest of the year.
Susie is quick to point out that the lack of an Oakland A’s ticket market framed by the fact that the Oakland Coliseum is a horrible dump, getting dumpier every day. The tarps in the third deck look weathered and horrible, while the bathrooms, parking lot and facilities remain some of the worst for a major league sport. Nevertheless the empty seat patterns – along with all the unsold display ad inventory throughout the stadium – are clear indications that baseball is not recession-proof. There are easy ways to make profit from making markets more efficient; marketing and pricing are the classics. Let’s see if the A’s and their brethren take up the challenge.
Sights Seen
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