Spiersblr

ninety9: spiers: A Hugh MacLeod original from 2002, gifted to...

Sun, 22 Nov 2009 23:23:42 -0500

spiers:

A Hugh MacLeod original from 2002, gifted to me a couple of weeks ago by [the sadly no longer blogging] Objectionable Content.

Funny thing is, this is exactly the line I used on @girlfriend. Related: if you thought for even as second that I was being serious, you should unfollow both of us.

Please. I’m not that easy. (He said, “I read Dealbreaker.”)

A Hugh MacLeod original from 2002, gifted to me a couple of...

Sun, 22 Nov 2009 23:10:00 -0500

A Hugh MacLeod original from 2002, gifted to me a couple of weeks ago by [the sadly no longer blogging] Objectionable Content.

reblogt: spiers: Sunny San Antonio: the view from my hotel...

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 18:32:54 -0500

reblogt:

spiers:

Sunny San Antonio: the view from my hotel room. (Denny’s!)

i’m basing this all fr that denny’s, so i know this is a stretch, buuuuuut… is this right?

I’m staying here.

Sunny San Antonio: the view from my hotel room. (Denny’s!)

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 18:19:16 -0500

Sunny San Antonio: the view from my hotel room. (Denny’s!)

It was only a matter of time: VF's Gladwell parody

Sun, 15 Nov 2009 22:46:43 -0500

Why baby Jesus? Research confirms there were upwards of 157 hotel-cum-stables in Bethlehem that night, with estimated 97 percent occupancy levels. So why did that star shine so brightly over his?

Imagine that I were to ask you to dress up as a baby and lie in a manger. Would you attract a comparable crowd of shepherds plus livestock and anything upwards of three kings from the East?

In a hugely influential 2004 experiment at the University of Colorado at Bollocks Falls, Professor Sanjiv Sanjive and his team asked 323 volunteers to wrap themselves in swaddling clothes and spend the night in a stable, lying in a manger.

From Malcolm Gladwell Explains Christmas to Craig Brown [Vanity Fair]

"An eclectic essayist is necessarily a dilettante, which is not in itself a bad thing. But Gladwell..."

Sun, 15 Nov 2009 14:35:52 -0500

“An eclectic essayist is necessarily a dilettante, which is not in itself a bad thing. But Gladwell frequently holds forth about statistics and psychology, and his lack of technical grounding in these subjects can be jarring. He provides misleading definitions of “homology,” “saggital plane” and “power law” and quotes an expert speaking about an “igon value” (that’s eigenvalue, a basic concept in linear algebra). In the spirit of Gladwell, who likes to give portentous names to his aperçus, I will call this the Igon Value Problem: when a writer’s education on a topic consists in interviewing an expert, he is apt to offer generalizations that are banal, obtuse or flat wrong.”

- Book Review - ‘What the Dog Saw - And Other Adventures,’ by Malcolm Gladwell - Review - NYTimes.com (via femmebot)

Yes. What Steven Pinker said.

(via evangotlib)

"But really, the word douche is just like the story the Times did on it, and the generalized..."

Sat, 14 Nov 2009 15:33:42 -0500

“But really, the word douche is just like the story the Times did on it, and the generalized sources—the “some people” who “may be offended” by it— they used. It’s empty. It means nothing. It’s a completely subjective assessment of somebody who does something you don’t like. I know people who use the word “douchebag” when referring to other people; I’m willing to bet those same people use the word “douchebag” to refer to the people referring to them. And I’m most disappointed when people I know who use the word could find something more concise, or shocking, or linguistically artful to go with. It’s sold at the Wal-Mart of pejoratives. It’s cheap, it’s made en masse, and there’s nothing but bad preservatives in the ingredients. Let’s all—The New York Times, Bloggers, TV Writers, Those Who Use The Word “Douchebag,” Those Who You Would Call A “Douche,” Bar Patrons, Sports Fans, English Professors, Joe Dolce—become better communicators, and find something better than the word “douche” and its mediocre suffix “bag” to go with.”

- Foster, calling on all of us to use words better. (via maura)

(via fek)

Yes. Also: If you have to call someone a “douchebag,” you’re failing as a writer. Good opinion writing isn’t about making pronouncements from a position of authority; it’s about making a persuasive argument. You can’t just call someone a douche; you have to demonstrate that they are and let the audience decide whether you’re right. Show, not tell.

Still evaluating the Droid

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 17:12:25 -0500

mikehudack:

bijan:

I bought my Droid last Friday.

And I’m still not sure if I’m going to keep it or return it.

There are a bunch of things I really like about the Droid

-Android 2.0 is a huge improvement over the 1.5

-Verizon Network is awesome.

-Maps is much better on Droid than iPhone

-Exchange sync is great.

-gmail integration is better on droid than on iphone (one click archive, etc)

-I like the FourSquare Android app better than the iPhone app

-improved battery life

-GoogleVoice rocks

Things I don’t like:

-maybe I have a lemon but the battery door is way too loose for my taste.

-There isn’t a Tumblr app for Android

-There isn’t a Yelp app for Android

-There isn’t a flickr app for Android

-The camera is fussy (i understand an update is coming dec 11th that should fix this)

-I’ve tried a bunch of Twitter apps for Android. My favorite so far is an app called ‘Swift’. But it doesn’t hold a candle to Tweetie2 on iPhone

-The music player on the Droid isn’t great. It doesn’t sync with iTunes which is a buzzkill. I’m using DoubleTwist to sync my media and that works out okay.

-I’m getting better with the keyboard but its far from ideal

If I keep the Droid it will most likely mean I’ll end up carrying two devices which isn’t ideal. A number of my friends do this but I never thought i would.

Giving this Droid test run another week.

I’m using aTumble for Tumblr and Twidroid for Twitter. They both seem to work fine.

Apparently I bought the “male 24-35” phone: http://bit.ly/2gdq7m Figures.

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 03:27:57 -0500

Apparently I bought the “male 24-35” phone: http://bit.ly/2gdq7m Figures.

Dialogue, paraphrased

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 00:18:07 -0500

From a play we saw earlier:

Her: So you just don’t want anyone to know you’re really happy here?

Him: Yeah. I don’t want to deal with the resentment.

ninety9: spiers: ninety9: @girlfriend just bought a Droid (shit is as hot as everyone is saying)....

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 00:05:26 -0500

ninety9:

spiers:

ninety9:

@girlfriend just bought a Droid (shit is as hot as everyone is saying). We just shared our google calendars with each other. GET ME ALLEN SALKIN (ht: bakes twitter, today). Related: what happened to the YM calendar?

So it was inevitable, really. It’s the Oh-Fuck-It moment where convenience trumps the pretense of coolness. Sharing gCals is the new “oh hey, I got you a toothbrush. And if you want to keep some of your shit here, i’m fine with that.”

Note, Foster, this won’t make it any easier for you to schedule dinner. Related: I make sure to buy the same color toothbrushes when restocking. I make the token effort of checking which one is dry before using. Sometimes I don’t even bother with that. I mean, it’s not like we don’t have our tongues in each other’s mouths most of the time anyway. Plus, we drink plenty of alcohol.

Also. Frighteningly. True.

ninety9: @girlfriend just bought a Droid (shit is as hot as everyone is saying). We just shared our...

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 23:52:00 -0500

ninety9:

@girlfriend just bought a Droid (shit is as hot as everyone is saying). We just shared our google calendars with each other. GET ME ALLEN SALKIN (ht: bakes twitter, today). Related: what happened to the YM calendar?

This is all frighteningly true. My phone now periodically announces itself in a little robotic Space Odyssey 2001 voice—”drooooid“—that I haven’t figured out how to deactivate yet, having not gone through the manual or played with it very much. But it’s oddly endearing. I’m a sucker for hardware that talks to me in a cute robotic voice. And it’s pretty damn slick, I have to say.

I’m also enjoying the thought of AT&T not raping me on messaging and roaming (90 mins in Ohio on a supposedly national plan=$80+ in extra voice charges on last month’s bill) while simultaneously dropping my calls and offering next-to-no reception in my apartment.

RE: gCal - Also true. Mostly a function of having this conversation over and over:

Me: So what’s happening this week? Did we commit to something on Thursday?

@boyfriend: (Peering at Super Cool Early Adopter T-Mobile Android 1.0 gPhone gcalendar): I dunno. Did you have something on Tuesday?

Me: (Peering at un-syncable I Won’t Upgrade Until I Have To Blackberry): I can’t remember. Will have to check my [client-side unsyncable laptop] calendar.**

@boyfriend: But we definitely have something on Thursday.

Me: Yeah… Er, I think?

@boyfriend: [Sigh…][Shaking head at pitiful Blackberry that requires occasional removal and re-installation of trackball to function…]

So it was inevitable, really. It’s the Oh-Fuck-It moment where convenience trumps the pretense of coolness. Sharing gCals is the new “oh hey, I got you a toothbrush. And if you want to keep some of your shit here, i’m fine with that.”

Or it’s the moment when your @girlfriend realizes that her failure to have any sort of portable, sync-able planner is making life harder for everyone. Your pick!

So now I’ve upgraded all of my technology and web apps to at least early 2007 levels.

** Once upon a time, I was an Early Adopter (TM). I went through every new version of Palm handhelds through 2002 or so, and was lusting after Danger Research’s Sidekick before it was called Danger Research and before their fledgling supposed Berry-killer was called the Sidekick. Then I got New Technology Fatigue, mostly because it was exhausting… my bank account.

In backlash phase, I even went back to a paper-based planner for a year (Moleskine, natch/cliche). But that didn’t stick, as my handwriting is nearly unreadable. And I’d leave the damn thing at home half the time.

But I’m in the process of reforming.

Lola (@EpilepticChihuahua) went as Gizmo for Halloween. No...

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 00:21:00 -0500

Lola (@EpilepticChihuahua) went as Gizmo for Halloween. No costume required. No leaving the house required, either.

TroubleAndDesire.tumblr.com

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 00:05:20 -0500

Ned Riffle: I want adventure. I want romance.
Bill McCabe: Ned, there is no such thing as adventure. There’s no such thing as romance. There’s only trouble and desire.
Ned Riffle: Trouble and desire.
Bill McCabe: That’s right. And the funny thing is, when you desire something you immediately get into trouble. And when you’re in trouble you don’t desire anything at all.
Ned Riffle: I see.
Bill McCabe: It’s impossible.
Ned Riffle: It’s ironic.
Bill McCabe: It’s a fucking tragedy is what it is, Ned.

Exit Strategy

Sun, 01 Nov 2009 23:48:38 -0500

bijan:

When I meet an entrepreneur for the first time I like having a conversation about the idea or see the product (or prototype) in action or even a “chalk talk” for those of us that are more visually inclined.

I’m generally not a fan of slides, especially if it’s an early stage company.

But if the founder wants to use slides then I usually go along. Founders should use whatever tools they feel most comfortable.

The one thing I am allergic to is when a founder includes a slide that says “Exit Strategy” and then has a few bullets that says “IPO or sell company to company a, b or c.”

Oy.

An early stage company should be thinking about how to create something great and how they want to get there. How to build value. Not think about exits.

Now most VCs that I know feel the same way about that dreaded slide. But there is a topic where I’ve seen disagreement amongst successful VCs related to the concept of exits when considering an early stage investment. Some VCs will think about who might be the potential buyers of the company.

They do this analysis upfront because most companies never go public. So they want to know if there could be multiple buyers of a company someday. If there aren’t any potential buyers then they it might impact the VCs decision.

I don’t see the world that way.

If you build a great company then you don’t have to worry about exits because you will have many options (e.g. public, get profitable & stay private, secondary offering, sell the company).

I believe there have been many exits where the actual buyer wouldn’t have been on any list at the time the initial venture investment.

This is just speculation on my part but at the time of the initial investment in the following companies who would have guessed the ultimate buyer:

-Flip Video (Cisco)

-Danger Research (Microsoft)

-Daily Candy (Comcast)

-Sling (Echostar)

The list goes on.

Yes, you can imagine the strategic rationale for those deals. But not on day 1 of the venture investment. The world just moves too fast to try and predict this stuff. And it’s not the most important question anyway.

We would all agree, the real question is whether a particular team & product can make something special.

I like Bijan’s posts more often than not, but I think this is pretty disingenuous when the venture capital model is almost exclusively exit-dependent. When VCs stop touting exits as evidence of successes in their portfolios, you’ll stop seeing entrepreneurs with “exit” slides. So I’ll buy the “exits aren’t important” rationale when I see even one term sheet that creates incentives for long-term profit-sharing over a sale or IPO. (I’ve also never been through a full due diligence cycle where the investor didn’t ask the entrepreneur—even informally—about acquisition possibilities.)

I feel like the real title of this Shouts & Murmurs piece should be “Lazy Author...

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 14:26:01 -0400

I feel like the real title of this Shouts & Murmurs piece should be “Lazy Author Doesn’t Want to Promote Own Book and Feels Inclined to Mock Publisher’s Publicity Department, Which Has the Temerity to Suggest That He Might Want to Do So.”**

**And This Might (Godforbid!) Involve Using the Internets. Sorry, Author Who’s More Accustomed to Quill-And-Parchment-Paper Interface!

Gawker Gets Scammed

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 08:50:00 -0400

Gawker Gets Scammed:

mikehudack:

spiers:

ryanbrown:

spiers:

The sponsored posts should go for far more than the $3 CPMs on display. They’re taking a premium form of advertising and using it as an add-on, when they should be upselling it. (And there’s no inventory for sponsored posts.)

And in that email exchange, there’s no upselling, just throwing it in for free.

What’s more: this lead CAME to them! Why are you throwing in fries and a drink when the client is clearly willing to pay full price for the stand alone product? I’d understand if this was an effort to build a portfolio of executions for a new product or something… but the “sponsored post” is pretty old hat for Gawker Media, and the “client” is already starting at the 25k line!

What Ryan Brown said.

Because the rebuy is better than the buy. Because you want clients who get real value and keep coming back. That’s how you build a business.

I totally agree. But I haven’t noticed any disparities between re-ups from clients that are getting traditional campaigns and re-ups from clients who are paying for non-traditional campaigns. If anything, the latter are more responsive and invested. If you’re charging for non-traditional features and they aren’t adding any value and the client doesn’t want to come back, that’s probably just bad execution. Your “value adds” are neither.

Gawker Gets Scammed

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 23:28:25 -0400

Gawker Gets Scammed:

geisen:

spiers:

brianvan:

spiers:

So sponsored posts are ostensibly higher value than the standard IAB spots in the margin, but at Gawker they’re “value-add” on top of a standard display buy? The appeal of sponsored posts for publishers is that they aren’t CPM driven (unless you want them to be) and you can charge more than for regular display. So Gawker’s just throwing them in as an add-on? Why, exactly?

This is a guess at something I know much less about than other things I’d speak boldly about, but:

It’s a cheesy tie-together. It’s not entirely unlike when a supermarket sells frankfuters in packs of 10 and buns in packs of 8. Even if you intend to get 8 hot dogs, you’re going to end up with two cold hot dogs that you didn’t want - the IAB slots - and that benefits everyone in the retail supply chain except the customer. If the IAB slots were the add-ons, they would probably end up as dead inventory and would be phased out of the site design by mid-2010. The way that they’re doing, it, though, they can sell BOTH inventories to people who want only one. If no one complains, it’s a good racket, right?

That’s not what I’m saying. The sponsored posts should go for far more than the $3 CPMs on display. They’re taking a premium form of advertising and using it as an add-on, when they should be upselling it. (And there’s no inventory for sponsored posts.)

And in that email exchange, there’s no upselling, just throwing it in for free.

This is actually pretty common. IAB units are easier to peg to CPMs than unique placements like sponsored posts because they are standardized across multiple publishers.

Sponsored posts and other non-standard opportunities are custom and therefore require additional work on the part of agencies (or not). Media buyers loath engaging their stretched-thin creatives to build custom units and they have no way to compare prices of a sponsored post on Gizmodo to a custom program on FM. When you lack the ability to properly price opportunities, negotiating leverage is lost. Couple that with units that you need your creative team to build from scratch and all of a sudden this opportunity gets scratched from the media plan and the Gawker Ad Sales Guy is losing budget.

As soon as it’s value-added it brings down the eCPM. Then the Gawker Ad Sales Guy throws in their own creative resources to build it and all of a sudden he’s just succeeded in upselling the original program and maintaining his company’s hard-fought premium CPM margin on the “boring” IAB units.

If and/or when sponsored posts become more of a standard I’m sure you’ll stop seeing them value-added in favor of the next custom program.

Well, my experience of doing non-standard plays is that the publisher always does the creative. Might be different for you guys, but never once has an agency handed me anything other than display creative. But they nearly always ask for something beyond that. And they’re willing to pay for it.

So I think creative services are no longer an option for publishers; they’re a necessity.

Part of having a good sales team is having people who can sell non-traditional packages, because that’s where the highest margins are right now—even when you have to do the creative in-house. My feeling is that if you can’t sell that as stand-alone or as an upsell, you’re going to be in trouble if/when CPMs keep sliding downward in major categories. And particularly so if we end up in a post-CPM environment where brands decide the IAB standard spots are irrelevant. (I don’t think we’re at that point yet, but I hear a lot of frustration about how increasingly ineffective they are.)

Gawker Gets Scammed

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 22:49:45 -0400

Gawker Gets Scammed:

ryanbrown:

spiers:

The sponsored posts should go for far more than the $3 CPMs on display. They’re taking a premium form of advertising and using it as an add-on, when they should be upselling it. (And there’s no inventory for sponsored posts.)

And in that email exchange, there’s no upselling, just throwing it in for free.

What’s more: this lead CAME to them! Why are you throwing in fries and a drink when the client is clearly willing to pay full price for the stand alone product? I’d understand if this was an effort to build a portfolio of executions for a new product or something… but the “sponsored post” is pretty old hat for Gawker Media, and the “client” is already starting at the 25k line!

What Ryan Brown said.

Gawker Gets Scammed

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 22:31:00 -0400

Gawker Gets Scammed:

brianvan:

spiers:

So sponsored posts are ostensibly higher value than the standard IAB spots in the margin, but at Gawker they’re “value-add” on top of a standard display buy? The appeal of sponsored posts for publishers is that they aren’t CPM driven (unless you want them to be) and you can charge more than for regular display. So Gawker’s just throwing them in as an add-on? Why, exactly?

This is a guess at something I know much less about than other things I’d speak boldly about, but:

It’s a cheesy tie-together. It’s not entirely unlike when a supermarket sells frankfuters in packs of 10 and buns in packs of 8. Even if you intend to get 8 hot dogs, you’re going to end up with two cold hot dogs that you didn’t want - the IAB slots - and that benefits everyone in the retail supply chain except the customer. If the IAB slots were the add-ons, they would probably end up as dead inventory and would be phased out of the site design by mid-2010. The way that they’re doing, it, though, they can sell BOTH inventories to people who want only one. If no one complains, it’s a good racket, right?

That’s not what I’m saying. The sponsored posts should go for far more than the $3 CPMs on display. They’re taking a premium form of advertising and using it as an add-on, when they should be upselling it. (And there’s no inventory for sponsored posts.)

And in that email exchange, there’s no upselling, just throwing it in for free.