Rex Hammock's RexBlog

Rex’s prayer for the busy geek

Rex Hammock — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 20:58:42 GMT

Lord grant me the serenity to accept that there are some things I just can’t keep up with, the determination to keep up with the things I must keep up with, and the wisdom to find a good RSS feed from someone who keeps up with what I’d like to, but just don’t have the damn bandwidth to handle right now.

Links for 2009-11-06 [del.icio.us]

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 00:00:00 PST

Twitter Starts Curating Trending Topic Tweets | MG Seigler, TechCrunch
The Twitter feature I hate the most, Trending Topics, is getting tweaked by Twitter. I don't hate the notion of surfacing topics that are getting discussed the most. Why I think it's broken is that link spammers on Twitter immediately tag their spam tweets with any term that hits the top trend list, making it meaningless to click on the trend to see what it's about. Perhaps what MG is writing about will help solve that dilemma.
Retweet Limited Rollout | Twitter Blog
I don't know. There was just something about this blog post that made me want to re-tweet it.
Google Magazines: Now Actually Findable! | Technologizer
Former magazine superstar editor and now jurnopreneur Harry McCracken says Google Books now has a page that displays the magazines they have digitized. http://re-x.me/googlemag
Condé Nast Wastes Money On Everything Except Magazines | Mediaite
Gist of article: It's easy to beat up on Conde Nast proligate ways.
Norville remembers the not-so-good-old days | unclebarky.com
Gist: My friend Deborah Norville* says she should have ignored NBC and talked to the media during the Today Show debacle. "I don't think 'disrespect' is a strong enough word for what they did to me. I was vilified." (*Disclosure: Life's journey leads to interesting friendships.)

links for 2009-11-06

Rex Hammock — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 05:02:23 GMT

Norville remembers the not-so-good-old days | unclebarky.com

Gist: My friend Deborah Norville* says she should have ignored NBC and talked to the media during the Today Show debacle. "I don't think 'disrespect' is a strong enough word for what they did to me. I was vilified." (*Disclosure: Life's journey leads to interesting friendships.)
Condé Nast Wastes Money On Everything Except Magazines | Mediaite

Gist of article: It's easy to beat up on Conde Nast proligate ways.

(tags: magazines)
Google Magazines: Now Actually Findable! | Technologizer

Former magazine superstar editor and now jurnopreneur Harry McCracken says Google Books now has a page that displays the magazines they have digitized. http://re-x.me/googlemag

(tags: magazines search google)
Retweet Limited Rollout | Twitter Blog

I don't know. There was just something about this blog post that made me want to re-tweet it.

(tags: twitter)
Twitter Starts Curating Trending Topic Tweets | MG Seigler, TechCrunch

The Twitter feature I hate the most, Trending Topics, is getting tweaked by Twitter. I don't hate the notion of surfacing topics that are getting discussed the most. Why I think it's broken is that link spammers on Twitter immediately tag their spam tweets with any term that hits the top trend list, making it meaningless to click on the trend to see what it's about. Perhaps what MG is writing about will help solve that dilemma.

(tags: twitter)

The Last Days of Gourmet

Rex Hammock — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 11:19:47 GMT

When I started blogging almost ten years ago, I decided that I would not blog about the transactions of the magazine world: the buying, selling, launching, closing, hiring, firing stuff. Those things are what trade (business-to-business) publications and news websites focus on and I don’t really want to play the role of “reporter” here. (Self-appointed pundit is more fun.)

However, I have made some exceptions to that rule. If transactions involve friends or someone who is especially newsworthy, or if the launch or closure involves a publication that reporters start pulling out the adjective venerable to describe. (In journalism school, they must teach that there are no other adjectives to describe magazines that have lasted a long time.)

So I decided to point to an “insta-blog” in which Kevin Demara captures “the final days of the venerable magazine Gormet because it reminded me that while (as I’ve siad) magazines open and magazines close, magazines are also people.

(via: waxy.org)

What a surprise. Once again, the experts still haven’t figured out the DVR

Rex Hammock — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 13:19:58 GMT

Today, the New York Times has a story that was DVR’d two years ago and re-played today.

2007 story: Viewers Fast-Forwarding Past Ads? Not Always

2009 story: DVR, Once TV’s Mortal Foe, Helps Ratings

I remember that previous story because I blogged about it at the time (more on that in a minute).

Today’s story rounds up some industry experts who seem dumbfounded that users of DVRs actually like TV and use their DVR to time-shift the programming they enjoy. And, what’s more, viewers don’t always fast-forward through the commercials.

Ironically — but stereotypically — the experts seem perplexed by this:

Quote:

Why would people pass on the opportunity to skip through to the next chunk of program content?

According to Brad Adgate, the senior vice president for research at Horizon Media, a media buying firm, is that the behavior that has underpinned television since its invention still persists to a larger degree than expected. “It’s still a passive activity,” he said.

First off, I think it’s wonderful that a guy named Adgate would feel compelled to pursue a career in researching what commercials we watch. However, I think he’s missing the point of a dynamic of TV viewing enabled by the DVR — as did the experts in 2007.

The story in 2007 also rounded up some experts who marveled that people who have DVRs don’t always fast-forward through commercials. Their reasoning was much like that of Adgate’s: People are lazy and are programmed to sit passively through commercials.

I disagreed then and suggested it might help if the experts actually started using a DVR before coming up with wild theories.

Back then, I offered some counter-intuitive reasons for the not-fast-forwarding phenomena — which I still believe are as good as those from the so-called experts:

1. People who are holding the remote control in their hand are extremely aware of the commercials being zoomed through. They must be to learn the visual cues that alert them that the commercial block is about to finish. Often, the person with the control is being judged by a second party for their finesse in stopping the fast-forwarding at the precise time it needs to stop, so, therefore a second party is also engaged in looking at the sped up commercials.

2. As a hardcore DVR user, I’ve come to the conclusion that one-location, continuous-scene ads are more likely to cause me to stop and view them. Those who create Apple advertising understand this — or are lucky. Both the iPod and “I’m a Mac” campaigns have visual cues that hold together for the entire 30 seconds of the commercial. The scenic context of the ad remains the same for the entire 30 seconds. The first time I see a new commercial that appears within that context, I’ll stop and view it. Sometimes, I’ll stop and view it again. Subsequently, every time I see it as I fast-forward, I recall it.

3. Even though I’ve used a DVR for over a year — and use it a lot — I still sometimes forget that I can fast-forward through a commercial as, even with a DVR, the TV is on in the background of something else I’m doing — most likely, on my computer. Which begs the other obvious question to advertisers: Do you really think people are sitting there watching your commercials even if they don’t have the ability to fast-forward through them. No, they use that time to focus on the other two or three things they are doing while they watch the programs.

4. Once you use a DVR to watch any type of program that has commercials embedded in it, you realize how much advertising you are subjected to in the typical one-hour of network TV. You grow queazy at the thought.

The best thing about blogging

Rex Hammock — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 03:55:55 GMT

I’ve been so jammed with projects the past few days (yes, even through the weekend), I haven’t done my usual ego roundup checks (don’t tell me you don’t have a Google alert set up for your name). So I’ve been remiss in not saying a public thank you for the kind things Kate O’Neill and Dave Delaney said on their blogs last Wednesday.

And since I’m shamelessly pointing to people who have said nice things related to me, I’ll point also to a recent post “My buddy Dave,” Dave Winer, wrote. (To my geek-free friends reading this on Facebook, even if you’ve never heard of Dave, you have come in contact with many things he’s pioneered.)

No doubt: the best thing about blogging for me has been the friendships I’ve made through it.

Everything else is secondary.

Thoughts on Twitter #8: You’re going to love Twitter Lists, unless you don’t

Rex Hammock — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 08:12:38 GMT

[Notes: You can view all my "Thoughts on Twitter" posts displayed chronologically here: http://www.RexBlog.com/thoughts-on-twitter.]

If you read this blog closely, you know I’ve been whining for a “lists” or “groups” feature on Twitter since, well, about the time I started using it. (About 90% of the complaints I hear from people who use Facebook could be solved if they understood and used the FaceBook “friends list” feature.)

For those of us who use third-party services and software to manage our Twitter following and tweeting, solutions to organizing people and topics one follows were solved a long time ago. Likewise, it’s been obvious for a long, long time, that a person who experiences Twitter just via the Twitter.com website is completely lost because of the lack of such a feature.

They are so lost that the Twitter powers-that-be started rolling their own lists of suggested Twitter users for new Twitter users to follow. Unfortunately, those “suggested users” were the entertainers, media types, tech-personalities or random friends of the person who controlled the list, that it resulted in a sky-rocketing of those individuals’ followers. The infamous “Suggested User List” (SUL), in my opinion, set back the comprehension of what Twitter is as it encouraged new users to believe it’s something you sign up for when you want to get blasts of messages from famous people you’ve never heard of. And so, they re-confirmed their perception that Twitter is a joke.

Recently (as I explained in Thoughts on Twitter #6), I decided that the list of people I was following on my @r Twitter account was creating so much noise, the tweet-stream had become meaningless. Therefore, I re-booted the list — wiped it completely away and started all over. In doing so, I lost hundreds of followers who, obviously, have services set up that unsubscribe from anyone who does the same to them. As I explained in that post, my idea was to be a better “curator” of the list of people I follow, so it became more targeted on friends, folks I respect and talk with professionally, some of my passions and Twitter users who live in my hometown of Nashville.

The experience of thinking about “following” as curation made it clear to me that if a Twitter user was able to make “lists” have a public view, such list-building would be viewed as a valuable service — and, in a way that is understandable to longtime students of online reputation, another data-point that could be used by those who are always trying to quantify “authority.” (If you stick with me, you may discover why there seems to be a high correlation between tech-geeks and baseball fanatics.)

Here’s an example of “following” and authority and curation that I’ve experienced personally.

Because I’m the “juggler-in-chief” of the wiki-model resource SmallBusiness.com, I registered the “early-bird-catches-the-worm” Twitter account, @smallbusiness. While it currently has about 5,000 followers — a lot less than many small business oriented Twitter accounts — Digg.com’s WeFollow.com’s algorithm ranks my @smallbusiness account as #2 in authority in the #smallbusiness category, again, despite being #63 in followers.

As, frankly, I have too little interest to spend much time trying to understand how WeFollow actually measures “authority” (another term for “reputation” or “influence”), I’m assuming it’s related to the number of “high authority” users who follow someone else with perhaps some weight given to the “authority” rank of individuals who re-tweet something posted by a particular user.

As the “content” of the tweets I post on @smallbusiness are limited to news stories and other items I think are ofinterest to small business owners and managers (unlike the goofy banter on my personal user account @r), I get lots of RTs because it’s obvious that the links I post are highly curated and timely: they are real news I look for carefully.

What WeFollow is doing with an algorithm, Twitter Lists is going to do with the power of the crowd. Lists will provide an incredible service to the casual Twitter user — and will help the service evolve away from its perception of fluffiness — a perception the Twitter SUL helped to reinforce.

It will also turn the ridiculous notion that how many followers you have on Twitter is the most revealing marker of “authority.” Listen — you can buy Twitters followers. And, no doubt, you’ll be able to buy getting on “lists.” But the challenge and cost of doing that will become more geometric in complexity and expense. And, the likelihood of those with “real” authority following your spam list is zilch.

Bottomline: Lists will make it a lot easier for unconvinced users of Twitter to understand its utility. And second, Lists will reward those who actually spend time and effort providing helpful, witty or engaging content in the form of the “tweets” they post OR the effort they put into curating unique and special lists.

Sidenote: I am working through the weekend on a major project, so I haven’t gotten around to building many lists on my @r Twitter account. However, I’m going to be aggressively creating lists using the @smallbusiness/lists (where I have an amazing URL to build such lists) and I’ve already started a few.

Bonus link: Like so much I have learned regarding the nature of content and connectedness over the past ten years, Dave Winer has been my maven on the topic of Lists, as well. The other day, when I first received the feature, I was thinking of him when I decided that Twitter Lists won’t be a “perfect” feature until they are exportable via OPML and can be followed via RSS. I’m sure Twitter will enable those or there are 3rd party hacks of the API going on right now.

Other bonus links:
Dave Troy – “Why Twitter Lists Change Everything”
Todd Zeigler – “Using Twitter Lists to Judge Influence“

Links for 2009-10-29 [del.icio.us]

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 00:00:00 PDT

Announcing a new 'link feature' - Google-Apple Wars
With a link to this TechCrunch article about a new Android-only navigation app released by Google, I'm starting a new feature and personal tagtag related to the escalating war between Google and Apple. (The tag will be google-apple-war on http://deliclous.com/rexblog)
Google Music Search
Not only does this Google blog post explain the new service, it provides a could of good factoids: 1. 20% of the "top ten" search queries involve music. 2. Google term for the time it takes you to get from starting a search to finding what you're looking for --> "Time to Result"

links for 2009-10-29

Rex Hammock — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 04:03:11 GMT

Google Music Search

Not only does this Google blog post explain the new service, it provides a could of good factoids: 1. 20% of the "top ten" search queries involve music. 2. Google term for the time it takes you to get from starting a search to finding what you're looking for –> "Time to Result"

(tags: google search music)
Announcing a new 'link feature' – Google-Apple Wars

With a link to this TechCrunch article about a new Android-only navigation app released by Google, I'm starting a new feature and personal tagtag related to the escalating war between Google and Apple. (The tag will be google-apple-war on http://deliclous.com/rexblog)

(tags: google-apple-war android iphone apps)

Some gimmicky magazine technology that may be cool one day

Rex Hammock — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 10:51:33 GMT

The Wall Street Journal this morning reports (paywall protected) that the December issue of Esquire will include some “augmented reality” features that, when held up to a video camera, will trigger some video. While the phrase “augmented reality” is about to become one of those terms you’ll get sick of hearing because it will soon mean anything, so therefore nothing, the “idea” holds some promise unlike the incredibly awful blinking cover technology Esquire tried last year.

While I have not seen the issue of Esquire and don’t know exactly what they’ll be doing, last year a German automotive magazine and Mini Cooper joined up to create something that may give you a taste of what can happen when you link up new media and old in ways that create something completely new (unlike when you try to replicate old media with new media and you end up with something stupid). I’ve embedded a video below that demonstrates how it was done.

Warning: Early iterations of these approaches will be expensive, gimmicky, silly and only-for-nerds. But somewhere down the road, they will make sense and will be used to do things we haven’t even thought of yet. Stay tuned.

A brief video about an “augmented reality” ad appearing “in” a German automotive magazine in 2008.

I’m getting all verklempt: The Nashville Technology Council Awards

Rex Hammock — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 10:53:26 GMT

This post, in what I’d say if I were wearing my editor’s cap, “buries the lede.” But hey, this is my blog and rambling before getting to the point is part of what I do and who I am.

Last night, I attended an impressive event at Nashville’s Schemerhorn Symphony Center. (Frankly, any event in the Schemerhorn is going to be impressive — what an incredible building.) The event was an inaugural awards gala hosted by the Nashville Technology Council, an affiliate organization of the Nashville area Chamber of Commerce whose stated purpose is “to help the Middle Tennessee technology community succeed.”

I’ll admit that, despite Hammock Inc. being a member of the organization since its inception, I’ve thought — as it should be — it has been primarily focused on what has traditionally been considered “the technology industry” in Nashville. What is that? Well visit this “Techville” map and you’ll get a sense of the companies that employ 25,000 individuals in tech-related jobs. Much of this industry is the type of work that serves the needs of Nashville’s better known industries and institutions: Information Technology services related to healthcare, education, music, publishing, automotive and traditional corporate technology and information-management and infrastructure needs.

As an individual, I’ve never really thought of myself as being a technology-industry person. Certainly, I’ve always adopted technology early for running businesses (bleeding edge, as they call it) and for creating the types of media Hammock is known for — not just magazines, as we were developing what was then called “interactive multimedia” for clients like Northern Telecom in the late 80s, for example — which is even before Hammock Inc. go started.

I’ve also, as an accidental geek and aggressive user of technology, identified more with those “outside” the tech mainstream: the open-source, start-up, indie developer, blogger, disintermediating, disruptive, free-lance, BarCamp, “unconference” digital community which tends not to think of itself as being defined by traditional geographic boundaries (unless one lives within 30 miles of San Jose).

In the past few years, the Nashville Technology Council has made a concerted effort to reach out more to this “other technology community” in the Nashville area. It has supported — without trying to take over — a wide array of tech-related grassroots efforts (i.e. Barcamps) and recently helped launch the Nashville Entrepreneur Center, for example. But other, behind the scenes efforts by people like Tod Fetherling, a veteran of tech startups who is now CEO of the council, are helping broaden the mission of the organization.

(Okay, so here is where I get to the lede.)

(via: MiiA)

Therefore, I was happy to see that along with big corporate type awards like CIO of the Year and Technology Organization of the Year (both won by HCA) and “Green” innovator of the year (Nissan USA), among the ten awards, there were categories for students (won by Hank Carter, a student at Belmont University) and startups (won by CredenceHealth) and, interestingly, for a blogger/social media person.

And, more interestingly still, the recipient was me. (Two friends, Kate O’Neill of [meta] marketer and Dave Delaney, social media wrangler at Griffin Technology and creator of such things as Geek Breakfast were also finalists and either should have won.)

I feel incredibly honored to win. But more than a little surprised.

First (as I said on Twitter last night), for me, winning an award for blogging is like winning an award for brushing my teeth — it’s just something I do. I’ve never even thought of blogging as writing. (Which is probably obvious.) Unlike when I write, there’s little “crafting” of what I share here. Elsewhere, I write columns that go through a dozen edited versions before being printed or released. But here, it’s completely extemporaneous and improvisational. This is about as me as it gets. So that makes “winning an award” for what I do here and on Twitter and elsewhere very surprising and appreciated.

Coolest “trophy” ever.

Second, and most importantly, this is a personal blog. Yes, sometimes I write about business and technology, but I don’t have a niche other than the niche of stuff interesting to me. Such an editorial focus is one I would never recommend to a client — ever. Had I picked an editorial focus when starting this blog, it would have a better name and, likely, it would be long-gone by now, as I doubt I would still have something to say about one topic after ten years.

This blog, in other words, is more like a columnist’s blog than a reporter’s blog. The only niche it serves are those people who may be interested in my random observations. (i.e., 10-12 people). Only some of those observations are related to Nashville. And only some of them are about technology.

So, therefore, I would think I’d be the last blogger/social media person to win an award from the Nashville Technology Council.

So I’m really surprised, and extremely appreciative.

And I’m also really blown away, as the “trophy” is a personalized electric guitar from a Nashville-based “technology” company: Gibson. (Photos to come.)

See also:

•A great Flickr set from the ceremony via Miiacom.
•VentureNashville.com recap of the awards.

Where to learn about Google’s Social Search

Rex Hammock — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 15:42:10 GMT

As my accidental role as content curator of geekish news for non-geeks, I have a rule: when a certain person I consider my control group for non-geekish people (i.e., my wife) asks me about something that has not even launched but she’s heard about it from a general news source (i.e., it’s about Apple or Google), I consider it time to post something with a little more insight than a brief mention on NPR.

This is one of those times.

If you’re wondering what Google Social Search is, all you need to do is what I do whenever the topic involves something new in the world of search: Turn to Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land.

Here’s his analysis of the new experimental service from Google: Google Social Search Launches, Gives Results From Your Trusted “Social Circle”.

That’s all you need to know.

Important things to remember:

1. It’s experimental: You have to be a registered user of Google (i.e., have a gmail account) to try it out. Sign in here.

2. It’s not “Twitter Search”: This is an attempt for you to be able to search and find results from those you trust. This is a big time challenge that about 4-5 people who read this blog will know is a personal fascination (and a long time ago, an obsession) of mine. Good luck to Google. If they can figure out how to sort search results based on the patterns of people you trust, they might just become a big company one day. (Note for the humor-challenged – I know Google is a big company.)

3. At this point, it’s a very-early geeky thing: If you’re not social media-obsessed, you may want to wait a while on this. Google needs to know some things about you that would scare you if I explained them here, so I want. Google knows them already — and if you make them work for you, this service will be awesome — one day.

Links for 2009-10-19 [del.icio.us]

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 00:00:00 PDT

Giving up on the news business | BuzzMachine
Says Jeff Jarvis: "There is no crisis (with journalism, just a failure of newspapers). When you start there, you don’t just reconstruct the past of journalism but see the possibilities to build a new journalism."
Want to Innovate? Look to the Little Guys | FolioMag.com
Gist: Magazines aren't dead. The only thing dead is the ability for giant companies with lots of debt to be innovative.
New $400 IREX reader delivers 1,150 periodicals wirelessly | TeleRead
Gist: Pretty evident from the headline. I just like the products name so I link to it as much as I can.

Links for 2009-10-01 [del.icio.us]

Fri, 02 Oct 2009 00:00:00 PDT

What I learned from Rex Hammock’s Wikipedia post | Dan McCarthy's ViralHousingFix
Thanks, Dan. Coming from you, a very nice compliment indeed. (Note: Dan is chairman and CEO of Network Communications, Inc., a large network of web sites and magazines focused on local housing markets. He and I go way back.)

Links for 2009-09-23 [del.icio.us]

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 00:00:00 PDT

More Than 1,800 Full Issues Of Life Now On Google Books | paidContent
Gist: Every issue of Life has been digitized and is now on Google Books. (Background for digital natives: Life used to be a magazine that everyone read each week. Sometimes you can see old copies at flea markets or on eBay.)

Links for 2009-09-19 [del.icio.us]

Sun, 20 Sep 2009 00:00:00 PDT

A Gallery Ripped From a Magazine’s Pages | NYTimes.com
Describing themselves as the modern version of Life magazine, the Polka brand now consists of a gallery, magazine and Web site.

Links for 2009-09-13 [del.icio.us]

Mon, 14 Sep 2009 00:00:00 PDT

'Dog Whisperer' Hopes to Lead Pack at Newsstand | WSJ.com
Observation: This will succeed. Why? I would tell you, but I've decided to stop giving away trade secrets.
B&N Promotes Magazines Using Recycled Paper | Press Release
Observation: I hope this makes all involved feel good.